[REPLAY] Alex Moazed – Building Modern Monopolies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.25]

[REPLAY] Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy, which explores the platform business model (Uber, Airbnb, Github). Alex is also the founder and CEO of Applico, a company that he started in his dorm room that is since grown into a huge enterprise that helps startups and Fortune 500 innovate with platforms. Alex and I talk about history and future of businesses and different types of business models. There’s a lot in here for investors, entrepreneurs, and historians. Please enjoy! For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub Follow Patrick on twitter at @patrick_oshag Books Referenced Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy The Systems Bible: The Beginner's Guide to Systems Large and Small The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future Links Referenced Failed Color App Applico Show Notes 2:39 – (first question) – Exploring the history of business models from linear to platform. 5:46 – A look at the share of overall business platform companies have taken over 7:06 - Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy 7:48 – The potential for platform businesses over the next 20 years 9:18 – Detailing the difference between a linear and a platform business 12:08 – Exploring transaction costs and core transactions across different business models 19:49 – Is the platform business model good for investors and VC’s since so many can get crushed when there’s a sole victor, or is it just for the founders and entrepreneurs. 24:35 – How the self-driving car is going to deliver more opportunity for consumer consumption 27:15 – Untapped supplies as the opportunity for new platforms and where we could see new openings 30:24 – How consolidated will things become across all platforms 33:16 – How do platform companies create a moat to keep others from replicating their business strategy 37:03 – Are there platform strategies that specifically don’t work 37:40 - Failed Color App 38:45 – Why complex systems typically don’t scale up and you should think small and easy to get started 38:47 – The Systems Bible: The Beginner's Guide to Systems Large and Small 40:02 – How the origin of so many larger companies started out small and localized, and why it makes investors more comfortable 41:37 – How Alibaba had to tweak their business model to accommodate the Chinese market 44:07 – Why are the modern monopolies better for consumers 47:52 – Exploring platforms that are asset heavy 49:00 – What do you look for as a VC to determine 52:05 – Alex’s take on whether a platform based company like Uber should be more asset heavy 54:31 – Exploring some lesser known platform businesses that Alex finds interesting 56:18 – If there is a demand in the secondary markets for a product, why don’t the primary suppliers simply raise their prices 57:03 – What Alex’s portfolio of platform-based businesses would look like 58:48 – A couple of most influential books Alex has read 59:12 – The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires 59:38 – Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future and other Peter Thiel books 59:53 – Looking at Applico, how it started and how it become so focused on the platform business model 1:03:56 - Most memorable day for Alex 1:05:13 – Kindest person to Alex in his life 1:06:10 – What platform opportunities could exist in the financial world Learn More For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub Follow Patrick on twitter at @patrick_oshag

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I know firsthand how complex the tech stack is for asset management firms. And seemingly every new tool and data source makes the problem even worse, adding more complexity, more headcount and more risk. RidgeLine offers a better way forward. One unified platform that automates away the complexity across portfolio accounting, reconciliation, reporting, trading, compliance and more, all at scale. RidgeLine is revolutionizing investment management, helping ambitious firms scale faster, operate smarter and stay ahead of the curve. See what RidgeLine can unlock for your firm. Schedule a demo at ridgeline.ai.

• 0:32Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  This podcast is sponsored by CFA Institute, the global association of investment professionals whose mission is to lead the investment profession by promoting the highest standards of ethics, education and professional excellence for the ultimate benefit of society. CFA Institute serves a global community of investment professionals, working to build an investment industry where investors' interests come first, financial markets function at their best and economies grow. The Chartered Financial Analyst credential is the most respected and recognized investment management designation in the world. The views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent the views of CFA Institute.

• 1:11Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Neal and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  Patrick O'Neal is a Principal and Portfolio Manager at O'Neal Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Neal Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Neal Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

• 1:54Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I have a rule that when I love a book, I do my best to find and meet the author. I usually fail, but sometimes I succeed. And this week's episode is a great example of why I go to the trouble. My guest is Alex Mosset, and the book in question is Modern Monopolies, which explores the platform business model. Think Uber, Airbnb, or GitHub. And also explores the history of business in general. Most nonfiction books are three times too long, but I wish this one had been longer. Alex is also the founder and CEO of Aplico, a company he started in his dorm room and has grown into a huge enterprise, helping startups and Fortune 500 companies innovate with platforms. Alex and I talk about the history and future of businesses and different types of business models.

• 2:37Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  There's a lot in here for investors, entrepreneurs, and historians. As you listen, try to wrap your head around the fact that Alex is still in his 20s. I had a blast and learned a ton, and I hope you do the same. For show notes, visit investorfieldguide.com/alex. And now, please enjoy my conversation with Alex Mosset. Alex, thank you very much for joining me today. We're going to talk a lot about new business models, the history of business models, and really get into the weeds, hopefully, on how to build platforms. So I thought a fun place to start would be exploring a bit of the history that you talk about in your book, from the linear business model, as you call it, to the platform business model.

• 3:22Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If we could start by you describing that big kind of picture, growth and transition, I think that would set the scene for talking about platforms.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Sure. So, great to be here, Patrick. Thanks for having me. If we were to start at 100,000 feet up, and you look back thousands of years ago and think about a bazaar in ancient Rome, connecting buyers and sellers, or now, say, the 20th century with shopping malls connecting buyers and sellers. It's the same underpinnings of the platform model, but using brick and mortar, as opposed to tech and digital and data. Now, we look at, say, the 17, 1800s Industrial Revolution. Companies being created to leverage machinery and industrial mechanics to create products,

• 4:15Speaker 03

  create value. Transportation systems, building cars, you know, and a whole slew of other products and services that are now enabled. Those businesses for really the past 200 or 300 years have been getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Every 20, 30, 40 years, you see a way to incrementally improve upon that linear business model, right? So, so value and information flow in a very linear way. I have suppliers, and then I bundle that up, and I create something, and I package it, and then I distribute it, and I sell it. And so I have really one consumer, one customer, and I'm creating the value chain and controlling a lot of it internally.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  Over the past probably 50 years, particularly in the 80s with Malcolm Porter and the idea of vertically integrated value chains and economies of scale, that idea was taken to the next level, which was, okay, if you go a step farther and now own your supplier and your supplier suppliers, you could shave a couple points of margin and add it to your bottom line, and since you're a huge multi-billion dollar company, that creates an immense amount of value. And then you saw a lot of consolidation and a lot of things happen like that to be more vertically integrated, say, in the latter half of the 20th century.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  What we see now, though, in the late 90s and 21st century, is the dawn of the platform business model essentially having a resurgence. It's somewhat always been around, but in niche markets and again through more brick and mortar means. But now, with the confluence of technology, the internet, and then smartphones and so on and so forth, data unlike anything we've seen before, and people's user behaviors actually molding to these new interaction models, now you see that platform model really coming onto the scene and in a position of dominance.

• 6:23Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Do we have any sense for... You could use the S and P 500. I know a lot of these platform businesses are still private, but what sort of early market share they have gained in, you know, measured by sales or market capitalization or something like that? Like, how are they just a blip still on the radar? Or are they really starting to aggressively gain share?

