Buy vs. rent vs. build.

Tech companies are often thinking Buy vs. Build. Everyone is.

You are a company. You have capabilities. You make stuff. You could make anything. Should you make your own salesforce automation/customer relation management platform? It’s just software…

Buy it or build it.

In our business at Knotel that is not actually the choice. There are three.

Buy is buy the capability itself. Buy the platform and integrate it and make it a capability for producing more and better outcomes. Maybe buy the company.

Rent is actually what most vendors want to give us. They want to give us one piece of furniture that solves one problem in one space. We could keep on buying their stuff again and in more places, but all we have then is a great partner and sourcing solution. But other will have access to it, and they might not do things the way we want. Of course we avoid having to invent and scale whatever capabilities they have developed.

Build is when we invent it internally.

That set of choices is how we think about so many things.