Key Learnings From Setter & Thumbtack

18 Aug 2024 · 2 min

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1:46

In this reflective monologue, the speaker distills lessons from their experiences at Setter and Thumbtack and explains how these insights shape strategy at Power. They express a cautious stance toward managed marketplaces, emphasizing the need for operational designs that avoid per‑transaction human involvement to achieve scalability. The speaker highlights the defensibility of high talent density observed during the COVID period at Setter, noting the value of retaining top talent over turbulent times. Finally, they discuss a funding strategy where, immediately after a VC raise, the company focuses on long‑term bets, then later tightens its focus on short‑term metrics to satisfy the next funding round, underscoring the importance of explicit long‑term investment thinking post‑raise.

Chapters

What were some of your key learnings from, from Setter and then maybe subsequently at Thumbtack that you've taken with you to Power? Yeah. So I think I've talked about this idea of like being a bit skeptical of managed marketplaces, maybe a bit more tactically. The— if when you have an ops layer at a marketplace business trying to ensure that they're only working on things they need to do once per unit of supply rather than things that need to be involved, be done once per transaction. really, really important because things that you have to do once per transaction with humans just don't scale. I think I also saw like, you know, I was at Setter through COVID and it was impressive to me how talent density is like a really defensible asset in a company. We had all these great people and there were all these ups and downs and people stuck around for a really, really long time, which was super cool to see. I think I also, I think I, I think we did an okay job of at Setter that, that I've internalized as being important is that like if you're engaging, if you're vacuuming up VC dollars, you really need to be using those dollars to think longer term. And so at Power, a thing we do is right after we raise a round, we like very much for the next, you know, few quarters, half a year, whatever, are focused on long-term bets. With the understanding that as we go to raise our next round, we will shrink our focus and necessarily have to tighten up sort of short-term wins in order to have the numbers that get the next stage of investor excited. But being really explicit about the fact that once you raise money, you've raised that money so you can think long-term and make those large investments, I think is a helpful learning I took from that business.