What makes a wrapper play defensible vs fragile? We asked Chris Paik (@cpaik) to break it down. “Wrapper strategies work best when the underlying infrastructure is purely commoditized.” If you can hop between models or clouds, you keep the leverage and vendors fight to be your base layer. That’s why Snowflake spread from AWS to Azure and Google: “Its vendors were competing to be their underlying customer base.” Flip the scenario and the math inverts. When you’re “building on top of a monopoly and that landlord just keeps rent-seeking,” the wrapper “doesn’t work.” The platform will slowly eat away every bit of margin you thought was yours. Wrappers work when the layer underneath is cheap and replaceable. But if one giant owns the ground, they’ll charge rent and you’ll pay it.