Thumbtack

You know, if we look at marketplaces, the likes of Uber in Southeast Asia here, we have, you know, similar types of platforms of food delivery if you're moving house and so on.

But the marketplaces where you find experts seem to just take a little bit longer to have a gigantic success.

Why do you think they just take longer to succeed? Are there some DNA characteristics behind them?

Yeah, I think so.

It's the right observation.

The way I'd characterize it is what's Emerge to date and sort of in order has been first kind of traditional e-commerce, you know, things you could buy from Amazon or any other kind of retailer.

Then we got sort of like travel and that category got eaten.

More recently, we've got sort of local, primarily through delivery of restaurants and mobility in terms of transportation.

On the spectrum of purchases, these all skew much more to the commodity end.

I would guess that the average basket, average purchase across those marketplaces is sub $50.

And whether it's a tennis racket, a ride to the airport, a pizza for dinner these are higher frequency sort of commodity purchases where what mediates you as a buyer sort of deciding who to use and when to use it is speed price and sort of like consistency reliability i think it's very different when you're talking about hiring a human and you know this exchange of like human capital is one that's a just much more subtle non-commodity personalized it also in our category happens to be very high ticket you're spending about a thousand dollars of purchase and there's a lot that could go wrong so the cost of failure is even higher what this means is that yes you want things to be easy and convenient you know we're still lazy at our core but what mediates this purchase is actually certainty and confidence and peace of mind.

And that's actually a harder plane to achieve.

And there's more dimensions that go into that.

And that's what we've been kind of working towards in various ways over all these years.

And when you think about AI, I think it's uniquely well sort of suited to addressing those

kinds of questions.

You know, when I speak to founders and they say they're starting a marketplaces company, I'm like, do you really want to do this? You know, normally there's a two-sided marketplace.

Sometimes there's a three-sided marketplace.

And honestly, I think founders get too much flack for building marketplaces.

Why do you think they do get so many critiques when building marketplaces? Is it really as bad as people seem to be?

They're very hard to get going in terms of sort of the jumpstarting of them.

I think it is... uniquely challenging it's why in our sector despite you know the almost trillion dollars of spend there's very few startups left at this point you have the kind of public company angs and yelps that have been at it even longer than we have and then very few almost none of the startups made it and so yeah these These marketplaces are hard to get going and they really winnow out a lot of the competition.

On the flip side, if you're able to be one of those marketplaces that does achieve scale and does achieve kind of compounding growth, that's kind of the best place to be.

And so the prize is what motivates people to try, despite the challenge being what it

is.

You know, if we look at marketplaces, the likes of Uber in Southeast Asia here, we have, you know, similar types of platforms of food delivery if you're moving house and so on.

But the marketplaces where you find experts seem to just take a little bit longer to have a gigantic success.

Why do you think they just take longer to succeed? Are there some DNA characteristics behind them?

Yeah, I think so.

It's the right observation.

The way I'd characterize it is what's Emerge to date and sort of in order has been first kind of traditional e-commerce, you know, things you could buy from Amazon or any other kind of retailer.

Then we got sort of like travel and that category got eaten.

More recently, we've got sort of local, primarily through delivery of restaurants and mobility in terms of transportation.

On the spectrum of purchases, these all skew much more to the commodity end.

I would guess that the average basket, average purchase across those marketplaces is sub $50.

And whether it's a tennis racket, a ride to the airport, a pizza for dinner these are higher frequency sort of commodity purchases where what mediates you as a buyer sort of deciding who to use and when to use it is speed price and sort of like consistency reliability i think it's very different when you're talking about hiring a human and you know this exchange of like human capital is one that's a just much more subtle non-commodity personalized it also in our category happens to be very high ticket you're spending about a thousand dollars of purchase and there's a lot that could go wrong so the cost of failure is even higher what this means is that yes you want things to be easy and convenient you know we're still lazy at our core but what mediates this purchase is actually certainty and confidence and peace of mind.

And that's actually a harder plane to achieve.

And there's more dimensions that go into that.

And that's what we've been kind of working towards in various ways over all these years.

And when you think about AI, I think it's uniquely well sort of suited to addressing those

kinds of questions.

You know, when I speak to founders and they say they're starting a marketplaces company, I'm like, do you really want to do this? You know, normally there's a two-sided marketplace.

Sometimes there's a three-sided marketplace.

And honestly, I think founders get too much flack for building marketplaces.

Why do you think they do get so many critiques when building marketplaces? Is it really as bad as people seem to be?

They're very hard to get going in terms of sort of the jumpstarting of them.

I think it is... uniquely challenging it's why in our sector despite you know the almost trillion dollars of spend there's very few startups left at this point you have the kind of public company angs and yelps that have been at it even longer than we have and then very few almost none of the startups made it and so yeah these These marketplaces are hard to get going and they really winnow out a lot of the competition.

On the flip side, if you're able to be one of those marketplaces that does achieve scale and does achieve kind of compounding growth, that's kind of the best place to be.

And so the prize is what motivates people to try, despite the challenge being what it

is.