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Guest Talk with Alex Komoroske | Gardening Platforms

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Alex Komoroske, drawing on his experience leading Chrome's web platform team, argues that platforms should be 'gardened' rather than engineered: built incrementally and horizontally from adjacent possible use cases rather than vertically toward a single predetermined goal, with continuous 'rationalization' to pay down the debt that inevitably accumulates as platform and ecosystem co-evolve. He frames platforms and their ecosystems as living, symbiotic systems bound by a 'gravitational pull' that breaks if changes move too fast, and discusses how platforms die through ossification, rising coordination costs, or failed 'second system' rewrites. In Q&A he extends the framework to crypto protocols, corporate digital transformation, and security-by-design, debating with Toby Shorin and others how legal/organizational fragmentation changes platform dynamics in permissionless networks like Ethereum, Cosmos, and Solana.

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Topics

coordination-headwinds-metabolic-rate-of-debt gardening-platforms-as-living-ecosystems governance gravitational-pull-and-co-evolution-of-platform-and-ecosystem guest-talks horizontal-vs-vertical-platform-growth organizations protocols security-posture-and-trust-in-platform-design technology