Shruthi Prakash 

Hello everybody and welcome to the Boundary List Conversations Podcast. I am Shruthi Prakash, your co -host and today I recording this episode alone which closes the season and offers a comprehensive roundup of season 5.

Today we’ve curated some of the best quotes from all the episodes to bring you back some valuable insights for our regular listeners and also provide a nudge for those who may have overlooked some of the episodes. How we’ve gone about it is that we have grouped the highlights into 4 major sections, each centered around a specific theme. So let’s get started.

Our first section delves into the somewhat dystopian aspects of current socio -technological trends. It touches upon AI, market dominance and the uncontrollable nature of social networks as an escalation engine. In this section, we’ll listen to Sangeet Paul Choudary,

James Currier, Jeremiah Owyang, and John Robb.

Sangeet Paul Choudary

Amazon is powerful because of network effects. But if you look at the data, till five to seven years back, the average take rate on Amazon was 15%. And that was the take that they could charge on a network effect. Today, the take rate on Amazon on average is more than 45%. Whereas the network effect hasn’t really improved. What has happened is sandwiching. Amazon requires you to meet certain levels of sales in order to get the default position on the buy box. Now, the only way to get that level of sales is to also invest in advertising with Amazon. So suddenly, your take rate has gone from 15 % to 30%. Another way that Amazon does sandwiching is to enforce vertical integration, where it says, if you want to sell products to prime users, you need to use Amazon logistics. And so now you’ve shifted it from 30 % to 45%. What sandwich economics does is it looks at what are the assets I have over here. These are not market assets. These are specific assets created by Amazon on top of the market and they are brought together to sandwich more power than profits away.

James Currier

With the advent of AI, we actually think that the incumbents are better positioned to take advantage of it than the startups. But if you look back at the mobile revolution and you do some back of the math calculations, looking at how many mobile companies were started between 2008 and 2015, went on to have any sort of value and you add up all that value, it comes to about $300, $325 billion of market cap was created in mobile startups. But if you look at the market cap expansion, of an Apple, which went from 40 billion market cap to 2 trillion, basically on the back of the mobile revolution. Or if you look at Facebook and the percentage of revenue they get from mobile, you basically look at the incumbents that existed in 2008 when the mobile revolution happened. It looks pretty much like the incumbents captured 94 % of the value. And so the question is with AI, what percentage will the incumbents capture? I think it would probably be north of that. I think it’s going to be closer to 96, 97. I think when it’s all said and done, the incumbents are very well positioned to take advantage of AI. It’s not of an extension of what they were already doing.

Jeremiah Owyang

There’s no clear definition on AI agent, essentially an AI agent has the following characteristics. One, it’s autonomous. It operates with little or no human supervision. And number two, it perceives what’s happening around it, which it helps to guide it and make decisions. So it is like the baby step towards artificial general intelligence, AGI, which is basically the goal here, where AI would be equivalent to human intelligence, which by the way, probably going to happen in our lifetimes. Basically, I’m expecting AI agents to read emails, prioritize emails, summarize emails, and then recommend its responses. And then after we see the recommended responses get better and better, you start to say, yes, yes, yes. And then eventually you give it the autonomy to respond on your behalf. So that will happen over time where your AI agent will be speaking to my AI agent and be doing a lot of those things on our behalf.

John Robb 

Network tribes are inherently aggressive and they’re always looking for weakness. once you, at least on the internal channels, let political discussions run wild, you can’t rein them back easily. You’re gonna have lots of dissent and it’s all gonna go online. The inside outside of the company is pretty open now. So has to be something that’s done at the very get -go. I think you can though, create a kind of a corporate culture in terms of civility. And if that’s reinforced from the get -go and becomes one of the elements of being inside that company. You can mitigate a lot of this, but once you start using coded language and you start using the kind of pattern matching that’s done outside to attack enemies, there’s nothing good that can come out of it because it’s anti, it’s against from the get go. By using it, you’re opening yourself up for attack and that goes left, right. It doesn’t really matter. It’s just like, hey, they’re using that word. Boom. That’s tough.

