Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us. This is a personal finance show on Money. How it

works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it.

I'm your host David Stein, today's episode 440. It's titled Beware of Platform Risk.

In Finance and Business, a platform is an online space where users transact business or

exchange information. The platform can act as an intermediary that connects buyers and

sellers for goods, services, or investments. Airbnb is a platform for booking vacation

homes from owners of vacation properties. Amazon is a platform for buying and selling

goods. In 2022, independent sellers, an Amazon's platform, made up 60% of sales, selling

4.1 billion goods that year. brokerage firms such as Schwab or Fidelity are platforms for

buying and selling investment securities. Other investment-related platforms include crowdfunding

real estate, cryptocurrency lending, and platforms for investing in startups. Social media platforms

like Instagram or Twitter provide a venue for users to interact, and often to sell goods

or services. Platforms have proliferated over the past decade and a half, and they have

become more powerful. Amazon, for example, is an absolutely huge platform. Martin Kenney

and John Seisman are two academics that have studied these platforms, and they came up

with the term in 2018 of the platform economy, because in their words, digital platforms

are becoming dominant, economic, and social intermediaries. They've just become bigger

and more powerful. In today's episode, I want to kick off our discussion of platform

risk with a real estate platform I began using in 2016. I think it's a good example because

it allows us to see the pros and cons of investing platforms. In September 2016, while attending

FinCon, a conference of financial media professionals, bloggers, podcasters, it was held in San Diego

and I met with Brett Crosby, one of the co-founders of Peer Street, an online platform for investing

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