Thread by @fdestin

1/ “Rise of Platforms” is everywhere and unstoppable - raises some interesting questions.

2/ The totemic company of our age is most certainly Amazon, and not just for their unstoppable volume-price- sales flywheels. First scaled cloud platform with AWS, dynamic pricing of resources, chaos maths in warehouses etc.

3/ I’m looking at this new funding round for PropTech @plentific and thinking unbundling of industries is just really getting started:

plentific.com/client/insight…

@Plentific 4/ @Plentific in PropTech is improving the way tenant / landlord services are delivered but is really part of a fundamental trend on “shrinking boundaries of the firm” and the rise of platforms - and it raises some interesting questions.

@Plentific 5/ Financial markets tell us marketplaces are almost impossible to outcompete in terms of allocation of resources and price discovery. So as software increasingly opens up access to data and leads to standardisation, dynamic pricing / allocation becomes possible everywhere.

@Plentific 6/ as an investor of course you look at this both in terms of opportunities (build faster on the shoulders of others), threats (co-operation / competition for margin splits), integrity of user experience, and of course sustainability / uniqueness of your own companies.

@Plentific 7/ as a society we’ve got an unstoppable march towards a relationship between worker and platform that looks less and less like employment.

That’s at the heart of a mega debate that we need to have.

Platforms accrue power and we don’t want the future to look like serfdom.

@Plentific 8/ One can vilify the pioneers (“Uber is evil”) but the reality is that “gig work” is coming to an industry near you pretty soon.

We’re not geared up for it. In fact the current framework (binary, employee or not) actually blocks companies from extending benefits 🧐

@Plentific 9/ we need a whole new way to look at work / legislation / social policies — income minimums, benefits, insurance, pensions etc — all tailored for a world where the relationship between work and income has become dynamic and not employer centric anymore.

Interesting times.