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There is real opportunity to:

- scale a HoldCo
- focused on a portfolio of software & digital-forward assets
- serving niche and/or traditionally sleepy verticals

A playbook to follow...

But first... why is there opportunity?

- software is eating the world (& APIs are eating software)
- there are great product opp's for those who know where to look
- theres no real competition
- SaaS/subscription is the best delivery model out there (build once, sell twice+)

And why now?

We’re entering what I call the ‘Deployment Era’ ... where more traditional (sleepy) businesses will increasingly leverage software/tech to improve their model

And the best part is... we're on the front-end of riding this longer-term wave

So what does this mean?

Software (& other digital-first products) will eat more of the ‘traditional SMB’ stack

But most aren’t focused here bc it isn’t sexy or cool…

Which is where the opp is for those who have the right deal nose & know what to build & for who

There is big opportunity to build/scale in overlooked places...

Where you can build/acquire assets that have the best econ delivery model (SaaS/sub), w/ low competition, where you have an inside edge/know everyone in industry, & can do it when no one is looking

Oct 1, 2020 - Fulton CTY
"Mr. Gilstrap stated that he did not feel comfortable installing a last-minute software change, and did not want Fulton County staff to be responsible for installing it. He told us that he told Dominion to conduct this

One of the big promises of software is composability. You can build rich, powerful experiences out of basic building blocks.

APIs add new things to the toolbox. For example: Treasury, which lets an app/platform store, move, and track a business’

I've been a small business owner and can talk at length about SMB banking, and will later, but let's put on the software developer hat right now.

Lots of software talks about money, keeps records about money, does calculations about money, but can't *touch* money.

This is extremely frustrating when you're building SaaS apps for businesses, because you have total control over your UX right until your app needs to touch money... at which point all data about it lives in a silo you can't access.

So you generally push work to the operator.

For example, suppose you’re writing a business-in-a-box system for electricians, including an invoicing feature.

You need to be able to read bank transactions to reconcile. You probably can't. The owner can. So you ask the owner to do mind-numbing work a computer does better.

It sure would be great if your business customers had bank accounts you could actually introspect and operate on their behalves! You could just get the list of incoming payments and match against the invoices.

There is some software to write but it is not rocket science.