The Digital Platform Economy Index 2020

In one of the most interesting articles on the Information-technology Revolution (ITR), Hobijn and Jovanovic (2001) argued that the arrival of the ITR in the 1970s created the need for new firms to emerge. Technology breakthroughs favor new firm formation for three reasons: awareness and skills; vintage capital; and vested interests. The stock market incumbents of the day were not ready to implement the new digital technologies and it took new firms to bring the technology to market after the mid-1980s. Stock prices of incumbents fell immediately. New capital flowed via venture capital to startups in the United States that built the new industries but not in Europe (Gompers and Lerner, 2001). Between 1980 and 2020 the U.S. stock market raised thirty-fold. The five most valuable public companies in the United States in 2020—i.e., Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google—are valued at or near $1 trillion each. Many of them are Matchmaker businesses whose core competency is the ability to match one group of users with another by reducing transaction costs.