• 6:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the quick and dirty definition of what makes you a platform company is you're taking a large fragmented network of individuals and/or companies that create value and your focus is on facilitating that exchange of value. So if we think about FAMGA, which stands for Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Apple, and I think at some point they own the top four or five slots.

• 7:08Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Yeah, recently.

• 7:09Speaker 03

  Right? In terms of just net market cap and valuation on the US markets. Those are a sampling, but in private companies, you have Uber and Airbnb and Snapchat, which is just about to go public, obviously, that will then quickly be added to those ranks. So it takes at least 10 years for these businesses to really hit a point of strong critical mass, or the book I co-authored called Modern Monopolies, essentially to become that modern monopoly for these network effects and winner-take-all dynamics, which we'll discuss. The time horizon is a lot longer than, say, a traditional linear business. Like, some of these books will give it a timeline of maybe five, seven, eight years

• 7:52Speaker 03

  for those to hit that billion-dollar mark. So we're still in the very early stages, but when you look at what in relatively short order, 15, 20 years, these companies have been able to do in terms of creating new markets and then reshuffling the value prop in some traditional industries, it's quite impressive and you're certainly seeing that on the stock market and in other places. Now, what we see for, say, the next 20 years is these businesses have a new operating model and they are extremely profitable and they need to grow fast in the future.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  And some of their markets, like Google Search, is actually starting to decline in some ways. Still generating a lot of cash, but they need to look for other ways for growth. And that's where you start to see a lot of those modern monopolies, that famga market, moving into other traditional industries and seeking to do the same thing. Bring their platform model into an industry with a lot of fragmentation, where you can create a tremendous amount of value by reducing search and transaction costs. So if you think about what's an industry where the existing players are creating value and they're also handling the distribution of their product or service?

• 9:19Speaker 03

  And you think about it in a macro way to say, is that actually being distributed in an efficient manner? And if I were to bring a new model, the platform model, into that industry that could more effectively coordinate that exchange of supply and consumption essentially? Could that business create a lot of value? If you're checking off yeses to a lot of that, then those are some of the things that these businesses, just as a core value prop for the business model, will be able to bring to these new industries.

• 9:50Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So there's so, so much to unpack in all of that. And maybe an interesting place to start would be a few examples to make sure it's very clear the difference between a linear and a platform company. So I think this is right, but if you look at Apple, it's an example of both, where the hardware business, which is obviously most of its business, is linear. Economies of scale, very efficient production, supply chain, value chain. iTunes is an example of a platform, where you have consumers on one side, producers on the other. Apple is not, at least not yet, producing any content. It's relying on musicians and movies, et cetera, but it facilitates the connection. So is that a clean, is that a clean example of a company that has both kind of old line linear business alongside platform business?

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Apple's a great example. I would prefer to use the App Store as their platform example. The only caveat with the music is just because the label... And the rights in music give you somewhat of a consolidated supply ecosystem for where you get the rights from. But yes, at a high level, the idea, you're spot on. And you see a lot of these, even Amazon, started as just a book reseller. Right? So another way to think about linear versus platform is if you were to think about the balance sheet of these businesses, those assets, the things that they're selling are going onto their balance sheet. Right? If you are a grocery store or an Amazon book reseller in the mid to late 90s, you're taking

• 11:20Speaker 03

  that inventory and it's going onto your balance sheet. Right? For the marketplace model that Amazon has been growing immensely over the past 10 years, and actually in their most recent quarterly earnings, is why they missed on the, some of the analysts will say that's why they missed on the revenue but hit on the margin, was because the revenue of selling a product through the Amazon marketplace, they don't recognize the revenue, but they get their commission, an eight to 20% commission off of the goods that are sold by third-party sellers in the Amazon marketplace. And that's where they make the predominantly large portion of their profit from their

• 12:03Speaker 03

  e-commerce unit, is from the third-party sellers who are also paying rent to store the products in Amazon's warehouses if they want to be in the Amazon Prime program. So, yeah, you see a lot of this kind of blending of linear and platform. You also see Amazon creating a lot of their own, their own white-label products to undercut, say, P&G and many of their business lines and product lines because they can. And they can create some additional margin and sell some quality products at a lower price point.

• 12:37Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Your book, which is, people know that I read and share a lot of books and I have various clubs and one of them is the 100 Club, which is books that I took more than 100 highlights and notes in. And Modern Monopolies is one of a fairly small list in that group. It's a fantastic book. And it kicked off for me, an interesting journey into the history of the corporation. So I'm gonna read a quote which I came across in some of my reading, which I think is really interesting. "The company outsourced as much as it could, not least the manufacture of goods in the east, its shipping, as well as ultimate retailing of its products. The value it added to the process was in the selection of goods and the efficiency of delivery. In a situation characterized by extremely poor information, the company's strength lay in its ability

• 13:19Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  to achieve an equilibrium between supply and demand on opposing sides of the planet." Now that sounds, almost sounds like Uber. Like when you order an Uber, you see those little lines connecting, you know, basically doing that supply-demand equation. But that's actually being written about the British East India Company. So the first corporation in 1600, so instead of ride-sharing, it was, you know, spices, tea, and opium.

• 13:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:41Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  But like you said, this idea has been around forever. And for me, what fascinated me most about the book was this idea of transaction costs and core transactions. So I'd love to get into those topics.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:54Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So you talk a lot, what I find, I love books that surprise me. And what I was surprised by a bit in your book, just because I'm used to business books being business books, was a very interesting and detailed history of the thought. You know, guys like Ronald Coase and The Theory of the Firm, which are explored in detail. And he talks a lot about transaction costs. So could you get into some detail about what are transaction costs? Why is it good business to reduce them for people? What types are there? Because I think that those ideas may be applicable to anyone out there. That's, you know, on the personal level, reducing other people's transaction costs is good. The business level and so on. So let's dive into those.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. So when we think about transaction costs, they often come hand-in-hand with the concept of that core transaction, right? And when you look at...

• 14:42Speaker 03

  In the taxonomy of platforms, there are multiple different types of platform business models, particularly in, say, service and product marketplaces, which is how we would define where an Uber fits on a service marketplace because the driver is essentially exchanging a service, or in an Amazon, you're exchanging a product. And in those kinds of businesses, we call them exchange platforms, the value prop of reducing search and transaction costs is probably the strongest point of value that at a macro level, the platform is able to bring to that industry.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  And what that means is if you were to take the traditional business model canvas of a linear business and look at all the costs that go into sourcing the labor, coordinating the labor, having the upkeep for either the product or the car, how efficiently you're then able to fulfill the demand and what kind of opportunity costs you may have by not having inventory readily available, or maybe you see this a lot with the heavy equipment rental industry where United Rentals, the biggest player, will actually go and lease

• 16:05Speaker 03

  equipment from other smaller rental companies to fulfill the demand that they're getting but they can't fulfill. And all the costs that go along with having those assets on your balance sheet, them depreciating and so on and so forth, all roll into this bucket of overhead. Now, if you were to say, how do I create a more efficient model where I can reduce those search and transaction costs? All I want to do, I want to separate the two roles in fulfilling the demand, right? I want a business to focus on just finding me someone or a product or a service who's going to give me what I want.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  And then I want the person or good or service that I'm receiving to just focus on giving me that good or giving me that service. And I don't want that to be the same company, right? I want to separate these things so that the platform as facilitating the exchange can focus on just creating the best exchange possible. And there is the least bloat and least overhead involved in actually connecting those two things. And where you see that possible are in more fragmented industries. Where if you were to just think about it and say, okay, if I have an industry where it's

