Max Brun walks through OfferUp's 350-person org structure, built lean around engineering and sales. The company learned hard lessons scaling from 40 to 150 people in 18 months, then restructured to move faster. About 13% of U.S. auto dealers now use the platform.
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What is the OfferUp kind of team like and maybe even like a marketplace kind of org structure? So I'm sure there's a lot of moving pieces behind the scenes.
Yeah, we have about 350 employees now. And primarily, like, if you think of the arc, we don't need to be a massive company in my opinion. We can be pretty lean. Like, we're not building warehouses and, you know, we don't have a lot of operational costs because we're not in the middle of the transaction. We're just connecting 2 different people. And so primarily, you know, I always say, you know, what we are ramping up more now is marketing again. Like we hadn't marketed in a while. And so that's going to be a bigger concentration of, I'd say, overall capital, but not a lot of people on that team. But engineering and product is probably, you know, a good chunk of the company and sales. We have a big sales team because we sell our product to Like auto dealers, local power sellers. That is a growing segment for us. And so for those that may have been around in the eBay era, when I first joined eBay, there was no power sellers on eBay. And then all of a sudden power sellers started using it because there was an audience there. And then now it became, you know, what eBay is today. And so we're kind of in that, I'd say that inflection point. There's, it's crazy to see we have power sellers that are selling millions of dollars worth of inventory using this, like, kill me. Like, you need a desktop interface, you integrate with your inventory management system. Like, no, but it's awesome to see that the— what people are starting to do on their own because they're seeing value, you know, in doing that. So I think, I think power sellers are— will continue to be a big area and will continue to probably scale our sales team. Like, they're— we're supporting, like I said, auto dealers, we probably have 13% of all the auto dealers in the country. that are using OfferUp. So how do we continue to grow our autos business? So that's kind of the overall, you know, makeup. And then we try to keep it pretty lean, like, you know, have an executive team and a leadership team, but have a lot of the very long kind of bench of work. And I've seen us overscale probably last year. I think we overscaled and we went, we slowed way down. We stopped delivering product at the rate I thought we should. And then we made a bunch of org changes, and now we're moving much faster again. So that's something to be aware of. I kind of, you know, it sounds bad to say, but like, yes, you need people, but a lot of times you don't need as many people as you think. And so as you're scaling, if you're not on it, guess what? Your people are going to hire more people. And then you're going to wonder, like, why did my company get twice as big, but now I'm moving twice as slow? So it's, I don't have a good answer for that other than You just got to be mindful as you're scaling and how to try to navigate that. And I always felt like it was messy because it is, you know, when you go from 40 employees to 150 in 18 months, you're going to break a lot of stuff. Just that's the nature of it.
