I used a Multiflow Trace back in the day. For certain types of apps (mechanical engineering simulations in our case), there were significant speedups. It was a weird box, though.
I think you're right as well, and in fact many companies grow quite large without having a CFO, and you certainly don't need a CFO to raise VC (a top flight lawyer is money better spent). Through several startups I've done, every single adviser I've had that I felt had our interest at heart said, basically, "you don't need a CFO until you can see a path to going public". The rationale is that someone who is really qualified to be a CFO would be wasting 80% of their skill set until then and costing you a lot of money and ownership. Until then, a controller or accountant will be able to manage the organizations finances just fine (and that function can be outsourced), and there are any number of "rent a CFO" arrangements should you find yourself with some particularly hairy financial needs without committing to a hire.
I can't comment on the utility of Wordpress, but I can tell you it (or, more precisely, it's ecosystem) is a security cesspool. Check out http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-2337/.... And that's without dragging in the ocean of vulnerable 3rd party plugins. We see malware callbacks to new vulnerable WP sites every day. We had an internal group lobbying to roll out a WP-based, high-profile portal a few months back, and a 10 minute overview of security was enough for management to support us blocking it.
> our offering is so much better than theirs that any
> informed user choosing our competetion would be absurd
Betamax was "better" than VCR; any "informed user" would have picked Betamax. But VCRs delivered what most customers wanted, when they wanted it, at a quality & feature level they could live with, at a price they were willing to pay. And they had better marketing.
Your definition of "better" obviously isn't correct. You need to fix that. You also caveat with "informed user". You might think about that as well. Are you effectively communicating to potential users of the superiority of your platform? Do they believe you? Do they care? Frankly, it sounds like you may have developed the perfect platform for you, and are delivering it to a market that's looking for something different. Find out what makes their customers swear by their service and focus on that.
Actually, there's a whole niche market selling pallets of food like that to Mormons, as they're obligated by their faith to have a year or so of food/water/supplies.
Wow, that's a mind-boggling false equivalence. Tips, being optional, incent a waiter to excel. Bribes, not typically being optional, only incent the corrupt policemen to catch as many drivers as possible, whether they have committed an infraction or not.
Agreed, mostly. We always maintained a pool of "disposable" kit (laptop, phones, etc) with a minimum of "stuff" loaded (OS, major productivity apps, some publicly available documents, etc). Go ahead and search or seize, no worries. Carrying it avoids the awkward "so you're here to do IT stuff, but you don't have a laptop or phone...hmmmmm".