If it is swarms of drones thats the risk. Couldn’t we have defensive drone swarms? Isn’t anduril working on drone submarine? Just trying to understand how we can tactically defeat this problem since politics doesn’t seem to be a solution here.
Doing something similar. Bought a business in the petroleum equipment service space. Building internal tools for ourselves. Pen and paper still dominates the industry.
I worked in scheduling and timekeeping industry for a little bit, when pen and paper is mentioned you think "oh it's just notes written, and some other things" but in reality it's literally whole departments storing everything in daily/weekly sheets/binders and it's like 20 people's job to keep it all in order and keep the ship running for next week.
When someone asks what the plan is for next week, the answer is normally, it needs to be written out, or I'll have to find this for you etc.
Yeah, my first job at a startup was at an oil and gas saas that ingested unstructured data into a standardized db for smaller operators.*
"How much money did we make yesterday?" was a nontrivial question that required a several people a couple of days to compile manually before our software.
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* Would probably make a killing today; this was over a decade ago and the extraction was 98% regex and custom if statements
Usually... buying proven technology, and marketing lead lists is still a gamble. However, the other YC posters are correct in the "never make what you can buy" advice... if and only if there is still mileage in the product life-cycle.
In general, there are a lot of serious rules around energy and fuel industries. Rockwell and Kongsberg technology still dominate for some very practical reasons. Seeing a few small firms fail hard in the area, I would still call it a fools errand for those looking at low hanging fruit. =3
You want at least a year where you're systemising the owner out of the business without filling their shoes.
You'd also want some kind of break clause so you can back out if it turns out the business can’t run without the owner, or if the team won’t adapt and can’t be replaced.
Do you remember the watches? This was a big thing on watches for a short while in the late '90s, and the cool kids were definitely the ones who could flip the wall-mounted TV on and off when the teacher wasn't looking!
