Platform Strategy

"Anything that is shaped like an ecosystem that has some kind of network effect... you have to know what you're looking for and find the dynamics of a thing that if it worked would work at an accelerating rate. Lots and lots and lots of things intrinsically have this shape."

"The way I think about how we are positioned and what we do with GitHub is... So it's a system, not just a product or a set of features... you need to have a system. You need to have kind of the ability, an entire Swiss Army toolkit, not just the autocomplete, not just a chat, not just like a software agent that runs and you kind of hand hold. You need all of this to work together."

"Provide guardrails for what a good experience is in your marketplace, set a clear bar for quality, and provide the right coaching and tools for supply to be successful, and then take a step back and see where the gaps are and invest more in hands-on tactics just to close those gaps more specifically."

"Once we moved to a service-based architecture, and then teams could own their code with defined endpoints, APIs that other teams could understand that are well-documented, then we could move in that direction."

"The cycles for platform work are five to 10 odd times longer. You're maybe changing something on the infrastructure level, then opening up an API and then doing an alpha period for the API where developers now build on that and test things. And then you move into a beta. And then finally, two years later, some end customer actually uses that app"

"The four steps are essentially, one is I call a Step Zero. It's the conditions of the market have been met. Step One is about a moat, Step Two is about a platform opening, and Step Three is about the platform closing for control and monetization."

"Step One is then these players, somebody essentially identifies whatever the moat is, the thing that is going to help build them defensibility and help them hit escape velocity... That typically comes down to third-party content creators or app developers and other businesses. So they all establish a third-party platform that has some incentives built in."

"I think it was probably predictable to some degree that platforms would win because just of the nature of aggregation. Once you have either all of the supply or you've aggregated the demand, it's really a strong network effect. Why investors love to invest in these types of businesses, it's hard to break out."

"Platform engineering is not just maintaining cloud infrastructure... platforms are products, ultimately. You should be thinking about how do I create coherent offerings that make this company more productive?"

"I think it gets to be like, you have 50 plus engineers. I don't think this is the kind of thing that you start when you are 10 engineers... when you hit either a lot of inefficiency where you're seeing the same people across a bunch of different teams... dealing with this instead of centralizing it."

"A lot of the best platform type offerings in companies start in individual application teams. An application team has a problem and they solve it for themselves and it turns out that that's actually a really good idea... So a good platform team is often looking around for those and then sort of taking them and then assimilating them."

"What data network effects are, is leveraging product usage data to make the product value stronger and stronger over time... your product being able to generate its own data, versus just relying on the big platforms to do all the work for you. That's a real edge."

"We believe in the power of open source and one of our core missions is to increase openness, and that means contributing to open protocols and contributing to open source. ... We want to build things that not only are good for us and our customers, but that outlast Block and outgrow Block."

"Another thing here is what I mentioned previously is us investing heavily into platform so that every solution is scalable from the get go so that we don't have any custom solutions. For example, take our credit team, they ship new products like loans or credit cards in the country literally every month. And it is just maybe 300 people."

"If you don't create hard APIs to your technology, you're out. And if you think about it, it has to be that way because otherwise no one would do it... because he forced it so hard, they were the ones who did Amazon Web Services because they had such hard defined APIs."

"The more you can bake into a clear platform, it reduces the decision-making complexity for everyone who's working on the domain part of the problem."

"The idea of a compound startup for us is that we're basically a lot of businesses that all work together... all of these different businesses benefit from being built on top of one platform."

"We think about dbt open source. It's really the guts of the data transformation... on the cloud side we build proprietary software that supercharges the development life cycle and the productionization of dbt at scale. So what we think about as leaving for our cloud offering is we deal with state, so stateful interactions and also any cross team or structural collaboration."

"The code that decides what notes share has to be out in the open. All of the data and ratings that make it happen have to be out in the open. People should be able to take the code and data and replicate the whole service..."

"What's been most exciting to me, actually, is the non-developer persona is now empowered to go and solve these really, really, really more challenging problems by giving the model enough context on what that problem is to be able to solve it."

"You better go build an application economy... I think he wants me to build an app store. At that moment, I went to the domain registry, and I bought appstore.com. Then, I started working on it at Salesforce so that we would have the ability with our platform to build apps, and then sell them, and that you could do all these things."

"And a true platform, it's when your ecosystem makes more money than the core does. And so many times, whether it was the Facebook platform, I'm putting that in air quotes, or the Shopify platform, companies build on it and then they get the rug pulled out from under them because they're too successful."

"MCP really tried to tackle that middle one [context and memory]... what if we made this a protocol and what if we made this something that was repeatable? ... I hope that's where we had, and I hope that's where more things had, which is to really have agency and have these agentic use cases."

"I also would love it if you could start a business on ChatGPT. I think there really is a world where, as this thing hits a billion user scale, it can get you distribution, it can get you started on making something in the same way that people built on the internet"

"we have a single global tech stack, and we have deep local infrastructure. ... you end up with a global product team that owns overall KPIs around conversion rate, et cetera. And you have local, regional teams that own the conversion rate, and the cost to do KYC for their market, and they contribute to the global product code base. So we have weak product ownership, where anyone can make code change, and pull requests, and these guys owning the vision in the center."

"I would go, okay, we need to win the problem space first, and if the platform is there, let's use it. If it's not there, we'll hack it, test it, iterate on it with customers, and then whatever is good there, let's platformize it later. But that's where you see what makes us super powerful as a bigger company, can also slow us down and make us focus on the wrong assumptions."

"How long would it take to build a platform layer, which exposes APIs so anyone could build NFT gating in one hour? ... If you put the gas in the tank, people could drive on that gas for a long time going forward."

"on any new computer... the developer platform itself is much more interesting and lucrative and world changing than the first-party computer itself... Arc as a development platform is going to be much more central to what we're doing, building on top of these internet computers"