Casey Winters Sharing Parting Marketplace Advice

I actually had one last kind of question for you before we wrap things up, which is, you know, if you could go right back to before you entered the world of marketplaces, you know, what would you tell yourself about them specifically?

Good question. So I think one thing I had to learn as, you know, kind of like a product growth sort of guy is like marketplaces don't win on features. They win on connecting supply and demand. And in all marketplaces, supply only cares about one thing, which is more business, which means more demand, which means if you're not driving more demand and finding a way to make that more attractive to supply, you're probably not doing an important thing long-term at the company. So I had, you know, all these feature ideas for Grubhub and we built some of them. And I think Net-net, that created negative billion dollars of outcome for the company because of how distracting it was. And, you know, that's like sobering to tell other like product leaders in marketplaces, come like all this skill you have, don't use it. Just don't ever use it. You have to just like grind, grind, grind on more users, more suppliers, Forever. And I'm super comfortable with this as like a marketplace product leader. But for some people, like it's a little bit uninspiring to like internalize that. And I went through my change curve on that, like, you know, whatever it was like 13 years ago. But I definitely had to learn that the hard way at Grubhub. Even at Apartments.com, I built like a whole, you know, non-transactional community product for Apartments.com, total failure. Yeah, a lot of our product skills just don't matter in marketplaces. It's an optimization game. Doesn't mean you're not strategic, but it means you gotta be building something that you know is gonna create more demand or create more supply, or it's fundamentally the wrong thing.