• 17:27Speaker 03

  more fragmented, that probably means that the cost of, the cost is duplicated a lot more across all these different providers who are both, say, providing a service and then handling all the marketing, the SG and A costs to actually have that service consumed. If we just take the, if we take the heavy equipment rental market for an example, right? You have a lot of small players, mid-sized players, and then you have a few big players in markets where you see the biggest players having, you know, maybe half of the revenue in an industry. That means you have thousands of other companies that are small that all have to figure out how to go get customers using probably a lot of the same channels that the big players

• 18:12Speaker 03

  do. And that's one of the advantages. The big players say, okay, I'm going to buy you and now I can reduce all the similar overhead SG and A costs. I can just roll that into all these existing cost centers of mine and I have a more efficient business, right? So the platform is able to reduce that by saying, you just focus on having equipment ready and having it be of good quality and ready to be serviced, having good customer service. And I'm going to focus on getting you, the customer, figuring out what their needs are, making sure it's an optimal price. So a lot of these industries, there's a huge transaction cost inherent in A lack of pricing transparency.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  So, one of the inherent ways that transaction costs are reduced by a platform, by a marketplace model, is by bringing pricing transparency. And then pitting all the third-party suppliers against one another to make sure they're giving you the most optimal price. Because what happens when you have a lack of pricing transparency is you then have arbitrary pricing, which again is just increasing the cost of whatever that service or good is to the end customer. So, you're ripping a lot of that out by centralizing it and saying that the platform is the central arbiter and understands the market better than anyone else.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  So, they can do the best job in matching supply and demand better than any one individual on either side of that ecosystem can. When you look at more commoditized products or services like Uber, which we've talked about, you start to see the opportunity for that platform to essentially reduce transaction costs even more by standardizing price, rather than letting the third-party sellers or providers set their own price, because they don't know how they should be setting the price. And there isn't too much differentiation in the service or good that they're selling. So, the platform should be able to look at the handful of variables that influence price and then standardize and set it for the ecosystem.

• 20:21Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  One of the cleanest little phrases in the book for identifying why this works so well is, I think it was GitHub, where it was their original line that X, you know, fill in the blank, no longer a pain in the ass. That if you can find some platform that finishes that sentence for you, you know, finding a car quickly, no longer a pain in the ass, finding the right block of code, no longer a pain in the ass, that that is a great, simple little rule of thumb. For identifying the power of this platform that sits in between consumers and producers. One of the things that I'm really interested in, and you talked about the importance of the rise of data, the internet, transparency, as kind of coinciding with the rise of this,

• 21:04Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  of the platform business model, is the idea that most of the value is now, there's more consumer surplus being captured by the consumer versus the producer in the past. So if you think about consumer surplus as, I'm willing to pay $10 for something, but I only have to pay $5, that's $5 of surplus. And I always try to think about all of these things, especially when it comes to business models, from the perspective of investors, investors and entrepreneurs. So if I want to start a business, or I want to invest in, if I'm a venture investor, investing in businesses. Curious what you think platform business models represent as an investment, because there's no doubt that they seem to dramatically increase consumer surplus.

• 21:47Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  They are good for consumers and producers because they just get to use the winner, right? They get to use the platform that emerges victorious in a very competitive, you know, it's hard to scale into a network. Whoever wins, great, I'm gonna win. And then the end user wins. But it seems like because there are relatively few things to colonize and be a platform for, you know, Facebook colonized social identity, and LinkedIn colonized professional identity. If I'm a VC, if you're sitting across from a VC or an entrepreneur, are you encouraging them to build a platform? Because it strikes me that maybe the odds of success would be lower, even though if you're the winner, obviously you're gonna do incredibly well.

• 22:29Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So it's like more of a power law that already exists in VC. So what do you think about all that? Do you think that the platform business model is good for entrepreneurs and VCs? Or is it just for, you know, the lucky founders of the ones that turn out? And then, you know, the externalities, the consumers and the producers that just get to use the winner?

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think it comes in waves. We saw a huge race to the internet when the internet first came out, which let you build essentially web apps. When mobile and smartphones and iOS and Android, you saw another wave of opportunity. And so, somewhat I think about it is...

• 23:10Speaker 03

  Development platforms are one type of platform that we've identified of the eight. The development platform would be iOS or Android. It's letting third-party software developers create software and the platform is enabling that software to be consumed and interacted with, et cetera. And every time there is a dominant or new development platform that comes to fruition, you then start to see all of the other kind of platform types become repopulated or have fresh blood or fresh approaches to solving similar problems, but now with consumers

• 23:55Speaker 03

  that interact with the software in a different way. Or with a different set of data that the development platform is providing to you than wasn't, say, previously accessible. So if you were to think about the difference between a lot of the apps that we've seen come to light that are on your smartphone versus on the web and what literally just having knowledge of where your location data is brings to light for, say, Uber as an example to match you with a car because it knows where you are and where the car is pretty easily versus the idea of like ordering a car service online, which was technically

• 24:34Speaker 03

  possible, but is that really going to have the impact and the success that that services marketplace would have on the internet versus the web? So I think when we look at it like that, I think when you look at the timelines in each one of those development platforms, like I think some new development platforms that are on the horizon for us, I think Auto is going to present a really interesting development platform, set of opportunities. If you're talking about- Can you expand on that a little bit? Yeah, so, you know, your idea of kind of like excess kind of consumption or, you know, finding that, right?

• 25:12Speaker 03

  If you think about all the passive time that people spend in cars on their phone using probably software and the tens of millions of hours that exist in a very, you know, I mean, you're captive, you can't go anywhere. And you think about- What kind of software and experiences you could create better when enabled by all the data and sensors and equipment that are in the car? I think you're going to see a tremendous amount of opportunity. Apple, Google, and Baidu are trying to move pretty heavily into that, and some of the existing autos are in the midst of, you know, trying to figure out that question.

• 25:56Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So there's obviously a ton of talk and writing and interesting things about self-driving cars, which, if you think about resources, again, thinking back to like the East India Company, it started with this kind of mercantilist, zero-sum, land-based, there's a limited amount we're going to explore. Then there was productivity growth, so we've kind of explored everything, but we're going to get more efficient per capita. And now there's this like attention-based, maybe Coase is the right economist for this, where we are trying to free up as much time as possible, like, you know, washing machine, freed up time in the 50s or something like that. And now, I don't know what the number, maybe you know, the number of dead hours where you

• 26:39Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  are actually driving, which now you'll be able to, who knows when it'll happen, let's say it's 10 years, you won't drive at all, so you'll have tons of extra time and attention. So is that what you're talking about, is mining that new source of attention in like new and interesting ways?

