INVISIBLE COMPANIES

Summary from the TLDR Founders newsletter

Steve Ross started by renting his father-in-law's unused funeral limousines at night. He added parking lots, cleaning companies, plumbing, and other fairly boring businesses. That collection eventually bought Warner Bros. These companies were attractive because ambitious people rarely bothered to look at them. Constellation Software found a similar opportunity in tiny software businesses serving marinas, funeral homes and libraries. There may now be more than 38,000 of these vertical software companies. Perhaps for your own startup, look one or two layers beneath the industry everyone is chasing. The better business may be selling to the supplier nobody at the conference thought was worth meeting.