Invest in integrations, not the platforms

I have been thinking about the kind of software companies I’d want to back - and it starts with the tools I actually use day to day. My own stack isn’t built atop a mega-suite I get from Microsoft or Google. It’s sticky-taped together from a set of focussed, well-made apps that are each good at one thing. They don’t pretend to do everything and that’s exactly why they’re good.

Here’s what I use professionally:

Linear for product management
Notion for collaborative documentation
Gmail for email
HubSpot for CRM
PagerDuty for on-call
…plus a handful of other tools, all tightly scoped and highly functional

Could I do almost all of this with Microsoft 365? Probably. Would I enjoy it? No. The user experience would be bad across the board. Their tools feel overreaching and clunky. They feel like a rush job – try to do too much and end up doing nothing well. That’s the problem I have with these mega-suites that try to own my whole workflow: they rarely get the details right.

VCs love chasing the next platform unicorn. The next Salesforce, the next Oracle. But I think they’re missing something fundamental: most businesses don’t need another monolith & most businesses aren’t even using the monoliths they already have. They need tools that integrate cleanly, do one thing really well, and quietly make everything else better.

We already have solid foundations. Leaders that haven’t really shifted:

macOS and Windows, iOS and Android
Google Workspace and Microsoft 365

It’s rare you see an organisation that doesn’t use these tools at the core of their operations. These aren’t going anywhere. Replacing them outright is near-impossible - and frankly pointless.

The smarter play is to build on top of these platforms, to integrate with them, to extend them, to make them better. That’s where the real opportunity is.

A tonne of Enterprise software is built to satisfy procurement teams rather than end users. The most checked boxes usually win the RFP, but what gets bought isn’t always the software that gets used. When I was at Coles Group, there was a secret Slack workspace where engineers would hang out because early Microsoft Teams was so hard to use and integrate with.

When a product tries to be everything to everybody, it bloats. It slows down and it fails to delight the end user. And people will find a way around it – or out of the company entirely.

Great tools do one thing well and when they interoperate cleanly, they become the obvious choice. You don’t need to dominate the whole stack to be successful.

Even products I mentioned earlier fall into this trap. I’ve always found Linear’s docs feature a bit annoying when as an organisation we collaborate in Notion and the lack of clean integration with Notion itself gets in the way. Notion, meanwhile, is trying to become a full platform - accessing my emails, calendar and so much more. That tension is felt by users, and it diminishes both products.

Some VCs get this. A few are quietly backing companies that complement the ecosystem instead of trying to replace it:

Sequoia Capital backed Figma and Notion and has a history of investing in companies that prioritise integration and user experience over broad functionality
Accel backed Slack and Dropbox, both of which were best in class solutions to a very specific problem
Notion Capital, not to be confused with the product, is a VC firm that focuses on investing in companies that build integrations and tools that enhance existing platforms rather than trying to replace them

But there really aren’t that many. VCs seem to chase platforms because the traditional model demands billion-dollar exits. As Jason Lemkin puts it, a $200M fund might need $5B+ in exits to hit target returns. That pressure fuels a cycle of companies raising too much, promising too much, and eventually getting sold off to the nearest acquirer. The founding team that built the product cashes out, innovation stalls and users are left with a product that no longer serves them.

We don’t need more of that. We need more IPOs. More durable, independent companies. More tools that solve real problems and grow sustainably without needing to become a platform.

I used to scoff at Dropbox still being around. I thought it was a relic of the past, a product that had been outpaced by Google Drive and OneDrive. But I was wrong. Dropbox has carved out a niche for itself as a reliable, user-friendly file storage solution that integrates seamlessly with other tools. It’s not trying to be everything to everyone, and that’s why it’s still here. It’s a publicly traded company with a market cap of US$8.5 bn. There’s a place for it in the world and it works because it integrates.

There’s absolutely space for small tech — deep, focused products that work beautifully with others. That’s what I use. That’s what I’d back.