The future of digital platforms
Governance, Impact, Regulation
An initiative by Launchworks & Co
Platforms and their ecosystems are now part of our daily lives. They are redefining the way we work, the way we learn, how we innovate and how we collaborate. As a community of platform leaders, how do we ensure that the full potential of digital ecosystems is realised for all?
What is Platform Leaders?
Platform Leaders brings together entrepreneurs, policy makers, academics and practitioners to exchange insights and best practices on the future of digital platforms and ecosystems. These communities don’t always talk to each other, yet are collectively building the platform economy. Platform Leaders provides strategic insights into key topics and allow experts to share complementary perspectives to shape the debate so that the potential of digital markets can be unlocked for all.
Latest event
Our latest event, Platform Leaders 2020, took place on 18 November. Check out the videos as well as the speaker list and agenda below.
Platform Leaders 2020 x Louise Plantin
An illustrated summary of Platform Leaders 2020 with live scribing from Louise Plantin.
Platform Leaders 2020 - Platform Impact
This session explores the social and economic impact of digital platforms. Speakers include Jennifer Schenker, Founder and Editor-in-Chief at The Innovator, Professor Arun Sundararajan, NYU, Joe Schorge, Founder and Managing Partner, Isomer Capital and Llibert Argerich, SVP Marketing, Udemy.
Platform Leaders 2020 - Platform Governance
This session explores the governance principles of platforms, the challenges associated with ecosystem management and the importance of trust. Speakers include Azeem Azhar, Founder and CEO, Exponential View, Frédéric Mazzella, Founder and President, BlaBlaCar and Co-president France Digitale, Rob Chesnut, Former Chief Ethics Officer, Airbnb, Author Intentional Integrity and Sasha Michaud, Co-founder & VP Public Affairs, Glovo.
Platform Leaders 2020 - Full Webinar
Platform Leaders 2020: the Future of Digital Platforms. Here is the full webinar with Master of Ceremony Petra Jung, Ecosystem Architect, Launchworks & Co
Platform Leaders 2020 - Introduction
Laure Claire Reillier, COO Launchworks & Co, introduces Platform Leaders 2020.
Platform Leaders 2020 - Platform Regulation
This session explores the challenges associated with the regulation of platforms and ecosystems. Speakers include Lewis Crofts, Editor in Chief, MLex, Professor Michael Jacobides, London Business School, Oliver Bethell, Head of Competition EMEA, Google and Tom Smith, Director of Legal, Competition & Market Authority.
Platform Leaders 2020 - Closing Remarks and Key Insights
Platform Leaders 2020's closing remarks and key insights from Benoit Reillier, CEO Launchworks & Co.
Frédéric Mazzella
Fred Mazzella
Laure C Reillier
Laure C Reillier
Laure Claire Reillier is Co-founder and COO of Launchworks & Co, the leading experts for designing and scaling marketplaces & platforms. Formerly a senior exec at eBay Europe, she has 20 years’ experience in developing, managing and marketing products and services for digital, e-commerce, and platform companies. Laure Claire was appointed in 2019 as one of the 8 experts on digital platforms at the World Economic Forum. She is also the co-author of Platform Strategy: How to unlock the power of communities and networks to grow your business.
Oliver Bethell
Head of Competition EMEA, Google
Oliver Bethell
Oliver is Head of Competition EMEA at Google where he leads a large multidisciplinary and cross functional team covering Policy, Legal, Economists, Product, Eng, Comms.
He was previously in private practice at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in Brussels before moving to Google’s in-house team in London in 2008.
Oliver is a graduate of Oxford University, BPP Law School and King's College. He is a member of the Bar of England and Wales.
Oliver was named Competition Individual of the Year, 2018 (Global Counsel Awards); Competition Individual of the Year, 2018 (European Counsel Awards); and Corporate Counsel of the Year, 2012 (Global Competition Review).
