Your whole tech portfolio is f#$&ed.

If you’ve invested in companies building software, you have a huge problem that you can’t see.

Every portfolio company is wasting massive amounts of capital focussing on the problems that their customers don’t care about.

In software teams of 5 or more, it’s likely that 1 of those team members is spending a large chunk of their time maintaining and supporting non-core systems.

You could attempt to hire more people but that won’t fix the underlying problem.

The best technical leaders quickly acknowledge that developer productivity comes from focus, and focus comes from using the best tools for the job.

In my opinion, the solution here is to buy your developer’s focus via tools that are built by experts and therefore get their experience on your team via proxy.

Pro-level dev tools are the best money you can spend for team efficiency. Developers hate inefficiency and those free or cheap tools that constantly break their flow are an extremely expensive hidden cost.

Some amazing companies that I’ve spent some time with lately are are Calibre, Stax and Forticode. All the founders have deep domain knowledge that can be added to your team for what is a relatively small monthly fee.

BuildKite, Hava and Percy are three companies that I am lucky enough to be involved with and all have been built by engineers who got tired of wasting time on deployments, network visualisation and visual regressions. Again, the founders are absolute experts in their domain and when your team uses their product, they get that expertise on tap.

The best tools increase the mean time between distractions, which is the main way to achieve developer happiness and productivity.

That developer happiness goes straight to the bottom line.

If you’re a dev tools founder, I’d be keen to hear how you’re helping teams focus and if you’re a VC who’d like to help your portfolio companies, find me on @mattallen