As of the second quarter of 2018, the top five companies by market cap are all platforms: Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook. In addition to these unicornest unicorns the list includes eBay, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Slack, WhatsApp, Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, GitHub, Kickstarter and more. Also, platform companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and Rakuten have taken over China and much of Asia.
Alex Moazed Founder & CEO of Applico says, that in the twenty-first century, the supply chain is no longer the central aggregator of business value. What a company owns matters less than what it can connect.
It means that a liner business model is no longer as successful as a platform business model and whether you’re building a platform business or not, you cannot succeed in today’s economy without understanding how platforms work.
Investors love platforms as they deliver faster growth, better return on capital, and larger profit margins.
Despite all this it is not easy to create a new successful platform. First you must attract users to join, then you aid them by matching them together, providing the technology to facilitate the transaction and establishing the rules that govern the network in order to build trust and maintain quality.
During our event we will talk about how to make it all happen and hear real cases on building a successful platform business from the side of a business owner and an investor with our speakers: Kirill Bigai, CEO and Co-Founder at Preply and Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups.
Event agenda:
19:00 – 19:10 – speaker’s intro.
19:10 – 20:00 – panel discussion
20:00 – 20:15 – Q&A session
20-15-21:00 –pitch session for startup founders
21:00 - networking
