I’d read that…I’d love to hear an Acquired podcast on the path of Long Distance Discount Services -> WorldCom -> MCI -> Verizon. They laid down a lot of fiber.
Curious how others feel about this narrative. As an SI we see the pain isolated systems cost businesses and the great deal of money required to make them fit into a larger ecosystem. That said as a rippling customer, their breadth and lack of depth is constantly on display. We’ve had several challenges with there “secondary” services. It costs money to be good at everything, my feeling is this style of getting off the ground is just as much a capital constraint as it is a revenue/gtm one.
He’s got a good valuation going selling ideas and figuring out how to implement later though…
I have worked for companies that chased breadth and companies that focused. The focused group contained the only real successes.
Breadth is a killer. It requires resources (eng, PM, executive) that are not available in young companies. Where it was pursued, the management imperative to build the broad set of capabilities without resourcing meant that almost everything sort of sucked. It was in one instance the result of a strong founder chasing every shiny buzzword even without a strong business justification.
Go with focus, unless you have proven-strong management and actual big-tech resourcing.
There are a couple of obvious problems with the breadth-first approach. While I think everyone would agree that a great platform beats a bunch of great one-function apps, building a great one-function app is much cheaper and less risky than trying to build a platform. The number of people who know some narrow problem they can solve better than existing solutions is exponentially greater than the number of people who know how to build a broad platform that solves most problems better than existing solutions. And the reality is that most companies who pay for platforms will still buy one-function apps if the platform's functionality is inferior enough to replace that aspect. They are much less likely to buy another entire platform, however.
I doubt Parker actually personally believes what he's saying here, it seems more like marketing from a company that is trying to sell a platform than it does the thoughtful opinion of an individual.
The comment on shortening resumes resonates deep. The ability to differentiate skill set is almost entirely distilled to a secondary search if you happen to spot the tiny 2003-2010 indicating more than a passing affair. Not that it’s confirmation of talent but when all you see is the same gpt fueled write ups regurgitating your job posting it is indeed harder to prioritize and suss out quality applicants. I see the newer generation of recruiters pushing for a 15 second resume review, so the problem is certainly on both sides but it certainly cultivates the continued downward spiral.
The clinicians themselves can be pretty dreadful. The uses being explored are to give coaching to them ahead of delivering news to help boost empathy and increase understanding. “It looks like you had a subdural hematoma cause a status epilepticus seizure” vs “that fall you took broke some blood vessels in your head which caused a longer seizure than we like to see”.
reply