Ex-technology companies
Interesting. posture Will Larson asks what criteria a company must meet to be considered a technology company. What happens when a company fails to meet these criteria? Will Larson identifies two criteria:
- Limit cost of service The additional user tends to zero - here's a reference to Ben Thompson's articleSoftware has zero marginal costs. If this is the case, then the growth of the user base allows large bones in the future to be distributed over a large user base and get a good margin. If investors believe in this estimate of the marginal cost of service, then they value the company in 2-3 More than a non-technological one:) Engineers influence the strategic decisions of the company - here the author refers to the opinion of Camille Fournier, who wrote a cool book "The Manager's Path", which I talked about in four parts: pre-manager, engineering managers, engineering directors and senior leaders. Separately on this topic, I recommend reading a book.A Seat at the Table"that I mean." told earlier I agree with Will’s opinion, and I also believe that these two criteria are quite clear between tech and non-tech companies.
And then in the article, the author talks about how the nature of work in companies that are no longer technological is changing. It could be because of different things, for example. If investors cease to believe in the assessment of the marginal cost of customer service and reassess the value of the company instead of 10x revenue to 2x revenue If technology leaders lose their place at the top table and conditional financiers come to power, which simply cut off spending on RnD and technological development, which leads to the fact that the bones for the support and development of IDP (internal developer platform) Unbearable for teams that have been cut n And then the author. remember his experience at Digg, where acquihire led to the reduction of engineering teams and the fact that the old infrastructural system, designed for the construction of a new model, 50 Engineers were no longer fit for the remaining dozen engineers.
As a result, the author offers this method of determining whether your company has moved to the ex-technological stage of its development.
Ask yourself is whether R&D at your company can significantly change your company’s financial profile over the next three years If the answer is yes, then you are still in the game and your company is still technological.) Even if the company is in a difficult moment, then due to technology it can get out of it. In technology companies, technology is a growth driver, and in non-tech companies, it is a cost center.)
P.S. Let me tell you separately that we had freshmanwhere we discussed the hybrid approach to RnD and the guests were Igor Maslov, Head of Basic Technologies and Data Processing at Tinkoff Stanislav Moiseev, Director of Engineering Research at Tinkoff And also me last year. told reportHow RnD Appears in Large IT Companies" at Techlead Conf.
#Management #Leadership #Engineering #RnD