Pete Flint breaks down how investors evaluate marketplace founders. They look for contrarian insights, tactics for balancing supply and demand growth, and whether the founder can build a strong team. The best founders see something others miss.
Chapters
Hey, Peter, I actually have a question for you myself on that. So are there like a few kind of questions, maybe 1 to 3 questions that you have to kind of evaluate, can this founder build a category-defining marketplace?
Yeah. So one of them is, what do you know that other people don't know? And this stands from the kind of the observation that most successful startups are somewhat contrarian, contrarian in writing. There's a lot written about this stuff on the web. So really, for you to be a breakout success, you need to think differently from other people or have an insight that not many people have. And so that's, you know, that's fundamental to starting a successful business. The, you know, the other, the other component, which is critical is like, you know, my background is really on growth side of marketplaces. So how do you just really, how do you unlock that and attract supply and demand? And what is the novel tactics? And how does that really work? And really, it's both, you know, It's sure you can say it's proven demand, but you know I need to get supplies. Like sure, but you still need to attract demand. You know you still need to be really really good at demand. You don't want to manufacture demand, but you need to tap into that demand. So really thinking about you know the the real granular details around. Growth hacking and not growth hacking, but growth marketing, and really that supply-demand acquisition. And then the, probably the third thing to really build an enduring company is the team and culture. You know, who are the, who you're going to hire next? You know, with this raise, talk about the team, what's missing, what's important, why is that what you need, setting a high bar for people you hire, being thoughtful about the culture and foundation. Time and time again, we see that the, the correlation between founders recruiting really great people post we've invested correlates with significant long-term success. And so if you, you know, very simply, like, who are you gonna hire? Give me some LinkedIn profiles. Like, who's, you know, what kind of profile are you looking for? Like, why is that? Who's next? And if you're, if they, you know, have impressive people that they're talking to, then, you know, that's a great predictor as well.
