Insight
Singh: Build novel software internally, but acquire established categories via M&A
“We should be only building software that is truly new and novel, where we're going to be first or second to market. But if we're late to a market, the catch-up work, we've got to do that through M&A, because then you're buying market share, you're cutting pric…”
Opinion
Singh: Bitcoin's blockchain will never have social utility beyond asset hoarding
“The Bitcoin blockchain will not be really used for anything that actually has social utility, but it's an asset that you hoard.”
Opinion
Singh: DeFi protocols primarily exist to support trading useless cryptocurrencies
“All the DeFi protocols about all the financial services have been created for DeFi protocols are primarily to support the trading of other cryptocurrencies that also have no social utility.”
Insight
Singh: Company core values must be polarizing guardrails, not generic lists
“The problem was that when you define your culture with like 10 values, Everybody fits. If I gave Ted a list of 10 values, he'd be like, I'm pretty good at like eight of those, so like, I'm a fit. I always say the values need to be like hard lefts, hard rights”
Opinion
Singh: Uber's decentralized ownership drove global expansion over Lyft's comfortable culture
“Why is that? I'd argue that it was the cultural difference because they had all the same resources, they had the same people, and you had one culture that was so intense that was driven It treated every manager as a CEO of a business unit. You go run that, tha…”
Opinion
Singh: A 30-year-old Warren Buffett would exclusively buy software businesses today
“If Warren Buffett was 30 years old, he'd just be buying software businesses, because they have every aspect of a great business that he talks about. They've got massive moats. You can raise price every year. Customers are happy. It's this beautiful flywheel of…”
Assertion Supported
Singh inherited an activist fight, embezzlement, and bribery probe at PAR
“They were in the middle of an activist shareholder fight. The prior CFO was on his way to jail for stealing money. The prior CEO had to step down because of bribery and corruption and investigations in China and Singapore.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Singh: Software pricing models will shift from SaaS subscriptions to transactional fees
“And I think the next model we're moving towards is transactional where it's saying, Hey, don't pay me for anything, Ted, unless you use it.”
Assertion Contradicted
Singh claims he first publicly proposed rolling up Amazon third-party sellers
“And so I think I was probably literally the first person to have the idea of rolling up Amazon sellers, which has obviously become this enormous business. I literally think I was the first person to talk about that publicly.”
Opinion
Singh: The real utility for NFTs is in gaming, not art
“And I think that applicability is not actually an art, but I think it's in gaming.”
Insight
Singh: Running an operating company is a million times harder than investing
“Execution is a million times harder than investing. I would tell you that running a company is, and I think most people have done both would tell, like running a company is so much harder than being an investor.”
Insight
Singh: Software products require 5-10 years, unlike short-term transactional finance
“When you're in a services business or in the investment business, It's a relatively short-term game. You're in a hedge fund, maybe it's a one-year game, or maybe it's a quarter game. When you're in a banking deal, it's a transaction. When you're building a pro…”
Insight
Singh: Startups need narrow domain specialists, not Wall Street-style generalists
“In the operating world, you're looking a lot less for rounded people and more for specific talents. And so what I would say is I want that intense bar that you had when I was trying to get a job at a hedge fund or at a bank, but in the operating world, I reall…”
Assertion Contradicted
Singh: PAR Technology was running out of money, forcing day-one layoffs
“The first thing I had to do as a CEO, literally the first day in the office, I had to go and terminate 25% of the workforce because we're running out of money.”
Opinion
Singh: Restaurant software transformation is still in the 2001-era stage
“In restaurants where we play, it is incredibly early. It's not a nine, it's 2002 1001.”
Insight
Singh: Directing engineering resources is a software company's primary capital allocation
“I think in a software business, product development is your capital allocation function. How you determine how you deploy your engineering resources is your, the idea of being a great capital allocator.”
Insight
Singh: If missing Airbnb or Shopify, invest in their ecosystem drafts
“The foundation of Coventry in many ways, and the way that I used to invest was this idea that if you miss the big platform, you don't invest in Airbnb, you don't invest in Shopify, was to sort of draft off of their success and finding ways to build or invest i…”
Assertion Supported
Singh: PAR grew recurring revenue from $12M to $80M in 30 months
“We're a company that when I think I stepped in as CEO, we had twelve million dollars of recurring revenue.
Today we've got 75 or eighty million dollars of recurring revenue.
Right.
We did that in two and a half years.”
Insight
Singh: Investors learn far more by talking to customers than the CEO
“I'm shocked how many investors still don't talk to customers.
I'm still blown away by that.
It is just still like you learn more talking to a customer than you're going to learn to talk to the CEO.”
Insight
Singh: Venture capitalists consistently misunderstand and overestimate true serviceable market sizes
“So my greatest investment recipe is historically, I would say everybody misunderstands TAM. When you look at venture capital, everyone's like, Hey, I've got this platform that's going to get real estate investing online. Real estate's a 10 trillion dollar indu…”
Insight
Singh: Changing an enterprise software user interface introduces massive operational risk
“I hate when anyone says, just do this, just go change the UI on your product. And that's always strikes me as like that person has never sat in my shoes and I am never be able to convince them that, yeah, do you know what it's like to change the UI on an enter…”
Assertion Partly supported
Singh: A 1982 McDonald's global POS mandate triggered PAR Technology's IPO
“And in 1982, McDonald's mandated that every store in the world become a par store. And it's an amazing turn of events. In four years, this rinky-dink consulting firm in upstate New York went to being mandated at McDonald's, and PAR went public in 82 off that m…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Singh: Seth Klarman and Dwight Anderson responded to his undergraduate cold outreach
“I started writing all of the investors that had gone to Cornell, Seth Klarman and Dwight Anderson, all these guys, and probably none of them remember me messaging them. And they all responded because this is before I think they had become the superstars that t…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Singh funded his college education with a high school eBay business
“By the end of high school, my brother had bought a car right when he turned 16. He had a car delivered in our driveway. We both paid for college with it.”
