Platform

“At least for me, having grown up at Microsoft, having seen whatever four major platform shifts I sort of fall into that camp where a platform is defined by fundamentally its ability to create more value about the platform versus what's captured in the platform…”

“Most of what we're building is platform, and we think that there's so many examples of where a platform can accrue a lot of value, but the customers who are building on that platform actually accrue even more value. We think that's where, what we're setting up…”

“And so we made the tough decision. I want to say it was like August of 25 to stop selling and just rebuild the platform.”

“All the platforms are penalizing outbound links. You know, I think ex-Twitter has gotten a lot of, took a lot of heat for this, like, Elon did this thing that's like, what, now everyone has to post the link in the comments below, but the truth is, like, they'r…”

“Most of the time you're going to need to be at like 10 or maybe even 15 or 20 to be considered a true platform.”

“The explosion in consumer in, you know, sort of the 2008 to 2012, 2014 period, that was an opening up of platforms. And then as the consolidation happened, you know, distribution closed down, which sort of spurred, you know, this move over to B to B.”

“The ship has sailed on starting like new platforms for the most part, in my opinion.”

“Platforms, if you really think about it, they started as a way to share things that you found were interesting. And now they are mostly ways to share photos and videos of you talking about things that you find interesting. It's kind of become like less novelty…”

“And so that's the key is like, they close it down by doing one of two, by one of a few things. They either shut it down entirely. Two, they develop their own first party applications to absorb the highest use cases. Or three, they artificially depress the orga…”

“They're playing you. So you need to play them. Like that felt like that, that might be a little sadistic or something, but that is business.”

“And the key part about this too, is it the broad trend is that the cycles seem to be getting shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter. So you actually have a smaller amount of time to play the game.”

“The key question for startups is totally different. You don't have the luxury to spread your chips. Like you have to go all in. You have to choose one and go all in. You have scarce resources, scarce attention from the market. And so it's a totally different b…”

“My wonder if it produces a kind of brute force level of pollution that then actually becomes hard to manage for the platforms. Two, it produces, it gets so good that it kind of creates this kind of Surreal new genre of like pure attentional drug, like the slot…”

“We actually need the platforms to allow other people to enter, but if we do that, we can actually have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of companies, each of which can get to a billion dollars net revenue each, you know. And like, you could do it pro…”

“We do think that's one of the reasons why platforms will continue to win. Point agents will not win in this whole race that we are in.”

“Platforms need apps. You want to have the top first party app that runs on your platform. Otherwise your platform can't get good.”

“I don't think our role as a platform on the internet should be to tell you what's right and what's wrong or who to trust and who not to trust. And it's a seductive idea that it should be that role. And a lot of platforms took that stance and it just didn't wor…”

“If you're trying to sell a platform, like inherently selling a platform means that your overall go to market messaging becomes like really tricky. And in particular, it becomes hard to scale because like, it's no longer just, this is what we do, but instead we…”

“AI is going to make the big, big, big platforms a shit ton of money. And it's going to be really good for small businesses, but it is a terrible place to hunt for startups, right? It's a great way to lose a lot of money on startups.”

“Every single of the 110 companies we've been involved with for 25 years are a platform. Every single one. There's no exception to that.”

“Second, investors don't properly value platforms because they don't give assigned value to the correlated option value of one program that becomes de-risked based on three other programs, and so you don't get the credit And you get the deduction because it's n…”

“No one, no networks ever had a billion viewers. Like, you're just, you just have never operated at that scale before. Like, these platforms operate at a scale that no one's ever seen before.”

“Because the best feedback loop to build a great platform for other people to use is to be building apps.”

“I would not want to build a ten-year business on any of these platforms, because they do not give a about you, and they will sooner cut off your API access accidentally, say oops, Killed your business. They will build the feature directly into their platform.”

“The other interesting thing is that if you are actually good at sports betting, they kick you off the platform because they know they're going to lose money on you because you have an edge”

“If you're a venture capitalist and you're looking for outsized returns, you don't necessarily want to rip a check into someone with a Canon five D who's going to go make vlogs and who knows if it's going to hit. And if it does, it's going to look like a lifest…”

“So then if, even if you don't have a hit product, if you just assemble like a plus talent, a super specialized, then as those platforms rise, your team itself becomes like a hundred million dollar asset.”

“Everything we offer on the platform, we came up with organically through these customer conversations.”

“And the only other thing that I'll say is right now, because we consume things through a lot of platforms, Platforms should be held accountable at some level to, you know, clearly demarcating what is real and what is not, right? Because otherwise it's going to…”

“They have to realize that they're good investors, but they could be great inside of this system, and therefore, a solid piece of this pie is better than signing up to live and die by every other own decision, let's say if you went to a platform, or having to b…”

“The idea that you have a bunch of apps come together on some standard around parental controls just seems way more complicated and less successful than just having the actual platforms do it.”

