What the $%#! is a Platform Company
Platform’s serve multiple purposes that enable the companies that build them to drive growth exponentially
I have competed against platform companies almost my whole career. I started my career in 1997, 3-years after Amazon launched. 10-years into my career, Apple iPhone launched with the App Store. 2 years into my career, Salesforce launched in 1999. I had just started a sales role and remember signing up for a free account to use as my customer relationship management system. As these companies grew, and the term “Platform” was coined, I had been using and competing with them for 15 years.
For the most part, I didn’t think about these companies as competitors. Until Amazon launched its price checker feature in their mobile app in and around the end of 2008, for the first time, consumers could walk into any retail store, check the price of the item on Amazon, and order with one click. A period of price match guarantees launched at retail stores. I was working at Target, and we had been using Amazon to host our e-commerce business. This was also at what I would call the beginning of Amazon’s sonic boom growth. They had just launched AWS two years before, monetizing the same infrastructure that powered their e-commerce sites.
