While Zoom Zooms, Slack Digs Moats

Managing in environments that have strong network effects is challenging because the feedback loops accelerate change: seemingly in the blink of an eye, cash disappears; platforms like TikTok, an entertainment app, and Pinduoduo, an e-commerce business, gain hundreds of millions of users almost overnight. In other instances, network effects impede

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Companies like Zoom that achieve massive growth and ubiquity lose one important competitive advantage: the ability to focus on a particular user. Recent events have forced the adoption of Zoom for use cases that it was not originally designed for. Teachers struggle to manage a classroom. Game nights with friends feel overly rigid. Working on a proj... See more

In the framework of adding layers to a cake, serving each adjacent network is like adding a new layer. Doing this requires a team to think about new markets, rather than listening to their vocal core markets—a hard feat when the core market generates most of the revenue. For the core market, there’s a different way to grow: adding new formats for p

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