Feb 12, 2024 · 1h 23m · news
Thomas Plantenga & Alex Taussig: Vinted CEO's Ultimate Guide to Scaling Marketplaces | E1114 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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This video features Vinted CEO Thomas Plantenga and Lightspeed Partner Alex Taussig in conversation with Harry Stebbings, detailing Vinted's dramatic turnaround, unique marketplace mechanics, and ultimate transformation into Europe's leading peer-to-peer fashion resale platform. It explores critical scaling strategies, the mechanics of international expansion, and the cultural differences between European and Silicon Valley venture capital ecosystems.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 16.5% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 4.4 Guest teaching 4.7 Guest disagreement 1.4 Harry pushing back 2.4
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:01:38 Thomas dismisses Rule of 40 optimization
Thomas forcefully rejects common VC dogma, calling direct optimization towards the Rule of 40 absolute bullshit and criticizing VCs who treat output metrics like physical laws.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 59:01 Harry refuses founder ignorance excuse for bad term sheetsHarry strongly rejects the framing that European founders are blameless when accepting predatory early term sheets, asserting that widespread content makes ignorance unacceptable.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 20:46 Alex explains why resale UX differs from standard e-commerceAlex educates the host on marketplace physics, explaining that unique 1-of-1 inventory in resale requires shallow, recommendation-driven feeds rather than traditional deep search catalogs.
Harry holds his own ▶ 11:39 Harry challenges backing non-founder CEOsHarry uses his venture capital background to directly challenge Alex on whether backing a brought-in CEO contradicted core VC principles of investing in original founders.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thomas Plantenga’s Unexpected Journey to Vinted | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Harry asks a conversational opening question about Thomas's unintended route to becoming CEO. Thomas provides a detailed narrative about his background, meeting the Lithuanian founders, and presenting a radical refounding plan. | |
| The Initial Skepticism of European Resale Marketplaces | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Harry asks specific questions about why Vinted's original business model failed. Thomas explains the flaw in charging 15-20% seller fees against free classifieds, while Alex notes skepticism around pan-European marketplaces. | |
| Lightspeed’s Investment Decision and the Refounding Concept | 6 | 3 | 2 | 5 | Harry presses Alex on whether investing in a non-founder CEO ran counter to venture capital orthodoxy. Alex defends the investment thesis, reframing Thomas's role as an essential refounder. | |
| The Vision of Unbounded Upside and Shipping as a Weapon | 5 | 3 | 1 | 3 | Harry asks sharp investor questions about the upside case and the pre-mortem failure reasons. Alex explains how shipping cost advantages served as a strategic weapon to expand across European borders. | |
| Solving the Marketplace Chicken-and-Egg Problem | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Harry poses a standard marketplace question about solving the chicken-and-egg cold-start problem. Thomas breaks down Vinted's conversion drivers, recommendation engines, and France expansion playbook. | |
| Search vs. Recommendation in Resale User Experience | 4 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Harry probes into search versus recommendation discovery dynamics. Alex educates on why resale marketplaces require recommendation-heavy feeds because every SKU is unique, unlike new e-commerce retail. | |
| Managing International Expansion and Navigating Early Failures | 4 | 4 | 1 | 4 | Harry drills down on early expansion failures, repeatedly asking why specific launches in Germany, the UK, and the US failed. Thomas explains local shipping infrastructure differences and execution hurdles. | |
| The UK Breakthrough, COVID, and Competitor Dynamics | 4 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Harry asks what made the sixth UK attempt work when previous attempts failed. Thomas and Alex explain multivariate improvements, COVID tailwinds, and the macro shift away from zero interest rates. | |