“It's impossible for platforms to pick this up because everything is done behind the scenes, the recruiting, the payments, the editorial direction, usually in discords or in text messages or on WhatsApp signal. And it's very, very difficult to pick up.”

“I think everyone should be able to be sued, because then you do a lot better at your business if you have the threat of lawsuits, essentially. So that's not happening, and so they're never going to be good at it until they can be sued”

“My epiphany eBay was at least for a marketplace, it's really a platform. And what that means is that when you build new functionality and capabilities, it's not enough to think about what the app can now do. And it's not the same as an application where, of co…”

“The value of an ecosystem is when the economic value generated by the ecosystem exceeds that of the platform.”

“I'd say data is something that people struggle with. Embracing data seems to be a challenge, at least in the long, short equity space. I'm sure I'll hear a lot of people say, no, that's not true, because they scrape data. But it's as simple as, okay, you keep …”

“And I think, again, the platforms, they got that right, because the contract gets set very clearly on day one. Whereas in the single manager contract, I think it's often quite fluid, and people are just expected to do more as they stay with the firm.”

“Early commitments in this case to like a Particular pricing scheme, particular monetization can really tie your hands as you then realize later you actually are a platform.”

“The most valuable things that get done on the platforms are not the things that got deployed in the first year or two of the platform change.”

“The best kind of business to build for like an indie hacker is to build on top of another platform.”

“Now with these platforms that we're talking about, if you look over the last three, five, 10, or even 20 to 30 years in cases where they've been around for that long, and there are some that have, the platforms have actually outperformed equities on a total re…”

“So what's happened the last 1012 years, you've had a lot more money flow into passive investments versus active investments, and you've had a lot of money flow into the platforms, which Not to paint a broad brush, but generally are shorter term traders. And so…”

“Because in order to build a really thriving subscription business, you really need a direct relationship with your customer, as opposed to just relying on platforms to really kind of distribute your coverage.”

“I think slightly better than others doesn't work. Consumers won't shift to you. You have to be fundamentally very different from consumer, from other sort of avenues where consumers can shop at so that, you know, I mean, that's the only thing that moves consum…”

“Sometimes very large platforms aren't necessarily depending on when they were founded and what kind of payment stack they have. They're not necessarily that much more sophisticated sometimes in, in the payments game.”

“By the time we had 15,000 users on the platform, roughly.”

“We think of it as an intermediary for transactions. And that's it. I know sometimes we see people sort of think of platforms as being bounded to digital technologies. People equate the term platform as digital platforms. For us, that's actually limiting the sc…”

“All these things that reduce friction are easily available to lots of people, and so your very ability to spin up quickly and make something happen, and it seems very powerful, may in fact be the very thing that makes it easy for a competitor to catch you.”

“So the value comes from matching a buyer and a seller, but power in these things is really different. It comes from one platform doing this materially better than another platform, And that the thing that drives that difference in performance is sustainable. T…”

“Platform side, it's more difficult to be replaced because you're just becoming the foundation for the customer's business, while end to end up, you can pick up the competitor and replace quickly”

“If you want to become a truly enterprise billion dollar unicorn, you have to think about, okay, what's the adjacent areas you can expand? What's the common layer you can have within the product? So going from app to platform.”

“If you build on someone's platform, or if you build on someone's roads, or if you build inside, you know, in someone's backyard, be prepared to be sued or screwed.”

“One indicator to look for is where are developers signing up? This is also true with companies, by the way, whenever there's platforms that are built and this is true for like enterprise companies or like app stores, where do the developers go? Where the devel…”

“And I think very soon we'll see that these owners are credited socially on platforms where that work is distributed.”

“It is the ease of sharing on these platforms and discovering new content and users on these platforms that makes it so exciting for you and I to start by building our audiences here because it's the easiest place to build an audience quickly, but it is also th…”

“It's not at all uncommon for great software companies to spend upwards of 40, even 50% of their total R&D budget on those platforms. Because those investments are multiplying the investments that you're making in the other 50% of your R&D investments.”

“That platform has 700, 700 and change.”

“The hard part of building a platform is not even necessarily the actual technical or the product aspects of the platform, right?”

“For platforms to succeed, you need to start with a creation tool. If you make creation easy, Instagram made creation of beautiful posts easy. When you make creation easy, TikTok has made creation of entertainment videos easy. When you make creation easy, that'…”

“When you're building a platform, you can always monetize later. But if you have a place where you have great educators and learners, you have supply and demand. Eventually you can monetize it.”