Quarles: OpenTable Failed to Give Its Product Away Free in Palo Alto
Krista Quarles · 20VC: A Masterclass in Leadership and Scaling Companies: The Decisions only the CEO Can Make, The Secret To Talent Acquisition and Retention and How To Find The Unscalable Things that are Fundamental To Scale with Christa Quarles, CEO @ Corel Corporation · Jul 29, 2021 · at 14:58
Krista Quarles, former CEO of OpenTable, describes an experiment attempting to test the depth of OpenTable's network effects across all restaurant types on a single street.
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“We picked a street in Palo Alto and I said, give it all away for free. I said, I don't care. Don't charge anything. I just want to see if we can get a hundred percent of the restaurants on the street. And what was interesting was they came back and we literally couldn't give the product away in that instance, because the restaurant would be like, well, I'm not an open table restaurant.”
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