The acquisition of IDspare took over a year and involved considerable efforts from a number of Loftex’s management. In particular, the legal teams on both sides expended huge energies in defining what we were buying, for how much, over what time-frames, etc. Regrettably the technological aspects of the technology weren’t really explored until the last round of documents.
Even as I write that I find it hard to explain or understand. If its a technology, surely the techies would be involved in examining it, trying it out, making sure it performed, before we even talked about what it might be worth?
Apparently I’m naive in these things, because its not at all necessary. A disruptive technology doesn’t necessarily involve anything tangible, like code. So it should have come as no surprise when the key element that we all understood to be the guts of IDspare turned out not to belong to the people we were buying IDspare from. It was (and is) rented from a couple of guys working out of a garage in South London. Good code, works as it says on the tin, but not for sale. They’ve written a song and want their 2p every time it gets played.
Which of course is going to be a gazillion times if the business model informing our modest multi-billion dollar valuation is anything to go by. Which perhaps it isn’t, but thats another story.
So what were we buying? Turns out to be a concept. Now anyone who’s read anything about the dotcom bubble knows that concepts can be worth billions. Or, after a pause for reflection, not.
Now we own a concept, which to be worth anything to our clients is going to have to be used to aggregate technologies, some of which we own and some of which we have to buy as we use. Which means we no longer have the problem of being solely reliant on our own small team of developers. We’re also now additionally dependent on an even smaller team of developers, and an implementation team owned by the erstwhile IDspare owners.
One of my larger former employers made a lot of play about its ‘Methodologies’. I used to be very skeptical about the value of these, given they were largely concepts with fancy logos and a lot of management consultancy words. I now see that they had quite a lot of value. We need to get some logos done and a CD made, sharpish.
