Three Questions with Bala Subramaniam: Marketplaces
I recently caught up with my good friend Bala Subramaniam, who is the Head of Fulfillment at Instacart. You may remember Bala’s talk on supply-demand equilibrium at our data-driven marketplace meetup back in May 2017. Bala is a seasoned product, business, and technology leader. Before Instacart, he was at LinkedIn and Microsoft. I always learn a ton […]
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 […]
Data is the New Oil
In recent years “Data is the new oil” has become a frequently used phrase in tech and investor circles to describe the incredible rise in the importance of data for today’s economy. Some of the world’s most valuable tech companies are built on tremendous data network effects and access to unique data: Google, Facebook, Amazon, […]
The Redistribution of Network Effects in Cryptocurrencies
Cryptocurrencies have strong network effects, built around the concept of mining. The more miners participate, the cheaper mining gets and the more quickly transactions are validated. (On a side note, this has actually not be true as of late for Bitcoin as it ran into scaling issues which is driving up mining costs). In fact, […]