Sarah Tavel: belief

Transcript context

…Okay, cool. Let's talk about dominating the marketplace and what that looks like, and how you do that. How do you dominate a marketplace and win, Sarah Tavel? So yes, level three, and this is the one I feel like every founder who starts a marketplace, they're chomping at the bit to be able to really focus now on growth. Because all along, I feel like we've been holding you back of just, "Focus, focus, focus." And what you're doing through level one and level two as you're honing what you're building, is that you're basically building a playbook. You don't yet know whether this playbook is repeatable. It's not always the case that the dynamics of one market is the same elsewhere. I'll take REKKI as an example. In the London food scene, there's significant fragmentation of suppliers. In the Berlin food scene, that's not the case. And so it's not always the case that whatever you did in one market works in another market, but usually there's something that rhymes. There's a hint of what is going to work. So what happens now is you have a market that's tipping, and the question then is, are you ready to take your eye off the ball and start to diffuse your focus into other markets? So there's kind of three vectors then that any marketplace can grow at this point. The first vector is within the existing market where you already are tipping that market. You as a founder then have to make a very personal decision, that what you're looking at is the context of your competitive situation. So if you're tipping a market and you have no other competitor going after that market, you're the first one to see this opportunity, then I think you have two things that you want to do at the same time to grow. The first thing is that you want to take the existing market that you're in and you just keep doing what you're doing, and you may even find ways to stretch beyond that initial market that you're going after- ... Beyond that initial market that you're going after, within the same market. And so, what I mean by that is Uber went from black cars to UberX to UberPool. They kept on finding ways in the geographies where they were already dominant to keep on getting stronger by expanding the use cases that they serve. So you have continuing to grow and penetrate the market, find ways to answer more use cases in that market that you can do, especially if you don't have a lot of competition. And then, the third vector of growth is you want to then try to get as many plates spinning in as many markets that you can handle as quickly as possible. And this is like the blitz scale, right? This is the land grab. And again, your equity value that you're going to create is going to come from dominating the market. And so you don't want to plant a thousand flags in a thousand markets at the same time, spread yourself too thin, and not decidedly win any one market. You always want to put more wood behind fewer arrows. The more scale that you have, the more cities or categories where you have the flywheel starting to spin and you're starting to see the tipping point happen, the stronger your company will be. arrows. The more scale that you have, the more cities or categories where you have the flywheel starting to spin and you're starting to see the tipping point happen, the stronger your company will be. Each market that you get, you have scale in, where you'll have contribution profit. You take that contribution profit, you invest it in new markets. The more markets and contribution profit you have, the more venture capital you'll be able to raise, which you then reinvest in growing. And so, this is really the place where you are, as aggressively as possible, while, at the same time, not losing sight of the fact that your goal is, in each market individually, to dominate that market, you're trying to grow into as much possible market opportunity as you possibly can.…

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