Roblox's leadership intentionally directs a larger portion of revenue back to its creator community rather than maximizing corporate profits. This strategy fosters a more engaged and innovative developer base, which in turn drives the platform's overall success and long-term defensibility.

OpenAI embraces the 'platform paradox' by selling API access to startups that compete directly with its own apps like ChatGPT. The strategy is to foster a broad ecosystem, believing that enabling competitors is necessary to avoid losing the platform race entirely.

During major platform shifts like AI, it's tempting to project that companies will capture all the value they create. However, competitive forces ensure the vast majority of productivity gains (the "surplus") flows to end-users, not the technology creators.

While individual AI companies see slightly lower retention than SaaS, Stripe's data reveals customers often churn from one provider directly to a competitor, and sometimes switch back. This indicates the problem being solved is highly valued, and the churn reflects a rapidly evolving, competitive market, not a lack of product-market fit for the category itself.

To stay relevant, tech platform companies must obsessively follow developers and startups. They are the primary source of insight into emerging workloads and platform requirements. This isn't just for partnerships, but for fundamental product strategy and learning.

To balance platform and partner needs, think of your product as a mall. The mall provides a managed, curated discovery experience. But once a customer enters a specific "store" (a merchant's page), the merchant controls the environment completely, preventing cross-promotion of competitors.

To avoid platform decay, Lyft's CEO focuses on fixing severe customer annoyances, like driver cancellations. Even though a metric like 'ride completes' looked acceptable due to re-matching, he used his intuition to overrule a data-only approach, recognizing the frustrating user experience demanded a fix.

When One7 Live's app catered only to big spenders ('whales'), it alienated new users, creating an existential threat. The solution wasn't a risky new product but a delicate surgery on the existing economy to incentivize streamers to reward non-spenders, ensuring a healthy user pipeline.

High daily user engagement on real estate platforms doesn't easily translate to revenue. Unlike purchase-intent-driven search, much of real estate browsing is aspirational entertainment ("Zillow and chill") with long latency to transaction, making monetization a significant challenge.