Platforms win through foundational systems, not feature count

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 35:37

   here okay so let me just kind of go in a slightly different direction you're kind of in this you're kind of in the center of the storm of a lot of ai just like seeing everything that's going on is there something you wish you'd known before stepping into this role that you're just like okay i see i didn't expect this when i first took the role it was kind of described as like the belly of the beast and i um had spent most of my career year.

2. 36:00

   We're building products at the center of machine learning and applications or businesses. And I think that, to my surprise, a lot of the learnings have translated in terms of what makes a great platform is what makes a great product. So and like the thing for me is like it's often in the invisible work or the like not the pixels that actually drives that. So like, for example, one of the first companies that I worked at was a company called Porch Group.

3. 36:30

   I was employee seven and we knew we wanted to help people take care of their home. And I think we invented so many features like the home report or like a way to manage your home or like house style inspiration where you could like see all of the houses and map every single room. And the single most important thing that we could have done and did during my time there was create a matching platform that matched the 6 million professionals with the 1300 service types of the 37,000 zip codes and all of the homeowners in North America to actually take care of their their home.

4. 37:05

   And that was just a game of inches and kind of optimizing that engine in order to create higher quality leads, essentially. That's what got us to the first $500 million valuation. That's eventually what we built on to actually have other vertical services and software platforms that IP of the company. Same with messaging. um the number one learning that i had was look like whatsapp didn't win because it had stickers or stories or dark mode in fact i i don't even think it had all of those things when it won it won on a few premises because one was the phone book like you knew that when you use whatsapp you could reach every single person because you had their phone number and those are the people that you care about when you're using messaging it was the reliability and how fast it was like i could

5. 37:57

   text my grandmother in india and know that she would get my text message all the time and then it was the privacy like when you are sending 200 messages a day to the four people you care about most you want to make sure no one else can read the messages and so the end-to-end encryption really mattered and so it wasn't the hundred of hundreds of features it was all in kind of the infrastructure and the platform same with instacart right like there are so many loved features of Instacart. But at the end of the day, it's a billion items that updates 3000 times every single minute to get homeowners their groceries from the store that they love. And so I think I wish I had known that because I think it would have curtailed my learning curve to say that it's not all the features for the platform that matters. It's the data residency. So the hospital

6. 38:47

   in Germany that's fine tuning a model can do so in confidence and the data isn't going to leave the region. It's the availability. It's the reliability. It's, you know, making sure you have the right selection of the tools that enterprises need and the right way to retrieve the knowledge. And that's kind of the platform that we've built, but just didn't fully have that picture that those learnings would translate. That's really interesting. So what I'm hearing is people kind of undervalue just how the simple bottom of the Maslow hierarchy of things that