Shruthi Prakash 

So next up, we have the second section. We shift our focus to the incredible opportunities and revolutionary visions that have resisted the dominance of powerful technological forces. In this section, we’ll listen to some of the speakers who discuss major opportunities in the platform economy, the potential of Web3 and digital public infrastructure to transform the internet and its products. And finally, also look at a revival of ownership beyond the dynamics of SaaS and the

In this section, we listened to Alex Komoroske, Kelly Sarabyn and Scott Brinker, Jesse Walden, Jason Fried, and Arvind Gupta.

Alex Komoroske

I view platform development as a swarm of energy of uncoordinated entities. Sometimes it’s literal developers inside of an organization. You can visualize it as a swarm. Sometimes it’s users of the platform, people on an open source project or contributors. And then there’s the kind of thing that makes it something coherent out of it, the selection pressure that kind of selects into a thing that is more coherent. I think the power of these approaches has tilted way too much into the selection pressure and the query. We are overdue for a swing back. I personally think that that generative AI helps significantly with that, allowing a lot of tinkerer energy, a new era of tinkerer energy.

Kelly Sarabyn

Everybody should be thinking about it. I think you even see companies that are not SaaS companies investing in these marketplaces and these platforms. And I think that’s only going to continue to happen. Not everyone should be trying to be a platform. That’s a mistake you see in early stage startups is they think, well, that’s where the money is, which is true. But you need to understand the dynamics of the platform to go off it. And this is what we saw in the data and the report. There are some industries where this journey is not as far as along. And one is where you have highly regulated data. FinTech, for example, healthcare, HR is another one that’s lagged. Again, where you see this like personal data, it’s been not as fast as say marketing or sales technology or IT to build like these thousands and thousands of integrations. In the report, you did see companies that were in those industries were just not as far along on the journey. But having said that, even those companies at this point still have ecosystems around them.

Scott Brinker

What’s the thing that’s most important to you in products that you select? it’s the integration. I need this stuff to work together. What is surprising is so many of the companies actually refuse to prioritize integrations. It can be all too easy when you are creating a product. You’re thinking about the stuff you’re building. And even if you kind of recognize that there are other things that we’re going to have to work with and be related to, it doesn’t feel by default is the sexy part of it. Like the sexy part of it is the net new thing that we’re doing. And so somehow in the just the jockeying of what got prioritized, very often like integrations would be near the bottom of the list. Over these past few years in particular, I think the memo finally got through because now we talk to more and more companies. They recognize this is core to their product market dip. It’s not just like a distribution element.

Jesse Walden

One of the primary benefits you can get from building on top of a platform is that that platform has some existing distribution. It’s the case today that in crypto, there aren’t a ton of protocols that have very, very strong network effects. That’s in part, I think two reasons. One is you could argue, well, maybe these protocols just don’t have market fit. Another reason may be that because users have control or ownership of their identity, their money and their data, protocols are less defensible. They don’t have the same network effects that platforms in Web2 have because those Web2 platforms control your identity, your money and your data. You can’t move it as easily between protocols. So maybe the case that because users are more empowered in Web3, protocols have fewer network effects and therefore there’s more competition, which is not necessarily a bad thing, right? More competition is better for end users.

Jason Fried

SaaS is very much a trust game. You don’t know what these companies are doing with your data. You don’t know really who’s looking at it. You don’t really know what they’re recording. And you have no insight into that. You can’t see how the product works. You can’t see any algorithms. You can’t see anything. And you also can’t see in beyond the product, like who has access to the database at this organization and all the things. And so with one’s product, she’ll install them. And you run them. And you’re in control of them. And the data is yours. And we don’t see a damn thing. We can’t do a damn thing. It’s not on our infrastructure. It’s all on yours. And this is not going to replace SaaS. And it’s also going to be foreign to a lot of people who are just more familiar with and comfortable with SaaS. But I do think there’s going to be a growing hunger for an alternative to rental. And I think ownership is going to be a thing again. And we’ll see how that plays

Shruthi Prakash 

For the next one, in the third section, we dive deeper into Doctrine, offering inspiration on how your organization can function as a platform for a multiplicity of teams and products. Our guests will talk about new skills and approaches such as continuous discovery, portfolio thinking, and how enterprise architecture converges. These shots will also provide you insights on how to empower your team and organize it for a success in a dynamic context.

