Building an AI platform for many businesses creates more compounding value than doing AI rollups, because rollup products only serve the acquired companies while a platform can serve every real-world business.
Melisa explains why she chose to build Netic as a platform rather than pursue the AI-rollup model: rollup products are inherently limited to the acquired companies, whereas Netic aims to be usable by every real-world business, letting them focus on their labor and differentiation while AI handles the rest. ✦ AI generated
Melisa Tokmak · No Priors · 2026-07-31 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 10:15
“How did you make the decision to build this service versus just doing a rollup or buying and running the assets?”
What I have seen there's a lot of successful roll-ups and tech enabled roll-ups, but at the end all the products you're building are for the company you just bought. It can't really be actually applied to any other company. So you are committing to buying these a few companies in whatever industries that you are interested in and serving those with your products versus what I'm interested in is how every real world business can run on netic right if we didn't have to limit them if they could focus on what they are good at in that business which is the labor which is the differentiation quality of the service how could netic run the rest.
verbatim transcript · starts at 10:15
10:15committing to buying these a few companies in whatever industries that you are interested in and serving those with your products versus what I'm interested in is how every real world business can run on netic right if we didn't have to limit them if they could focus on what they are good at in that business which is the labor which is the differentiation quality of the service how could netic run the rest
10:38>> how do so when people talk about um AI for the real world they mean two or three things right so obviously there's is what you're doing at Etek and serving these businesses that you know go and implement different services for people in their homes or their pets or you know different aspects of their life. There's people who talk about robotics they're self-driving like do you think all these
10:56things converge over time? Do you think the timeline of that is very far in the future and doesn't kind of matter in terms of these other types of things? >> Yeah, it's almost you're looking at the same book maybe but different chapters. We're talking about much more now chapters and for the next few decades. I do believe that there's a chapter in the future. It is all about robotics. But in
11:18some of the industries that I'm working with that is quite far in the future. And I always say you know if you spend a few days with these business which is very important for us like you know I have to tell you about how I learned about these uh industries and every single engineer in our company do have to go visit customers on site to build the right product back home in San