LLMs do a lot of things, but none of them well enough.
10 years building vertical software: are we cooked?
51–54 of 54 posts
Re: 10 years building vertical software: are we cooked?
#52Show me even a single trader who would prefer a slow-ass chat interface to 36 monitors full of stock tickers and charts.
Is trading even a real thing? Is there really a job title "trader"? Entities really think they can outperform DCA SPY?
Who do you think makes the price of SPY change?
Re: 10 years building vertical software: are we cooked?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
We spent the last 20 years building a whole set of specialised little tools on the web to do specialised little tasks for businesses. Now an LLM can do most of that, easier, and effectively for free. The first pass on a new problem is not googling to see if there's a SaaS for that, it's prompting an LLM to see if it can do it, or if it can build a tool that can do it. Case in point: in my job we have to data-enter in…
There has been a standard X12 EDI format for invoices for decades. It's kind of a hassle to work with but it can at least be reliably parsed. A lot of huge businesses like Walmart use it successfully, and even require their suppliers to submit all invoices that way. I don't object to using LLMs to parse PDFs but over the long run it's going to be less efficient and reliable than other options.
Yes, there has been a standard format for invoices for decades, but it was only ever used if both companies were using a ERM system (and as you say, large enough purchasers could force their suppliers to). We have to deal with small business who don't use the standard format, which is the vast majority of them.
Please go ahead and try parsing non-standard invoices without an LLM. I spent 20+ years on and off dealing with this problem. It's not as simple as it looks. And then LLMs came along and made it simple.
Re: 10 years building vertical software: are we cooked?
#54It’s worth asking: what do Wall Street traders know about building software companies? Almost nothing. Anyone who has attempted to start a startup knows that the software is always the easy part. Building the business is hard. The notion that we’re going to undo 100K+ years of specialization just so that companies can run mediocre, buggy versions of SaaS tools just to save a few bucks is crazy to me. SaaS stocks are…
> SaaS stocks are currently the buying opportunity of a lifetime.
Is anything down far enough to look like the opportunity of a lifetime right now?
There were some deals out there over the last few years. I still kick myself on a daily basis for not taking Carvana at $5 in 2023.