Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Belidic Evans, and we have Tim I Riley on today here to talk about his new book, among other things.

So your book is called WTF, and it follows an arc talking about platforms in general, but then sort of flowing through to kind of the broader impact of how these companies interact with us all and with the economy.

WTF can be an expression of delighted amazement or an expression of horror.

And when we're faced with technology today, we really are hearing both. The arc of the book is really a tour through 35, 40 years in the technology industry looking at some of the

great platforms and where they've gone wrong, where they've gone right, and what they do.

And in the course of that, I look at some of the latest platforms. They spend a lot of time on Uber

and Lyft and on Airbnb kind of talking about how they have to make both parts of the market come together. A lot of time on Uber and Lyft and on Airbnb, kind of talking about how they have to make both

parts of the market come together. A lot of people don't understand, for example, of the need

to make a thick market in a new city is sort of this driving factor behind the high costs of

these companies. Once that happens, their economics is going to be very different because

they've got to recruit

enough drivers. They've got to get pastures. They've got to get critical mass on both sides.

Critical mass on both sides. And the thing that's interesting, though, is there's a lot, when you

understand the implication, something like that, you can really start to tease apart what people get

wrong about company business models. For example, taxi companies, you know,

traditional taxi companies, they thought, oh, it's this app. If we have the app, it will work.

You know, we will be able to compete. But the app is only a tiny part of the business model,

because the fact that Lyft can deliver three-minute pickup times is because all these part-time

drivers showing up in their own cars so that supply automatically rises as there's more demand.

And it just doesn't work with their business model, which has a fixed number of cars, which

is sort of optimized for sort of middle of the day or whatever, or, you know, it's optimized for a certain

level of service. And you can't get there unless you take on all parts of the business model.

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