Early Stage Marketplace Tips

So we're going to get into group questions here in a little bit, because otherwise I feel like you and I could just go on chatting for quite a bit. But like right before we do though, so I would love to learn, you know, what are maybe like, you know, 1 to 3 kind of like key takeaways or tips, you know, from the Cold Start Problem that you'd like to share with us as earlier-stage probably marketplace founders?

Yeah, I think the first thing is just like know where you are from a stage standpoint. And don't fool yourself there. I think a lot of folks who don't have product-market fit basically think, okay, yeah, I just need to raise and burn a lot of money, and that's the right way to do it. When in fact, Uber started out very, very early on extremely lean and only started to spend enormous amounts of money once they were kind of accelerating and going from there. So I think understanding where you are is important. Are you at the cold start problem or are you at the tipping point stage or are you working on saturation? Like, what are you working on? And that you have different strategies for different phases. I think that's one of the most important points that I make. The second thing I would say is there is a long playbook of different things that you can do. And so some people, they should build, they should do a come for the tools, stay for the network. kind of strategy, as coined by my colleague Chris Dixon, or others maybe should be subsidizing all that growth. And I think the only way to figure out ultimately is you can't remove the art from all of this. There's just a long phase of experimentation that you end up going through, and that's just part and key to the whole thing. So I think that's important. And then the final thing I'll mention is that, you know, I think a lot of times, you know, what we're seeing in the market is that there's a lack of understanding around kind of the metrics guidelines and targets that you need to hit in order to show that you're an interesting company. And so for us, that's why we're always thinking about and looking at I referenced this in kind of the— I think it's like 3 quarters of the way through the book, kind of the triple, triple, double, double, double framework, because ultimately there is a minimum growth rate that we need to see. And then similarly, we want to see retention rates, at least on one side of the network, of over 50% annually. And there's a good reason for that also based on benchmarks that we see. So I know as an early— when you're building something really early, it's hard to, I think, assess like how good is my product market fit. And so I think looking at some of those metrics and comparing are, are, are some of the key ways to do it.