Building & Investing in Marketplaces

And so that's been key to the working, but the economics were awful when we invested. And so the leap of faith there wasn't people would want groceries delivered to their homes. The leap of faith was he can make the economics work.

Apoorva's superpower is optimization. He's just said, "These are the 19 things we need to accomplish to make the unit economics work. And I'm halfway on this one and just laid it out."

What kinds of actions did that mean when you were at eBay operating to try to promote price discovery or price equilibrium or something like that? What were you literally doing? Jeff: The most interesting thing is early on we try all these initiatives that we baked on our own and debuted the community. And we found out the leverage was way more to ... See more

One threat was we get hollowed out vertical by vertical by specialized marketplaces, because one of the benefits of the horizontal marketplace is the consumer can go to anywhere they want and find what they're looking for. One of the negatives is it's really hard to tailor the experience to the unique attributes of that vertical

The best models are ones that don't really rely much on paid acquisition. The best entrepreneurs have figured out hacks to get user demand at scale through a user proposition

You have to continue to be adopting your decision framework. One was whenever I saw a bargain, I should run. It's a sign of no heat. Whenever I did a bargain, I regretted it later. Whenever I was forced to pay up, to date that has been a very good basket of companies

The other is ideally lead gen. You're creating relationships that otherwise wouldn't have been created. The thing you try to avoid is "Okay, I have a relationship with my car repair man, my hair stylist, my whatever and it's a frequent relationship." Those don't do well because the service provider, they'll pay a little bit for convenience. They'll... See more

Two main ones. One is fragmentation of the marketplace. I often have used the difference between OpenTable and Fandango in explaining this. OpenTable, the average restaurant owner on OpenTable owns one restaurant. And so aggregating them is a pain in the ass. But once you've aggregated them, it's a very valuable thing.

Typically what the consumer founder is, typically they're really young, they're digital natives, and they've made observations about the state of the digital world that typically more senior workers with more experience don't make.

One of the most important lessons for me, another lesson learned, in the areas I invest in, which is largely consumer, I think it's critical you have a theory and defensibility. And for me, that defensibility typically has been network effect.