Today’s VC post of the day is from Lee Hower (NextView Ventures) titled Odds Are, Your Startup Probably Isn’t A Platform. Lee totally nails it in this post and reminds us of two important things.
“Simply having an API doesn’t make your company a platform. Similarly, simply having a piece of software that gets embedded in other products doesn’t make your company a platform… that just means your product is usefully extensible or perhaps you’re a dev tools business.”
The word “platform” became the overused word of 2010 – I wrote a post titled Your Platform Is Not In My Space where I actually referred to it as the most annoying word of 2010. Eventually words peak and disappear as tech cliches (thankfully the word “space” isn’t used 3,541,947 times a day anymore.) Until then, just know that every time someone calls something that isn’t a platform a “platform,” a puppy pivots somewhere.