| Competing Against Chinese Fast-Fashion Giants | 5 | 6 | 2 | 5 | Harry challenges Thomas on how Vinted can compete against massive ad spending by fast-fashion giants Temu and Shein. Thomas reframes the threat, noting Chinese competitors acquire buyers who become secondary sellers, while pointing out tax policy loopholes. | |
| Network Effects, Scaling Depth, and Board-Level Trade-offs | 4 | 5 | 0 | 1 | Harry asks technical questions about breadth versus depth and regional ramp times to profitability. Alex breaks down Lightspeed's three-level board evaluation framework for balancing country efficiency with growth. | |
| Avoiding Scaling Pitfalls and Cohort Miscalculations | 5 | 6 | 1 | 3 | Harry asks about past miscalculations along the efficient frontier. Alex and Thomas explain how distorted COVID cohorts led tech companies to overspend based on flawed long-term LTV assumptions. | |
| Customer Acquisition Cost: Average vs. Marginal Cost | 5 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Harry presents a thesis on customer acquisition costs over time. Thomas corrects the host's reliance on average CAC, explaining why growth decisions must be made using marginal CAC curves. | |
| Identifying Regional Cash Cows | 4 | 5 | 0 | 2 | Harry asks which market generates the most free cash flow and prompts Alex on market selection criteria. Alex defines customer surface area as a superior leading indicator of addressable market expansion. | |
| Why Europe is Losing and How to Change It | 6 | 5 | 2 | 4 | Harry leads a discussion on why Europe is lagging behind the US and China. Thomas compares cultural work ethics across Europe, Lithuania, and Silicon Valley, while Alex highlights the scale of European market demand. | |
| European vs. US Venture Capital Products | 7 | 5 | 4 | 7 | When Thomas describes predatory seed term sheets in Europe, Harry forcefully pushes back, arguing founders cannot use ignorance as an excuse given media transparency. Thomas and Alex defend the emotional reality of young founders. | |
| Debunking the Rule of 40 | 5 | 7 | 5 | 2 | Harry brings up the Rule of 40 metric. Thomas forcefully labels direct optimization for Rule of 40 as absolute bullshit, while Alex explains the crucial distinction between input and output metrics. | |
| EBITDA Margin Optimization vs. Absolute Cash Flow | 4 | 7 | 3 | 1 | Harry asks about debunking EBITDA margin targets. Thomas and Alex explain that absolute free cash flow dollars and return on equity matter far more than high EBITDA percentage margins. | |
| Going Public and Financial Transparency | 4 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Harry conducts a quickfire round covering public listings, top competitors, personal strengths/weaknesses, and 10-year valuation predictions. Thomas reveals historical board friction over high-burn budgets before macro downturns. |
Statements from this episode (43)
Plantenga: Vinted's business collapsed after adopting Poshmark's monetization model
“They changed the business model into what was, let's say, what the business model that Poshmark is using as we speak. And then the business started to collapse.”
Plantenga: Vinted originally charged sellers a 15% to 20% commission fee
“So they were asking something in the tune of 15 to 20% seller fee, which is like the standard thing that eBay and Poshmark were doing for years,”
Plantenga: Vinted's 5% plus 70 cents fee drives 85% of revenue
“We make it five percent plus 70 cents. And it was a bit of like a, well, let's just do it a bit higher and a bit higher now. Now it's 85% of our revenue and practically all the gross margin.”
Taussig: 90% of Vinted's GMV was in France when Lightspeed invested
“And at the time that it got resurfaced, 90% of the GMV was in France.”
Taussig: Non-founder CEOs can drive critical refounding moments in startups
“And I believe that Companies can have these refounding moments where, where a really outstanding individual comes in with the right set of skills for a given moment in time and takes a company on a different trajectory.”
Taussig: Fashion resale projected to reach 20% of apparel market by 2030
“It's actually a lot of people think resale could be 20% of all apparel by 2030.”
Taussig: Vinted was already profitable in France during 2018 fundraising
“Because it was very clear they had won France at that point in time. And it was, and France was like, it was a profitable region, right?”
Plantenga: Vinted scaled globally by testing its investment playbook in France
“So, so by staying long in France, we walked France through all these investment scenarios, and thereby we had a playbook that we then ruthlessly could roll out in all the other countries and make upfront investments that looked like nuts to people.”
