Platform Shift

“You go through a platform shift, and the first step of the platform shift is you do the old stuff, but more.”

“If you're a huge tech company, you can miss maybe one platform shift and do fine, but you miss two, you're going to be out of the game.”

“Every company's market share is up for grabs when there's a platform shift.”

“Every once in a while you get a platform shift that's like dramatic enough where it basically means that you both kind of can and have to reinvent from scratch the whole idea of what the thing is in the first place.”

“The classic pattern of the platform shift is the incumbents always try and make it a feature.”

“In the early innings of a platform shift, you can be narrow and you can find a lot of product market fit, but towards when the thing mature, say, you know, web or cloud, what have you actually have to be a lot more ambitious.”

“If you think about every major platform shift as, like, kind of a pond, and the pond is kind of stocked with opportunities, it will get fished out over time. You know, the best opportunities over time will get taken. There's always this question of, why is thi…”

“There are certain product categories that are very, very sticky where the half-life is very long when there's really only one chance for you to build a company in that space. And that's when you have a platform shift.”

“And whenever there's a platform shift in terms of how applications are built and how services are delivered, whether it's PCs or mobile or in this case, the cloud, there's a big opportunity to build new companies, or at least you have the best opportunity to b…”

“And then finally, startups usually win on big platform shifts. Many people have observed that startups come in these clusters. Those clusters usually come after a big platform shift.”

“In the next platform shift, that will also be true. The biggest beneficiary is likely to be Google or Facebook or Apple or Amazon.”