Limited Life Terms
I’ve just learned Outsell is in the 13% club. Our 30-year anniversary provided a nice time to reflect, but I’d never seen a statistic like the one sent to me by a colleague last week, nor about the notion of a limited life company. Here we are founded in 1994 and in a bakers-dozen of surviving companies.
We have seen technology waves come and go with a new one playing out. We have been blessed with a bevy of colleagues who have retired from our firm and are still in touch, like the gentleman who sent this table. I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a company last having just finished Another Way: Building Companies that Last.
It is a thoughtful book about jettisoning fast money and the hype (and loss and waste) that goes with it. It is a must read about a better way than the Silicon Valley way. After 30+ years there is plenty to consider. While I wait for our salesforce rep to reemerge (and he did five minutes ago) I think about big tech and the benefits and havoc it has wrought. I focus instead on our clients, the change afoot in our industry and what Outsell must do to remain healthy and thrive for the next decade ahead.
Our ‘one thing’ has always been about sizing companies and markets and providing a measuring stick about navigating digital transformation. First a transition to the internet, then mobile, social, workflow, (DaaS, SaaS, PaaS — convergence) and now AI. How do companies compare in their journey? What statistics point to performance? How fast is growth occurring once revenue diversification ensues? It is a pleasure and privilege to measure that and now we continue doing so. Look soon for the Outsell Accelerate A! Assessment (TM).
Even if AI is a bubble, it will come back with a vengeance just like every technological wave before it. Claude is becoming the enterprise tool of choice while ChatGPT leans into consumer. We have seen this movie play out before. Big tech does big horizontal. B2BTech, data, information, analytics, and media lean into hyper vertical.
In the past couple of days, we’ve been analyzing big questions. What a pleasure and a privilege!
- What is the role of aggregators and who has permission to play up and down the value-chain. What do the likes of Harvey, Open Evidence, or even Starbridge portend as competitors, partners, maybe one day buyers? Who will buy them?
- What happens to SaaS when agentics take over and the next UI is no UI, and agents do much of the heavy lift?
- Do we believe a future posited by a colleague? His belief: the editor becomes a prompt engineer and the journalist is the LLM. Hmmm.
- What is the future of expert networks and the role of expertise?
- Do communities and events endure as a moat? What happens when the field gets crowded or the next generation, weaned on digital, and who care about sustainability, become less inclined to attend? Will we lean into micro-events? City circuits?
- Will our personal agents simply tell us what to do and where to go and even how to parent or be a better professional? (This is where the technology is headed once it listens in on our every word and becomes embedded in wearable devices. Watch the work that Jonathan Ivy is doing at OpenAI.)
- Isn’t it time we give up the word audience and ban it (and phrases like audience development) from corporate lexicon? Its definition: a group of people who watch, listen to, or consume a performance, broadcast, or creative work.
Is simply passive and passe.
So much to analyze, so little time. So much to measure, so little time. Nearly 32 years in and a 13%er. Now that’s a metric. Who knew?