It's easy to think platforms are difficult to build. With some of the "platform infrastructure" mentioned, it's very possible to assemble a large majority of a

It's easy to think platforms are difficult to build. With some of the "platform infrastructure" mentioned, it's very possible to assemble a large majority of a new platform out of large chunks rather than building from scratch. One of the infrastructure components of Shopify missed in the article is Stripe. Stripe makes it possible for them to scale to serve clients in many countries and offer an e-commerce capability. Then there is AWS. I think the article misses some of the depth of platform building capabilities that are out there and available for use.