Casey Winters
Co-Founder and CEO, SuperMe · 1 appearance on the record.
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operatorexecutivefounderinvestorauthor@onecaseman ↗LinkedIn ↗caseyaccidental.com ↗
Winters scaled Grubhub's growth to an IPO, led growth product at Pinterest, and served as Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite. He currently teaches growth strategy at Reforge and is the Co-Founder and CEO of SuperMe.
52statements → 16claims → 6claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.9/5average certainty → 2.02/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
6 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 10 not checkable as stated how the 16 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
1 prediction · 15 assertions · 2 opinions · 31 insights · 2 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 16 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 6 are resolved, and 10 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Casey argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Winters: The pandemic permanently fixed DoorDash's unit economics by eliminating latency
“Then the pandemic hits and all the unit economics of DoorDash flipped positive because everyone's all of a sudden ordering online and all the drivers are much more busy, which means all the latency in the model that was creating the losses went away.”
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Casey Winters on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Casey Winters said on In Depth that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Winters: Only four acquisition engines can scale startups to a billion dollars
“There aren't that many that helped you become a billion dollar company. It's basically sales, virality, what I call like content loops, which is we distribute content directly to, you know, Google or to social networks to bring more people in, and then those p…”
Winters: Paid acquisition inevitably degrades and becomes unprofitable over time
“And the challenge with paid is It always looks better yesterday than it does today, unless you have a network effect business where the product quality is getting better, faster than the quality of people you're bringing are getting worse, right? Cause you alw…”
Winters: SaaS networks yield fewer venture wins than demand-owning marketplaces
“It's generally lower take rate. If you have a take rate model, it's gonna be more like five percent versus 15%. And then of course you're paying the payment processing. It's harder to build a massive scale business. So you see fewer venture wins in that catego…”
Winters: SaaS-to-marketplace transitions almost never work as a second phase
“I generally advise founders against marketplaces phase two of the company. So there are a lot, a bunch of people were like, ah, SaaS to marketplace transitions. That's the model. And I'm like, name an example in the last 10 years where that's actually worked. …”
Winters: Marketplace network effects only kick in past 50% demand
“I don't think cross-site network effects really kick in until you're like past 50% of the demand, probably even more than that.”
Winters: Grubhub's only winning move was acquiring DoorDash and appointing Tony Xu
“The only thing they could have done was buy DoorDash as early as possible, and then basically let Tony run the company and build a delivery network.”
Winters: A $100M public company cannot beat rivals with $4B in capital
“I just don't think there's a way that a public company that raised like a hundred million in IPO is going to outcompete. Companies that have raised four billion dollars each, I think, in Uber and DoorDash like to crush you.”
Winters: Marketplaces must immediately copy rivals offering higher frequency or lower cost
“I think one thing marketplace founders need to be Careful about is if you are aggregating supply and demand in the market and someone else is aggregating the same supply and offering it at lower cost or with a higher frequency type of transaction, you need to …”
Winters: TAM is a misleading metric for early-stage marketplaces
“TAM is kind of a misleading metric for marketplaces, because in all the biggest marketplaces like Uber and Airbnb, it looked like there was no TAM.”
Winters: Grubhub data showed resolving bad orders boosted retention over flawless orders
“Early on, we were basically like, look, if there's an issue with the driver, if there's an issue with the order being late, we'll take it on as the marketplace, because we know if we make up for a bad experience by going above and beyond, we'll actually have b…”
Winters: Network effects are the only scalable defense against cohort degradation
“So what needs to happen is that the product needs to get better faster than the users you acquire get worse. And network effects are really the only scalable solution that can make that happen.”
Winters: Discounting does not create product-market fit in marketplaces
“One is discounting to product market fit does not get you to product market fit.
So in a marketplace, you are selling people on the value of the selection, on the value of, you know, the service.
And if you then give a five dollar discount, then you start chan…”
Winters: Startups nearly went bankrupt blindly copying Uber's expensive launcher playbook
“A bunch of people tried to copy Uber's launcher strategy, and then a bunch of people like almost went bankrupt doing it because it's really expensive and they weren't raising billions.
You didn't really understand what your playbook required.
You were just kin…”
Winters: Marketplaces win on liquidity and selection, not software features
“Marketplaces are not really usually winning on the software itself. Only if the software helps you find more selection on the demand side or brings you more money on the supply side.”
Winters: The pandemic permanently fixed DoorDash's unit economics by eliminating latency
“Then the pandemic hits and all the unit economics of DoorDash flipped positive because everyone's all of a sudden ordering online and all the drivers are much more busy, which means all the latency in the model that was creating the losses went away.”
Winters: GOAT will probably stay sneakers-only, limiting its growth
“It probably always will be a sneaker marketplace, and that will limit ultimately how big that company could get.”
Winters: Asset marketplaces win by requiring low initial supplier effort before raising standards
“So then there's the example of, okay, you actually have an asset that can be leveraged for the marketplace. And generally the way those models win, whether it's, you know, Airbnb or like Hipcamp is a company that I spent a lot of time working with. You're aski…”
Winters: Turo outperformed Getaround by prioritizing daily over hourly rentals
“I think Toro has done better than GetAround if I've paid attention correctly. And part of the reason why is GetAround built a bunch of infrastructure to make it easy for hourly rentals. And Toro is, wait a minute, there's no money in that. We should optimize e…”
Winters: Marketplaces must build granular data capabilities faster than other models
“Marketplace businesses need to get sophisticated around data, usually a lot more quickly than other models.
And part of the reason for that is
Once you're doing more than one category or more than one city or neighborhood, the aggregate data doesn't really tel…”
Winters: Owning demand matters most in marketplaces, contrary to Uber's philosophy
“And famously, Uber, like, does not believe this. They believe supply is all that matters, and I fundamentally disagree. Supply is It's a lot of times the tool to get demand, but owning demand is what keeps the supply happy.”
Winters: Low-frequency marketplaces require high AOV or high take rates
“If you're going to be low frequency, then you need to be high AOV. And if you can't be high OEOV, then you need to be high take rate on the low frequency. And if you can't get any of those to work, then chances are that a marketplace is not going to be an opti…”
Winters: Faire's zero-commission brand onboarding created proprietary acquisition loop
“Part of their unique advantage is they were able to build a product where brands can onboard their existing retailers for free and not pay any commission, but they can manage that workflow. And then that allowed FAIR to cross sell those boutiques to other bran…”
Winters: Edges in paid acquisition channels generally get competed away by rivals
“In today's environment where like paid is pretty hard to get an edge on any sort of edge you have will generally get competed away by competitors coming into the market. You're looking to see that someone's not going to rely on paid or sales for everything unl…”
Winters: Viral growth curves asymptote quickly as invited users exhaust interest
“Virality is, you know, mainly how consumer social companies have grown, but you get like a really fast curve, but then it asymptotes generally more quickly because all the people that reject the invites the first few times, they're not gonna necessarily accept…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| How to build and scale winning marketplaces | Casey Winters (Eventbrite, Pinterest, Grubhu | May 30, 2024 | 58m |