A Platform’s Economic Model

By editor on February 20, 2018 — 1 min read

Bill Gates said to us once, “This will be successful when the economic value of Facebook platform exceeds the economic, or is exceeded by, the economic value of those participants within it.”

And that’s what Microsoft did, right? If you sum up all the folks that live in the Windows world, their economic value is greater than Microsoft’s.

So why do you think Microsoft’s been around for 30 years? There are so many people working to keep it going; the incentives are there. You can debate whether it’s good or bad, that doesn’t matter. Winning is what matters, and those guys figured out how to win. Google is doing that now. Facebook is doing that… I think it needs to do that better, but, you know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDVDWNguPs4 (15:33)

Posted in: Entrepreneurship

Editor's Note

These are Chamath Palihapitiya's words. They are probably some of the best thoughts on VC, business, and life, but were scattered around the Internet. They live now in this archive.