Vertical Integrators

Other industries, though, are matter industries .

Think energy or agriculture. These things are necessarily physical. Electricity requires electrons. Digital food doesn’t fill bellies.

For the past few decades, as software has eaten the world, entrepreneurs and incumbents alike have attempted to fix these industries with software. They’ve made them m... See more

There are upsides and downsides to each approach. Almost half of billion-dollar companies focused on systems integration, which can be easier to pull off given the low technical lift but could be more costly in sales and customer acquisition. It’s much harder to solve a deep-tech problem, but doing so can act as a defense for those startups. Anothe

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Engineering organizations today have ballooned to huge numbers of people, but these huge engineering organizations don’t exactly have a reputation for high velocity output. Some of this is the result of what happens with products at scale: it is just fundamentally faster and easier to iterate, improve, or change a product with 100 users than it is ... See more