[aquajet]

Are there businesses built explicitly on unbundling? I think there are examples of unconscious unbundling (picking the best individual components of a service/stack) but the goal is never to unbundle. Then a business comes along whose sole purpose is to bundle, but with that comes bloat. And then the cycle continues.

[riwsky]

partially a conflation of terms, here: while the article discusses vertical integration, the main thing people think of for "businesses built explicitly on unbundling" is horizontal unbundling—picking a niche that is solved OK by a wider solution, then solving that really really well. The textbook example is for random startups to unbundle Craiglist[1].

[1] https://a16z.com/2019/09/11/platforms-verticals-unbundling/