Making Sense Of Unicorns
Contemporary attitudes towards disruption by new technologies revel in the notion that there is opportunity in uncertainty, in the space where the physical and the familiar can be replaced by the digital and the novel, and where value is created by shifting bits in an app and across the internet. It’s an appealing idea. Virtually anything is possible. With funding and passion. Experience something you didn’t enjoy? It was too slow? It was too cumbersome? The service was poor or lacked a sense of experience? Then do something about it. Let’s consider Uber. It was started by a couple of millionaire entrepreneurs who were apparently caught cab-less on a winter’s night in Paris in 2008. Uber is lauded for not owning any vehicles or employing drivers, its value is derived from the market platform it has developed, an API (protocols which allow seamless interactions between different software applications) technology stack, which efficiently matches riders with drivers. In this platform econ...