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Find an earned secret
Leonard's secret
Mark Leonard was working in venture capital when he kept running into vertical market software companies. They were a terrible fit for venture investing. Buying them, never selling them, and building a conglomerate that kept compounding could create a lot of value, and that became Constellation Software. He would not have seen it without that earlier job.
Why secrets exist
Every correct answer to the question of what valuable company nobody is building is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, hard to do but doable. If many secrets are left in the world, many world-changing companies are probably yet to be started.
The fear of being wrong
Few people look for secrets because they are scared of being wrong, and a secret hasn't been vetted by the mainstream. Anyone whose goal is never to make a mistake shouldn't look for them. The founder of IKEA reframed it: making mistakes is the privilege of the active, and the only way to make none is to do nothing.
How does Constellation Software work?
Constellation Software is based in Toronto and buys small software companies that serve a single industry, such as clubs, schools, or local governments. It keeps what it buys instead of reselling. Each acquired business runs as a semi-autonomous unit inside one of several operating groups. Constellation went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2006.
Why do niche software firms rarely lose customers?
These products run daily operations such as scheduling, billing, or compliance for one narrow industry, so staff build their routines around them. Switching means moving years of data and retraining everyone. The customer base is also too small to attract large competitors. A vendor in such a niche can keep the same clients for decades.
How did IKEA's founder build the company?
Ingvar Kamprad started IKEA in 1943, at age 17, in the Swedish province of Småland. He first sold pens and small household goods by mail, then added furniture and a catalog in the early 1950s. In 1956 an employee named Gillis Lundgren took the legs off a table so it would fit in a car, and the company moved toward flat-pack furniture. The first IKEA store opened in Älmhult in 1958.
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