Sangeet Paul Choudary , Best-selling Author of Platform Scale and Platform Revolution chats with Amit Somani , Managing Partner Prime Venture Partners .

Sangeet Paul Choudary is a C-level executive advisor and an international best-selling author. He has been selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and is ranked among the top 30 emerging thinkers globally in 2016 by Thinkers50 Radar, a global ranking of top business thinkers. His work on platforms has been selected by Harvard Business Review as one of the top 10 management ideas globally for the year 2016-17.

In this conversation, they explore the idea of Platform thinking, how should startups think about platforms, unique opportunities for businesses post COVID-19 world and more.

Listen to the podcast to learn about

1:00 - What is the platform business model & how should startups think about platforms

8:42 - Opportunities to rethink business models in a post COVID-19 world

14:30 - ‘Big shift is not just remote working, or streaming, the big shift is to the cloud’

16:00 - How to reimagine businesses that fundamentally needed physical presence

21:55 - How will public policy making & government regulations will change

22:50 - ‘without the ecosystem, the platform does not survive ‘, Why platforms need to protect the ecosystem

28:00 - When should platforms own inventory

28:55 - Why resilience will be more important than just the economies of scale

 

You can sign up for Sangeet’s weekly newsletter at http://platforms.substack.com .

You can also access Sangeet’s online masterclass at http://platform.institute . There are separate masterclasses available for startups and enterprises.

You can avail the following offer till May 15:

57% discount to the Startup course . Use access code STARTUP2020.

22% discount to the Enterprise course targeted at managers at large enterprises. Use access code ENTERPRISE2020.

 

Read the full transcript below

Amit Somani 0:23

Welcome to the Prime Venture Partners podcast. Today, we have with us a special guest Sangeet Paul Choudary. Sangeet is the Founder of Platformation Labs and is a C-level advisor to many Fortune 500 companies across the globe. He is a strategic thinker and a best-selling author. I have read a couple of his books Platform Revolution and Platform Scale and we’ll talk about that and most recently wanted to congratulate him for becoming the youngest ever recipient of the IIM Bangalore’s Distinguished Alumnus Award. Welcome to the podcast, Sangeet.

Sangeet Paul Choudary 0:52

Thanks! Amit, really glad to be here. Thank you.

Amit Somani 0:55

So Sangeet, You’ve become very well known for your work on platform thinking. And you know this transition over the last decade or more from pipes to platforms. Can you just give people just a basic understanding of what platforms are? And what do you think about them?

Sangeet Paul Choudary 1:12

I believe that as the world has been getting more connected, especially since the rise of the smartphone and as we start seeing consumers and businesses generate more data, we’re moving to a new business model, which I think of as the platform business model, where you connect multiple different parties, producers and consumers of value and enable them to exchange value with each other. And that’s the business essentially, in the modern business model of connecting these sites with each other rather than simply creating products and services itself. And so to distinguish this from the traditional model of business, I think of the traditional model of business as a pipeline model where you keep creating product or service, you push it out and it goes to the market, and it’s a linear flow of value whereas in a platform business you enable this multi directional flow of value where different parties connect to you and exchange value with each other. And this is, I believe, the key shift that we’ve seen over the last decade where platforms have taken center stage. The leading companies and the S&P 500 are platforms, traditional businesses are moving towards platforms and just to put some more clarity around these concepts. When you think of platforms, we’re talking about social networks, marketplaces, like social networks, like Facebook or YouTube, marketplaces like Airbnb, Amazon Marketplace for that example. But it’s now extending more broadly across industries. If you think of healthcare platforms, businesses are coming up over there, banks are thinking of transitioning to platform style businesses. So I’m happy to discuss all this in more detail. But I just wanted to paint the broad picture to start with.

Amit Somani 2:47

That sounds great! So a lot of our audience members are startups and often early stage startups, maybe some even growth stage startups and, I’ve a point of view that hey, platforms evolve and you don’t as a start up, go and say, I am going to build a platform. You have to go solve problems and use cases that matter to the market. Of course, you would have an architecture, how do you think about it in the context of startups as opposed to perhaps larger companies in terms of how they should think about platforms? And then we can take a specific example maybe. But why don’t we start with how should startups think about platforms.

