Announcing our second eBook: Understanding Social Platforms
If you have been following our blog or firm, you know how much we love network effects. Our investment thesis is centered around network effects, and our portfolio is full of network effects startups ranging from marketplaces to social platforms, SaaS and applications of AI and machine learning.
It has been a little over a year since we published our first handbook, A Guide to Marketplaces. And now, we’re pleased to announce that we have just produced our second eBook, “Understanding Social Platforms.”
Why social? As individuals, we use social platforms on a daily basis. As investors, we love the underlying business models, including the daily use case, virality, and network effects. Humans have an innate need to interact with others. As a result, there will always be room for companies to dream up new ways to help us connect, share, learn, and participate.
Version One, as well as Boris as an angel, have invested in social platforms like Abstract, Edmodo, Figure 1, Shift Messenger, Wattpad, among others.
Over the past year, as we have been refining our investment thesis, we realized that not much has been written about social platform businesses. This is most likely because social platforms like Twitter, WhatsApp, and Figure 1 are quite diverse: it’s hard to draw conclusions that apply across them all.
To that end, we are sharing the insights we have gained from investing in, and watching, social platform businesses. In this book, we walk through the dynamics of each platform type: messaging, private networks, public networks, enterprise networks, and communities. There are chapters on metrics, exits, valuations, as well as our outlook for future opportunities in social.
Download the PDF or ePub version of the handbook and refer to it as you need it.
Lastly, we’d love to hear if you find the content useful. What should we expand on? Did we leave anything out? Please leave a comment below or reach out to us directly.
Originally published at versionone.vc on December 7, 2016.
