Modern Monopolies Quotes

“We think of and talk about the Industrial Revolution as a singular event, but in reality, it spanned decades. It wasn’t really a revolution but a gradual evolution with revolutionary implications.”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy

“After Alibaba blocked external search engines, its marketplace became the dominant destination for shopping in China’s e-commerce market. It became the go-to platform for product search in China, a feat that neither Amazon nor eBay could achieve in the United States, where Google is usually the first go-to destination for shoppers”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies

“What will provide defensibility?” The answer: “Networks of users, transactions, or data”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies

“platforms sit at the top of the economy. they have the most market power, the highest profits, and the most sustainable competitive advantage.”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies

“this is a gold rush.. you can either mine for gold like uber or airbnb, or your can sell the pots, the pans and the levi jeans”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies

“people say it all the time: this product is so good that it sells itself. this is almost never true. these people are lying, either to themselves, to others, or both”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies

“potential new users are driven by their attraction to (or distaste for) your existing user base. once a platform has attracted a critical mass of a certain type of users, more users of the same type will favour it.”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies

“laser focused on building tools that enable the ore transaction”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies

“replace individual trust with trust in the platform is an important part of removing friction from the core transaction”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies

“ultimately, the goal should be to get both consumers and producers to have a high degree of trust in the platform”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies

“getting consumers to help curate the quality of producers (and vice versa) can significantly reduce the difficulty of community governance”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies

“finding other networks to tap into, whether theyre digital or exist in the real world, is a key strategy for audience building”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies

“without liquidity, nothing else mattered, so the company was willing to play dirty to get its platform started”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies

“public policy... surprisingly common among those who have spent time leading platforms..”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies

“if you chase two rabbits, both will escape. pick one and seize it.”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies

“Alipay, is responsible for half of all online transactions in China. It processes more than $500b in transactions annually, which is twenty times more than the amount handled by China UnionPay.”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies

“technological progress has even led to what's being called the Race to Zero in cloud computing, where technological advances and increasing competition are driving down cloud processing and storage prices.”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies

“few people a decade ago could ever have imagined what we do routinely today”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies

“technical superiority does not equal desire, and therefore sales”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies

“Blackberry was focused on the keyboard, but that never really mattered. The key to controlling the market was the operating system and a network of third-party app developers.”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies

“Because Bitcoin allows developers to build on top of the blockchain protocol, it enables countless new uses of the underlying technology. Just as Apple’s iOS platform created a world where “there’s an app for that,” we may soon be in a world where “there’s a Bitcoin app for that.”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy

“Currently, Bitcoin is by far the largest blockchain network. However, many others (often collectively referred to altcoins) make small alterations to the Bitcoin protocol to adapt it for other uses. But as the nature of the blockchain suggests, a larger blockchain network is a more useful and more secure one. As a result, at present, Bitcoin is effectively the only game in town. However, there are signs that this could change in the near future.”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy

“Rather than ending the dominance of platforms, we would suggest that the growth of blockchain technologies will be accompanied by the emergence of many new platform companies. Like HTTP and the Web before it, the blockchain will create a decentralized infrastructure that provides the opportunity for new markets and communities to emerge. But most of these new opportunities won’t take shape without a platform company orchestrating them and capitalizing on their potential.”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy

“Bitcoin is usually considered a currency, but some economists think it looks more like a commodity—a sort of digital gold. Like a commodity, it’s subject to wide swings in price based on speculators investing in the bitcoin market. And like gold, bitcoins are scarce. The Bitcoin protocol limits the number of new bitcoins that come into circulation each year.”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy

“The next sector where big changes are happening is the Internet of Things. If you’re not familiar with it, the Internet of Things is an envisioned future where machines communicate directly with other machines rather than people. The idea is that Internet-enabled devices, such as cars, buildings, or electronics (really, any device you can imbed with a sensor), will exchange data directly with other devices. Any object could be connected and communicate with other devices in an intelligent manner. The hope is that devices will become context-aware and be able to respond or adjust dynamically to different users or situations.”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy

“Remember to look for these three factors when you’re trying to spot platform opportunities: technology that reduces transaction costs and removes gatekeepers; implicit or underserved networks; and large, fragmented sources of supply. One of these factors can be enough to enable the growth of a successful platform business, but the more boxes you can tick off, the better.”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy

“The failure of these B2B marketplaces is a sharp contrast to the one major success story in B2B ecommerce from the dot-com era: Alibaba. Alibaba took a very different approach from these other marketplaces. Rather than going after large, consolidated industries, it went after small businesses. This strategy was the brainchild of Alibaba’s founder and CEO, Jack Ma. Ma’s vision was that “the revolutionary significance of the Internet is that it will enable small enterprises to operate independently.”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy

“Finally, look for large, fragmented sources of supply. You want your potential supply to be large, because small industries often don’t have enough scale to justify building out a network. And you want it to be fragmented, because the supply in consolidated industries won’t see a need for you.”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy

“Look for industries where technology can reduce high transaction costs or remove high-cost gatekeepers. In many cases, you’re looking for transactions that can be automated and run by algorithms. The more you can use technology to reduce transaction costs, the more opportunity you’ll have to add value to both sides. The ultimate goal is to remove entire steps from the transaction. Remember, transaction costs aren’t always about money. They also include time and effort, among other things.”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy

“competition in a world dominated by platform monopolies looks very different from competition in the past. In the twentieth century, competition happened primarily between rival companies within one industry. Today, it happens across industries. The fiercest competition will be between incompatible, rival platform ecosystems and the networks of businesses they support.”
― Alex Moazed, Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy