For six months I've been trying to nail exactly what I do with my business. The answer showed up in the stock filings of two companies that couldn't be more different.
Bending Spoons bought Evernote, Vimeo, AOL and most recently Airtable for $1.3 billion, folds everything into one system, and listed on the Nasdaq last month at $18 billion. Technology is the lever. Constellation quietly owns over 1,000 software businesses, the kind that run golf courses, grain elevators, marinas. 150,000 customers in 160 countries, and it never merges any of them. People and knowledge are the lever. Its stock has grown over 30% a year for two decades. One transforms the tech and loses the people. The other keeps the people and never touches the tech.
My thesis sits in between. Small teams have spent decades bending themselves around software that never quite fits how they operate. Now building costs are collapsing, so the software can finally fit around them. I call it scaled customisation. It only works when it's built on the Business Brain: the decisions, processes and knowledge that make your company run, which never stop changing. Your knowledge feeds the software, and the software runs the repetition. One scaled code. The other scaled knowledge. I'm scaling both.
🎵 Curtis Mayfield — Power to the People
— Nicc