How Colin Gardiner Evaluates Marketplaces When Investing In Them

From a high level, how do you evaluate marketplaces when you're investing in them? There's a lot, but I'd say early, there's like a few basic things that all investors look at, probably regardless of marketplaces, which is like founding team, market, execution, like those things, like I don't think I'm like really differentiated on, like I want to invest in people that like want to solve a problem that's keeping them up at night. All of those basics. But in marketplace specific, you know, I think the things that I really look for are, you know, really around product market fit early. And what I mean by that in the context of a marketplace is product market fit for me in marketplaces is transactions, right? Like your job is matching of supply and demand. That's it. Like I don't care what else you do. If you can match supply and demand at scale, you'll win. Right. And for me, like a SaaS product, you know, you may have to go fundraise to build the technology, right? For a marketplace, I would say it's really more the opposite. And I think, you know, Mike, you got into this like in a lot of low-code ways, right? Like, I think that's really the, like, honestly, the path for a lot of people is a spreadsheet, low-code. Like, how do you get transactions early? And prove it out, right? Because I don't think it's required to have like this crazy awesome product in a marketplace to go get funding. I actually think it'd be more of a red flag if you were like, hey, I need $1 million to build a product to match supply and demand. I'd be like, interesting. Why don't you just see if you can't go out there and do it like, you know, manually right now and prove to me that you can do it and do it from people you don't know. That's what I kind of use as a rubric. So, and if anyone, so when generally I say when people come to me and they say, I have an idea, I'm like, great, you just, can you go prove it out? Can you get some transactions? So that's one of the things I look for really early on. 2, I look for this marketplace plus concept. Like, are you doing a marketplace plus something else, right? Like that to me is like a really defensible and scalable model. I call this kind of like the Gen 3 of marketplaces, First were horizontal marketplaces like eBay, then vertical ones like Airbnb, Uber. And now realistically to do it like well and at scale, you're probably gonna have to do a marketplace plus model. And that's kind of like what I look for is like, does this founder have some insight into how to do that marketplace plus model in their industry, whether it's SaaS, community, whatever. And so if you looked at anything in my portfolio, all of them have that componentry to it. And I think last but not least, do you have some interesting customer acquisition angle? Like, I think that the best investments and some of the best companies I see have novel acquisition strategies in marketplaces, isn't necessarily novel product. Like, I really don't think the product innovation landscape has traditionally been what drove marketplace growth, right? It was actually more probably The aggregation of supply and the essentially getting of unique supply on these marketplaces and essentially putting that in front of demand that was like really, you know, pent up. So I think those are some things to think about and what I look at marketplaces. One other component, if you can find it, that's really awesome. Amanda, you have this with in the prescription space is like if you can find inventory that is underutilized, right? And bring it online, that's really powerful. Like if you look at homes, Airbnb, Uber, you know, like the black cars, like anything that's underutilized and if you can bring it online for distribution and that makes it more readily available, that is a really interesting space overall.