Hamilton Helmer: evaluation

Transcript context

…Or exporting a PowerPoint to Google Slides, a problem that I think all of us probably deal with on a weekly basis. The translation is never perfect, and thus, if it's a very important presentation or whatever the thing is, you're not willing to switch. Right. But then another subtlety is that remember, you can only monetize that if there's a repeated economic interaction. You have to buy more stuff. There's got to be some kind of razor blade aspect to it. If there's just switching cost and you'll never buy anything more, it doesn't matter because it's in those additional transactions. That's when you look at ERP companies, why they acquire so many different things, because these are different tools they can interact with. They are real and a place where they can be especially strong is when they become embedded in a company process. We were talking before about, there's a company that sells lab equipment or talking about 10 Extranomics before, for example, where a piece of equipment gets embedded in how people do things. They not only get used to it, but there's a whole process designed around it, and switching it out is really hard. I'm just curious because you've been thinking about this, what would be an example? Slack's an example and there's a question of whether it's still sufficiently monetizable. I was wondering, in particular with this for SaaS companies. Is SaaS a business model innovation that if you have a switching cost source of power, can work really well together? Because the monetization is not like old on-prem software, you sell a big Siebel installation, boom, that's a lot of money up front, now you got to sell more stuff in the future. With SaaS, you're just constantly selling all the time.…

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