And what I would tell people is you had a very forward-thinking CEO. I'd like to say that I played some part in it, but like many things, I was helpful. I tried to be helpful along the way as an advisor, but it was a CEO who understood and could communicate the value of the innovation they had created and the innovation aspects of their business. So, if you want to maximize the enterprise value of your firm, it's not good enough to say you're innovative. What it takes is to demonstrate that you're innovative and to communicate it. So I know lots of innovative firms that are terrible communicators of what they're doing. Now, I've advised Thornton Tomasetti, and firms like that as well, which have had a great history. I've been working with Thornton Tomasetti for almost twelve years now and it's the two pieces, right? So I see lots of firms that are doing highly innovative stuff. They are not disciplined and structured about how they think about what it's worth, and they communicate it very poorly.
I would say we're a little bit of a nerdy industry. So we're very good at building nerdy things.
We're terrible at communicating what the value proposition of those nerdy things is and why it matters to enterprise value. So one is the M&. How do you maximize value from the innovation you're doing? So that's one area. Two is post-acquisition. We've been helping some firms understand what you want to happen, what's most important? The two firms are trying to get to know each other. So building a data lake of customer data, and project data, because it takes years to integrate the CRM systems and the accounting takes forever, right? But what do people want to know the day after a merger? They want to know, do I have this resource in this new firm?
What project experience do they have? All those things that are stuck in these silos.
But if you throw all that into a data lake and run AI on it now, all of a sudden, think about having an internal chatbot that tells everyone at new firms, the acquiring firm or the sole firm, what they have, right, or have we ever done a water treatment plan in Wisconsin? Well, it's sitting in a CRM somewhere, but until everything gets integrated, there's no way to know that. Do we have someone who can do archaeological studies? This idea of how we understand both firms very quickly, I think there's a huge application for AI that we've been working on with firms to understand that before you can integrate all the systems, let's make sure we're sharing lots of information to get the leverage right. You merge companies because you want to build something bigger and that one plus one equals five. You have a lot of mergers, one plus one barely equals two. KPReddy Email: kp@shadow.vc Website: Shadow Ventures
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