Stripe: Platform of Platforms – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Capital for platforms is not for Stripe’s customers, but rather the customer of Stripe’s customers, which is to say, Stripe is asserting itself as the platform of platforms

By offering a seamlessly integrated email, payment integration (Stripe is a big part of all these revolutions), and no-design-needed opinionated web presentation, Substack managed to basically resurrect a zombie category of text media that hadn’t really existed in this kind of pure form since the 90s.