What's a Tarida?
Our private equity firm is called Tarida Capital. Not many people have heard of a “Tarida." There’s a good reason for that.
It was a boat that came into existence around the year 1100. A few centuries later no one was making them anymore. The process of forgetting about the Tarida boat began long ago.
It was a major innovation when it first set sail. A flat bottom boat that was ideal for transporting horses and goods throughout the mediterranean. The front of the boat could be lowered for loading and unloading directly on the beach. It was extremely effective in war and increased trade significantly. Here’s a sketch.
There isn’t much of a historical record because it became obsolete. It was replaced by better boats that held more cargo, loaded and unloaded more efficiently and sailed further and faster.
We like the name Tarida because it gives us a valuable perspective on innovation. When we build something new we're always standing on the shoulders of what came before. Whatever we are building will be temporary. It will provide new "shoulders" to stand on. We want to build Taridas. Innovative technology that opens new markets. And then gets replaced and forgotten.
If we don’t see our work in this way we’ll miss the next thing. We’ll be the train company that missed the transport revolution enabled by flight. Or we’ll be Microsoft stuck to Office when everyone is in the cloud.
It’s a humbling perspective that helps us stay connected to the fundamental reality of things.
“Change is the only constant in life.”
“Better it is to live one day seeing the rise and fall of things than to live a hundred years without ever seeing the rise and fall of things.”
“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”
Constant change is encouraging. The biggest challenge we face in creating the future is that we are too attached to how things are now. Focusing on impermanence lets us take more risks while innovating. We know that whatever exists today will become obsolete. This way of thinking shifts the balance towards innovation and away from our natural, human preference for against change and for the status quo.
We could have named the company Impermanence Capital. Instead we named it after a boat that is a symbol of innovation and a metaphor for change.