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Yes I didn't get this either.

My guess is he meant software contracting or something related, making software to order rather than making their own products.

And presumably he could've switched to a SaaS business model without leaping into a completely different market. Instead he should have stuck with some B2B area he was already working in and knew well. That was the high-risk part in my opinion.

Metalab is a software/design development agency. 37Signals (now Basecamp) started as the same kind of agency.

He has a link in his twitter bio - it's software agency. It's also possible to get it from context - he mentions grabbing devs from it to build Flow.

This is just a techbro(well, more like middle aged) story, full of all the usual ingredients:Narcissism, overestimation of their impact on society, virtue-signaling, extrapolating personal experiences to the whole society. Give me better a story about a Turkish butcher(including he calling names to the mom of his competition) any day of the week.