Sangeet Paul Choudary 3:18

I guess all business starts with solving a pain point. And so that does not change whether you’re a pipeline or the platform business model, which is the logic of how value gets created and delivered comes as a second step once you’ve determined what pain point you’re trying to solve. So it starts with solving the pain point and the point at which you start thinking about a platform business is where you start thinking what’s the right way to solve this pain point? Do I create the value and bring it to the end user? Do I connect multiple sites so that they discover each other? Am I trying to help provide an infrastructure to a certain kind of customer to upscale themselves, or am I helping them connect to a new market? When you start getting into those nuances, then you start thinking about, well, a platform with a better solution than a traditional product or service model. I’m not a strong advocate of the idea of let’s build Uber for x or the Shopify for y, you have to start with the pain point and then determine what is the best way to solve it. And given the fact that there are many use cases, which are better solved by being an enabler and connecting different parties, rather than by providing the value yourself. That’s where platforms start becoming important. So I would still start with the pain point and in some cases, your initial iteration itself might be a platform because you just are in a market where you do not, where you cannot be the product or service provider. And in some other cases, you could start as a product creator and then transition it into a platform business. So again, you start with the pain point and then move from there.

Amit Somani 4:56

Sounds good! We’ll come back to startups a little bit later on the podcast. You define three attributes or sort of framework or framework that defines a platform. So there’s marketplaces or community, there is infrastructure, there is data as three key attributes. So, maybe let’s take an example, Zoom is all the rage now. In fact we are recording this podcast on Zoom, how does something like Zoom come about, when things like WebEx and Skype and Google hangout and so many other things exist, again, one party to illustrate the framework and partly to think about, say, Zoom in the context of it being a platform company.

Sangeet Paul Choudary 5:31

Yeah. So I would say that Zoom started up very much as an infrastructure provider, an infrastructure for having these discussions. So I’m using the term infrastructure in the form of a tool over here. So Zoom provided a tool for video meetings and conferences and interactions and from there, it started layering on other layers, so to speak. At this point, I would still say it’s a tool heavy business which has not fully transitioned into a platform business. But when it started opening up it was interesting. One is, of course, in terms of integrations. So there are third party integrations you can integrate into Zoom, that’s still, extending the infrastructure or tools layer of the overall business model, then there are network or community elements that are being brought in, which could range from how access control is managed in the future, data would start playing a bigger role. For example, if Zoom can figure out if you’re Zoom-bombing on a regular basis, or if you’re a high risk candidate, you just automatically have lower access and decision rights on the platform as you move forward. So I would expect that as we move forward, it would largely remain a tool oriented infrastructure heavy platform, rather than a network heavy and a data heavy platform. So again, if I compare Shopify for example is again an infrastructure heavy platform versus an Amazon which is a network and data heavy platform. And similarly in the video side of things I would say, Zoom is infrastructure heavy, TikTok is very data heavy and network heavy. They are solving different problems, no doubt, my point is that you can have platforms in many different configurations as these examples illustrate.

Amit Somani 7:07

So would you put something like Houseparty as a network or community heavy video interaction platform?

Sangeet Paul Choudary 7:14

Yeah, I would say that with the disclaimer at this point that I have myself not used Houseparty as such, I’ve just read extensively about it. But I would put that more in the network heavy model.

Amit Somani 7:25

Sounds great! So let’s talk about your latest blog post which actually triggered me reaching out to you.

Sangeet Paul Choudary 7:31

Sure. So I’ve started exploding this series of ideas around how business changes in a post COVID-19 world. And there are multiple elements of how that change gets manifested. There’s change in consumer use cases, there’s because of consumer use cases changing there’s going to be change in how processes are structured around consumers, how supply chains are structured, and eventually how underlying infrastructure shifts start happening on the basis of that. So, with that whole framework for where things are headed. I’ve started to get into identifying what are the core shifts and how business models will change? And in particular, how does that impact platform businesses, but also, all other businesses? How does that impact from a perspective of an opportunity to create a new business model? And if you think of things broadly, as pipelines and platforms, every pipeline has an opportunity to think of a platform business. Every platform has an opportunity to strengthen itself with more pipeline elements, which I can share about later as well. But that’s where I’m going with these blog posts and these newsletters at this point. I’m happy to dig deeper into some of these ideas.

Amit Somani 8:42

Sure! So let’s talk about one which we were talking about earlier, before the podcast which is What are some unique opportunities you think for people to rethink their models, business model, systems, strategies in a post COVID-19 world? Well, we see that there’s lots of opportunity, of course there are lots of downsides. And then people have talked a lot about that, maybe you could take a couple of examples and talk about some of the new things that could emerge beyond your Zoom meetings and Houseparty kind of stuff.

