marketplace

“So at .9, for instance, we're very focused on, on SaaS and marketplaces, right?”

“Our focus is mostly enterprise software and marketplaces. We, we've done a few other things, some ad tech, some commerce platforms and things like that. But really enterprise and marketplaces are the core focus and typically investing between two 50 K up to ab…”

“I think gross merchandise sales and take rate. I mean, gross merchandise sales being kind of the top line kind of what is the volume you're creating for your marketplace and then take rate is what do you take out of that? I mean, what are your revenues relativ…”

“And it's much easier to build up a big marketplace if you have A transactional relationship in, in between buyers and sellers.”

“Marketplaces, almost all of them are defensible by scale.”

“If people can switch too easily back and forth, you just don't really have that defensibility yet. And you're not building that boat. You know, I think you really need people to completely move all their behavior to your marketplace, and that's when you can wi…”

“I think when you know you should give up is when your supply is not differentiated. When the users can actually find your supply at a lot of different places, you have to question whether what you do is truly making your supply size business better. Is it tran…”

“One is winning a very differentiated supply first. Always go deep and have a thick network in one specific cluster versus broad and horizontal. And we're just finding that equivalent of power sellers in your target market is really critical. They have volume, …”

“The other is, third is actually it takes patience. It takes the growth curve, looks more like step function versus a linear curve. You get frustrated that demand looks flat for a period of time, and we see this often. And then suddenly the demand jumps. You ge…”

“No one expected or wanted us to have a subscription based business, which is great in a lot of context, but not in a marketplace.”

“The challenge with chasing GMV is that it actually points you away from that place of dominance. Like it points you in the wrong direction because oftentimes, or actually not even oftentimes, almost always, the fastest short-term path to maximizing GMV is to g…”

“And it is a marketplace, except that the buyer is using their time Instead of their money to buy, that's what they're giving into your system and giving to the supply side.”

“I have a belief that the demand side is, you know, kind of the, is the more, more strategic side, because suppliers typically will go wherever the demand is, and so for me, keeping a healthy demand Bucket, you know, is what your suppliers are looking for?”

“Most markets, even successful marketplaces typically are supply constrained.”

“Open table by contrast had, you know, the target market was 30 or 40 or 50,000 restaurants, almost all of which were the, had one, the owner only managed one restaurant. And so it was brutally hard to aggregate, but once you're aggregated, you know, it's bruta…”

“I have a belief that the demand side is, you know, kind of the, is the more, more strategic side because suppliers typically will go wherever the demand is. And so for me, keeping a healthy demand Bucket, you know, is what your suppliers are looking for.”

“And so it was brutally hard to aggregate, but once you're aggregated, you know, it's brutally hard to compete with it. And no supplier has supplier power.”

“If you're going to steer your whole marketing investment on one metric, like a cost per or a certain payback, then like, You're by definition you're wrong because all these variants are moving around. They need to like control them all.”

“The tricky thing about marketplaces is that you cannot grow arbitrarily fast. There is an efficient frontier. That, that you want to hit where you can balance supply and demand and fulfill a high quality experience for both sides of the marketplace.”

“One of the fundamental things like never changes across all marketplaces is that more liquidity generates higher and more inventory generates higher conversion rates, but there's diminishing returns on that, right? Because the user can only see so much invento…”

“So marketplaces have this very unique dynamic, which is that in your first six months, the unit economics are always horrible because you don't have enough liquidity in the marketplace. So you constantly need to subsidize the drivers, otherwise they're going t…”

“So one trick we did that really helped us get going in some of the first markets was actually to go to the market with the SaaS product and then convert it into a marketplace afterwards.”