Two investors discuss why B2B marketplaces offer more opportunity than consumer startups. They note that consumer companies like DoorDash and Lyft get most of the attention, while B2B has less competition and more room to grow. Move.co, a real estate marketplace, serves as a Harvard Business School case study.
Chapters
I feel like we're seeing the kind of the rise of B2B marketplaces, right? Like when it comes to kind of trends and opportunities. And, you know, I actually was going back and listening to one of your chats, you know, previously where you mentioned where you thought that you might invest like 50% kind of in consumer and then 50% B2B with NFX. But this, you know, looks a little bit more kind of like 80/20 B2B. So do you, on that note, you know, do you feel like it's as far as, you know, maybe consumer's kind of more competitive or like there's just like kind of more white space in B2B or how do you kind of think about that?
Yeah, I think both is true. I think there's more white space in B2B. I mean, the, a lot of the business folks have been slow to adopt software, whereas the consumers adopted it very quickly, both with their laptops and with their iPhones. And, and I think that, you know, look, anything that's exciting and colorful, a lot of people gravitate to, right? So when we talk about our big wins, we still talk about, you know, DoorDash and Lyft and Poshmark and whatnot, because these are things that people know. And so there's just more competition from founders and VCs who want to invest in colorful things that people know. Whereas, you know, the first, you know, B2B marketplace case study Harvard Business School ever did, they just did it 2 years ago, you know, so it's kind of just getting going. It's Move.co is the name of the case and it's one of our companies and it was the protagonist is the CEO, Steven Zhu and me. and whether we should invest in them or not. And, you know, so the B2B stuff is just being researched because it's kind of boring. And, you know, it's not as colorful, not as quick to grow. You know, you have to really understand and care about a lot of esoterica. And most people aren't willing to do that. They're more interested in shoes. They're more interested in food, right? They're in travel. You know, it's like all the fun stuff, yoga. You know, like that's what most people like. And so yeah, I think if you're looking for really good hardcore businesses, you're going to be in the B2B phase this decade.