• 26:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, pretty much, right? You have an existing tranche of time, which is huge, if you think about just passengers and cars, right? And then you're about to have another whole wave on top of that of people who have been driving that won't be driving anymore. So when you look at the next five, 10, 15, 20 years of that space and how software's going to be able to play in that space, and then you think about the literally trillions of dollars that are spent on transportation services, and how could software, again, which has now access to a functioning automobile...

• 27:33Speaker 03

  Figure out how to make that a more efficient and optimal transaction. Think you're going to see a load of opportunity.

• 27:40Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  One of the, again, neat little tricks that I keep thinking about from the book is in identifying potential, you've basically, you've just given one example, but in identifying potential opportunities for new platforms is to look for untapped supply, like big, kind of dead sources of supply. And by far, the most interesting example here is Airbnb. So you've got all of these residences, extra beds originally, places to stay that weren't generating any, very efficient, right? You're generating a lot more off an untapped supply. So, one, that's a great test. I'm curious, other than autos, looking forward five, however long you want to look forward, where do you see that opportunity densest for the platform business model? Like, what are some, what are some really interesting areas of the

• 28:24Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  economy that you're focused on or thinking about as you look at platforms?

• 28:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, so unfortunately, I see too many to actually focus well enough on all of them. But I think if I were to call out another development platform part of the economy, I really think, I mean, we hear a lot about IOT, particularly in the B2C space. So in the home, which is, there's an opportunity. But I think what actually is a bigger opportunity is industrial IOT. And when you think about the trillions of dollars that are flowing through machines, say, in the factory, and all the things that are happening behind the scenes, I think there's a load of opportunity there from letting software developers tap

• 29:12Speaker 03

  into the machines that are on the factory floor, from suppliers to workforce management to ERP and inventory management, to prototyping better, you know, products more iteratively. So that's a whole slew of things. Also, I think when you look at a lot of B2B industries in general, and you look at what Amazon Business is doing, moving into the B2B distribution space, which by some estimates is a three to eight trillion dollar There are a series of industries that's building materials to industrial supply for factories, to electrical supply, to metal distribution, to chemical and petroleum product

• 29:55Speaker 03

  distribution. I mean, it is massive. There is a big rave of this in the late 90s, which we talk about in the book with B2B marketplaces, and those didn't pan out. And we go into more detail as to why. And why also, when you line that up with why I think right now is very different. Amazon business has been growing at about 20% month over month. They've had over a billion dollars in revenue. And they see this as a kind of blitzkrieg for them for the next few years, because they can kind of catch a lot of these distribution companies before they really figure out how to combat this. So, that, anything also related in transportation, when you look at freight transportation, when you look at

• 30:40Speaker 03

  heavy equipment rentals, there are a lot of things like that where there are trillions or billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars where that marketplace model is the platform type that you're going to see create huge efficiencies.

• 30:57Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You mentioned Amazon, and one of the little things that I always found interesting was how they are taking search share from Google, because people, they've done such an amazing job as a business. I do this. Like, when I need to buy something, I don't search for it on Google, I just go on Amazon, because I just know that they're going to provide me the best experience. And it begs the question, how consolidated is this going to get? Like, how many platforms do we actually need? Because I could see, if they continue on this trajectory, like, relying on Amazon for virtually everything. So, is there an endgame like that, where this is, and it's called modern monopolies, and I want to get into that in a minute, because usually monopoly, people think that's a bad thing.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:40Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Bad for consumers.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:41Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  But this is very obviously the opposite. But how many, is there going to be like one platform to rule them all? I mean, how do you think this will go?

• 31:49Speaker 03

  I think a lot of that is up to... Entrepreneurs, VCs, I think also the large traditional businesses that are in the crosshairs of a lot of these modern monopolies. I think that we've seen the ability for multiple marketplaces, some being more niche than others, coexist if we think about eBay and Etsy versus Amazon. And now you're seeing actually a few startups, even just in the kind of local peer-to-peer on mobile set marketplace models. There's actually two or three startups that have each raised over $100 million and are

• 32:30Speaker 03

  growing like gangbusters, which is kind of like the mobile platform version of yard sales or different versions of that, right? So you're seeing market, you know, multi-billion dollar marketplace opportunities be able to carve out their own niches. If you can prevent Amazon from bringing their model into your industry is really up to a lot of these companies and entrepreneurs and how that ecosystem combats the threat. Because the threat is clear and it's coming. If they don't do anything, then sure, you're going to see an extremely centralized, you know, very dominant and continuously increasing role of, say, an Amazon.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  I think if the traditional enterprises can't figure it out, or the entrepreneurs can't figure it out, then eventually what you'll see, and this could lead into the next point, is other modern monopolies saying, well, the linear companies aren't doing justice to themselves, and I don't want Amazon to become that powerful, so I need to go create a marketplace. You know, I'm Google, and I need to create a legitimate marketplace initiative to combat Amazon because these guys aren't doing it for themselves.

• 33:46Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So that, a couple more examples now pop to mind where, you know, Google did that with social and failed, or has failed thus far. And Amazon, there's a VC here in New York, which you mentioned in the book, named Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures, who talks about how software on its Own is a commodity. It's extremely easy to replicate software. So then I'd like to get into what is hard to replicate. So how do how do these companies create a moat? Like, what would it be that that peer to peer yard sale idea does or could do to stop Amazon, which obviously with its resources could replicate the technology? So what are the what are the other key ingredients here to building a successful platform?

• 34:28Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You talked for talk through four things that that a platform has to do to be successful. So maybe we could start with with audience building or matchmaking, you know, take your pick as as two of the really interesting ones. What do they what? How can you? How can you build a moat? Can you build a moat?

• 34:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:41Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  And if so, how can you do it?

• 34:42Speaker 03

  So great question. We'll try and tackle as much of that as we can. At a high level, right, to to kind of finish the quote, right? Software alone is a commodity. The value is in the ecosystem. The software is enabling you to build an ecosystem and those things play hand in hand with one another. So the four core functions of the business model, audience building being one. When you think about, I have at least two different user groups, consumers and producers on either side of this ecosystem. I need to stage my focus and very often switch my focus back and forth between these two different groups. As I look to hit a point of of what you would call critical mass.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  The technical definition of critical mass is where the cost of a new user joining your ecosystem is less than the value they receive from joining. Literally what that means is when you see what a lot of people would say is kind of like viral growth, where these network effects start working for you and everyone wants to join because the value prop is so clear now that you have that critical mass, now that you have enough consumers and producers and that value prop is is really functioning as it should be. So, audience building, you can look at how do you really subsidize that value?

• 36:06Speaker 03

  So until you hit critical mass, the equation is in reverse and it's more costly to join than the value you get. So you need to subsidize. monetize the value. You can give monetary subsidies like referral codes, which everyone, which a lot of people do. Product feature subsidies, if you think about giving away software for free, like OpenTable did when it first rolled out to restaurants in San Francisco. It said, "We don't even have a platform. We just have this reservation management software. Here you go." And it's free. And then they got a lot of restaurants and they got, they said, "Hey, these restaurants have a lot of open tables, so I'm going to call myself OpenTable and let consumers book that."

• 36:44Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So cool.

