This is a really good shout and planted a seed of an idea for me. One thing I was ruminating on is that similar to your other examples in tech software, these middle businesses may not be needed forever as the system matures, these efforts consolidate and eventually could just become ubiquitous. So, an interesting aspect is planning for a business with an exit strategy when it becomes obsolete.
Fascinating concept, and that's certainly the hope. Do you think the middlemen go extinct, or just become commoditized? We still see plenty of Salesforce / SAP / Workday implementation consultants making a good living, even decades after those platforms launched. Same with suppliers in the chemical markets, which are perhaps the best analogy. Certainly something to watch.
There's probably always a need for some middlemen for smaller organizations, ones with niche needs, or who just don't want to spend resourcing on something that's not their core competency. Which, are the same reasons some middlemen still exist in tech like you listed. So, I guess more realistically there's this big initial greenspace like you pointed out, but eventually it will shrink either due to competition or the consolidation. Then the key is planning ahead of time to know what those signals might look like, and what the exit strategy is.
This is a really good shout and planted a seed of an idea for me. One thing I was ruminating on is that similar to your other examples in tech software, these middle businesses may not be needed forever as the system matures, these efforts consolidate and eventually could just become ubiquitous. So, an interesting aspect is planning for a business with an exit strategy when it becomes obsolete.
Fascinating concept, and that's certainly the hope. Do you think the middlemen go extinct, or just become commoditized? We still see plenty of Salesforce / SAP / Workday implementation consultants making a good living, even decades after those platforms launched. Same with suppliers in the chemical markets, which are perhaps the best analogy. Certainly something to watch.
There's probably always a need for some middlemen for smaller organizations, ones with niche needs, or who just don't want to spend resourcing on something that's not their core competency. Which, are the same reasons some middlemen still exist in tech like you listed. So, I guess more realistically there's this big initial greenspace like you pointed out, but eventually it will shrink either due to competition or the consolidation. Then the key is planning ahead of time to know what those signals might look like, and what the exit strategy is.