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On building versus buying

Why the future of software isn’t about choosing between building or buying, but finding the right partner to build with.

For decades, software buyers have faced a tradeoff: build or buy?

But it’s now clear that buyers have a third alternative: building in close collaboration with a vendor.

Buyers of all solutions will find themselves in a PayPal vs. Stripe dilemma during the procurement process:

Whereas PayPal offers “one size fits all” solutions for receiving payments, Stripe takes the “infrastructure approach” of empowering product and engineering teams by doing the heavy lifting of financial transactions: eng/prod teams need not worry about transaction atomicity, fraud detection, disputes etc. - but the end user experience remains entirely under their control.

So after observing this trend for years, our guiding principle at Markprompt is “Build, with us.”

And to a large extent, we’re betting that this is the future of software.

Companies are tasking eng teams to build bespoke gen AI solutions deeply integrated into the core product experience BUT these same eng teams often struggle to “get it right” - whether lack of expertise “taming” the LLMs, Pandora’s box of tooling to build in order to operate efficiently, measure performance, generate new knowledge, and so on.

So the future of many industries looks like Stripe: keep full control of the customer experience you want to build, but build on top of a partner who’s done the heavy-lifting of data preprocessing, prompt optimization, retrieval strategies, security, data flywheels, etc.