Here is a number that should bother anyone hiring a software partner: according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly 65% of businesses are gone within ten years of opening, and only about a quarter make it to fifteen. In the information sector — software and tech specifically — the ten-year survival rate drops to around 29%. Most of the companies pitching you today will not be reachable a decade from now.
It gets starker at the top. The average tenure of a company on the S&P 500 has collapsed from around 33 years in the 1960s to roughly 15 years now, and Innosight forecasts it falling further this decade. McKinsey has gone as far as projecting that about three-quarters of today's S&P 500 names will be gone — merged, acquired, or bankrupt — by 2027. Bigness is not permanence. Almost nothing is.
We mention this not to be gloomy, but because it's the backdrop to a quieter fact: True Dev has been building software since 1997.
The long version of the story
It started in Sweden, under a different name, in 1997 — the year of the first DVD players and a web most people still reached through a screeching modem. We wrote software for Swedish businesses while the industry reinvented its tools roughly every eighteen months. Then the founder, Mikael Löfberg, moved to Bangkok, and the company moved with him. Same craft, new continent, eventually a new name: True Dev.
That's nearly three decades across two countries and an entire era of technology — from desktop apps to the cloud to whatever we're all calling AI this week. We are, by the BLS math, in the small fraction of companies that simply kept going.
What survival actually teaches
Longevity is not a trophy you hang on a wall. It's a teacher, and it teaches three things you genuinely cannot shortcut — no amount of funding, headcount, or clever marketing buys them. You only get them by being there for the years.
The first is judgement. When you have shipped software through several hype cycles, you can tell the difference between a tool that will outlive the project and one that will be abandoned the moment a funding round dries up. We have watched "the future of development" arrive, get rewritten, and quietly disappear — more than once. That memory is the difference between chasing trends and choosing them.
The second is calm. Almost nothing in a normal project is genuinely new to us. A migration that looks terrifying on a Monday is a known shape we've handled before. Clients tend to feel that calm before they can name it; it's the absence of panic in the room when something breaks at 4pm on a Friday.
The third is ownership. A team built to survive can't treat clients as one-off transactions, because the same name has to be defensible next year and the year after. We write code we'll be willing to open again in 2030. That's a very different incentive from a studio optimising to bill and vanish.
Why this matters to you, today
You are not hiring 1997. You're hiring what 1997 turned into: a team that has already made most of the expensive mistakes, on someone else's clock, long before your project started. When the data says two in three companies won't reach ten years, picking the one that has reached twenty-nine is not nostalgia — it's risk management.
Software that lasts tends to be built by people who have lasted. Not because age is magic, but because durability forces a certain honesty about what's worth building and what merely looks impressive in a demo.
If that's the kind of partner you'd rather have on the other side of the table, you can start a project with us or simply look through what we do. No urgency. We've been here a while — we'll be here when you're ready.