In this section, we’ll listen to Craig Strong, Teresa Torres, Charles Betz, Susanne Kaiser

and Cliff Berg. 

Craig Strong

A life cycle for me is really important because you’re able to contextualize the right questions at the right time. And if you get that wrong, you could dismiss really good ideas too early or discover you’re developing the wrong things too late. So if you cross section a portfolio with a life cycle, so you know where your products are or ideas are at different stages, you can introduce incremental governance in a way where you can maximize learning and develop a culture of learn fast and quick decision making.

Teresa Torres

But at the product level, every product has a business model. Even if it’s a free product, there’s still a model where it’s supporting value for the business in some way or another. So most products, we sell them, they have a revenue model. We can start with that revenue model and generate what I call a revenue model formula. So what are the variables that contribute to you growing revenue? For each of those variables, we can look at what are the inputs into this is helping us sort of enumerate our business outcomes. And then if this is for a single product, we can look at what are the behaviors in the product that in turn drive those outcomes. And then depending on how many teams we have, we can break those down even further.

Charles Betz

The interesting thing we’re seeing, and we’re seeing this in large scale organizations around the world, are trying to move traditional infrastructure and operations into platform thinking. And the challenge is, is what does this really mean? And am I actually doing something different? Am I moving in a more entrepreneurial, intrapreneurial direction, or am I just rebranding myself? I’m giving myself a new coat of paint but I’m still bureaucratic, I’m still command and control, it still takes too long to get services from me. I have no customer feedback, I have no sense of my internal customer. And that’s the big challenge because the infrastructure organization, the traditional infrastructure organization, what you find is a large and economically huge part of the corporation that now needs to think in terms of product and has never done so.

Susanne Kaiser

If it’s too small and we have to implement a high level of choreography or high level of orchestration and maybe then put them together in one service, something like that, for example. Or a product area or something like that. Yeah, or product area. So, and I guess it’s something that you can reconsider and to see where it makes sense. And it could evolve over the time as well, right? What you have unbundled yesterday maybe you have to integrate it together again tomorrow. So to see also like how your market will change or might change and to be adaptive to that change, guess that you can also say, okay, let’s bring this together again.

Cliff Berg

The thing about self -managing is it should have an asterisk because what it really means is you’re empowered. You’re not really self -managing. You have accountability. You’re not just accountable to yourself. You have accountability and there usually is assigned leadership. You’re given a problem to solve and you’re given a lot of latitudes, not open -ended. You’re given a lot of latitude and you’re expected to align with other people. You’re not allowed to like go your own way and step on other products or go against corporate strategy. You’re expected as you operate to reach out and to collaborate and to figure out how to keep things aligned. This meme in the Agile community of, just create a bunch of people and then get out of the way. This is frankly nonsense. Experienced leaders who hear that, it really diminishes the credibility of what the Agile community has to

Shruthi Prakash 

In the last section, we present to you the most visionary perspectives, those who have dared to think beyond the rules and push the boundaries. You’ll probably find more questions than answers here, but we hope that it sparks ideas for you in your next few weeks of thinking and exploring during the summer. In this section, we’ll listen to Yolanda Martin, Joao Rosa and Hjorteland, Indy Johar, Milica Begovic and Giulio Quaggiotto, Mark Lambertz, and Amber Case. 

Yolanda Martin

The last 15 years, designers have been trained to look at tiny slices of anything. Design this ticket, design this epic. Let’s check out this particular small process in a huge app. Very few designers have the luxury of having seen the big picture of anything unless you are the only designer in a startup and you’re designing an app end -to -end. And as a result, a lot of designers become UX, UI designers or product designers with a very narrow understanding of the product. And it happens everywhere, right? Because you have to place your designers in particular verticals of your product, particular areas, and they obsess about that area. But the result is that very few designers develop that pullback, go higher to look not only at the end -to -end of your product, but how that product interacts and transacts with other products within the ecosystem in your sphere of influence or not.

