General

I posted yesterday about how a small company can grow by being hired by a large company. But there’s another key opportunity that’s often even bigger.

Smaller companies often find a gap in the offerings of larger companies, and are able to create their own offerings to fill the gap.

Gaps are everywhere

I’ve worked with data for a very long time. And over that time, I’ve seen countless small companies and startups created. So many times, what propels them forward is finding a gap in a popular offering from a large company, and quickly filling that gap with their own offering.

2025-11-13

One of the best ways to grow a small business is to find something a large business needs, yet for some reason, they can’t or won’t do themselves.

This happens for many reasons:

Specialized Expertise

Small companies often have deep niche skills that the large company either doesn’t have or can’t easily build internally (e.g., a boutique AI consultancy, a specialist in SQL Server performance tuning).

These small firms might work across many clients, so they’re exposed to the latest best practices and pitfalls the big company hasn’t yet encountered. Large companies often also have marketing-driven outcomes rather than just technically-driven ones.

2025-11-12

I was reading a Facebook post the other day, and it was talking about the sad tale of Keith Sapsford. Keith fell to his death from within the landing gear area of a DC-8 that was leaving Sydney, bound for Tokyo.

What was fascinating was that his fall was inadvertently captured by an amateur photographer named John Gilpin.

But why this fascinated me now, is that when I read all the comments about the post, the vast majority of the comments were saying that the photo was fake, that it was AI generated, and that this could not possibly have happened.

2025-11-03

I get a large volume of email every day. Part of that is always quite a lot of spam.

Now I don’t begrudge someone trying to make a living, and I understand that sometimes, they’re going to send me something unexpected.

But there are a few trends that annoy me.

The incorrectly targeted email

There’s a company out there selling access to email lists that has my company listed as a recruitment company. We’re not. I won’t shame this company by naming them, at least not today.

2025-07-25

One of the things many people don’t know about me, is that I spent many years both playing and umpiring baseball. Clearly that’s not so common for Australians.

In many ways, the umpiring was probably the most interesting. I’ve umpired up to state level games, including the Pan Pacific games. It certainly teaches you how to deal with strong views effectively.

Most people have seen the classic images of managers/coaches racing out to have a very heated discussion with an umpire. I’ve had so many people asking me how I dealt with that when I was umpiring.

2025-07-09

One thing I loved doing as a child was building and creating things. With models, there were two types of projects:

• Models with components and instructions (like Airfix)
• Basic building materials (like Lego)

With Airfix models, the challenge was to follow the instructions to build the project, then great care required to paint and finalize the model. But there really wasn’t much creativity involved.

With basic building materials like Lego, creativity was needed to produce something that looked like (or let’s admit it often just “resembled”) whatever you were trying to build.

2025-06-03

One thing that has annoyed me for a long time is why applications and systems make it so hard to disconnect yourself from a tenant that you don’t control. Here are two examples:

Stripe Connect

The first one that’s frustrated me lately is Stripe. Setting up your own account is straightforward, and leaving isn’t too hard.

But they have a service called Stripe Connect. In this case, the account is basically set up for you by a vendor you are dealing with, essentially on your behalf.

2025-05-15

Over the years, I’ve spent quite some time in Britain and there are many things that fascinate me about it.

Travelling Around

The first is that so many people that I meet with, particularly in England, have never seen much of the country, even though it’s not very big. They just don’t travel around to look at things. Even less have been to Ireland, even though it’s basically next door.

2025-04-27

I remember that back when Microsoft introduced the ribbon for the menu in Microsoft Excel, I was at a product group session where they explained why they did it. They told us that when they summarized all the requests from users for features to add to Excel, there was something amazing:

Almost every feature was already there

So, what they had was a discoverability issue, not a feature gap.

What prompted me to write this opinion today, is that I see exactly the same sort of issue in my data-related work. People are unaware of what their existing tooling and software can do, and wish features would be added, yet those features are already there.

2025-04-21

I see software houses all the time that are worried about why users find their software hard to use. Or at least harder than they thought they would find it.

One thing that I see worrying users time and again, is applications that discourage you for discovering how they work. Users are afraid to click on options that they haven’t used before, because they’re worried that  something will happen that they can’t undo.

2025-04-14