Modern Monopolies

What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy

By: Nicholas L. Johnson, Alex Moazed

Narrated by: Jonathan Yen

Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins

Publisher's summary

What do Google, Snapchat, Tinder, Amazon, and Uber have in common, besides soaring market share? They're platforms - a new business model that has quietly become the only game in town, creating vast fortunes for its founders while dominating everyone's daily life. A platform, by definition, creates value by facilitating an exchange between two or more interdependent groups. So, rather than making things, they simply connect people.

The Internet today is awash in platforms - Facebook is responsible for nearly 25 percent of total Web visits, and the Google platform crash in 2013 took about 40 percent of Internet traffic with it. Representing the 10 most trafficked sites in the US, platforms are also prominent over the globe; in China, they hold the top eight spots in web traffic rankings.

The advent of mobile computing and its ubiquitous connectivity have forever altered how we interact with each other, melding the digital and physical worlds and blurring distinctions between "offline" and "online." These platform giants are expanding their influence from the digital world to the whole economy. Yet, few people truly grasp the radical structural shifts of the last 10 years. In Modern Monopolies, Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson tell the definitive story of what has changed, what it means for businesses today, and how managers, entrepreneurs, and business owners can adapt and thrive in this new era.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2016 Applico, LLC (P)2017 Audible, Inc.

Awesome book

Wish I read this book very early. It literally gives you the blueprint of how to start a current/future tech company. This book not only gives great insights into what to do to build a large tech company today, but also opens up a lot of great questions to ask for the future around IOT and Crypto company ideas

Very Relevant and Useful for Investors

This was a really good book. I liked that it was full of countless examples to explain it's points.

Great book on the power of platforms

I found this one through the “Invest Like the Best” podcast, not really knowing what it would be like. But, I was pleasantly surprised in the end; it was very good. It’s a deep dive into today’s monopolies — just about all of them being platforms — how they rise to power, what makes them successful, what keeps them alive, etc.

The authors do a great job of assessing the competitive landscape and describing how specific companies fall into the “platform” bucket. For example, though we might not realize it at first, Apple, Google, and Amazon all are platforms or have large, platform-based offerings — all of them bring buyers and sellers together on their various websites and apps without necessarily needing to own any inventory. Think: Apple’s App Store, Google’s Play Store, Amazon’s retail operations (though they certainly do hold some inventory).

The power of the platform, as the authors tell us, is all about breaking away from the traditional, linear, and value-add business model and harnessing scale, network effects, and stickiness instead.

Toward the end of the book, the authors also give some tips for spotting new trends and brainstorming ideas for the next hit platform company. I liked how those sections tied the rest of the book together and summed things up nicely.

All in all, it was a fun and exciting read. I think that anyone with a passion for business, finance, or tech would enjoy it.

-Brian Sachetta
Author of “Get Out of Your Head”

Eye opening!

Great explanation of platform business in today’s world. The authors do an amazing job of breaking down how and why the companies that we use on a daily basis are so successful.

Required reading for makers and market movers

Modern Monopolies offers a solid introduction to, and understanding of, the platform business model and the unprecedented market success enjoyed by its greatest adherents. Replete with relevant examples and easy-to-follow insights, it is a must read for any C-level executive who wants to learn how to leverage the power of platform economies.

Good content

Interesting topic to nerd out on. With all due respect the narrator while articulate and professional sounded dry and like an old professor lecturing a class you may need a catnap in. The other issue early on is that it started out smelling like a sales pitch for the authors’ consulting business. That just makes ones BS radar start beeping. But good credible content thereafter.

Very good

Great book with many kinds of entrepreneur examples. Its indicate if you want understand the big tech and digital business.

Very informative review of platform companies.

Wonderful tips on the essentials of building a successful platform company and, how to avoid failure.

Mostly notes for myself or highlights of the book

Loving this so far!

1. Modern monopolies are bottom up build and not top down. They are essentially created by the customers.

2. Companies like Uber, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, etc are not taking the pie away from traditional business, they’re making he pie much larger.

3. Microsoft was considered a monopoly of the 90’s and yet they are nearly forgotten today because of the rise of Google and Apple... and in the years to come there will be more technology to overtake google and apple

4. The difficulty with these platform based “monopolies” is to have a large user base and also a larger producer base. It’s hard to bring more people into a platform that doesn’t have producer, and vice versa hard to bring producers into a platform with no customers. Examples include YouTube stars making videos because of people constantly on the site. And more customers watching because of the large amount of content being put out. Uber has troubles with this, so they introduced surge pricing, which is a very genius way to balance supply and demand!

Lots of golden nuggets to feed on and understand the next 30+ years of business and advancement.

Modern Monopolies

Great analysis of the platform business model. I’d highly recommend reading if you’re looking to start a platform business or just want to learn more about the dominant & most profitable business model of the 21st century.