founders paras chopra, chapter by chapter
17. Your Foundation Doesn’t Limit Your Size
A business built on another platform can outgrow it by serving a different market.
Being built on a vendor or platform does not cap a company at that provider’s size. Each layer serves its own customers and use cases; the lower layer may merely enable value created above it. The reverse mistake—the stack fallacy—is assuming that owning the foundation makes an adjacent layer easy to copy.
Judge your ceiling by the market and customer relationship you own, not by the tool underneath you. At the same time, resist competing casually with partners built on your platform: their domain knowledge and distribution may be the real business, and threatening them weakens the ecosystem.
Original sketch and model by Paras Chopra. Read the source chapter.