Why

• As a founder, you want to:

  • Engineer technologies making lives of humans better.
  • Build a sustainable business around this technology, allowing you to build a world-class team and finance riskier moves.

• When you're a technology-first founder and not a product/vision or pain point-first founder, there's a strategic question on if you want to sell your technology as a service to businesses which provide the actual end product, or if you want to go "full stack" meaning you own both the core technology behind your product and also supply the product.

What

• The difference between fullstack and consumer:

  • Lemon markets + banking frontend = fullstack:
    • Trade Republic

• Fullstack businesses don't need to be consumer-facing

• Examples:

  • Tesla could have also built many vertical businesses like:
    • Battery technology for EVs
    • Self-driving technology for EVs
    • Power charging network for EVs
      • But they put it all in one

• Equation vs Aviato

• Manafund selling their tooling to hedge funds

  • Internal tools of hedge funds

• Food robotics company selling robots (robots to large-scale kitchens) - Sweetgreen, Kaikai having their own stores designing kitchens and processes from scratch around robotics

• OpenAI

  • First focused on selling API access - B2B service
  • Now fullstack solution with end-user products for consumers and teams - making up the majority of their revenue

• Amazon

  • Instead of building e-commerce SaaS tooling like Shopify did, Amazon built the fullstack solution (infrastructure, supply, marketplace)
    • (Shopify is going more and more fullstack as well through investment in physical infrastructure for their clients)

• Apple

  • ...

Conclusion

• Fullstack ventures often have great business moat because they own actual assets, they build brand for their service both in consumer and B2B