“We stopped selling software the day we became a platform.”

For a decade, the ambition of a software company was to own a workflow. Own the workflow, the thinking went, and you own the customer. Elena Cho thinks that era is closing — and that the founders who understand what replaces it will define the next twenty years of the industry.

The shift, as she describes it, is from owning a workflow to owning a rail: the payments, data and identity layer that other companies build on top of.

That reframing changes how a company prices, where its margin comes from, and which competitors it should fear — and it is the case Cho makes for why this is structural gravity, not a trend.