Heat looks like validation, and validation looks like safety. It is hard to ignore a sector when customers start leaning forward at the same time investors do. Still, the more cycles I have lived through in competitive technology businesses, the more I see heat as an optical illusion. It sharpens whatever is easiest to notice and blurs the underlying mechanics that determine who or what holds control.
At one point, Andrew Gazdecki belonged to the second of these two cohorts. "I held on because I was attached," he says of his first company, Bizness Apps, which he sold in 2017. The company, a publishing platform that helps businesses develop mobile apps, began life in 2010, riding the smartphone revolution kickstarted by Apple. When, years later, Bizness Apps began losing customers, and continued losing customers, part of Gazdecki knew it was time to sell. And yet he waited.