MFA investment January 2025

Investing in software

As mentioned previously, we have been pinching pennies to afford our DIY sabbatical. (Happily, our DIY sabbatical is very affordable and there are lovely things here that literally cost the equivalent of a few pennies—more on this another day.) I was apprehensive that we wouldn’t be able to continue to invest for the months that we are outside the U.S., but now that we are here, it seems clear that we can keep putting modest sums into long-term investments that we won’t need to touch until it’s time to open up the coffee can and see how they have done over the course of years and decades.

So today we’ll break down our next Money for Artists portfolio position.

To recap, since we find index funds to be irrevocably bound up in bad things, we make a modest but sincere attempt to find individual investments that don’t make us retch with their wickedness and put our little retirement dollars into them.

This time, we are going to up our investment in a software company with the following characteristics:

Necessity

You need this company’s platforms (or something comparable to them) to build the modern world. Sorry, Luddite homies.

Longevity

Although it just went public a few years ago, the company was founded 40 years ago. This isn’t the same thing as investing in Lindy the way we’ve done in the past, but in the world of software, that’s a helluva long time.

Durability

1) Just to take one other software-as-a-service example, the risk of AI eating up Adobe’s business has definitely weighed on that particular stock. AI can’t eat this business, though. This is work that has to be done by human beings.

2) You can’t put some Stanford grads in a room with a bunch of pizza and computers and cash and create something that can compete with this business. This ain’t a dating app, fam. You need deep expertise in the field to take part in the conversation. The number of companies that can play in this sandbox is very small.

Reach

There are 195 “recognized nations” in the world. This company has clients in all but one of them.

Characteristics of a long-term compounder

Paid subscribers, read on….

If software was actually soft, you could run your hands over it like these textiles and it would feel nice. Photo by Olga Kozachenko on Unsplash