Michael Bruun of Goldman Sachs on the thing that never shows up on a balance sheet:โฃ
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"Does this company have a good tech stack? Does this company have a homogeneous set of data? Is it a clean dataset?"โฃ
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25 ERP systems. No data lake. A dataset that's been neglected for years. None of that appears in the financials, but it determines how a company adopts AI, and Goldman bakes the cost of fixing it directly into their return model.โฃ
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It's future-proofing. Fix the plumbing during the ownership period, and a strategic buyer sees a company that's already ready.โฃ
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There's a J-curve. It costs real money upfront. But the alternative is selling a company that looks fine on paper and can't actually use the technology everyone assumes it can.