Building a Platform Business Requires Balance—Lessons from Salesforce

MIT CISR

Martin Mocker reads MIT CISR's June 2024 research briefing, which he co-authored with Ina Sebastian. See the text version and related content at https://cisr.mit.edu/publication/2024_0601_SalesforcePlatformBusiness_MockerSebastian. Abstract: Platform business models have become highly popular; they are used by half of the world’s ten largest companies by market capitalization. The challenge for established companies is that running a platform business is different from running a product business. A platform business requires building an ecosystem of various constituents with differing interests: customers, the company’s internal product teams, and partners. Based on an in-depth case study of Salesforce Platform, this briefing illustrates one approach to balancing the interests of these constituents.