Open Source
A platform play can seem daunting and like we have to create all the software that Google or Amazon have ever written. Additionally it would seem too daunting and impossible to develop such a large system in a reasonable time with a reasonable team. However the good thing is that most needed large systems have been built already in open source. We can greatly increase our velocity by taking the already proven open source technologies, like many FAANG do, and build on top of those.
Sell along the way
The platform provides compounding power when built; it also provides this with a partial set of headline services. That allows us to build a small part of the platform and then iterate as we get customer feedback, much the same that AWS started out. We have to start with enough insights in the platform for the sum of the part to be greater than the whole. The rest will follow in an iterative manner.