Aggregators are the best situated to do cross-silo spanning use cases, but also the least capable of doing it.

· Bits and Bobs 8/12/24

Eric Beinhocker in The Origin of Wealth captures a similar dynamic:

"We thus have two opposing forces at work in organizations: the informational economies of scale from node growth, and the diseconomies of scale from the buildup of conflicting constraints. Taken together, these opposing forces help us understand why big is both beautiful and bad: as an organization grows, its degrees of possibility increase exponentially while its degrees of freedom collapse exponentially.

Put simply, large organizations inherently have more attractive opportunities before them than small organizations do (the large can theoretically do everything the small can do, plus more). But reaching those future opportunities involves trade-offs, and the more densely connected the organizational network, the more painful those trade-offs will be. The politics of organizations are such that local pain in particular groups or departments is often sufficient to prevent the organization from moving to a new state, even if that state is more globally fit."

Aggregators have more data in more verticals under one roof, so it's possible to create, for example, a smart calendar scheduling algorithm that takes into account your contact list and email history.

But also, the aggregators are large companies with massive coordination costs.

This means it's very very hard for aggregators to coordinate around anything but massive use cases.

The PM would have to corral dozens of overworked people across the company to collaborate on a use case that is a P2.

Aggregators are terrible at swarms of P2 style features, despite that being where most of the value is.

And at the scale of an aggregator, use cases that would support an entire unicorn of a startup look like P2s.

The best way to unlock this swarm of cross-silo P2 features that are currently impossible is to create an open, safe ecosystem where the swarm can create that value without any top-down coordination.

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