[ChrisCinelli]

So you do not have need of innovation?

Usually a company with software need to develop new features, reengineering to reduce infrastructure costs and improving performance bottlenecks, maintenance, etc. Do not you have that in your company? And if you do, who is leading those initiatives?

[gnicholas]

We are not innovating on the core product, which has remained static for many years. Instead, we are pushing adoption through our licensing partnerships. We now have over 250k students using our reading tech through education platforms that we work with. Building more of these partnerships, based on the data we have gathered from our existing partners, is the focus.

[lmm]

Sounds like at that point you're not really a tech company. Your tech might as well be some off-the-shelf stuff as far as you're concerned, if you're not actually working on it any more.

[gnicholas]

Interesting perspective! So if Dolby had stopped making new versions of its technology and just licensed what it had until people stopped buying it, then it wouldn't have been a tech company? What kind of company would it have been?

[lmm]

A sound company, or whatever the technology in question does? If you're in a position where it's viable to not be making new versions of your tech then presumably that means you're in a field that's at least somewhat mature as its own thing. I think there's a temptation to equate "on computers" with "tech" whereas for a lot of fields doing it on computers is pretty much commodified now.

[gnicholas]

In our case, we're growing via adoption of our first generation core product. I could definitely make a second version, but it wouldn't help overcome the primary challenge we face with adoption, which is that the technology looks unconventional, and isn't well-enough known yet. Making a more complicated version wouldn't help with this, and might not even improve the efficacy. It would also require internationalization, whereas our current version is language agnostic.

So it's not that we won't ever create a newer version, just that it's not the primary focus.

[danjc]

Hate to tell you this but a business cannot thrive if it doesn't innovate. At best, you'll ride on your momentum for a while.

[trgdr]

I mean not all businesses need to thrive. If the thing generates significant profits for a while then the founder can retire and either sell it or just let it die. If it's not a publicly-traded company there's no fiduciary duty to do anything more than that.

[gnicholas]

If we were riding on momentum I would expect our revenue to be stable/shrinking, not growing (as it is). I agree that in the long term this is true, but when you start as a tiny speck, you can grow for a long time as awareness spreads. For example, we started our in education and are now getting interest from news/media organizations. This is without changing the core functionality at all.