The Founders’ List: "The 3 Types of Platform Companies" by Elad Gil (Color Genomics & Twitter)

The strategy for building a successful platform is different from building a successful infrastructure company. Many people confuse the two and pursue the wrong approach as a company.

The best infrastructure companies have clear economies of scale or network effects.

A platform almost always grows out of an existing vertical product (e.g. Facebook or Twitter) and is ultimately a generalized extension of some aspects of that product, such as Facebook's internal user graph identity and Facebook Connect.

Almost always, a platform is valuable due to some unique characteristic of the original vertical product from which it grew.