Plantenga: Tech industry expected Vinted to go bankrupt prior to 2019
“So I think up to 20, 2019, most of the industry was just waiting until we would go bankrupt because they thought like, this doesn't make any sense. But they didn't believe our economics would make sense. They didn't believe that you could spend that amount of …”
Taussig: Recommendations are more critical in resale than traditional retail
“Recommendations are even more critical in resale than they are in, in, in new.”
Taussig: Vinted achieved social media-like engagement levels in 2019
“When we looked at Vinted in 2019, it had social media like time spent. In the app.”
Plantenga: A seller's first two transactions are most critical for retention
“Practically the first two transactions are the most important.”
Plantenga: Vinted's French expansion succeeded due to key shipping partnerships
“If you look at France, why it took off, that relation with Mondial Realais, The relation with mango pay, both of these French companies believed in us, gave us good contracts and worked very closely with us. And then the marketing pricing in France was favorab…”
Plantenga: Vinted's initial expansion tests in the US and UK horribly failed
“And then we got really excited and I was like, okay, let's just test some stuff in the UK and the U S which horribly failed.”
Plantenga: Vinted required five or six attempts before succeeding in the UK
“But yeah, so, so along the way, many failures and many failed launches, like the UK took, I don't know if it's six or five times before it worked.”
Taussig: Higher interest rates benefited Vinted against discounting competitors
“The end of zero interest rates benefited us a lot. I remember when, early when I joined the board, it was still, we're still in this era of like insane discounting by some of our competitors in various regions. And we had to make these hard choices. Like, do w…”
Plantenga: Etsy buying Depop caused existential panic at Vinted
“So Depop got sold to Etsy. And we were shitting our pants. Like I thought Josh Silverman is gonna like take a bit baseball bat and smash us into the ground because Etsy is a company I very much look up to. They're a great company. Josh is a great CEO. And I th…”
Plantenga: Temu and Shein ad spending does not hurt Vinted's growth
“Timo Shine are spending money to attract buyers, and every Timo Shine buyer can become a vintage seller, and we're spending money to attract sellers of second-hand clothing. So for us, we're kind of like, just out of that storm. Like, so, so that storm just pa…”
Taussig: Temu and Shein directly compete with H&M and Zara
“I mean, they're really competing against H and M and a lot of fast fashion Zara, like the fast fashion companies.”
Plantenga: Shipping efficiency drives fashion industry transformation over marketing
“When you look at the fundamentals that completely changed the fashion industry over, let's say the last hundred years, then it's actually the people who consistently found new levels of efficiency in production and shipping. So the non-obvious is that shipping…”
Plantenga: EU tax loophole makes shipping from China cheaper than intra-Europe
“There is a loophole that if you send in a package under 150 euros, it's not taxed. And therefore, for example, companies like Zalando are actually having higher prices to send a package from Germany to Belgium than they have from China to Belgium.”
Plantenga: Vinted achieves regional profitability in 12 to 36 months
“It can be as fast as 12 months and it can be as long as three years.”
Taussig: Marketplaces cannot grow arbitrarily fast without destroying equilibrium
“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.”
Taussig: Vinted is no longer raising venture capital
“We're not raising venture capital anymore. We're looking at our cash flow and saying, how do we want to invest that cash flow next year?”
Taussig: Post-COVID consumer cohort degradation caused 2022 cash burn spikes
“If you look at any consumer company, in 2020 and 20 21 their cohorts look fundamentally different than they did in 2022 and 20 23 they just performed different people were adopting new behaviors a lot of those behaviors did not stick and a lot of projections a…”
Plantenga: Optimizing marketing on a single metric guarantees failure
“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.”
