Start-ups are an exciting place to be. By definition they are founded based on technology that will improve some segment of the market. Faster, cheaper, smaller are part of the daily vernacular. Then there is 'different' - the paradigm shift, the technology that is going to force people to think differently. I like different because it forces an evolution from within the start-up itself. This is because of the 'Key Transition'. Miss it and you will get lapped. Believe it needs to happen and you are too early - the world will look at you like you have just landed from the planet 'Ork'.
The Key Transition is when evangelism, education and definition of the paradigm shift are reaching the end of their usefulness and the transition to 'Why Us' needs to occur. Let's imagine you are First, Best and Only (FBO), in the technology space, 'O' will soon disappear because others will see a lucrative opportunity as well.
You will fly to the corners of the earth with the vigor of any good evangelist to sway audiences to the new paradigm. But then something happens - you reach your targeted destination and meet with prospects to change their minds and you realize they are familiar with the lexicon of the new paradigm. How can that be - it's new. The key transition happened and you weren't the one driving it. But you should still be able to recoup and regain the lead position if you leave academia and transition into the business competitive landscape. But how:

• bring 'why you' to the foreground of the discussion
• you made choices along the development path that make you different and more valuable/viable, they need to be explained
• the competition rode your education wave, you need to graduate
• distance and differentiate value based on unique technology

If you don't, you will be welcomed into the price bidding war.

If the title for this thought makes sense, you are a pre-sales engineer. Your work with sales teams requires you to deal with square pegs and round holes on a daily basis. You have likely participated in discussions where some of these themes pop-up:

• "...but they don't have that much in the budget"
• "... can't the smaller configuration do?"
• "... what do you mean it doesn't work like that?"

Mathematics would describe this as a combinatorial optimization problem; an example of such a problem is the knapsack or rucksack problem. This may seem a little extreme, yet I feel the principles are quite similar. You are tasked with architecting a solution where there are too many items to stuff into the knapsack. The knapsack items might be:

• Memory
• IOPs
• Data Capacity
• Threading

You need a means to push and poke at the knapsack contents to see what can be done without causing a seem to burst. The tools built by Polyeidus, give you the ability to push and poke, see what the impact of either is and suggest a configuration that may improve your competitive position.