The Whole Platform Founders: If you're not the platform, you are (or will eventually become) a feature on someone else's platform. Always strive to build the platform, the whole product, end-to-end. Ask yourself: -- Are we solving the problem, or are we solving a symptom of someone else's incomplete solution? -- What would it take for us to own the entire workflow, versus just one part of it? Features get commoditized. Platforms compound.