Olivia identifies greenfield markets ripe for marketplace startups: AI, blue-collar labor, home rentals, and home services. She argues that even dominant platforms like Craigslist and eBay leave room for innovation when they become calcified, and advises a data-driven approach to finding product-market fit.
And Olivia, for you, talk about if you had a request for startup, what are you looking for? Any particular opportunities and spaces in the market?
Yes. We try not to be too maybe prescriptive in our own thinking about what is the exact marketplace that needs to be built, because the data will tell us. The consumer base will tell us. If the flywheel starts going on a marketplace, it's really, really hard to stop it. To use the Airbnb example again, if you were kind of very rigid in your thinking around air beds is never going to be a big business, you would have missed this massive investment opportunity. So we do try to be open-minded with marketplaces in particular around, look, even if we aren't the user yet, maybe we will be someday, or maybe there's this other big community or market. That being said, there are a couple big markets that we haven't seen maybe a massive, you know, multibillion-dollar marketplace emerge yet. We're like, okay, maybe it's AI, maybe it's, you know, something else, market timing that could emerge. So, like, you know, blue-collar labor, like how people find jobs that aren't necessarily the typical office job, like that's still unsolved in many ways. Home rentals in many ways is still unsolved. Home services in many ways is still unsolved. So any of those big kind of greenfield markets, many of them actually still have room for a massive company. Some of the ideas have been taken already, but there's a lot still to build.
Well, and I was going to say, by the way, I think sometimes you also end up with products that— categories that have dominant products, but then they end up being a little bit calcified.
Yes, exactly.
I was actually just at a dinner with Sean Rad, who's one of the founders of Tinder. And Tinder, it's Kind of a marketplace. It is. It is. Okay? It is. No one can tell me differently. And so, you know, and I was asking, you know, Sean, because it's so amazing that they came up with the swiping functionality, like, pretty much right off the bat as they were building it. Actually, this guy, John Bedeen, who is, you know, iOS engineer on Tinder, you know, built it. And I'm like, is this all there is going to be? Is this, you know, are our great-great-grandkids going to be swiping away. There's got to be more, you know? So anyway, so it's all up to the Apple HMD to make dating different.
Yeah. No, but exactly. Like, there was— I feel like when I first started as an investor, it was like the unbundling of Craigslist was the big marketplace graph. And then maybe 5 years later, it was like the unbundling of eBay. And then, you know, there's just more and more opportunity every few years that go by to build these, like, amazing marketplaces that take this thing that was working and kind of adapt it and update it to like the next generation of consumers.
