Traditionally, startups in healthcare have had challenges with distribution. This is not any different from…
Entrepreneurship
There has been a lot of chatter about platforms as of late and their moves have mostly been to the detriment of platform developers (Facebook forcing Zynga to use their credit system; Twitter banning third-party apps from inserting in-stream ads or Apple changing their developer agreement to ban use of third-party analytics and services). As […]
Traditionally, startups in healthcare have had challenges with distribution. This is not any different from…
Last week we brought together over 20 founders, CEO's and senior managers from 6 portfolio…
There has been a lot of chatter about platforms as of late and their moves have mostly been to the detriment of platform developers (Facebook forcing Zynga to use their credit system; Twitter banning third-party apps from inserting in-stream ads or Apple changing their developer agreement to ban use of third-party analytics and services). As the life of a platform developer has become less interesting / profitable and more risky, should you still consider building a company / product on top of an existing platform?
First of all, every platform that is run by a for-profit company will ultimately try to maximize their economic rent and will leave just enough on the table for application developers to keep them motivated to continue to innovate on the platform. To assume that platforms would think differently about this is naive in my opinion (hence I am still surprised why people are still so upset about Twitter’s moves as of late). Given this assumption, there are only 2 strategies for app developers to mitigate risk and build businesses on top of other platforms:
The risk of developing for a platform must be weighted against some of the amazing distribution (and monetization) opportunities that all of the large platforms offer so the decision will never be black or white. Personally, I would invest in a company that intends to build products on top of an existing platform like Facebook or Twitter as long as they have a clear strategy to mitigate risks as mentioned above.
Version One
It’s been about a little over a month since I joined Version One and returned to early-stage venture after spending the past five years as a founder in the addiction treatment space. While a month is a short amount of time, it’s been fascinating to see how certain things have changed during my time away. […]
The first week of September is my VC anniversary. This milestone is always a great…
VC funds go through challenging times world-wide but the situation in Canada is probably worse…