• 36:45Speaker 03

  And I'm going to take a fee. So that'd be a great product feature subsidy. And the last one is kind of interesting. It's like psychic rewards. And that's more, you see it a lot in social networks or in content platforms, that's getting likes on your photo on Instagram, right? These things that don't really have a monetary or a product value, but

• 37:04Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Exposure.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  they make you feel good, right? Or they give you an audience, right? It's kind of like that attention. And then once you get a lot of that, maybe you could monetize that separately. And you see a lot of Instagram folks now selling ads and some product sponsorships and stuff. So, audience building is very tough. It's the idea of overcoming this chicken and egg problem. I need consumers to get producers and vice versa. Where do I start? And it keeps changing.

• 37:30Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Do you think one of those, the one that really resonated with me was that OpenTable example, where even if you're not bringing a single consumer to the table, you're still doing something good. Do you think that any one of these, in your, in watching all these platform companies, and also the ones that fail, maybe ask this negatively, so are there ones that don't work as well as some of the, among that menu that you listed?

• 37:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think that there are, there are a lot of fun and horrible examples of platforms failing pretty aggressively.

• 38:01Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What's your favorite example?

• 38:02Speaker 03

  There's, there's an app that we talk about in the book that raised $40 million and... It was like a hyper local Instagram. And so the idea was you'd only see posts from people that are within a couple hundred meters of you.

• 38:15Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Oh, this color?

• 38:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:17Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Yeah.

• 38:17Speaker 03

  And, uh, and, and so they said, this is gonna be great. All, all the content in there, in there is gonna be very contextual and like relevant and local. Um, we're gonna, we're gonna kill it. And they launched and within an hour of launch, the, the founder knew, oh, boy. We botched this and we spent the bulk of all the money we raised. No investors are gonna give me more money. And everyone has blank feeds. Because they didn't have, when you think about audience building, they didn't have a hyper local audience building strategy. Right? If, if your whole, if they have a rule, essentially rules and standards is one of the other four. And they have a rule in there that says you only see posts from people 200 meters radius from you.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  Then that means when you think about audience building, you should be hyper focused on, you know, really block by block, getting people on this content platform. And if those things aren't all in sync, then, uh, it can fall on its face.

• 39:17Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I read a, an interesting book I've referenced a few times, um, called the Systems Bible, which is a fascinating book. And one of the things it talks about is that there never has been, there's no examples of a complex system that people have designed and dropped in and then it's worked.

• 39:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 39:32Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Complex systems that work are invariably the result of a simple system that gets scaled up. And Peter Thiel talks a lot about this when it comes to entrepreneurship and venture capital, that to use your block analogy, you should effectively, and for color, should have started on one New York City block and then moved out from there. Instead, they tried to do it all at once. And, and that was a lesson from your book as well, that in the platform business model, the early days, it just struck me that you have to be a hustler.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 39:59Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You have to really focus on a niche. You have to really do right by the early adopters, um, like OpenTable did. And that that's probably the best way to, to build a platform early on, which is incredibly hard thing to do.

• 40:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, we like to say that actually, a lot of the things you're doing in the beginning don't scale at all.

• 40:17Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Right.

• 40:17Speaker 03

  Uh, they're Actually super manual and have no ability to handle, let alone tens of thousands of users or certainly hundreds of thousands of users. It's super manual, but you're really just trying to, back to our earlier point, is really hone in on that core transaction and figure out, how do I just get these two different parties to transact? And if I can see that happening, okay, now let me optimize around that. But you don't want to bog it down and prevent producers and consumers from transacting, particularly when you're first launching.

• 40:52Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I love that story of the Airbnb founders who, you know, you think about these platforms as these kind of technological automated fancy algorithms. But, but they started by literally themselves going and helping people take better pictures of their apartments to better sell them on, on the platform. And it's so funny how the origins are so analog. And then, you know, you figure out what works and you can amplify it. But that seems to be a key, really seems to jive. I'm assuming you like Thiel's kind of way of thinking about starting very local or small and then scaling up from there.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and a lot of investors are comfortable with that model. A lot of investors are very comfortable with the idea of saying, hey, look, I've done this in one market. It's working. Give me this money. I could make that more efficient and do more of it in this market and then I'll expand to five other markets. And that's a, that's a, a level of comfort that, you know, I think a lot of, a lot of VCs have come to find. And, you know, even in China, there's a lot of lessons learned that we could talk about if, if we have time in terms of, say, how Alibaba did things differently than, say, eBay. When we think about audience building, when we think about rules and standards, but I'll let you.

• 42:06Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So, so, so let's just go there. So, um, so as I understand it, Alibaba's model is much more about advertising than taking a cut. So maybe describe the lesson, the lesson from Alibaba.

• 42:17Speaker 03

  So the interesting, interesting thing, and to Thiel's point, to what we've talked about, keeping it simple. In the Chinese market, when you're talking about connecting buyers and sellers, the idea of haggling on price and these things with your, between those two parties is pretty much table stakes, right? That's how they do business over there. So eBay took its model from the US and brought it to China, which meant that eBay was going to monetize the transactions by taking a cut of every sale. And that meant that if the buyers and sellers could talk with one another, there was a high probability that they would lose out on monetizing and have something that we call platform leakage, where the core transaction happens outside of the platform and now you

• 43:02Speaker 03

  don't get to monetize that transaction. So they had a, they had rules and standards which were much more strict and which had a very specific flow that that core transaction needed to follow because they needed to monetize it. Alibaba instead really just kind of opened it up and said, "Just come and match and I don't care how you transact. I just want you to be coming here and finding yourselves here because then I'll figure out how to really optimize my own core transaction." So they said for the next three years, we're not going to charge any fees and that was really the beginning of their path to defeat eBay. And now all the buyers and sellers went to Alibaba rather than eBay, it was cheaper

• 43:47Speaker 03

  and they could transact in the way that they were comfortable with. Alibaba kind of stumbled upon this idea of saying, "Let me just let my sellers advertise to my buyers." And they actually created kind of like a Google AdWords-esque model, which was much more profitable than what eBay or even Amazon had at the time by taking a cut of the transaction. So it was interesting, but it all really kind of started with saying, "I'm going to make this simple. I want people to transact and just keep coming back again and again. And what is not as attractive with investors, I'll figure out monetization, I'll figure out business model as we go."

• 44:29Speaker 03

  It worked there and the funding climate was able to support that way of building your business, which now could be a little tougher.

• 44:37Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I want to come back then to my earlier question, which we didn't get into, which is, the title of the book's Modern Monopolies. Monopoly is, has a negative connotation. Meaning people are getting fleeced because, you know, Standard Oil has cornered the market in oil and could charge whatever it wants, or, you know, pick your example. Why, in the modern sense, are these not bad at all, but actually good for consumers?

• 45:01Speaker 03

  So, the idea for consumers, if we think about the timeline of a platform, let's just say you've got a 10-year horizon to really kind of hit the modern monopoly status. In those 10 years, for the most part, you're going to be subsidizing a lot of value in one or multiple ways from what we talked about. Monetary subsidies, product feature subsidies, giving things away for free, you're going to see a lot of subsidies. It's when they hit a point of that modern monopoly status, which is where theoretically they would have more leverage, where if they wanted to really kind of turn on monetization more heavily, and that could potentially put consumers at a disadvantage, where you would see that happen.

