This content was created by Max Brun. This content was uploaded by Max Brun. This is a YouTube Q&A titled "Sarah Tavel Q&A On Marketplace Learnings From Working With Bill Gurley" (published 2023-09-20). It’s a short conversational excerpt from a Q&A/interview with Sarah Tavel (two speakers), in which Speaker B (appearing to be Tavel) recounts lessons from working with investor Bill Gurley about marketplace strategy — emphasizing the value of small, defensible markets (example: Hipcamp), how Gurley challenged her assumptions, her deep learning and revision of a “hierarchy of marketplaces,” and the confidence vs. competence two-by-two framework. Content type: YOUTUBE.
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I had a question for you myself, and it was that actually a few founders asked and then was on the Google Doc. But of course, you know, Bill Gurley is a legend in the world of marketplaces. So, you know, working with him, you know, on the team there, has there maybe been any kind of like specific learnings or lessons from him as far as when it comes to marketplaces?
Man, what would I— how do I even answer that? Because there's just so many things. Certainly, The whole thing of focusing on a market that, you know, a small market that you can run the table on has influenced, like, you know, I remember when I brought Hipcamp, like I looked at Hipcamp when I was at Greylock with a seed and the feedback I got was just like, ooh, this is a small market. Like these guys, like they're not gonna build anything valuable. And then I brought Hipcamp into Benchmark for the A, Alyssa had kind of reached out to me where we were rekindling our relationship. And Bill was like, I don't care how small the market is. Like, she's making money out of nowhere. Like, and that's, he has a blog post making it, you know, making money off thin air or something like that, which was just like this idea that, you know, people have land, they don't have it online. You bring that land online and people were making tens of thousands of dollars, you know, a month with that. Like, oh my God, all of a sudden you're making money out of, you know, thin air basically. Like, you can then imagine how, where you go from there to help people generate even more revenue. And so, I, you know, that idea really came from him. The second thing I'll say is like my, the first draft of my hierarchy of marketplaces, you guys, like it wasn't good. I was like, a lot of these things, like I thought I understood marketplaces. I like did the whole thing and I sent it to him and he very, you know, and then we like sat down and he went through it. And it was like this, like, oh wow, I thought I understood it. I really don't. And, or I did on a surface. I didn't deeply understand marketplaces. And I ended up for like, I don't know how many more months then I went on a learning journey myself to like really, really, really understand and learn and synthesize like that. Piece took me hundreds, more than 100 hours easily. I would say a couple hundred hours to like think through it, synthesize it, and a lot of it was like this moment I had with Bill. Have you guys ever heard of this two by two? That's confidence versus competence, where like a new someone starting something new. Starts high confidence, low competence. And then you go from high confidence to low confidence, and so you're low confidence, low competence. And then you go to high competence but still low confidence. And then you go up to high, high. Bill helped me with that thing.
