Adams operationalized his discontinuity based investing method by hiring only engineers as partners, leveraging their technical training in the search of promising markets in which to invest. Overtime ACM’s investment focus evolved to focus on markets which he and his partners were already relatively familiar with and had already recognized as attractive.
From a Limited Partner’s perspective Adams strategy in comparable to a growth-investing strategy many fund managers implement in the equity markets. That being said, Adams is searching for method of discontinuity based investing looks to capitalise on a company’s potential growth well before they have reached a large enough size to be listed on the equity market.
ACM developed more sophisticated pre-requisites to investment developed overtime, these methods digress from typical investment managers and Private Equity/Venture Capital theories firms. Firstly, ACM was only interested in investing in companies which had business to business relationships with their customers, meaning companies without a retail branch from which to distribute products or services to consumers. Secondly, ACM believed the firm value’s and hence the value of their investment would be driven by return on investment (ROI) of respective business customers. Whilst always remaining focused on the business making us of “first generation applied technology” or being one of the first companies to use a specific technology for a specific application.
A combination of ACM’s investment strategy’s divergence from typical investment theory, as it invested in small companies who’s growth prospects were infinite, focused on ROI of