
Ask HN: Examples of company-internal capabilities to become available publicly? - jschulenklopper
I&#x27;m looking for examples of former company-internal capabilities [medium business value but high quality] that later became available as services offered to external parties, thus increasing the company&#x27;s business value. Amazon offered AWS... but what are other well-known examples?<p>Things like: Shell to provide _moving_ oil rig services for other petrochemical companies. A company to offer their own security guards providing safety at large sport events. Hotels to provide dry cleaning services to other (possibly competing) hotels and restaurants. A salary-processing dept. of a company to offer payrolling services to companies nearby. [All these are examples I just made up - but I hope the are more in real life.]<p>Anyway, any case in which a former internal service is turned into a revenue-generating external service, most likely being made possible by a high (technical) quality of that service. I guess it&#x27;s a likely to be a new service that is orthogonal to the current activities in the company&#x27;s business model.<p>Just like in Amazon&#x27;s case: they offered their excellent infrastructure hosting capabilities to other organizations, in addition to using those just for their own e-commerce needs.
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jschulenklopper
After asking the same question on LinkedIn, I guess we found another (but just
one good one) example: Flexport. They started with gathering (and selling)
knowledge about freight forwarding via a software platform: shipping lines,
availability, prices.

Later, they started to use those capabilities to become a freight forwarder
(shipper) themselves, actually transporting stuff (on behalf of customers)
using the knowledge that they gathered for other purposes originally.

Read for example [https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/21/container-full-of-
cash/](https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/21/container-full-of-cash/).

