Hamilton Helmer

I mean, it's a great example.

They didn't understand that it was actually a platform where you want to cover as many types as possible and it shouldn't be constrained.

And so they missed the business definition.

And Visa is one of the highest margin businesses in the world right now, right?

That is nice and actual.

Were they owned by banks?

Right.

I love the answer.

And I think she's right.

I mean, when we look at platform things, there is the business of running the platform.

So think of, for example, the fixed cost in Uber of their modeling and all that kind of stuff.

And then there's the network economy aspects of a two-sided platform with people, you know, and so on.

And you could have power in either one of those.

But if it turns out that the cost structure is not, there isn't a huge lump of fixed cost, then it doesn't matter much.

But I think, Jenny, you got it right.

Yeah, and this isn't sort of a pointy-headed kind of issue because it gets back to if you find the thing that's cause rather than effect, that's the thing that you've got to defend, right?

And my intuition about this, and I don't know if it's right, is that you have to introduce time as a variable in this to correctly understand the problem.

But I think Jenny and I are involved in this deep debate right now about sort of the boundaries and relationship between scale economies and network economies.

If you want to get even more confused, just remember that scale economy typically is defined as a situation which, as scale increases, cost per unit goes down.

That's often true of network economies, right?