Sangeet Paul Choudary 9:09

So let’s think of opportunities at least three different levels. So the first is opportunities because of change in consumer behavior. And the reason I think that is important is because I think the right way to think about the current crisis COVID-19 is not to think of it as a disruption to business, but as an extended social conditioning phase where consumers are being conditioned towards the use cases. So if you’re the business who can identify those new use cases earlier, you are well positioned to emerge in a post COVID world with a strong business model. So let’s dig a little deeper than the consumer use cases. The second thing I would look at is value chain shifts, because when consumer use cases change, they don’t just impact a particular product or business model. They impact the negotiating part in the value chain, and I’ll give a few examples of that which I believe are happening right now. And the third thing then is what are the upstream impacts, what are the infrastructural shifts that would start happening and which are largely driven by some of these horizontal consumer use cases. And there’s a reason for these infrastructural shifts happening around crisis moments, if you think of it a lot of technology shifts have happened around crises and they have not been coincidences. So, if you think of the shift to mobile happened around the previous recession 2008-2009, the shift to smartphones and to mobile in the enterprise. The shift to web in a big way happened post the dot com bust and post 9/11 and similarly, client server architectures got adopted post 1992. And PCs got adopted heavily in the early 80s so in the recession as well. So, if you think of all of these different scenarios, infrastructural shifts also have a high correlation with crisis for that matter. But let me start with the three things. So I’ll give one quick example on all three. So think of changing consumer use cases. I think what’s really interesting is you’re going to move to the remote work all that is fine. But what’s really interesting is how can you re-imagine this rather than just think of it as a channel shift? How can you re-imagine work in the future, then what new opportunities will that provide? And while that still sounds nebulous as a problem statement, let’s take the example of Disney. That’s a very real problem statement over there. It’s a business that has huge IP, that has very strong characters that have a lot of resonance with the audience. But it monetizes that IP heavily through amusement parks, which are now shut down. So what would an amusement park look like in a shutdown world, In a lockdown world? How would you think re-imagine amusement and this is where I think a few companies like Minecraft, for example, started as a virtual world and then it became so recognisable that it’s the value of the IP in that world increased beyond the technology. And that IP now gets licensed into other amusement parks, into other game boxes. Can Disney go the other way round? Can Disney go from the real world where it has strong IP into the virtual world and create virtual worlds which compete with Minecraft, for example. So that’s one example of how to think about end user experiences being conditioned as more people spend more time and immersive gaming than they have ever before. Is there an opportunity for that? The second point that I talked about was the value chain. And right now there’s a very interesting time to think about that. Because if you think of movies releases for example, or if you think of the entertainment industry and the TV and movie industry in general, the big value chain shifts that are going to happen, the most obvious is with movie releases, for example. So movies would be released to theaters and then they would be a windowing period, after which they would go into streaming distribution channels like Netflix and Amazon. But now with theaters getting closed that windowing goes out of the window, so to speak, because the theaters lose all the negotiating leverage that they had, they had an incredible negotiating leverage, which is why the studio’s would never want to disturb that relationship. But now studios are increasingly launching directly to consumers through streaming channels. And in China, platforms themselves are changing to provide a channel to movies, if you look at Huanxi which is a Chinese studio, partnered with Byte Dance, and for the first time Byte Dance went into the streaming model. So if you think of this when we come out of a lockdown world, and if users have been sufficiently conditioned to expect movies and interact with it in new ways, in a direct to stream, the value chain relationships will change. The negotiating power of the theater would have changed by then. And you can say similar things about the TV networks, which have long distinguished themselves on live events, on sports, concerts, all of that is going away. So now they need content, content production has stopped, because studios are not working at this point. Where do they get the content, they get it from potentially somebody like Netflix or Amazon, which then allows Netflix and Amazon to get in front of audiences that would otherwise not have thought of them. So movie value chain, T.V. value chain, all of this is being impacted. So that’s the second big thing to think about. And the third big thing to think about is really the infrastructural shift. And that is where I think the big shift is not just remote working, or streaming, the big shift is to the cloud. Because if you do remote working, the companies will have to move more of their processes to the cloud. And so cloud infrastructure investments are going to increase. Similarly, I believe data infrastructure investment is going to increase all the way from wireless networks down to subsea cables, because if you look at post locked down Europe had to negotiate with Netflix to reduce, it’s streaming rate, because the data infrastructure was not capable of handling this level of entertainment consumption. But post lockdown, we might be in a position where that might have to be the new normal. And so we would have to invest in that data infrastructure. So I think it comes down to thinking of change at all these three levels. And I’ll just post there if you want to dig into any of them in more detail.

