Talent Wins
Marty Ringlein
My favorite letters of the alphabet are R&D, followed by M&A, right before I.P.O.
Today, we celebrate a huge win from one of the most talented teams I know,Tom Giannattasio and the crew behind MACAW. I’m excited that I can now share the news that Invision has acquired MACAW! What started as an ambitious dream quickly became a product with industry evolving potential. And now, it’s ridiculous talent and technology will make one of the strongest upcoming leaders in the design industry, much stronger.
If you do it right, they say you never lose; you either win or you learn. We have certainly learned much and won more than our fair share over the past decade. It’s not always about winning, we just try to be slightly better than a coin toss. What I know to be right is that the best talent doing the best work will always win. It’s the only model I know, the only model I trust and the only model I invest with.
The best experience you can ever have is being a part of a great team. When great talent is given the opportunity to do great work, great things happen! Talent wins. MACAW was one of the first companies we had ever invested in, but, we didn’t invest in MACAW, we invested in Tom; we invested in the model!
The Model
We had a crazy idea once when we started our very first company; what if we built a company the way we wrote code. We had no idea how to build companies, but we certainly knew how to write code! Start with finding someone else who had already done something similar, peek under-the-hood, reverse-engineer it and then make it our own while learning the process along the way. Instead of starting a company, we deconstructed someone else’s.
We needed to survive and the consistent model seemed to be that we simply had to make more money than we spent; we needed profit. To get profit, it appeared to us that most had to have revenue and the driver of revenue came from customers who needed a product that serviced a need. Product seemed to be based on technology and it was people that developed that technology. It became clear to us immediately that the greater the people, the greater the tech, the greater the product, the greater the customer the greater the revenue the greater the profit … so, what we needed was great people, great talent.