Benjamin Lauzier
Co-founder & CEO, Nurra. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveoperator@bnjii ↗LinkedIn ↗nurra.me ↗
Benjamin Lauzier is the co-founder and CEO of Nurra, an AI-assisted healthcare advocacy platform. He is recognized as a two-sided marketplace expert after serving as VP of Product and Growth at Thumbtack and leading supply-side product growth at Lyft.
1shows
1appearances
27statements
6resolved
2supported
2contradicted
33%fully supported
Everything Benjamin Lauzier said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Thumbtack pros hated direct bookings because they preferred the thrill of sales
“We knew we're going to improve the ROI by something like 20%, maybe. And we lost this and pros hated it. They hated it because they actually subconsciously, like, they liked the spill of the sale, right? They loved this contact with customer. And they sometime…”
Product-market fit can exist independently of functional marketplace dynamics
“Maybe this is a hot take, but I feel like product market fit is independent of your marketplace dynamics. You might have, like, you know, a great product, and it provides amazing value to both sides, but you have yet to crack the, you know, the flywheel on the…”
Granular user feature toggles can unintentionally fragment marketplace supply
“People who build marketplaces tend to want to give a lot of control to the users because this is what users want, or this is what comes up oftentimes in user feedback. Like, oh, we have those two distinct group of users. Those ones, they really want new cars. …”
Ignoring supplier needs leads to catastrophic churn due to lagging network decay
“Many large, you know,
Marketplaces only thinking about their demand side funnel. So they run ads, they get clicks, they turn those clicks into dollars, and they try to get enough supplies that intuitively the experience is good enough for users. And my advice…”
Peer mentoring let Lyft match Uber's footprint with a fraction of resources
“This allowed us to match most of Uber's footprint with like, you know, a 10th or a 20th of the resources that you know, I, incredible speed, I guess.”
Lyft peer driver recruiters outperformed the company's trained professional sales team
“Those guys were outperforming our very best, like, trained salespeople, because it's not like, hey, it's Ben from Lyft, like, hop on the road, please.”
Rigid French labor laws reduce product manager autonomy compared to the US
“I think in France, the market is much less liquid. So it's incredibly difficult to change jobs, and it's very expensive to fire someone in France. So it seems to lead to two effects beyond the obvious job security. One is, I think PMs tend to have less autonom…”
French tech executive equity is often sub-10% versus over 50% in America
“For exec roles, I think it's often like sub-ten percent of their total compensation. Whereas, you know, in the US it's very often like more than 50% of your competition would be equity.”
Pre-PMF marketplaces should master one side and hack the other
“If you don't have product market fit, if you don't have a good enough growth strategy for at least one side of your marketplace, just forget about all this marketplace stuff, right? Focus on this core exchange of value. Go deep with one side of the marketplace…”
Early marketplace founders should prioritize building the hardest side first
“Which side to focus on is, like, there's different approaches to this, but generally people will pick the hardest side, and so if, you know for, I'll take the example of Thumbtack, because we're going to talk about it, so Thumbtack is a home services marketpla…”
Thumbtack jumpstarted its early supply by cross-posting customer requests to Craigslist
“You have countless businesses that have been built off of Craigslist. I think, you know, Thumbtack was partially, like, one of them. And the idea was like, hey, like, we can find, you know, all those great pros on Thumbtack. We can, when we have someone who wa…”
Supply is the hardest side to build in 90% of marketplaces
“Yes, I would say supply is the hardest side, maybe like 80 to 90% of the time.”
Lyft rider booking conversions plateaued when driver ETAs reached three minutes
“What will predict you deciding to book a ride for Lyft and for Uber, it was ETAs. So we knew that if we had if the closest driver was at least three minutes away from you or closer, then we had hit a ceiling. You were more than like X percent likely to, you kn…”
Service marketplaces face unique difficulties due to highly heterogeneous supplier preferences
“This is what's so tricky, by the way, about you know, services, service marketplaces like Thumbtack, because unlike eBay, where sellers, you know, they just want to sell very clear and distinct inventory. On Thumbtack, you have electricians who only want certa…”
Sidecar's granular user filtering fragmented supply and drastically hurt service levels
“I think one real interesting direction that they took pretty early on to differentiate themselves was in my mind, Perhaps very naively a mistake. They decided to give complete control to the user where as a user, you had a whole bunch of filters. You could dec…”
Marketplaces struggling with liquidity should offer tangential supply despite strict user requests
“If you have, like, different verticals, like, try, if possible, to, like, open up your supply walls. Like, your user is telling you, like, X, but try to give them, like, something that is tangential to what you think they want, because odds are that they are a…”
Marketplaces should use secondary user preferences for search ranking rather than filtering
“Work on ways to, like, make this sort of checkbox affect the ranking, but not the actual filtering is a great example of how you can listen to your users and, you know, tweak the experience, but, you know Simplify their sort of cognitive you know, load by know…”
Toptal advertises a 3% acceptance rate because its true 1% sounded fake
“There's, they advertise something like maybe like a three percent you know, sort of pass rate for their talent, so they only, like, on board, like, three percent of the people who apply, and allegedly their actual pass rate is even lower than that, but they th…”
Lyft built the fourth-largest US car rental fleet in just eight months
“And I think in, in three months we'd built, you know, rental company from the ground up and within eight months, I think we were like the fourth largest rental fleet in the U S.”
Lower capital liquidity forces French startups to prioritize business models over tech
“In France, I think like the business model, like has to be like front and center, perhaps for each, like Be able to raise venture capital for each, be able to like even exist. Right. So it means like it attracts a lot of like business you know, minded you know…”
Eighty percent of tech employees do not fully understand their equity compensation
“I'm convinced like, you know, 80% of people just don't fully understand like their equity”
Prompting stranded riders to become drivers failed to generate significant Lyft supply
“In our case at Lyft early on, we were, you know, we had a wait list on the demand side because we just couldn't you know, onboard enough supply. And so we had this idea of like having a pop-up instead of saying like no drivers available, it would be like, Hey,…”
Thumbtack's optional smoke machine filter accidentally eliminated 95% of available DJ supply
“Unknowingly to them, obviously, like only five percent of our DJs had a smoke machine. And so you would carve out, like, 95% of our supply”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Benjamin's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Nurra | 1 | 27 | 33% 2/6 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |