by Guimar Vaca Sittic Building marketplaces is really hard. The hardest nut to crack is building liquidity: having a critical mass of buyers and sellers. One of the main reasons … Continue reading “”

As an entrepreneur and investor, I am fortunate enough to collaborate with startups on a regular basis, learning about their ambitions and plans to shake up their respective industries. In … Continue reading “”

The used car industry is massive. There are 40 million used cars sold per year in the US representing $320 billion in value and $70 billion in industry revenues. The average … Continue reading “”

As you can see from my article on The Evolution of Marketplaces, Craigslist is facing a great unbundling. Startups are attacking Craigslist category by category by offering a better user … Continue reading “”

Anand Iyer, the Chief Product Officer of Threadflip, just wrote a thoughtful blog post on how to build liquidity in modern marketplaces. In short: Create a managed environment Have an … Continue reading “”

In the early days of the web Craigslist’s horizontal listing based marketplace was all things to all people as speed, simplicity and liquidity were the key success factors in the … Continue reading “”

Bitcoin confuses people. They don’t grasp what it is and how it works. The two presentations below are the best I have seen. They clearly present how Bitcoin works and … Continue reading “”

I have had the privilege to see Henry do his “Mary Meeker” impersonation as he effectively flies through 200 slides in less than 1 hour and it’s very impressive. He … Continue reading “”

It seems a foregone conclusion that 3D printing will change the world. It’s already revolutionized prototyping, and we’re now getting a glimpse of the technology’s potential in mass customization, medicine … Continue reading “”

As you can probably imagine given my recent blog post, Thoughts on building successful vertical marketplaces, marketplaces have been on my mind a lot of late. Last November Bill Gurley … Continue reading “”

Bill Gurley is a partner at Benchmark and an investor and on the board of Uber, OpenTable and Zillow amongst others. He just wrote a fantastic article on the optimal … Continue reading “”

As you know, I love operating and investing in marketplaces. It’s been interesting over the years to observe which vertical marketplaces take off sustainably and which fizzle, especially in light … Continue reading “”

What is surprising about this business to me is how high the take rate is. Most marketplace business take between 1 and 20%: eBay: 12% Airbnb: 13% Stubhub: 25% Etsy: … Continue reading “”

In the past few months, we’ve been approached by almost 10 companies who want to be the Pinterest for some foreign country. As you well know, we like investing in … Continue reading “”

The last few months have been difficult for Netflix. Ignoring the Qwikster disaster, the world seems to have realized that Netflix’ business model has fundamentally changed for the worse in … Continue reading “”