Why Airbnb will always be a better business than Uber

Learned a lot about the nuances of platforms while editing this one by Jonathan Knee of Columbia Business School

MIT Sloan Management Review, Sept. 15, 2017

by Jonathan A. Knee

The dramatic influence of the internet on how businesses operate and the emergence of a handful of gigantic, digitally enabled corporations have led to breathless pronouncements regarding the importance of a peculiar new class of monopolies built on digital platforms. These platforms, it is argued, fuel network effects that lead inexorably to winner-take-all marketplaces. This perspective is invariably coupled with infectious optimism and investment euphoria regarding the extraordinary scale and strength of network-effects businesses.

In theory, the key attribute of a network-effects business is its momentum-driven flywheel. Every new participant increases the value of the network to existing participants, attracts more new users, and makes the prospect of a successful competitive attack ever more remote — thereby bolstering the relative attractiveness of the business. The imagined innate indomitability of network effects stems at least in part from the breathtaking strength of notable platform businesses, like Facebook’s social network or Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

The problem is that not all platform businesses exhibit network effects. Moreover, even a cursory survey of the landscape does not support the oft-repeated assertion that such effects are “likely to strengthen a market’s winner-take-all tendency.” For every Facebook and Microsoft, there are literally hundreds of network-effects businesses operating in crowded sectors or in sectors where it is not clear that anyone will ever turn a profit. Take, for example, the once hot peer-to-peer lending space, which after more than a decade has attracted dozens of aspiring entrepreneurs and spawned a billion-dollar IPO but nevertheless has largely been a bust. The first mover in U.S. P2P lending, San Francisco-based Prosper Marketplace Inc., continues to struggle to achieve consistent profitability, and the billion-dollar IPO of San Francisco-based Lendingclub Corp. quickly ended in tears for investors.

Nor are digital platforms necessarily better businesses than the analog versions that they displace. Analog malls had the benefit of their shoppers being many miles away from competing malls, and the benefit of their retail tenants being committed to long-term leases. On the internet, platform competitors are only a click away and companies regularly and dynamically optimize their customer reach across competing platforms and directly via their own sites.

It is not that marketplace businesses built on e-commerce platforms do not have advantages or that they cannot thrive. Rather, it is that the mere existence of network effects tells entrepreneurs and investors relatively little about the attractiveness of a particular business. For example, there is almost no fundamental difference in the network effects enjoyed by Uber Technologies Inc. and Airbnb Inc., the global leaders in the ride-hailing and short-term lodging marketplaces, respectively. Yet, other characteristics of those industries ensure that Airbnb will enjoy dramatically stronger results than Uber will ever achieve. Read the rest here.