On a Tuesday in late August, at a window table at a restaurant on Pohjoisesplanadi in Helsinki, an investor who has been with us for most of our strategy’s eighteen years put down his fork and asked the question we have heard more than any other this year. “When did you decide to sell software?”
We said: we didn’t.
The rest of the sentence took the remainder of lunch, and it is the subject of this letter. The last three letters were about where misunderstanding lives: Jevons’ paradox, the whole product, the facts filed under the wrong heading. This one is about how we go looking for it: the process that decides what comes in, what stays and what leaves.