Marco Zappacosta
Co-founder & CEO, Thumbtack. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutive@M1z ↗LinkedIn ↗thumbtack.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Marco Zappacosta co-founded Thumbtack in 2008 to connect customers with local service professionals across home improvement, events, and other services. Under his leadership, the platform scaled into a multi-billion-dollar business backed by major venture investors including Sequoia Capital, CapitalG, and Tiger Global.
1shows
1appearances
15statements
3resolved
2supported
1contradicted
67%fully supported
13said about them ↓ Everything Marco Zappacosta said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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.”
Zappacosta: Thumbtack retains a large portion of its $250M venture funding
“We're in this position where we've raised two hundred fifty million dollars And a huge chunk of that is still in the bank because of that discipline and the business has done very well”
The other half of the tape: Marco Zappacosta's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 13 times in 7 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 11Jason Calacanis 2
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 13
2019 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Okta Founder Frederic Kerrest on Why You Want To Be A Monopolist In A Small Market, The Biggest Challenges in Scaling Okta To IPO and Being a16z's First Ever Fund Check
- 20VC: NEA Partner, Dayna Grayson on Sourcing, Picking, Winning, Gut vs Data in Investment Decision-Making & The Evolution of Entrepreneurial Expectations of Venture
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 9 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward
- 20VC: Behind The Scenes of a $Bn IPO Process, What Startups Can Learn From Teddy Roosevelt's "Five Minute Meetings" and What John Lennon Teaches Founders About Storytelling with Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Yext
- 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
2017 1 mention in 1 episode
2015 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Marco's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Thumbtack | 1 | 15 | 67% 2/3 | full record on 20VC → |