Platform Economies

Small businesses growing digital first on platforms, and those brands creating their own traffic and following. By [[Ali Hamed]] https://medium.com/@alibhamed/platform-economies-65d6714ca768

We’ve noticed a handful of themes that are starting to crystalize for our investment team: (1) The world of small businesses is moving off of main street, and into platform-based economies (2) Value capture is moving away from the platforms themselves, and to the commercial actors of those platforms (3) Platform economies are not created equal, and offer varying levels of “investability” (4) It might be better to invest at the atomic level, rather than in the shares of these tech stocks (5) The commercial actors on platforms are getting better (6) Certain platforms have magical superpowers

Rather than own FB shares, we’d rather own Instagram accounts. Rather than owning Amazon stock, we’d rather own a bunch of third-party selling merchants. And rather than owning Google stock, we’d rather own YouTube libraries.