Unsexy Businesses

I’m really interested in unsexy businesses that don’t scream that they’re obvious targets for technology adoption. Ideally, businesses outside of Silicon Valley with lots of esoteric knowledge required to engage effectively.

Trends

• Software is getting much cheaper and faster to build with AI. Building custom code instead of using off the shelf SaaS software is a better idea now than ever - with the right agentic coding approach.
• AI agents are becoming general purpose automation tools, giving operational efficiency to anyone who is capable of adopting them effectively.

It seems like the greatest durable value capture from AI may come from improving profitable non-software businesses with moats that tie to physical constraints, either through operationalizing general purpose AI or efficiently creating custom software with AI coding agents.

While the industry is using AI to build more software more rapidly, selling that software through normal channels to these non software companies seems to be missing the largest value capture. Embedding agentic AI into those solutions doesn’t change that math.

Personally, I like learning about fairly disparate business domains and trying to find the patterns between them. I also like using all parts of my experience - business, product, operations and technology to identify the highest leverage problems and solve them.

If you’re a PE firm, investor or owner with a similar thesis and a need for an AI first operator, LMK.