Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Grubhub was disrupted because public market scrutiny blocked private capital tactics

Sarah Tavel · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · Dec 27, 2023 · at 1:40:00

Sarah Tavel is a General Partner at Benchmark. Discussing marketplace disruption, she explains why incumbent Grubhub lost market leadership to DoorDash and Uber Eats.

0:00 / 0:21exact quote · 21.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“GrubHub wasn't able to, for different reasons. They were a public company. And so they couldn't, couldn't access capital in the same way that the private markets could, but they were too slow. To change the atomic unit of their supply to have delivery that they fulfilled, and so they got disrupted by the, you know, DoorDash, Uber Eats of the world.”

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 Sarah Tavel

Opinion
Tavel: MAU is meaningless without tracking users completing core actions
“But at the end of the day, if you're not doing that action, you're not really a user to the product. And that's why it's, you know, the MAU thing doesn't really mean anything It's really looking at, I think, of users completing the core action.”
Sarah Tavel Dec 27, 2023 ▶ 6:53 The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest)
Insight
Tavel: Purely anonymous apps fail to build sustainable retention and network effects
“The challenge when you have pure anonymity is that you don't have that accruing benefit or mounting loss that, that happens. I don't know if you ever played with secret, but it's similar to Tik TOK or something like that. These are the types of experiences whe…”
Sarah Tavel Dec 27, 2023 ▶ 24:57 The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest)
Insight
Marketplace GMV is a vanity metric that does not indicate enduring value
“GMV is really actually a vanity metric. It doesn't get at the core of whether you're building enduring value. It's like very clear. And there's plenty of examples I could give where there are companies that had incredible scale and still were disrupted by a st…”
Sarah Tavel Dec 27, 2023 ▶ 50:28 The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest)
Insight
Tavel: Marketplaces need healthy supplier churn to protect buyer experience
“When you're building a marketplace, you actually, there's a healthy amount of churn that you want on the supplier side. Because there are just going to be suppliers who aren't going to create a great experience for the buyer, and you can't do anything about th…”
Sarah Tavel Dec 27, 2023 ▶ 1:08:39 The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest)
Insight
Tavel: Enduring marketplace value requires cornering demand
“The only way to build long-term enduring value with a marketplace is to corner the demand side.”
Sarah Tavel Dec 27, 2023 ▶ 1:15:43 The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest)
Insight
Tavel: Social products depend on a core action that drives retention
“What I, what you realize when you look at social products is that there are almost always is this action, which I call the core action. Of that product that forms the foundation of the product. When a user completes this action, it's clear that they both under…”
Sarah Tavel Dec 27, 2023 ▶ 6:02 The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest)
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 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.