Michael Jacobides
Michael G Jacobides
Michael G Jacobides is the Sir Donald Gordon Professor of Entrepreneurship & Innovation and Professor of Strategy at London Business School. He is Academic Advisor to the Boston Consulting Group, Visiting Scholar at the New York Fed, and Visiting Fellow at Cambridge, and is the Lead Advisor of Evolution Ltd, a boutique consultancy focusing on helping firms adjust in a digital context. In 2019 he was selected as one of the Thinkers50, the top 50 management thinkers worldwide, and is a leading expert on business ecosystems, and how firms navigate shifting, digital environments. A frequent keynote speaker, he engages in corporate, industry, and broad-appeal events such as TEDx and the Global Drucker Forum. A winner of the 2018 Theory to Practice Award from the StrategieForum, he advises disruptive start-ups and Fortune500 firms alike in Europe, the US and Asia. He works on thought leadership with consultants such as McKinsey, IDEO, Accenture, PwC, Deloitte, Keystone and ECSi, and on strategy with corporates such as Haier, Huawei, MasMovil, Vodafone, Nokia, SAP, Enel, Santander, Helvetia, Zurich, CS, Airbus, DeBeers, Burberry, MerckSerono and the NHS. He has visited Harvard, NYU, Cambridge, Imperial, Bocconi and Wharton, where he obtained his PhD, after studying at Athens, Cambridge and Stanford. His work, which has received the Sloan Foundation Award, has appeared in the top academic journals such as SMJ, AMJ, AMR, OrgSci and Industrial & Corporate Change, where he is a co-Editor, as well as HBR and FT. He appears on CNN and BBC. On policy, he has worked with the UK parliament (on the future of financial services), the European Council (on innovation in Europe) and is currently the Chief Advisor on the Digital Economy at the Hellenic Competition Commission. He served on the Global Agenda Council of the World Economic Forum, he is a co-author of the WEF’s White Paper on Digital Platforms and Ecosystems, and has presented in the Davos Annual meetings.
Benoit Reillier
Benoit Reillier
Benoit Reillier, Managing Director of Launchworks & Co, specialises in strategy and corporate development for innovative high growth companies and platform businesses/ecosystems. He has been advising the boards and top management teams of many blue chip companies as well as regulators and Governments for more than 20 years. Prior to founding Launchworks Benoit was Director of Economics and Regulation at KPMG where he focused on Telecommunications, Media and Technology clients globally. Benoit is a guest lecturer in a number of top business and engineering schools and is in charge of the executive Platform Strategy module of the HEC Paris MBA. He is a graduate from IMT Business School in Paris and holds Master degrees in Management, Economics and Law. Benoit is also a graduate from Columbia University in New York and London Business School (MBA).
He is the co-author of Platform Strategy: How to unlock the power of communities and networks to grow your business.
Llibert Argerich
Llibert Argerich
Llibert Argerich is Senior Vice President, Marketing at Udemy where he leads demand generation and customer acquisition for the company around the world. Before joining Udemy, Llibert was the Global Director of Performance and Digital Marketing at eBay where he led a global team of high-performing digital marketers and oversaw eight international markets. Prior to eBay, he spent five years at Expedia where he held multiple digital and brand marketing leadership roles. Llibert has lived and worked in Zurich, London, Barcelona, and Toulouse.
Lewis Crofts
TBA
Lewis is Editor in Chief of leading news provider MLex, now part of LexisNexis. He leads editorial strategy, content direction, quality and development.
Lewis has a reputation for breaking stories and providing analysis on complex legal disputes before regulators and courts around the globe. He has also developed MLex's unique coverage of competition policy, litigation, regulation, Brexit and international investigations.
A graduate of Oxford University, Lewis worked in academia at the Charles University in Prague prior to becoming a journalist.
Rob Chesnut
Rob Chesnut
Rob Chesnut was most recently the Chief Ethics Officer of Airbnb, Inc., a role he took on in late 2019 after almost four years as Airbnb’s General Counsel. He previously led eBay’s North America legal team, where he founded the Internet’s first E-commerce person to person platform Trust and Safety team. He was the general counsel at Chegg, Inc. for nearly 6 years, and he served 14 years with the U.S. Justice Department, where he prosecuted CIA employee Aldrich Ames for espionage. He is the author of Intentional Integrity: How Smart Companies Can Lead an Ethical Revolution (St Martin’s Press, 2020).
Azeem Azhar
Azeem Azhar
Azeem Azhar is an award-winning entrepreneur, analyst, strategist, investor. He produces Exponential View, the leading newsletter and podcast on the impact of technology on our future economy and society. He is on the board of the Ada Lovelace Institute and a number of other firms. His work has been profiled in The Economist, Financial Times, New York Times, WSJ, and MIT Technology Review.