Taussig: Marketplace inventory expansion faces diminishing returns per user session
“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…”
Plantenga: Steering marketplaces by average CAC instead of marginal CAC is dangerous
“So therefore, it's very, very important to consistently really look at the marginal cost and not the average cost of all your cock, because that's also a very, very big mistake, right? You can say, I have a cock of This. Okay, nice, but what is, let's say, you…”
Plantenga: Vinted avoided post-COVID cohort mispredictions by forecasting conservatively
“We did not because like we got quite a boost to it and we know that we have this summer effect and these autumn effects and we see just in summer, people go to the beach and then they're buying a lot less. It's very obvious. Then autumn comes, weather changes,…”
Plantenga: Vinted cash flow scales with country population and market maturity
“We see all countries moving at the same trend. Older the country, the more it contributes in terms of free cash flow. That's practically, and then it's obviously, it's correlated to the population. So the older a country, the bigger a country, the more cash fl…”
Taussig: Lightspeed evaluates market opportunity by surface area, not dollar TAM
“At Lightspeed, when we think about addressable market, we don't really think about it in dollars first. We think of it as surface area. We think of it as like, how, what is the surface area we're gaining access to here uniquely in our strategic wedge? Because …”
Plantenga: Lithuania possesses a uniquely strong work ethic within Europe
“And I think Lithuania has a bit of an exception because it's a very young country. They really want to build themselves up, want to prove themselves. So there's a very strong work ethic there.”
Plantenga: Predatory seed term sheets in small European markets handicap startups
“Like if you look what kind of like seed stage term sheets get to the table of like people I know building companies and I get like in these small markets in Europe, but it's like financial rape and it does a lot of damage. It's, it does a lot of damage because…”
Taussig: Silicon Valley VC culture incentivizes fair treatment as a repeat game
“Silicon Valley has this like weird risk loving kind of culture. And we also know that it's a repeat game. We know that we're going to be playing the game with these people for decades. And so we got to treat everyone right.”
Plantenga: Rule of 40 is not a causal driver of success
“So, but that then saying that that is a causal rule that drives to create big companies, that's absolute bullshit. Because I can have a company that is actually declining while I'm milking out a lot of cash and I will get to a rule of 40, but obviously that is…”
Plantenga: Absolute free cash flow matters far more than EBITDA margin
“70% EBITDA margin says nothing. It's about the absolute amount of EBITDA or free cash flow. Like a business is valued on money. More money that comes freely out of it is better. Doesn't matter under which ratio that money comes out there. And we've been lookin…”
Taussig: High-margin eBay is losing market share yearly to Vinted
“Usually the highest EBITDA margin businesses have the lowest growth, right? And so it's this kind of funny thing where You know, the business like eBay has a great EBITDA margin. It hasn't really, it's not really growing and it's kind of losing market share ev…”
Taussig: Airbnb spends 18% of revenue on marketing versus 30% for competitors
“Something like 18% of revenues on marketing, whereas bookings and Expedia spend 30%, and that's because they have unique inventory.”
Taussig: Return on capital deployed compounds businesses better than margin metrics
“What's your return on equity? Like what is your, when you make a hundred million dollars in investment, you know, in the coming year, well, what do we expect the return on that hundred million dollars to be over the ensuing five years? And that's a hard thing …”
Plantenga: Vinted going public will be no different than private fundraising
“And I think I'm not worried about it because. Every time I talk to somebody about Vinted that they didn't know our financials, they were very skeptical about it. Secondhand, who's buying secondhand? Is this ever going to be a business? And then you show the fi…”
Plantenga: Second-hand market will become the Amazon of resale in 5-10 years
“It's going to be an Amazon, but then for second hand. So it's going to be all the ease and all the, you know, sophistication is going to go into the secondary market as much as it's gone into the first market.”
Shorts cut from this episode
▶ Why Rule of 40 is 💩 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings (@1:01:39)
▶ How #Vinted solved marketplace growth 📈 · 20VC with Harry S (@36:57)
▶ Why Europe is Failing 📉 part 2 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings (@52:13)
▶ Why Europe is Failing 📉 part 1 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings (@50:54)
▶ How Vinted Entered New Markets 🌎👕 · 20VC with Harry Stebbi (@17:14)
▶ From Failing Business to $3.5B Tech Unicorn 🤯 · 20VC with H (@0:00)