Staff writer
In his 2010 Ted Talk "When Ideas Have Sex," Matt Ridley posits that human prosperity was caused by one thing and one thing only; our unique human ability to specialise and exchange ideas and tools.
Half-way through 2012, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that Facebook was doing a MySpace. In other words, Facebook was on a fast path to slow, painful decline.
In July 1993 cartoonist Peter Steiner sat at his desk, trying to think of a clever caption for one of many cartoons he created for the New Yorker. The cartoon had no defined, intended meaning.
One of the best ways to get a closer look “under the hood” of public companies is to check out their Investor Day presentations. Atlassian's 2019 Investor Session was a tour de force of Platform Economics.
The technology industry’s buzzword du jour is “platform.” Conceptually, the idea of a “platform” is not new, but technology companies’ desire to become platform companies, and the number of new companies claiming their status as a “platform” has accelerated dramatically over the last few years.
Fast Company recently reported that contractors at multiple delivery platforms have partnered with labor advocacy group Working Washington to demand a $15/hour minimum wage across the entire gig economy.
Early stage SaaS companies survive and thrive by creating new customer value as fast as they can. Ignore feature requests from your early adopters at your peril. They churn, you fail.
In late 2016, whilst leading the Developer Platform team at Intercom, I published a blog post titled “Browsers, not apps, are the future of mobile.” It quickly became the most-read post published on Inside Intercom that year, and generated a lot of debate — externally on Hacker News and Medium, and internally within Intercom.
In early 2018 the city of San Jose — deep in California’s Santa Clara Valley — hosted two events a week apart that together signalled the most significant shift in a behaviour for over a decade.
The list of ‘product’ companies that have committed to become ‘platform’ companies is short. The list of ‘product’ companies that have successfully become ‘platform’ companies is even shorter. Mature partnerships — and partner programs — are common trait of those rare successful platforms.
Beginning his 15 minute talk at the the 2010 TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, England, author and journalist Matt Ridley compared side-by-side an Acheulean hand axe from half a million years ago, and a modern computer mouse.
From enabling passengers to embark and disembark trains, to vertebra-crushing shoes, and operating systems like Microsoft Windows, “platform” has been used to describe many different things, in many different contexts, over a long period of time.
With 40,000 outlets in 120 countries serving almost 70 million customers every day, McDonald’s is one of the most valuable brands in the world. The Golden Arches and Ronald McDonald are symbols recognized everywhere, and Justin Timberlake’s song “I’m Lovin’ It” is one of the most famous jingles of all time.
Founder of DeveloperEcosystem.com.
Built products and platforms at Facebook, Intercom, Zalando and HubSpot.
I share lessons on platform strategy, startups, and bootstrapping.
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