Platforms, Ecosystems, and Aggregators

"So many companies base their projections on the cost of acquiring a customer at the beginning. The problem is at the beginning, you're serving your ideal customer - the one that really wants your product. Usually your marginal customer gets more and more difficult to acquire."

"This is what regulators have to get through their heads is people are going [to Google]. No one is forcing people to go to Google. No one is forcing people to go to Facebook. They're going there by choice...People using Google instead of using Yelp is a problem of you not liking what customers chose to do. But there's nothing you can really do abo... See more

An “aggregator” is a company which aggregates demand in a vertical and has three key features: 1) it has a direct relationship with its customers, 2) it has effectively zero marginal costs for serving users and 3) its costs to acquire customers fall over time. Level 1 aggregators acquire supply (Netflix). Level 2 aggregators don’t own their supply ... See more

"All parts of our economy were previously based on scarcity. In almost every case, that scarcity has disappeared. The way you win on the internet is to be the starting place where people go - Google, Facebook, these aggregators - or you're highly differentiated and you leverage the fact that you have zero distribution to reach anyone."