Marketplace Defensibility At Scale

As far as like when it comes to, you know, defensibility, you know, a little bit later stages for marketplaces, you know, you've been in a very unique position, you know, with Abeox and kind of seeing a lot of, you know, marketplaces kind of, you know, scale up in later stages from investing. So how do you kind of think about it from the earlier stages and kind of even chat through that with founders, you know, that might be at like pre-seed and seed and talking through defensibility?

You know, ultimately, as I said before, I think it always comes down in the long run to mindshare among buyers, right? And the buyer choosing you on a repeat basis to transact, right? Supply, it might be unique in the beginning, but as the marketplace becomes more mature, there's more competitors, there's more tools to list directly into different marketplaces. Supply will not stay unique and it's not in the interest of any supplier to just stay with one marketplace. I mean, obviously they want to sell across all marketplaces, right? And so then it really becomes about buyer mindshare, right? And, you know, you can get that through brand, right? Be the dominant brand. You know, Airbnb obviously, you know, as an example, has an incredible brand around vacation properties and just kind of rentals in every single location. It could be around the breadth and depth of products, right? So, you know, I think this is the describing you've seen around Uber, right? Where you see like, you know, you can get everything from obviously transportation to Uber Eats. They think about, you know, kind of even kind of the ridesharing piece, like, sorry, a scooter piece in there. So they think about like, how can I become this super app that has a buyer manager for all sorts of needs, right? And obviously then become the one-stop shop for buyers. So it really switches very quickly from supply to demand and buyer mindshare and really kind of making that kind of the primary focus.