Most companies should build products in-house rather than acquire them. Acquisitions carry hidden costs: integrating teams and cultures is hard, tech stacks clash, and leadership gets distracted. Buying only makes sense when you're getting years of R&D you couldn't build yourself.
Chapters
You can build it yourself in-house, or you can buy another company. I'll reveal my bias, which is I think that the vast majority of the time, building is better than buying. I think buying companies, particularly when you're small, comes with a huge amount of overhead that is hard to foresee. You have to integrate the team, the culture, the product. You're not going to have the integrations. It's generally speaking going to be more expensive than if you just build it in-house. It's going to be a huge distraction to your leadership team relative to building it in-house. Um, you might have different tech stacks. And so it just, it's, it's not the optimal path most of the time. Um, a second, which happens at a smaller scale, is there are instances where a different company or team has done a long, complicated build that will actually take you a very long time and you won't have the product expertise to do. And so you're acquiring like years worth of R&D and, and a team that really knows how to build it.