Growth strategist Casey Winters outlines the limited set of scalable growth vectors available to venture-scale companies during an interview with Brett Berson.
“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 people create content and then you redistribute that, or paid.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Casey Winters
Insight
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…”
Casey WintersMay 30, 2024▶ 7:36How to build and scale winning marketplaces | Casey Winters (Eventbrite, Pinterest, Grubhub)
Insight
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…”
Casey WintersMay 30, 2024▶ 12:41How to build and scale winning marketplaces | Casey Winters (Eventbrite, Pinterest, Grubhub)
Insight
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. …”
Casey WintersMay 30, 2024▶ 21:10How to build and scale winning marketplaces | Casey Winters (Eventbrite, Pinterest, Grubhub)
Insight
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.”
Casey WintersMay 30, 2024▶ 25:01How to build and scale winning marketplaces | Casey Winters (Eventbrite, Pinterest, Grubhub)
Opinion
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.”
Casey WintersMay 30, 2024▶ 29:13How to build and scale winning marketplaces | Casey Winters (Eventbrite, Pinterest, Grubhub)
Insight
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.”
Casey WintersMay 30, 2024▶ 29:30How to build and scale winning marketplaces | Casey Winters (Eventbrite, Pinterest, Grubhub)
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, about 80 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.