Amit Somani 15:23

Yeah! Actually I want to take all of them but let me just summarize. So you have of course, a change in consumer behavior that has suddenly accelerated, thanks to all the remote work and online and online education and online health care and everything. The second thing you said is, value chain shift, which is around the example of how movies get released, how content gets produced, how it gets streamed, how do creators fit in, how do content producers fit in, and lastly, the infrastructure and upstream sort of impacts. So let’s start with the consumer. First and foremost.

Sangeet Paul Choudary 16:00

Right!

Amit Somani 16:01

And in terms of consumer behavior changing, like, how does it, And I know we’re going to be pontificating a little bit here and speculating. How do you reimagine businesses that fundamentally needed physical presence, In a post COVID world? So let’s say going in eating in a restaurant or seeing a live theatre performance, does that sort of go away? Or is it like a new kind of normal. The fact that people are comfortable with streaming and watching the theater, I just want something from the National Theatre Academy in the UK a couple of days back. And it was a phenomenal performance, I watched it obviously, on my TV. So how do you think about what will consumers be more open to and what are things that they are implicitly more open to, but they don’t know it?

Sangeet Paul Choudary 16:40

Yeah! So again, at this point, we are perhaps a little early in this whole shift. So as we move further, we’ll see how it unravels. But the framework in which I would think about it is to think of both the consumer value chain, where value is being delivered to the consumer and help the consumer is coming in to experience that value, as well as the upstream supply side value chain. So if we just take restaurants as an example, and people have stopped eating at restaurants, what exactly does that mean? This could have impact at various levels. On the upstream side, for example, the economics of restaurants is extremely skewed by the real estate costs that they bear. If the location of a restaurant is no longer going to be an advantage, then maybe you will have to rethink the economics, maybe you’ll have to convert the restaurant into dark kitchens and give up on your prime real estate. And so, we might start seeing restaurant businesses moving into dark kitchen models just because and when I say dark kitchen, it means just a kitchen without a front end, without the restaurant experience that is in a lower real estate, lower rent part of town, closer to the end user. So that delivery time is also optimized. So we might see that happening for example, if you will look at the upstream effects. If you would look at the downstream effects of changing consumer behaviour, at the consumer, there could be a whole range of different scenarios. Say for example, if drive-in becomes important. This is something we’re talking about yesterday, the interface that the drive-in interface, as you mentioned, would become a very important point of innovation and conversion funnel at that point, how do you optimize the drive-in experience for maximum conversion, best turnaround that starts becoming important, then that will be where you’ll start seeing innovation happen. We will see this restaurant innovate over there. But more importantly, you’ll see across industry innovation, either by tool providers, who provide good experiences and service, or by aggregators, who aggregate data from the drive-in experience to create new platform based business models around it, that could come in. And so, those are some of the ways in which we could start seeing change coming in, with changing consumer behavior. So that’s the broad framework.

Amit Somani 18:51

Yes. Let’s talk about upstream impacts, in your blog post, you mentioned companies like Microsoft and Amazon, really doing well through this downturn. Particularly with respect to the infrastructure shifts that are gonna happen, like a lot more. Now, people have been using cloud technologies for a while not just at the consumer, but at a business level, but that rate of pace of change is gonna get rapidly accelerated. So it’s not just the application like Zoom or Netflix or whatever on top of it. Really the shift to cloud will become much more accelerated.

Sangeet Paul Choudary 19:22

Yeah. So I think the shift to cloud will become accelerated as a function of multiple things. The first is that shifts in the enterprise is also fundamentally end user driven. So if end users demand something, it’s just like bringing your own device. BYOD is when BlackBerrys were taken out and we saw everything being replaced by iPhones. When you start seeing that happen, the purchasing parameters change, your purchasing department is not involved. And so a lot of different new kinds of work flows start getting implemented, new kinds of technology providers are coming in as well. So there’s definitely an upside for, I think Microsoft, Amazon and the others, who are in the cloud business. But there’s also a big potential opportunity to enter the enterprise space at this point where the decision maker for the purchases is going to shift. So that’s also going to be an important shift. Similarly, we have infrastructural needs that are going to be required for these new consumer use cases which are away from the enterprise. So let’s say streaming is on the rise, there’s going to be more need for video compression technologies. And with the remote work being on the rise, there’s going to be more need for encryption technology. So these are all infrastructural shifts that are bound to happen, that are waiting to happen and crises like this. And the shift in consumer behavior totally escalates this. So in terms of bet I find it a much safer bet to bet on the infrastructure because you’re providing the picks and shovels for the Gold Rush, rather than the Gold Diggers themselves which are the services on top of it. So that’s why I would go long on Amazon or Microsoft with their Cloud capabilities at this point,