• 45:43Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So this would be like Amazon, all of a sudden, has complete share and they just jack prices and they-

• 45:47Speaker 03

  Right, they jack prices.

• 45:49Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  They start to improve their margins.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  And, and I would say, you know, Amazon, you hear reports of Amazon knowing who you are and where you're logging in from, so they show you more expensive things and things like that. So it's not that these entities are completely pure, but it's the idea that when you look at the competitive environment of these modern monopolies, you now actually have, as we've said, five or 10 of these things, that since their ecosystems and since their reach is so big, if Amazon, or if Uber, or if Google were to really kind of overstep that boundary and then hurt the consumer in a way which was, you know, the market wouldn't tolerate,

• 46:32Speaker 03

  that you would have plenty of other modern monopolies there, ready to take advantage of that and then try and grab market share from them. And that's one of the big differences when we think about the structure of these dominant businesses versus the linear monopolies of the 20th century is- You have a strong first-place player and you have a second-place player. And these ecosystems, if you look at their consumers and producers, they overlap pretty greatly. So the idea of linear monopolies ramping up oil production is a very timely, costly, CapEx-intensive thing to do if Standard Oil oversteps its boundaries.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  But in this kind of a competitive environment, they already are touching your ecosystem. And many times, they already have Bing versus Google Search, or you have Lyft versus Uber, or you have iOS versus Android. And there are alternatives there that are always looking for a way to capitalize on a misstep that the market leader may make. So there's kind of an element of inherent checks and balances that we've seen now that we're 10, 20 years into this. I think where it's a little bit more difficult is if you look at China, there's a lot of really great advancements that their platforms have made, but they have, say, three extremely

• 47:54Speaker 03

  dominant platforms, and that's a lot less than, say, five or 10. And we have a number of others that I think are going to be added to that list over the next few years. So the fact that we do have a more open, vibrant VC entrepreneurial ecosystem here that has let other modern monopolies sprout up from the grassroots is only creating a more vibrant, more competitive environment at scale, which should protect those consumers.

• 48:24Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So some of this is coming back to this idea of moat, where if Uber does 10 things that everyone hates, Lyft is a pretty clean alternative. Funny, I've never actually used Lyft, so I don't know that to be true, but it seems to be the case. So I'm curious, as an investor, again, there's this interesting idea of capital intensity or asset intensity, where obviously, these businesses are super asset-light. They don't own the cars, they don't produce the cars, maybe someday Uber would, and maybe then it wouldn't be a platform company. I guess it wouldn't be a platform company, kind of like Netflix produces content. But I wonder if there are any...

• 49:04Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Platforms which are asset-heavy, is that even possible? Given that a key feature of platforms is that you outsource.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  Would you say Apple's asset-heavy?

• 49:15Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It is, but I would say that the portion of its business where all the CapEx is happening is linear, is a linear business, is a hardware business. So I don't know, I just think about, again, like, okay, I've got, let's say I've got 100 million bucks, I'm a foundation, and I want to, you know, I've got my asset allocation and part of it's venture, and I want, I buy that the platform business model is the model of the future, and that the best returns will be somehow positioning my dollars at early stages in winning platform companies. You can see where I'm going with this. I'm trying to identify markers for what to look for as a VC. Or, as more and more of these companies go public, you know, if I'm looking at Facebook

• 50:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  relative to some competitor, that's a public market competitor, which doesn't really exist today, what are the markers of a potentially good investment in a platform company? And the reason I bring up asset-heavy is, yeah, it's hard, it requires, like, I don't know if there's gonna, you mentioned, you know, heavy machinery, but I always think like a mining company, or an EMP company or something, you're not gonna be having an EMP platform, but maybe you might. And in some ways, that asset intensity is a, can be a mode, it can also be a huge drag, and make things very cyclical and hard, but I'm just trying to think ahead to, like, I would love to invest in some platform companies, but I'm just worried that if I tried, I would fail miserably, because so many people are trying to do a platform in every space, like, how the hell am I gonna pick a winner?

• 50:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, how do you, is it, you know, is Snapchat, Facebook, or Twitter? Which is a, which is a debate that we have a lot internally. So, I think if you were to look at all the different platform types, any platform, any development platform that has hardware, that, you know, essentially, like an Apple, is going to have... A higher barrier than say a social network from if you're looking at kind of a CapEx and from really moving into that arena because you now need to have hardware if you're say going to compete against that or you need to create a hardware alliance like Android did with other smartphone OEMs.

• 51:29Speaker 03

  So there's a definitely I would say a tangible step up in terms of the longevity or timeline or durability or whatever metric you would want to look at when you look at successful development platforms. You could also look at the kind of switching costs of their producer base, right? So if I'm making software, I'm making an iOS app for the iPhone. For me to go make that app on the Windows phone is probably one of if not the highest amount of kind of switching costs for me to go and create the same value that I'm creating, but create it for someone else's platform.

• 52:12Speaker 03

  So when you look at that time invested or say how commoditized that service or that product or that value is, those are some metrics that you could look at in terms of defensibility. So development platforms kind of I think help shape entire platform ecosystems where other platform types are then able to grow and build on top of these development platforms. So those are kind of like the underpinnings of these communities in some ways.

• 52:39Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If you were an Uber shareholder, would you want them to go into the business of building a fleet and owning the fleet? Let's say we're going in the direction of self-driving cars. Would you as someone thinking about platforms versus linear business models and wanting the highest return on your investment, would you want them to go into the fleet business or would you want them to use independent owners of? Of self-driving cars and just stay a pure platform.

• 53:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I actually, I think Uber should try and go public as soon as it can because the next five to 10 years are going to be very difficult. I think the fundamental underpinnings of their business model is going to change because autonomous cars are going to be here. And I think that if the Google and, you know, the Androids, the Apples of the world and other players like BlackBerry's QNIX and other autos can figure out how to essentially create an operating system that lives on the car, and now Uber could be one of 20 different transportation apps.

• 53:48Speaker 03

  Well, it's, if we think about switching costs, right? It's a much higher switching cost for me, a driver, to flip on the Lyft app or the Juno app, which isn't that hard, but it's a much higher barrier than getting consumers to just say, you know, okay, Uber or Lyft, you know, if I'm not using my car, you know, you can put it on your network and whatever. And certainly, the price of every one of those transactions is a lot lower. So I think, I think they certainly have their approach. Well, I think they have many approaches for how to solve it, but at the same time, they don't really have too much control over how it's all going to sort out.

• 54:30Speaker 03

  I think they're trying things with Volvo and Mercedes and others. But can Uber get auto manufacturers to figuratively hand over the keys and, you know, do a one-off integration with Uber? Maybe, but is that truly the operating model? I mean, to me, I just, I see another iOS, I see the iPhone moving into the car and having a developer ecosystem that can tap into transportation apps.

• 54:59Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What are one or two really interesting platform businesses that maybe people have not? Yet discovered that you've seen and find really interesting today.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  So there's some interesting stuff, if you want a fun one.

