Exocapitalism Part 2 - Lift has a longer history than the platform economy

Read business history through “Lift”, the lens Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo develop in Exocapitalism, and the familiar story of disruption starts to look rather different.

Instead of a parade of companies that somehow escaped the constraints of physical assets, you see a long process in which contracts, capital markets, logistics and software progressively separated production from control.

McDonald’s is a useful example because it keeps the argument honest. Its franchise model moved restaurant operations to franchisees while retaining many of the sites themselves, allowing the company to collect both rent and royalties. In 2025, franchised rent was US$10.4 billion, compared with US$6.0 billion in royalties. McDonald’s did not lift itself away from every physical asset. It retained the asset with durable bargaining power.

Nike took a different route, with nearly all of its products now made by independent contractors. Apple similarly relies heavily on outsourcing partners for manufacturing, while TSMC’s dedicated foundry model allowed chip designers to specialise without having to finance fabrication plants themselves.

Hotels reveal the same logic on another balance sheet. Hilton ended 2025 with just 46 hotels in its ownership segment, compared with 873 managed and 8,239 franchised or licensed properties. The buildings still matter, but brand, standards, reservations and loyalty can scale without owning them.

Uber made the pattern particularly visible because the coordination layer sits in every customer’s hand. Its platform generally does not own the cars, instead coordinating independent providers through software. The app accelerated the separation of coordination from production; it did not invent the underlying logic.

What interests me is what these companies chose to keep.

Land. Brand. Design. Customer demand. Architecture. Matching.

There is no universal progression from atoms to software, and “asset-light” is therefore a surprisingly poor description of what is happening. The more useful question is where the bargaining power sits.

When a company sheds an asset, it does not necessarily shed control. It may simply be moving control to a layer that is harder to see on the balance sheet.

So when someone pitches you an “asset-light” business, I would start with a different diligence question:

Which layer did they decide to keep?

That is usually where the economics are hiding.

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