Amit Somani 21:04

Wonderful! So switching gears a little bit, let’s talk about government and the role of regulation. And policy and policy frameworks, in terms of how do you think that is gonna get impacted? Because the government is even in India has had to kind of double down on adopting technology and figuring out how to get the country going in this time. So may we talk a little bit about, I know you work a lot more with clients in Europe, in the US, but just the role of government, the role of regulation, etc, that will be helpful.

Sangeet Paul Choudary 21:35

Yeah! Sure. So I think it’s a super interesting time for multiple reasons. The first is that governments are in even before we get to the regulation governments are providing big stimulus packages, but at the same time, we are beginning to see the role that platforms play. Because platforms are having to provide fixed stimulus packages as well, in their own ways, because platforms are market makers, much like the government is and if you look at Airbnb, for example is doing it’s provided this whole package to hosts who are going through this crisis, there’s going to be a monetary help for them. Airbnb on its own is not in a good position. It had to take a down round at a very high interest rate 11 to 12%. But it still has to, in order to protect and sustain its ecosystem and not end up with mass foreclosures, it has to provide this kind of package. And we’ve seen something similar with the restaurant industry as well, with zomato, for example, in India, running a campaign to help restaurants, Yelp and OpenTable trying to do their part for restaurants. So the first piece that I see that’s really going to take shape is that when platforms realize how much they need the ecosystem, they’re going to start acting more like custodians of the ecosystem because without the ecosystem, the platform does not survive in these cases. So this is something we’ve not seen to the same extent in the past. We’re going to see that happen much more through the crisis and then when the ecosystem gets conditioned beyond it as well. So that’s one big shift, right? The second big shift that is there is just how the narrative around big tech has changed. That has changed quite a bit. Because over the last, I would say 2010 to 2015 it was all about or 2005 to 2013 or so it was all about the upstarts beating the giants and Facebook and the young companies coming up in 2013, tipping point was around Brexit, Trump election 2014 onwards, 2016 onwards, the narrative started moving against platforms. And because also platforms became really big and started exploiting the ecosystem. What’s happened is that all this narrative, if you just do a date bound Google search for big tech regulation, you’ll see that this kind of hit a peak towards the latter half last quarter of 2019. And 2020 was supposed to be the big year that the big four tech companies, big five tech companies would be regulated, especially Google, Facebook and Amazon. And what’s happened is quite the contrary because big tech has stepped up, and is now playing a massive role in helping governments solve this current crisis. And so for the world right now, the current crisis is so much bigger that everybody’s willing to forgive all this regulation. And in the process, we’re going to start saying regulation actually moves in a direction that might favor the big tech as well. We’re in a situation right now, where we don’t have a playbook to get out of lockdown to a full service economy. The only thing we’ve seen is China where data harvesting is required. Data privacy is thrown to the dogs in order to get the economy working again. And if that is how you get the economy back on its feet, then that legitimizes your data collection that takes data privacy away from the equation, and that would then start needing to deregulate data to a much bigger degree in western democracies as well. And we might well say that this is all towards a humanitarian cause but regulation is, policy making is complex, you can’t create very strict boundaries. So as long as there’s a reason to deregulate data, there’ll be a way to make that work for capitalism as well. And so we kind of move in the other direction in the coming days is, what I really feel at this point.

Amit Somani 25:15

Sounds great! I want to build on a couple of points that you said there. In fact, I’m looking at your Platform Manifesto, which you had out in 2015-2016. So you said two things there. One is that the ecosystem is the new supply chain and liquidity management is the new inventory control. And so the point you make about whether it’s Airbnb and their hosts and making them stay alive, or whether it is Zomato, with restaurants or anybody which sort of is a multi sided marketplace, or even a two sided marketplace, I think it was all the rage to say hey, look, Airbnb is the biggest, hotel chain with no hotels or no hotel rooms or no capital infrastructure, but like sort of coming back full circle, in some sense. How do you think about that ? A lot of these folks that were pure Tech companies, marketplaces within a strong network layer, a strong data layer, perhaps strong tech layer, they do need to have the underlying nodes of the network be healthy for their business to be viable.

