Are you building a marketplace, social network or a platform? Do you ever describe what you’re doing as the Uber for X, Airbnb for Y or the Twitter for Z?1 Do you want to understand why certain startups scale and others fail?1 Over the last few years, I’ve been obsessed with platform business models and their ability to scale. Unlike traditional enterprises, platforms do not scale by scaling...
This article was originally published on Sangeet Paul Choudary’s personal blog Platform Thinking – A blog about building early stage ventures from an idea to a business, and mitigating execution risk. A keynote laying out the shift that platforms are bringing about in the nature of business today. One of the central concepts I talk about on this blog is the shift from linear business models to...
One of the most common questions I get asked, while talking about platforms, relates to the issue of labor on platforms. Facebook and Twitter, among others, get a lot of value from their users and make billions of dollars, but the users don’t see much kickback. The economics of free-labor platforms Social networks like Facebook and Twitter leverage free labor from a global talent pool to...
Premise: Wealth creation by humans happens in 2 forms, by making “something desirable” or by helping the maker sell it. Everything else is a support function that brings efficiency to these 2 activities. The Web being a communication medium can only help sell something, which happens through some form of lead generation. One might argue that SaaS tools are “desirable” products on the web but the...
