Why I Bet on Boring Businesses

Pet snacks. Physiotherapy. Chasing overdue invoices. A salon. On paper, my portfolio is aggressively unglamorous — and that's not an accident. It's the strategy.

The startup world is built to celebrate the opposite: the world-changing narrative, the category that doesn't exist yet, the deck that promises to reinvent something. Some of those bets genuinely pay off and change the world. But most don't — and the base rate is brutal in a way the highlight reel never shows.

So I've spent my career quietly betting on boring instead. Here's why boring is underrated:

Boring means the problem is real and permanent. People will always have pets to feed, backs that hurt, invoices that go unpaid. You're not creating demand or educating a market into existing — you're serving a need that was there yesterday and will be there in ten years. That's a much easier place to build.

Boring has less competition. Everyone smart and ambitious is chasing the shiny thing. Which means the unglamorous corners — the physio clinic, the trade-receivables problem, the premium dog treat — are strangely uncrowded relative to how much money is actually in them.

Boring pays you now, not “someday.” A hype business often depends on the story continuing — the next round, the next narrative, the belief that profit comes later. A boring business depends on customers continuing. One of those is far more reliable than the other. Boring generates cash from day one, and cash is the only thing that doesn't need anyone to keep believing.

The real distinction isn't boring versus exciting. It's an annuity versus a lottery ticket. A boring business compounds — quietly, unspectacularly, durably. A hype business is a bet that the music keeps playing.

None of this means low ambition. It means choosing durability over optionality — building things that make money because they solve a real problem, not because the market is momentarily willing to fund a dream.

The most exciting thing a business can be, in the end, is still here in ten years, still profitable. That's the excitement I optimise for.

What's the most “boring” business you secretly admire — and what does it quietly get right?