The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 25 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Plantenga: Vinted will reach a $50 billion valuation within 10 years
“Fifty billion. Global platform fully integrated shipping and payment functionalities across every category. Amazon like marketplace dynamics across all categories plus new software solution businesses next to it.”
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: 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: 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: 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 …”
Gibson: Vinted achieves higher user engagement than Instagram
“I am very impressed with what the team at Vinted have been able to do. It's a bit of a weird one, but the level of engagement I see from people who use the app is apps, the unreal, and people, it's like an addiction. I mean, they're using it more than they wou…”
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?”
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: 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.”
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: 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…”
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: 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: 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.”
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: A seller's first two transactions are most critical for retention
“Practically the first two transactions are the most important.”
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 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…”
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 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.”
Plantenga: Vinted was valued at $3.75 billion during its COVID funding round
“So the last one is was during COVID was a 3.75.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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,…”