An export you have never restored is not an exit
Most exit plans stop at the export button. The exit only exists once someone has loaded that file into something else and the business kept running.
- exit plan
- data portability
- migration
Blog
Why lock-in is being repriced as a risk, what sovereignty means without the politics, how to test an exit before you need one, and what would prove the thesis wrong.
Build the exit before your first customer asks for it
Adding an exit to a mature product means unpicking years of shortcuts. Designed in from the first commit, it costs little. Where customer state usually hides.
- product design
- data portability
- architecture
Lock-in is often a financing decision, not a product one
Products rarely start out designed to trap their customers. They drift there when the capital structure needs predictable retention. How the drift works.
- venture capital
- retention
- lock-in
Whoever holds the root credentials owns the system
Owning your data means little if someone else registered the domain, owns the cloud account and holds the encryption keys. How to find out who actually does.
- access control
- encryption keys
- cloud accounts
Your AI vendor keeps the part you actually built
Instructions, test sets, corrections and logs are where an AI system's value builds up. They are also the parts most contracts forget to let you take with you.
- AI
- data portability
- evaluation
We only back companies their customers could leave
Switching cost has been treated as an asset for two decades. The argument here is that it is quietly turning into a liability, and why we are betting on that.
- lock-in
- switching costs
- retention
Sovereignty is not patriotism, it is a supply chain question
The word has been captured by politics and marketing at the same time. The useful definition is narrow, testable, and has nothing to do with where a company is registered.
- digital sovereignty
- supply chain
- cloud
A venture studio is an admission, not a strategy
Building companies rather than funding them is usually presented as a superior model. It is more honestly described as a response to deal flow that is not there.
- venture studio
- company building
- deal flow
The open-source business models that work, and the one that keeps failing
Four models with real companies behind them, one that reliably ends in a licence change, and how to tell which one you are looking at before you invest.
- open source
- business models
- licensing
What would have to happen for us to be wrong
A thesis that cannot be falsified is a preference. Five things that would show the sovereignty argument is mistaken, written down while it is still cheap to admit.
- falsification
- investment thesis
- risk