Joao Rosa

One of the early introduction or not invention, but sort of description of open systems was around the environment. So conceptualizing the environment that an organization or a group is sort of part of. Like in the industrial era, we assume that things were predictable. There was competition, but it was all about winning the mound. To become the king of the hill or whatever it was like, you have to win the market. So it’s all about strategy and all that stuff and getting the right people cost cutting and all that stuff. That works in one certain environment where things are fairly predictable. But the thing is that the environment that we are in now is highly unpredictable. And that’s where complexity comes in. That’s where the open system theory really shines is because they take that in full. You can’t predict anything. Everything is unpredictable. So you have to create an organization that can adapt to anything. That’s when you need the full brain power of the whole organization. You can’t just rely on some brilliant person at the

Indy Johar 

Any form of single point optimization is problematic. And this may be the big paradigm leap. I think missions might be great to going to the moon, but they’re terrible for the transition that we face. So it is not sufficient for Genoa to become decarbonized because it could become a net zero city by massively increasing inequality, massively not increasing justice, massively increasing environmental damage around the planet. And we think there’s a problem with the mission theory because it actually is systemically creating single point optimizations, thereby codes a goal which actually drives systemic

Arvind Gupta 

We have to change the way we look at big tech and technology. The internet was meant to empower the common citizen of the world, the common habitat of the world. I think time has come back to change the web 3, 4, 5, whatever it’s going to be in the future, to the power of being really decentralized to the last person. And I think there is a lot of good hope with digital public infrastructure governments across the world are realizing the benefits of it. Lastly, we need to ensure that technology is not weaponized, but it’s used for welfare of the human kind and it’s not controlled by a few, but it’s the governance is much better than what it is.

Milica Begovic

So our thinking is that if we are to start pursuing system transformation, the vehicle through which we are to do that would need to shift from project, meaning a very siloed linear understanding of the world towards something else. And portfolio is our hunch for a vehicle that is able to help us understand the drivers as opposed to symptoms of the issue. A vehicle that can help us generate more options in tackling very complex issues and bringing together the resources, the partners, the expertise around some of the big questions.

Giulio Quaggiotto

If you move to this portfolio logic, you actually go to people who are doing their work anyway in a particular area, say climate, if you go to any country, there will be hundreds of organizations already working on this. And then you use coherence as the leverage. You basically say, well look, you can continue to do your own thing. If we are somehow able to elevate ourselves above our organizational identities and work in a portfolio logic, yes, we have a higher level of impact, so our coherence attracts leverage that way. And also we have a shared responsibility around the outcomes and the accountability.

Mark Lambertz

The VSM is a model that shall help to understand how can we create an organization that is able to maintain its own existence. It deals with the question, how do I steer an organization? How can I ensure a healthy maneuverability through complex times? So it’s very different to the typical approach, let’s say, of organizing in a hierarchical organization. And it’s also different from the typical approach of a process -driven organization which wants to explore what is happening when in time, so activity -based. So, VSM is about steering slash enhancing the maneuverability of an organization. What makes it special? You start always with an outside -in perspective.

Amber Case 

There’s these notions that we get when we look at innovation, that it looks like an innovation center or you’re celebrating raising money, not actually building the product. And you’re doing something that’s incremental, not the next generation, because you aren’t even asking the right questions. And so when we look at ethics in a vacuum and try to apply it without good civil engineering skills or even mechanical engineering skills, or would say like control systems theory skills it becomes really hard to like say we’re going to do an AI ethical system. Where are the ethics? When? What’s the application? Be specific.

Shruthi Prakash 

And that’s a wrap. We hope that you enjoyed this season as much as we did. We’ll certainly be back with more podcasting in the fall. Most likely we’ll start in October. During this time, head over to Boundaryless .io, check out our articles, methodologies, trainings and services. And we hope that this helps you develop and design platform strategies and embrace platform organization models. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us. You can propose new guests or themes that we should take up for our next podcast.

And of course, remember to enjoy your summer, take a breather, take a break. And as we’ve always said, remember to think Boundaryless.