James Currier Sharing Initial Marketplace Learnings

Going back though, you know, to your founder and kind of operator experience, you know, were there any other kind of like specific kind of learnings or maybe like key insights that you've taken with you to maybe, you know, thinking about how you invest in marketplaces today?

Yeah, I mean, there's a ton, right? I mean, each marketplace is so unique and the big thing I think that I came to realize is how difficult they are to fly. So often, like you'll create a, a SaaS business and then you'll evolve the product every now and again, but really you're just innovating on sales once you've figured out what you want to go to market and your product is. With marketplaces, you literally have seasons or you have innings of a baseball game. There's literally like 9 or more and you have to keep changing what you're doing and what you're emphasizing at different phases of growth as you get more demand or more supply or more this or more competition. And And so they're difficult to fly. It takes a really skilled pilot looking at a lot, a lot of metrics to understand how to make these things work and certainly how to make them bigger. And so you'll have companies like Fiverr, which will start small and very compact and everyone will say, oh, that'll never be big. And then it gets to be worth $6, $7, $8 billion and they really can't grow from there. They just sort of asymptote out because they can't figure out what the next inning is. So even the successful ones have a tough time. I mean, you've seen what happened with Lyft right now where it's, you know, that network effect is collapsing. So that's sort of the overall picture about marketplaces is that they're all unique and it's a very difficult plane to fly.