• 55:14Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Sure, maybe a fun one and a really good one.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  Which honestly shouldn't even exist. It actually only exists for arbitrary reasons. It are these secondary sneaker marketplaces, which I actually think are a viable threat to the likes of Foot Locker and other kind of like shoe retailers. Because if you look at the supply, there's only like three shoe manufacturers. There's no reason that a marketplace should be created. But a marketplace is being created, going back to the consumer thing we were talking about earlier, because there's a limited, an arbitrary amount of limited supply for designer sneakers, and a certain consumer base is willing to pay an extraordinary amount of money to get these things, and they don't want to wait in line.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  So a lot of people will put it in sweat equity, or schmooze the people at the stores to get the sneakers retail, and then flip them. Or hold on to them for a year and let them appreciate, and then flip them, right? And there's now a viable marketplace, one just raised another $30 million, I think today they announced it, and Dan Gilbert from the Cavs owns one. And now some of the sneaker brands are actually doing a release, they just released LeBron's directly into this marketplace, going around a Foot Locker. So for no reason, it doesn't need to be there, you have a marketplace, and now it's actually

• 56:42Speaker 03

  creating a digital channel that I think is a legitimate threat to traditional sneaker retailers.

• 56:48Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So this is an interesting one, because it reminds me of like Hamilton tickets, the very popular Broadway play where, I don't know what the face value is, let's say it's 100, but they're going for 1,000. And same idea here, like if I'm the producer of the shoe that everyone wants, why am I not just raising prices? Like, it seems like a horrible misunderstanding of demand.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 57:09Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  And so, such an interesting idea, right? And same thing could be applied to tickets.

• 57:14Speaker 03

  It's because you have like MSRP's in place and retailers don't want to cross that line. And so, you have literally the creation of a marketplace that doesn't need to be there.

• 57:24Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Right.

• 57:24Speaker 03

  So, I've always found that funny, but now there's, you know, there's real money going into this and, you know.

• 57:30Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So, let me phrase it slightly differently and it'll just be purely about self-interest. So, if you could build a portfolio of, your goal is the next 10 years, that's the timeframe we've kind of talked about, best total return. You get to build a portfolio of three platform companies. What's, which three would that be?

• 57:47Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 57:50Speaker 03

  I would go Dev Platforms with Apple and Google and probably Facebook. What I would also do is I think you could make a, you could make a bet that I think would outperform any of the other traditional indices if you were to say, "I want to bet on platforms as a whole." And sure, there's laggard, you know, there's losers like a Twitter or a Groupon or Zynga, but, you know, I think you'll find the winners greatly outweigh the losers. And I think you'd, if you looked at those returns over a 10-year horizon, I think it would, it would probably outperform most indices.

• 58:27Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  This is, this is so, I'm so interested by this because, you know, my DNA is value investing, which is literally the opposite. These companies fall in the glamour category of very expensive valuations, which as a category historically has done very badly relative to value. But we were maybe coming out of, but have been in for a long time, a period where big cap tech, despite crazy valuations, has just crushed everything. And the question is always, well, can that last? And my view based on the data is no, these things are cyclical. And, you know, you know how much of this is fueled by incredibly cheap money, which drives money to VCs who give it to these places to subsidize growth and it looks, all looks fantastic until it doesn't.

• 59:11Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So, who knows how it goes, but such an interesting idea of building a little platform portfolio. It might be something that I short instead of buy, but, but interesting nonetheless. I'm curious, given how much of this is centered around and the original, the origin of the conversation was your book. If you could list a couple of the most formative or influential books that you've read for how you think about things.

• 59:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think, well, some of the, some of the books that, that I know we read with myself and co-author Nick Johnson while putting the book together was Tim Wu's book, The Master Switch. Really does, especially if you want to dig deeper into this kind of, you know, old monopoly versus new platform, modern monopoly conversation, it really helps provide some great context for how those things operated quite differently versus, versus these. I think some of Peter Thiel's work, as we were talking about, is great. Really fast, quick, easy reads, like zero to one, but the, you know, the concepts are

• 1:00:14Speaker 03

  there and pure and he's definitely a strong stalwart in, in the arena of, of this thinking. So those two would, would be where I'd start, but I could probably send you some others.

• 1:00:24Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Can you tell me a little bit about your business, about Aplico? So what, what you guys do, how you started and how you, kind of what the evolution was to get you so focused on the platform business model specifically?

• 1:00:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I started the company eight years ago. I was in college, had some credit cards. It was 08, 09. BlackBerry still had 75% market share. And I was saying to myself, you know, I think these app things are going to be pretty big. Let me get in there. So maxed those things out and started building apps for myself and for others and had some bestsellers and then people said, hey, can you build apps for me?

• 1:01:04Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What was a good early example of one?

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  We, for, we actually did some stuff, in the first early, early days was for BlackBerry here commuting between Greenwich and New York. And it would give you your train schedules in the app. And that became a, a bestseller and because the browser was so bad and you couldn't even get the schedule and all these things. And then we fueled that into doing iOS apps and Android apps and all these things. But then over the years, while doing that, I started to see some of our clients Have what came to be known as platform businesses. And was always wondering, why are we building things this way? Or why are we doing it this way and not that way?

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  And when I would do the research, there really wasn't any substantive body of work that was describing what these things were and why they were very different from all the other businesses and large enterprises that we were working with. So started focusing on helping to advise these businesses between startups and then more large enterprises. And while putting together the book and actually doing this work, helping to build platforms from an advisory and an execution standpoint, from a product development and user acquisition standpoint. And today, with the focus of Aplicho is, is we call ourselves the world's first platform innovation company.

• 1:02:25Speaker 03

  Because we see, we're 20 years into platforms, from the mid 90s really. And we see the next 20 years as this intersection of the modern monopolies with large traditional enterprises. We actually see these traditional enterprises as having a lot of assets that they could use to their advantage, like having billions of dollars of cash that they very often give away in distributions. Like touching at least one or sometimes both sides of the market with consumers and producers. Having very strong brand and trust amongst those user groups, which is very hard for these platforms to instill. Especially even say in Amazon coming into B2B distribution.

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  Everyone is very scared of actually working with Amazon and think of it as the devil. So these enterprises actually have a lot of advantages. What we believe is if you take that Silicon Valley recipe book, and if you take that playbook of the platform and you put it in the hands of these large enterprises, they could beat... The tech companies at their own game. But now it's really a time to put that to the test. We've seen some companies dabble with this and do internal efforts like Walmart had their marketplace initiative that they started in 09 and it failed and then they had to buy Jet for $3 billion, right? So when you look at buying versus building versus investing, there's a variety of ways

• 1:03:53Speaker 03

  that these businesses could start to play offense rather than defense. And we want to help them figure that out and help them actually have that be successful.

• 1:04:01Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Really neat. So you're working with not only startups, but also some really old line businesses potentially getting into this game?

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, mostly now all large enterprises where the work that we're doing can have a real material impact on that industry and on that company's long-term trajectory.

• 1:04:21Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What was the most, what has been the most memorable individual day of your career so far?

