Our Top Posts from 2018
Happy new year! Each week we like share our thoughts on a range of topics from vertical markets to general startup advice and our reflections on investing. We’re proud to say that we wrote a blog post every week in 2018 – and we’ve done that now for the past three years. In case you […]
Where are the opportunities for the next venture-scale marketplace business?
Here’s a question that we have been getting a lot lately: Do you still invest in marketplaces? The answer is YES! We love their network effects and continue to invest in them. In a tweetstorm last week, our friend Andrew Chen listed the 20 best links he’s seen on marketplaces and included us on the […]
Introducing the Second Edition of “The Guide to Marketplaces”
Note: We’ve updated this handbook — read the latest and greatest 3rd edition here! About two years ago, we put together The Guide to Marketplaces. It compiled many of the insights we’ve learned from working with great marketplace companies and analyzing the industry. One third of Version One portfolio companies are marketplace companies, and with […]
Who will be the Stripe for insurance?
A few years ago, we began to see SaaS companies integrate payment processing into their software. This push to integrate payments was due to a couple of factors. First, it offers a better user experience – why send somebody off-platform to pay for a product or settle an invoice? Next, adding payments to a platform […]
Blockchain’s impact on marketplaces: what’s the future for decentralized marketplaces?
Nearly two years ago, we published our first ebook, A Guide to Marketplaces. Towards the end, we touched briefly on emerging marketplace types and included decentralized marketplaces in the mix. At the time, OpenBazaar was still in beta. Since then, we’ve been closely following the evolution of blockchain technology and looking at the potential impact […]