How a Canadian company became the world’s best acquirer of tech firms | The Meeting Paradox: Navigating Connection and Productivity in Remote Work | AI Chatbots Won’t Tell You Who To Vote For, But They Will Create Targeted Political Ads | An Invisible ‘Demon’ Lurks in an Odd Superconductor

You Might Like

How a Canadian company became the world’s best acquirer of tech firms - The Economist

For older startups these are tough times. The weak recent stockmarket debuts of Arm, a British chipmaker, Instacart, a grocery-delivery group, and Klaviyo, a software firm, have dampened enthusiasm for initial public offerings. Venture capital (VC) has dried up. Data from PitchBook, a research firm, show that late-stage startups need almost three times as much money as is available to them. Many are putting themselves up for sale. Acquisitions of private firms valued at $100m or more are at their highest since September 2022.

One happy buyer is Constellation Software. The Canadian firm’s targets must have sales of at least $5m and show consistent revenue and profit growth. A strong management team, preferably founder-led, is a plus. Though it has splurged on larger deals, the median value of firms it acquires is around $3m. According to Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), since 2005 Constellation has spent $8.7bn on more than 860 firms (see chart 1). In that time its revenue has grown by about 25% a year on average. This year it could exceed $8bn. The company’s market value is up by a big-tech-like 250% in the past five years, to $50bn, outperforming the tech-heavy NASDAQ index (see chart 2). It is now Canada’s second-largest tech firm after Shopify, an e-commerce platform.

Whether by fluke or design, Constellation’s dealmaking success is based on principles that look strikingly similar to those of the world’s heavyweight acquirer, Berkshire Hathaway. Like Warren Buffett, Berkshire’s boss, and his right-hand man, Charlie Munger (who died on November 28th), the founder and president of Constellation, Mark Leonard, seeks out businesses with a lasting competitive edge. In Constellation’s universe, such a “moat” is enjoyed by software firms that specialise in building digital wares for unsexy industries from car dealerships and builders to spas. Tech giants shun these relatively piddling markets and smaller rivals lack the requisite know-how. The result is rich profits for the incumbents.

Continued here

You Might Like

Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.

The Meeting Paradox: Navigating Connection and Productivity in Remote Work - Inc.com

In recent years, the shift from physical office spaces to the realm of remote work has been nothing short of monumental, challenging many established norms of the working world. Chief among these norms being reconsidered is the practice of meetings. As the digital age integrates more deeply into our work processes, one pivotal question stands out: In a world where we can connect at any moment, how often should we?

Zoom Video Communications, a leading force in virtual collaboration, provides a fascinating lens through which to view this question. Having once established a no-meeting Wednesday policy, their objective was transparent: to offer employees a day devoid of the disruptions that meetings often bring, a day solely for focused, individual tasks. Yet, as revealed to me today, Zoom's philosophy on this matter is undergoing significant revision. Their newfound perspective seemingly underscores potential collaboration challenges such a policy might inadvertently introduce, especially when navigating the intricacies of globally distributed teams.

However, the change in direction from Zoom is not merely a corporate blip. To me, it reflects a broader debate regarding the very nature and role of meetings in our new digital-first work culture. Here, the findings of my research published by MIT Sloan Management Review prove interesting. The results showed the advantages of scaling back on frequent meetings: productivity can surge, and employee morale gets a noticeable boost in a reduced meeting environment. But there's a caveat. The data suggested that after curtailing meetings by approximately 60 percent, the positive outcomes began to stagnate. Even more concerning, if this trend is pushed further, it can lead to adverse effects -- which perhaps Zoom observed. As a proposed equilibrium, our study advocated for a work schedule offering three days entirely free of meetings, juxtaposed with two days allocated for these organizational convergences. This balance, we (still) believe, harnesses the benefits of focused work time while still maintaining essential communication channels.

Continued here

You Might Like

Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium

AI Chatbots Won’t Tell You Who To Vote For, But They Will Create Targeted Political Ads - Forbes

Conversational AI bots like ChatGPT and its ilk have begun telling us how to live and work, advising people on which medicines to take, how to file taxes and where to go for their next trip. But what happens when political campaigns begin using them to shape our opinions?

That's a question top of mind for many as the AI gold rush careens headfirst into the fraught-to-the-point-of-toxicity politics that undergirded an unprecedented attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. And it's been at the forefront of widespread discussion among experts and AI leaders even as AI tools are already being tested or deployed by political campaigns, whether it's the Democrats using it to create drafts of fundraising emails, or GOP candidate Ron DeSantis using AI to produce deepfakes of political opponent Donald Trump.

"I think it's pretty dangerous if we start to have AIs campaigning and persuading and having conversations with people about who to vote for," said Inflection CEO Mustafa Suleyman, speaking at the Wall Street Journal Tech Live event last week. "I would like to take that off the table. We're certainly not going to do that. I think other companies shouldn't either."

Continued here

You Might Like

An Invisible ‘Demon’ Lurks in an Odd Superconductor - WIRED

In 1956, David Pines formulated a phantom. He predicted the existence of seas of electric ripples that could neutralize each other, rendering the overall ocean motionless even as individual waves ebbed and flowed. The oddity, which came to be known as Pines' demon, would be electrically neutral, and therefore invisible to lightâthe definition of tough to detect.Over the decades, physicists managed to catch glimpses of demon variants. But Pines' original demonâwhich would arise naturally out of electrons in metallic blocksâwent undetected.Now a team of physicists at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign appears to have spotted Pines' demon. After refining a technique for precisely tracking electrons as they ricochet off a material, the team produced and detected a series of periodic waves rippling through swarms of electrons. These waves, which physicists call "modes," largely match Pines' calculations. The researchers detailed their findings in Nature in August."These modes haven't been seen for 70 years," said Piers Coleman, a theoretical physicist at Rutgers University. But this new experiment, somehow, "picks up these demon modes."

The 1950s were a boom time for studying electrons in metals. Physicists had already developed a simplistic theory that ignored electrons' tendency to push each other away, treating them collectively as if they formed a sort of free-flowing gas. In 1952, Pines and his adviser, David Bohm, went a step further. After adding electron interactions to this "electron gas" theory, they found that electrons could bunch up in some places and spread out in others. These clustering electrons formed tidy waves of alternating higher and lower density (and therefore regions of higher and lower electric charge).

Pines then pushed the new theory further still. He imagined a material containing two gases, each made from a different type of charged particle. Specifically, he envisioned a metal with "heavy" electrons and "light" electrons. (All electrons are identical in theory, but in the real world their measurable properties depend on their environment.) Pines found that waves in the first gas could neutralize waves in the second; where heavy electrons bunched, light electrons would thin out. Then, as the heavy electron clusters dispersed, the lighter electrons would gather to fill in the thinner patches. Because one gas thickened precisely where the other gas thinned, the overall electron density of both types togetherâand therefore the overall charge and electric fieldâwould remain neutral and unchanging. "Things can be moving even when they seem not to be," said Anshul Kogar, a condensed matter physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Continued here