• 1:04:27Speaker 03

  Ooh, I think the book launch was a pretty huge milestone. I never thought I'd be an author to begin with, but I am that title and I was invited to a conference and they had my bio and they said, "Author." And I looked at it, say, "I guess so." So that was, that was pretty amazing. That was three years of really hard work and not just the thinking, but then organizing the thinking in an easily digestible manner. And now it's being translated into Mandarin and Japanese, which I'm pretty excited about because Asia's a very, very great place to look for platforms, lots of interesting lessons learned from them.

• 1:05:10Speaker 03

  And yeah, it's just, it's exciting stuff.

• 1:05:13Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  The people that I've given it to have, most of them have come back and said the same thing, independent of one another, which is, "I'm just amazed by the level of detail." In the history and the thinking and I always appreciate when books are make you think of questions and then go there like go to the actual answers to those questions. And it really, the book really does that. So, so I highly recommend people read it. The last of my kind of standard questions that I ask everybody and then I want to talk a little bit about fintech to close up is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

  I'd probably say I would, I would just default to my mom. Uh, my mom raising me, you know, for, for the most part, you know, single mother figuring out how to put me through private school and boarding school and college and has always been unbelievably supporting and positive and just, just an amazing figure, just such a great role model. And, uh, you know, she's, uh, she's the best. So, and that's actually who the book is dedicated to.

• 1:06:20Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Awesome. You know, it's, I have to go back and look now we're 25 or 26 into this, into this show, but I think you're the first person to say mom, which is shocking. You'd think that that'd be like half the answer.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:06:31Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  But, uh, that's, that's as good and as pure answer as I can think of. Um, so last we got about 10 minutes and I'd love to hear your opinion on platform opportunities within the financial world. So, so the, my perspective is always since I'm on the asset management side, interested in the robo space, which I think is fascinating, but really complicated and hard to do well. And it's a good example of what you just said where incumbents are actually crushing. So Vanguard, Schwab, um, they were late to the game, but their orders of magnitude bigger than a betterment or a wealth front because they had captive audiences and client acquisition has been really hard in the B to C model. So I'm curious in the

• 1:07:11Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  fintech space where, where you see opportunity and maybe where you see some fluff or skeptical of things like blockchain or, or what have you?

• 1:07:20Speaker 03

  Where I see a, if there's trillions of dollars and of opportunity in those other industries, there's probably at least tens of trillions in finance. I mean, one of the first places that we look at is, is when you just think about the exchange model and what an investment platform, what a, what a kind of marketplace brings efficiencies is matching that supply and demand. And I look at Supply and demand in the context of the allocation of capital to people that are then, you know, making investments with that capital. So I think the two in 20 model as an industry standard, I'd say, you know,

• 1:08:02Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Back to the last?

• 1:08:03Speaker 03

  If we were to look for a place where there's a lot of bloat, I'd say there's a lot of bloat in the two in 20 model. And I think that you, I mean, you know, it's one of those systems where it's a great model, why change it? But I think if you were to just conceptually think about a lot of people and/or robots that are doing investing, and you think about the appropriate compensation of the people creating the value to do the investing, if you can create a more efficient way to bring capital that wants to be invested to the people and/or robots that will do the investing, you could create a lot of efficiencies in that market.

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  Whether it's robots, or whether it's, you know, different types of managers or investment managers that, you know, don't have a strong brand or a billion dollar fund, but, you know, maybe they have a small track record of like 50 million or 100 million dollars or in whatever space that they're in. Is there a better or more efficient way that you can enable them to get capital and create some interesting marketplaces that standardizes reporting, standardizes kind of compensation, standardizes how the capital could flow between, you know, different people that are then investing that money, or different robots, or algorithms that are investing that money that then is created by the quants and the mathematicians, right?

• 1:09:33Speaker 03

  But do they, do the quants and the mathematicians need all the overhead of the people that are really responsible for going and selling and closing the LPs and the investors to put the money in, and all the overhead in marketing and research and like investor-related things that go into the kind of consumption, getting the demand, getting the consumption side of that marketplace?

• 1:09:56Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Yeah. That's a can of worms. And you talk about bloat, and what's interesting about the two in 20 model is It's kind of like growth investing in the public markets, buying expensive stocks. Because some companies are worth way more than 2 and 20.

• 1:10:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:10:15Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  And you'd happily pay 3 and 50.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:10:18Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  For the privilege of putting your money with certain managers. And it's always the hope that you're going to find the next one that I think has perpetuated people's willingness to pay these fees, which are, you know, very hope-based. And I don't know, I don't know how that will work because on the one hand, it sounds great if you're a guy in, that just likes to dig, tear apart companies and find 10 great investments, but don't want to deal with any, you don't want to create a firm, you just want to be an investor. It would be phenomenal for there to be a marketplace where you can show a track record or something. Are there any, are there any companies like that? Like, has anyone tried to start to break into this from the market, as a marketplace model?

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  There are some firms that I've, that I've seen kind of do this internally, but not necessarily on the consumer, on the consumer demand side, right? But I've seen, if you look at how they manage, say, their traders or their investment managers internally, it's a system that will look at their performance and it's in a standardized way, and then based upon their performance, you know, they're allocated more or less money and their compensation is, is tied to a lot of that, right? And that means that you may have a revolving door of people that come in and, you know, it could be streaky and then they leave, but I've seen some places that have like trialed this internally.

• 1:11:38Speaker 03

  The idea of this going end to end, I think there are investment platforms out there on the, say, like VC side, like an Angel List, which have a syndicate model, which is kind of in the vein of this. There are other places like iCapital, which I think are more about getting access to the really large firms that you wouldn't have access to otherwise.

• 1:12:05Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  The millennials, the citadels.

• 1:12:06Speaker 03

  Exactly. But, and so that's kind of getting access to consolidated supply, but, but where I see, again, huge value of the Business model is taking fragmented supply and bringing order and bringing order to that chaos and getting efficiencies from it. So, you know, does there need to be such a lumpiness of capital in a relatively small number of very large firms? I'm sure, I'm not saying that those folks are not good. They're probably very good at what they do. But could there be a more, say, evenly dispersed amount of capital to people that, you know, maybe they don't have an investment thesis that scales to over a billion dollars in

• 1:12:48Speaker 03

  capital, but maybe they have a great investment thesis for a couple hundred million dollars? And they don't need all the other overhead that goes along with that. So I just think it could be interesting to see what would happen if you could open up a marketplace that lets some of that creativity shine.

• 1:13:04Speaker 04

  It'll be fun to watch. I really appreciate all your time. This has been a blast. This is going to be what I have to listen to a few times to make sure I understand just all the, all the interesting angles for entrepreneurs, VCs, consumers and producers on other sides of the platform. It's been a blast, so thank you very much.

• 1:13:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you so much.

• 1:13:24Speaker 04

  Hey, everyone. Patrick here again. To find more episodes of Invest Like the Best, go to investorfieldguide.com/podcast. If you're a book lover, you can also sign up for my book club at investorfieldguide.com/bookclub. After you sign up, you'll receive a full investor curriculum right away and then three to four suggestions of new books every month. You can also follow me on Twitter, @Patrick_OShag, O-S-H-A-G. If you enjoy the show, please leave a quick review for us on iTunes, which will help more people discover Invest Like the Best. Thanks so much for listening.