Sangeet Paul Choudary 26:13

There are two parts to it. There’s certainly the part that you talk about right now, which is you need to manage for resilience, not just for scale. Because you don’t want to just keep moving fast and breaking things, you want to really be sustainable as well. So that’s one part of it. And I’ll come back to that shortly. The other part of it is what would have happened even despite COVID-19 what was already happening, even despite the crisis, and the other part of it is this that a lack of asset ownership is not the success criterion for platform business. It just so happens that platforms leverage third party assets. That’s how they scale, that’s how they don’t need to scale on the supply side and get benefit from the massive returns, but what we repeatedly see is that success in a platform business is not in lack of asset ownership, but in strategic asset ownership. So what essentially platform businesses do is they allow the ecosystem to take the risk of asset ownership. And once the merchants or the content providers of any kind of producer ecosystem, sustainable business model in a certain niche in the ecosystem. The platform enters in and starts owning the inventory over there. So many examples of this, think of Amazon the moment the merchant starts doing better, Amazon goes in as a retailer in that category and pushes the merchant out. And if you think of the whole model of Netflix and Amazon Prime, all of it is based on studios taking the risk where studios work like venture capital, they take big risks, they don’t know what’s going to happen and few succeed most fail. But all the risk is taken by studios and Netflix and Amazon Prime gather the data of the end consumer, and then inform their own data driven content creation, which ensures that they don’t have to go to the same risk taking model again. And that’s when owning the inventory makes sense. So my point is the first part of it, COVID-19 or no COVID-19 it always makes sense for the platform to own the most lucrative parts of the inventory. There is no badge of honor and saying that we don’t own the inventory. The only reason you don’t own the inventory is two reasons. Actually, the first reason is, you want somebody else to take the risk. And when once they have proven it you then swoop in. The second is that you don’t want to own the inventory in less profitable categories. Let others do that. That’s what Amazon does. That’s what Netflix does, if you really think of it now. The second piece is that post COVID-19 reality, and this is where I believe that resilience is going to be more important than just the economics of scale. You need to have a resilient ecosystem, you need to have a resilient supply chain platform or not you need to own critical nodes. And so that part is going to be increasingly important. What I believe, though, is going to happen. And this is where again, I would go bullish on Amazon for example, what I believe is going to happen is, the longer this lockdown lasts, the more difficult it is going to be for companies to over invest in resilience. Most companies will be just in survival mode. And during this period, the companies that will over invest to create resilience, and Amazon has perfected the playbook. It over invests in technology in warehousing and logistics and then uses that internally, but there are also opposite to third parties. So this is an opportunity for somebody like Amazon to over invest in various parts of logistics, various parts of even healthcare logistics at this point in time, and then provide it as a service in AWS for healthcare, for example, create that as a service model, which then survives this period and continues. So I would expect that there will be a lot of skilled players who will emerge who would invest on the supply side and then provided as a service. And that allows them to win big in the post COVID world.

Amit Somani 30:09

Wonderful! Sangeet. This is really fascinating. I feel we could go on for hours, maybe we’ll do another one in a few months or whatever, as this thing unfolds. Before we wrap up here, I know you’re doing some amazing work in terms of opening your own platform and you have a new site that you’re planning called Platform.institute. Can you talk a little bit about that, in particular, both for startups, as well as for larger companies?

Sangeet Paul Choudary 30:32

My goal over there was actually to essentially democratize the workshop or the masterclass that I provide to corporates. So the starting point of that was to convert it into an online masterclass that is self-serve that can be used by startups to upscale and understand platform strategy in detail and can be used by enterprises to think about how to reinvent their business model. So that’s what’s launched right now at Platform.Institute which is the whole masterclass available online. But in the coming weeks and months, it’s going to be expanded even further where a third party, for example, can use this curriculum and run their own workshops. But keep this as the backbone. Somebody who’s certified and well positioned to run it, can keep this as the backbone of the workshop and help a company to build a platform. And similarly, even for startups, there’s going to be a constantly updated set of content on this program. But as we move forward, and as the platform keeps evolving the content will keep on changing and will keep on evolving as we move forward.

Amit Somani 31:32

Wonderful! Thank you so much Sangeet, this has been really exciting. I strongly encourage our audience to go check out platform.institute. And if you haven’t read one of his earlier books, please read those, there are some very nice articles in HBR as well. Thanks again for being on the Prime Venture Partners podcast Sangeet great to have you.

Sangeet Paul Choudary 31:49

Thank you Amit. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.