Lightspeed has been on an absolute tear of acquisitions. There are fundamentally two ways to look at this:
- Lightspeed is being strategic and buying market share using cheaper costs of capital than their non-public counterparts can offer. This will springboard opportunities into new geographies and vertical segments.
- Lightspeed is buying market share because their organic growth has slowed and they need to keep a high revenue CAGR to justify their valuation.
Summary: Lightspeed is using the crazy cheap capital in public markets to buy growth. They’ll figure the rest out later.
InstaROI. They’d be stupid not to.
Managing to the quarter is the antithesis of every successful tech company I can think of (AMZN, FB, GOOG, SQ, etc).
Unless they are a bank, not deploying capital would be irresponsible as well.
Merging of all these products is going to be a monumental feat. Buying and holding their stock is the belief that they can pull it off.
With the jumble of components Lightspeed has built up – and the likelihood it will continue — I would never work for them nor would I want to be a customer. Your article hit it on the head — combining disparate technologies is not only challenging but it’s the least interesting work for anyone of technical merit. As a customer I have no interest in deploying software that is complex to support. Good luck having a help desk person know how to pinpoint where an issue lies in disparate patched together components.
Considering you built the tech stack for Taco Bell, that’s saying something. Thanks Peter.