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 15 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Zappacosta: Forming a founding team before finding an idea is valid
“So we kind of did what you're not supposed to do, which is decide to start a business and then go hunt for an idea. However, I think that actually gets a very bad rap here in the
And it's a very tried and true method. You know, Amazon did that. Microsoft did t…”
Zappacosta: Board meeting preparation offers more value than the actual discussion
“And just providing that insight, which I think is honestly most valuable in preparing rather than necessarily the discussion that it fosters.”
Zappacosta: Judging board decisions as right or wrong is a false framework
“I think starting from the premise of right and wrong is a false framework, because the truth is you don't know, and you will not know whether you're right or wrong for years, and so it's much more about the process around the decision-making, how well you can …”
Zappacosta: Subscription business models do not work for marketplaces
“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.”
Zappacosta: Marketplaces do not inherently sacrifice NPS on one side
“I think that's bogus. I think that's definitely not true of Amazon. It's definitely not true of Airbnb, and it shouldn't be true of a service marketplace either.”
Zappacosta: TaskRabbit's commodification of labor drove low supply-side NPS
“I think TaskRabbit's challenge is that it commodified the labor side of the platform, and therefore its main offer to the customer was speed and low prices. And in that sense, Yeah, it's going to have a low MPS on the supply side.”
Zappacosta: Thumbtack service professionals earn an average of $72 per hour
“Our pros are earning 72 dollars an hour and are able to differentiate themselves on more than just price.”
Zappacosta: Thumbtack expects international expansion and an IPO within five years
“Yeah, both of those things I would expect happen in the next five years.”
Zappacosta: Local service friction stems from discovery failure, not supply shortage
“It wasn't because there weren't great professionals who are ready to do the work. It was literally a market failure, a problem of discovery that these two sides couldn't easily find each other and transact.”
Zappacosta advises founders to hold weekly check-ins with board members
“I would definitely encourage founders to have a weekly or every other week phone call. Ours is 30 minutes. We often use 10 to 20 minutes. Sometimes we use the whole thing. Rarely we skip it, but it does happen, and it's just someone I trust a lot, someone who …”
Zappacosta: Home service pros require offline ads; creatives convert on Facebook
“Creative services, think photographers, DJs are very digitally savvy and tend to have Facebook pages about themselves and talk about themselves on social media. And so we can target them more easily on Facebook. Home service companies like plumbers, HVACs tend…”
Nationwide supply density enables efficient broad marketing like remnant TV ads
“The benefit of that is it has let us then leverage marketing channels that are not geographically specific. So we can buy remnant on TV or online independent of where it's going to show because we have supply everywhere.”
Thumbtack raised Series B from Sequoia six weeks after business model pivot
“February and March were the first months that this new model was rolled out nationwide. And we raised our beef from Sequoia six weeks later because they saw the potential in what we had done.”