In Defense of Vertical Software
In Defense of Vertical Software
George Sivulka (CEO, Hebbia)
💡 Key Learnings from this article
Last Mile = Entire Problem
From 50,000 feet, all firms look the same. But zoom in: each team, each MD has different workflows. The 10% idiosyncratic stuff is where deals get made and careers are built. That's where differentiated value resides.
Software = Social Contract
Software encodes how teams collaborate. It's 'an opinion for how a group of people should cooperate, encoded in a durable system.' It contains institutional memory and shared expectations that can't be easily replicated.
General AI Can't Be Opinionated
Anthropic, OpenAI, Google build for EVERY use case on earth. They can't know specific team preferences - that's not their job. But that's EXACTLY the vertical company's job - to know those specific details.
Network Effects > Interface Friction
Bloomberg is sticky not because migration is hard, but because people COMMUNICATE through it. Shared tooling creates shared language that becomes self-reinforcing. This moat doesn't vanish with easy migrations.
📝 AI Summary
Why vertical software companies can still win against Anthropic, OpenAI & Google. The value isn't the code—it's understanding processes deeply. Software is a social contract that encodes how teams collaborate.