I think an interior designer who really groked how software people worked could book themselves solid for next several years doing “We talk for an hour about your tastes, you take one day off work, you come back to best workspace you’ve ever had, I charge you cost of a Tesla.”
And after one of your clients is on *one Zoom call* at work you’ll have new referrals coming out your ears.
(There’s a certain level in corporate America past which I think you literally can’t afford to not buy this if anyone at or above your level in org has.)
“I mean sure she’s a director but is she a white wall director or is she a /r/battlestations bestof director?” “The latter.” “Say no more.”
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Under the hood this is doing intelligent location of the customer and running your product against a curated DB of the (truly, truly complex) tax jurisdictions and rates by product category state-of-play.
The thing it does not solve is making it truly end-to-end, where in addition to knowing how much money Chicago would charge for a hotdog if it was cooked on the premises for consumption off, at some point Chicago will want some data and some money.
There are a *lot* of services business which have this quality of being heavily, heavily networked on the customer side. This one has the additional wrinkle of having power law economics.
The reason no large player has cornered it yet is that they believe, accurately from their perception of the world, that the IPO/etc is a discontinuous event in someone’s life and an opportunity to sell someone services, and so they didn’t need to nurture 100X clients to there.
I think what most people aesthetically want is a boutique firm that has small N partners, personal service, and a few hundred clients with say starting balances of $100k AUM or less (“a thirty something’s IRA in tech”).
But but but boutique has this problem in year 8-15:
From @micsolana’s quotation in a newsletter, a line which jumps out at me:
I think this misunderstands the issue. BigTech is quite capable of ingesting science *and in fact does*, for example in making consequential choices about how they will protect their work forces.
An interested party could score those dated choices against dated CDC or media.
The issue isn’t that BigTech can’t run a truthseeking process. It is that BigTech would strongly prefer not to run a truthseeking process over every human utterance because *BigTech is not being attacked for failing to arrive at truth but rather for threatening power.*
This is one of my surprises in U.S. fast casual landscape. The other is that Japanese gyudon don’t have Chipotle-style distribution. They’re cheap, the supply chain works in U.S. trivially, and the food is instantly maximally palatable to most Americans after one try.
“I like rice. I like beef. I like onions. You have a novel preparation of rice, beef, and onions that tastes like an umami bomb and has optional toppings that are also all things I like? And costs… $2?!”
I would happily invest in an expanding restaurant chain in either of these areas. (My record as an angel investor absolutely destroyed by my record as a Chipotle investor starting shortly after McDonalds spin-off.)
The even more pernicious thing about this is that a business with a lot of $600 clients spends its time adapting to complaint management and a business with $60k clients spends its time adapting to e.g. sales / multistakeholder management.
Many people think that folks exaggerate about salaryman schedules, as did I, before e.g. I had 20 receipts in a month for a hotel room close to the office because I missed the last train home at 12:30 AM.
A superior once asked me if I’d please consider moving so that I wouldn’t need to use that train as an argument for leaving work early so darn frequently.
“Come on Patrick you’re still in your twenties and aren’t even married. What do you have in your apartment anyhow that you wouldn’t have if it was right next door? And then you’d have 3 more hours of work time a day!”