The Exchanges

Q And I'd love to delve back into that operational side, uh, of your career, and ask you, what did you see in marketplaces then, in 1999, that, you know, obviously marketplaces are huge now, but back in 1999 maybe not so prevalent, so what did you see, uh, and why do you think then we've seen this mass re-emergence of the marketplace model now?

A Yeah, I think the, the, the one thing where I always kind of got astonished by the power of marketplace is when I heard personal stories of our customers at a books, right? There were people that were looking for a book that they had read in their childhood or, um, that were covering a specific topic that they were interested in for years and years, going from book fair to book fair, going from one antiquarian bookseller to another, um, Always kind of trying to, to scout through these, um, you know, local inventories that were limited. And they found eight books, and suddenly they had a hundred million books, uh, at their fingertips. Like, they could browse through local inventories across the world. And in most, most of the time, they found the book they had been looking for, for such a long time. So just the power of bringing together buyers and sellers in, in a relatively small market, like the, the hard to find books market, Right. Um, it could convince me, and like, like, when you get these, these passionate customer stories almost on a daily basis where people thank you for creating a box and, and, uh, being part of the company, then, uh, you suddenly realize, uh, in, in a very personal way how powerful marketplaces are.

AI assessment note: “just the power of bringing together buyers and sellers in, in a relatively small market”

Q So focus on supply. Then when you're addressing that, how do you know then how much to have? I mean, like, is, is that a tough problem that comes about?

A Yeah, I mean, it's, you, you continuously trying to evaluate kind of, do you have, you know, where does supply in relation to, um, Um, demand stand, right? So, so one of the things we always, uh, concept we're thinking about is, is hotspots. So when you look at the marketplace and you, you see the first transactions happening between, um, buyers and sellers, like try to understand what type of transactions work really well, right? Sometimes it could be, uh, around when you, when you think about a product marketplace around a certain price point or in a certain vertical or a certain kind of buyer and supplier and trying to figure out, like, What does work really, really well? Because I mean, you're going to have a lot of noise in the marketplace, a lot of random transactions that are not really repeatable, but what are the things that are working well? And then double down on these things and trying to scale supply and demand in this subset of the marketplace. And sometimes there's, there's a few hotspots, not only one, one hotspot, but it might be three or four that work really, really well. And then double down on these things and kind of try to accelerate the development in this area.

AI assessment note: “double down on these things and trying to scale supply and demand in this subset”