Every cycle produces a fresh reason to overpay for technology. The label on the reason changes — a platform shift, a new architecture, a category that will supposedly reorganise the economy — but the effect is the same: prices detach from the businesses beneath them, and narrative does the work that fundamentals should. For an owner planning to hold for a decade, that is not an opportunity so much as a trap dressed as one.
“A narrative can move a price for a year. Only fundamentals hold it for a decade.”
We try to underwrite the business, not the story. Durable advantage tends to come from unglamorous places — distribution that is expensive to replicate, data that compounds with use, switching costs that make customers stay, unit economics that improve at scale. A narrative can move a price for a year; only those fundamentals hold it for ten. That discipline means we will miss some things that run further than we expected. We are comfortable with that. The alternative — paying tomorrow's price for yesterday's story — is the more expensive mistake.