Seeding a sharing-economy or platform company
These days if you’re creating a company you likely hope to accomplish more with less people, two ways of doing this fall to: The sharing economy and creating a platform. It’s easy to see the case for this when you have such unicorns like AirBnB or Uber. The opportunity for each of those to compete against hotel chains or taxi services which each need to manage their own inventory is incredibly exciting and revolutionary. In a similar fashion platforms can offer much the same, Heroku’s platform and marketplace made it easier than ever for developers to click a button and get everything they needed years ago. It’s not just their code, it’s everything from Postgres to Mongo to Logging. Or take the app store as example. Smart phones weren’t a new thing when the iPhone came out, but it was only the saviest of users that had apps installed on their windows smartphone or blackberry. The app store made the iPhone different than any other phone by allowing others to build and improve it, turning the iPhone not into a phone but a platform.