Since we’re seed investors, we’re looking for markets where significant dollars are flowing between businesses. These are often older, more established buying patterns where the innovation is launching the marketplace itself.

If demand can only buy more from the supply side once they sell the goods because of balance sheet limitations, then payment terms are really important.

We love asset-light or asset-less B2B marketplaces that use existing infrastructure and think building endpoints to access that infrastructure is the future.

We've learned over the years that B2B marketplaces are poorly positioned to own customer support on behalf of supply and demand, given the complexity of what follows a transaction.

When considering building a marketplace, there are many decisions you have to make upfront, particularly whether they want to own the infrastructure or partner with the best-in-class partner or provider. For example, if you were starting a marketplace four or five years ago, you probably were building a lot of this stuff yourself. But suppose I’m... See more

Consumer marketplaces thrive on high frequency, and B2B marketplaces need tons of volume. 

I do think that bringing the marketplace functionality too early can be a burden on the company, especially one that's not capitalized well... offer something with high intrinsic value and low marginal cost, start getting customers hooked into that workflow, and then expand into other parts of the workflow that leave you well-positioned to launch a... See more

The more complex and fragmented the market, the more likely you will have these many-to-many relationships, which get harder to manage without a software layer.

We look at [the taxonomy of B2B marketplaces] in a couple of different ways. High-level, there are aggregators, managed marketplaces, channel marketplaces, vertical SaaS-enabled marketplaces, and then tech-enabled brokerages.