Marketplace innovation driven by crypto
Marketplace innovation comes in waves and we can point to a handful of major trends over the past two decades: Right now, the most exciting area in marketplace innovation is blockchain-enabled marketplaces, especially with what is happening in decentralized finance. The Ethereum ecosystem has enabled the emergence of a tremendous number of protocols, platforms and […]
Classifying marketplaces in a 2×2 matrix
In a recent Invest Like The Best podcast, the guest, who goes by the pseudonym Modest Proposal, described a 2×2 matrix for segmenting marketplace types. It’s a simple, yet very effective way to think about the differences in online marketplaces, from the original product marketplaces like eBay to the emerging services marketplaces. One axis represents […]
The Future of Education
I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of education lately. It’s clear that our current model is beyond broken. The very young are taught to grin and bear twelve years of compulsory passive absorption. Upon graduation, they’re then incentivized to take on >$30k in debt to study random subjects which may or may not […]
Announcing our investment in DemandStar, a marketplace for government procurement
Today we’re excited to announce that we led DemandStar’s $2m seed round. The Seattle-based company provides an online marketplace for business-to-government commerce – it connects local and national suppliers with government procurement officers. It should come as no surprise that government procurement is riddled with inefficiency. $1.5 trillion is spent in the local government procurement […]
The API-as-a-marketplace
As we’ve been spending time on B2B marketplaces and dev tools/platforms, we’ve come to realize that there’s an interesting sub-category that combines elements of both: the API-as-a-marketplace. What is an API-as-a-marketplace? Just like a traditional marketplace, an API-as-a-marketplace has two sides: suppliers and buyers. But, the interface is different. In a traditional marketplace, discovery and […]