Stay in the game long enough, and every software investor has encountered the red flag: “This business is 100% dependent on Shopify, Salesforce or Amazon.” Investors are right to be cautious. For well-documented reasons spanning concentration risk, customer acquisition fragility, API vulnerability, margin exposure, and more, such dynamics pose material risk to a startup.

And yet, platform dependency isn’t binary — it exists on a spectrum.

What is platform risk?

Platform risk describes a company’s reliance on a 3 rd party ecosystem, be it for distribution, infrastructure, monetization or otherwise. For a startup, tying yourself to an existing giant can shortcut growth by way of accelerated distribution (think built-in access to large customer bases, which can dramatically lower CAC and

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