A Massive Opportunity Exists To Build 'Picks And Shovels' For Machine Learning

Many multi-billion-dollar companies have been built by providing tools to make software development easier and more productive. Venture capitalists like to refer to businesses like these as "pick and shovel" opportunities, a reference to Mark Twain's famous line: "When everyone is looking for gold, it's a good time to be in the pick and shovel business." Atlassian, which offers a suite of software development and collaboration tools, has a public market capitalization above $30B. GitHub, a code repository, was acquired for $7.5B by Microsoft in 2018. Pivotal, which accelerates app development and deployment, was valued at $2.7B in VMWare's acquisition last year.