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.

Another way to think about [expanding a company into an adjacent market] is, will this new offering contribute back to your growth function. Let's say that for a marketplace, growth is a function of GMV, take rate, frequency of orders, size of orders, AOV, all that stuff. The new product offering should have a neutral to positive impact on those va... See more

We believe the future of B2B marketplaces starts with vertical SaaS solutions. These initially look like software-enabled workflows that streamline operational inefficiencies between supply and demand, making online transactions possible where previously they may not have been. 

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

My personal favorite are these vertical SaaS marketplaces. They start as vertical SaaS software, then layer in a marketplace later on. Usually, it begins with a software solution that is focused on a highly technical business problem. For example, a software provider may give away or charge a very low fee for something that has high intrinsic ... See more

The other thing that we’re seeing is that there are so many agents and aggregators up and down the stack in many industries. These represent opportunities for integrated software solutions to streamline the process. We think about how these low-value brokers and inefficient workflows can be replaced by machine-to-machine transactions. The value acc... 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.

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 b... See more

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.