Arun Sundararajan
Professor Arun Sundararajan
Arun Sundararajan is the Harold Price Professor of Entrepreneurship and Professor of Technology, Operations and Statistics at New York University’s (NYU) Stern School of Business, and an affiliated faculty member at many of NYU’s interdisciplinary research centers, and has researched, written, taught and spoken about the economics behind the digital transformations occurring in business and society. He is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Technology, Values and Policy, and serves on the Steering Committee of their Operating Models for the Future project. Arun is an advisor to numerous organizations that include the National Academy of Science, the City of New York, the City of Seoul, Walmart Corporation, Cisco Systems, the Female Founders Fund, the Internet Society of China, OuiShare, Samasource, the National League of Cities, the Royal Society for the Arts and the Center for Global Enterprise. He works with tech companies on issues of strategy and regulation, and with non-tech companies trying to understand how to forecast and address changes induced by digital technologies.
Jennifer Schenker
Jennifer Schenker
Jennifer L. Schenker, an award-winning journalist, has been covering the global tech industry from Europe since 1985, working full-time, at various points in her career for the Wall Street Journal Europe, Time Magazine, International Herald Tribune, Red Herring and BusinessWeek. After leaving BusinessWeek Schenker founded Informilo, a U.K.-based media company that published print magazines about the global tech sector. She is currently the founder and editor-in-chief of The Innovator, a global subscription newsletter about the digital transformation of business (www.innovator.news). Jennifer was voted one of the 50 most inspiring women in technology in Europe in 2015 and 2016 and was named in Forbes 2018 list of 30 women leaders disrupting tech in France. She has been a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneers judge for 20 years. She lives in Paris and has dual U.S. and French citizenship.
Joe Schorge
Joe Schorge
Joe Schorge is Managing Partner of Isomer Capital, based in London and focused exclusively on European venture capital. Isomer accesses high-potential opportunities in European technology through limited partner investments in early stage funds, company co-investments, and secondary purchases of funds and company positions. Joe has spent 25 years’ working as an LP, GP and technology operations executive, previously at Pomona Capital, a leading global secondaries firm, and at Cambridge Associates responsible for advising institutional investors on private equity investments. Joe began his career in information technology operating roles at Invensys plc (now Schneider Electric) in the US and Europe. He received a BS Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth and an MBA from London Business School.
Tom Smith
Director of Legal, Competition & Markets Authority
Tom Smith
Tom is legal director of UK’s Competition and Markets Authority where he has worked on a number of high profile cases. He was a key contributor to the recent market study into online platforms and digital advertising.
Prior to joining the CMA in 2014 Tom was a lawyer at Hogan Lovells in London. He also worked at the OFT (Mergers Branch) and ITV, plc.
Tom is a law graduate from Trinity College, Dublin and the University of Bristol.
Sasha Michaud
Sacha Michaud
Sacha Michaud is the co-founder and Vice-President of Public Affairs at Glovo, one of the world’s fastest-growing on-demand delivery players. A serial entrepreneur, with a prolific record of founding several successful companies, Sacha has more than 20 years experience in the digital sector.
After launching his first company at 25, LatinRed, which went on to become the world’s largest Spanish-speaking internet services provider, he then joined Betfair. He spent nine years leading the Iberia team for the online gambling giant and helping them with their global expansion. In late 2014, he decided to launch an ‘everything-on-demand’ service and began talking to investors. Soon after he was introduced to Oscar Pierre, who was about to launch a similar project, and he decided to join him. Together they founded Glovo.
3PM – 3:10PM
WELCOME TALK
Introducing Platform Leaders.
3:10PM – 3:50PM
PLATFORM IMPACT
Platforms are playing an increasingly important social and economic role that will further increase post covid. This session will explore how platforms have fared and adapted during covid, their increasing contribution to resilient ecosystems and how they may contribute to a sustainable economic recovery.
3:50PM – 4:30PM
PLATFORM REGULATION
Like all businesses platforms are subject to competition law as well as a range of regulatory obligations (including for example data privacy). Some policy makers are now arguing that platforms may require additional scrutiny. This panel will explore the challenges associated with the regulation of platforms and ecosystems, and discuss the latest thinking of EU and UK policy makers.
4:30PM – 4:40PM
CONFERENCE BREAK
An illustrated summary of the first two panels by Louise Plantin. Louise studied illustration and comic art at the École Estienne in Paris and at the École des Beaux Arts in Angoulême works with large companies, start-ups and publishing houses.
4:40PM – 5:20PM
PLATFORM GOVERNANCE
Unlike traditional businesses platforms orchestrate complex ecosystems and co-create value with their participants. This panel will explore the governance principles of platforms, the challenges associated with ecosystem management and the importance of trust.
5:20PM – 5:30PM
CONFERENCE WRAP UP
Closing remarks and key insights from the three panels.