Two things surrounding Apple that have been playing out over the last week: the Epic Trial against Apple, and the tracking opt-out option in iOS 14.5 that has really hurt Facebook’s ability to track users across platforms.

Both are unrelated, and I’m not going to even attempt to cover them in depth here. If you want to find out the gist of what’s up, here’s a good one on the Facebook problem, and one on the Epic trial.

Both have one thing in common: where you start building a company (or career, or family, etc) matters a lot.

Facebook and iOS 14.5

Facebook started with the idea of serving a very specific community, college kids. It quickly moved to serving a large community, to serving advertisers. Today Facebook doesn’t care that much about whether their service is useful to its users, as long as users keep using it.

That’s why it’s such a big deal that people can turn off a significant tool for advertisers. If Facebook had focused from the beginning on staying true to serving its customers and not its advertisers, they really wouldn’t care if ad revenue was slightly reduced.

Epic Trial

Epic Games is mad at Apple because they take about 30% of the revenue generated by in-app purchases. That’s about what Xbox, Sony, and other hardware devices charge, but Epic believes they shouldn’t have to pay it in the case of Apple. Their reasoning is pretty convoluted at best.

In their defense, 30% is fairly high, and Apple’s making a healthy profit from charging that fee. But it’s not a monopoly in the strict use of the word (well, we’ll see what the courts say in the end) and Apple built the platform (iOS).

I think what Epic is really upset about is that they didn’t build the platform, because they if you can pull it off, building a platform is where the real money is.

Takeaways

• If you’re building a company or a profession, build it on the right things, the right way. Design your career to be If your customer knew exactly what you were doing, and had to click a button on their phone for you to keep making money, they’d gladly do it.

• Build the platform, or don’t complain about paying a lot for access to the platform.