By turning from a service to a platform. Traditionally, companies that have a direct relationship with the customer are able to derive revenue by auctioning off

By turning from a service to a platform. Traditionally, companies that have a direct relationship with the customer are able to derive revenue by auctioning off that access to the highest bidder. What we've seen across a range of creative industries is a transformation of incentives from those who are able to run the best business into those who are able to make the best product. Take Youtube for example. Prior to Youtube, creatives had to figure out how to create compelling videos, where to market them to attract the most eyeballs and then how to monetize the ensuing attention. Those are three disparate skillsets that are rarely found in the same person. Now with YouTube, while possessing the skills to market and monetize are beneficial, they're no longer essential. Instead, what you can do is purely focus on producing the best damn videos possible (where "best" is defined by whatever Youtube algorithm of the week is optimizing for) and Youtube will put your videos in front of the right eyeballs, grow your audience for you and monetize that audience (in exchange for taking a hefty cut and locking you into the platform). We're seeing the same thing happen with Medium in blogging, AirBNB in accommodation, Facebook with news etc. Right now, most restaurants fail, not because the food is bad, but because restauranteurs rarely make good businesspeople. There's a compelling value add to chefs to offering them a platform where all they need to focus on is making the best possible dish for a given price point and customers naturally are delivered to them. At the same time, there's a compelling value to consumers where an app can look at my past purchase history, use machine learning, and add a free sample sized portion of a dish it think I will like to any delivery I order in order to expose me to new restaurants. Any app that manages to insert itself into the middle of that transaction is going to redefine the food industry. That's why everyone is so hot for delivery right now. Even though the short term game has horrible unit economics, delivery is a natural choke point by which you can own the customer relationship. In reality, in the US, this is really Yelp's game to lose. Yelp's stranglehold on reviews gives it a natural leverage point to pivot into this space. It's only Yelp's horrible executional ability that has opened up the space to so many well funded competitors.