Sanjeet Choudary has put out a book about how platforms, not pipes, are the new business model. The book is very inspiring so I recommend reading it. There are not any new ideas in it but they are packaged together very nicely. It’s very much another “explaining things” book and for the lens that it wants you to use, I think it does a good job.
The key thought behind the book is actually fairly simple:
Be a middleman. Reduce your costs as a middleman to gain share. Shift cost and risk out to everyone else, as much as possible. Allow companies to build on your platform. Reducing your middleman costs can gain you share and the best way do that is to be digital. If you only make a small slice of money at every interaction, you need alot of interactions so don’t forget the “make it big” part.
That’s really about it. There’s not alot of examples with deep insight in the book and he avoids most levels of strategic thinking entirely. The book also fails to connect what has been going on today to the massive “platforms” built in the past few decades but which are not necessarily fully digital as in the examples reused in the book. The book spends most of its pages explaining that if you can reduce transactions costs and get scale, the wold is your oyster. Of course, this is only just one model of succeeding in business and actually not always the most interesting or sustainable.
But that’s OK. Go find your “unit,” reduce that friction and make a billion. It’s a good read.
Enjoy!