Sarah Tavel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, I love Hipcamp by the way. Okay, well, amazing. Well, if you have a tent and a sleeping bag and you're not afraid to put your thermos in a running river and clean the water, then that was the early days of Hipcamp. It was for the hardcore camper, which itself, feels like a very small market. It's not actually that small, but it is a smaller market than other people might themselves get comfortable with. But then, what would happen is that hosts on Hipcamp, and I stayed at one of these Hipcamps, and it's just such an incredible experience, the host started to make a little bit of money from Hipcamp. And they took that money, and they started to invest in structures on their land. So in the beginning, maybe it was a fire pit or a bathroom or shower, and then, it became a tree house or a yurt. And so, what happened with Hipcamp is that, in the beginning, it was going after this very different market segment, but as they became successful, made their landowners money, those landowners invested that money back into their land and started to open up the market opportunity for Hipcamp, into people more like me, that are glampers, that want that experience in nature, but maybe don't want to pitch a tent to have it. And so, that's kind of one of those examples of an underestimated market that ends up growing beyond that. There's warning stories here too. I always think of Etsy. So Etsy, I remember, actually, when I was at Pinterest, being driven crazy by Etsy, because Etsy was all about handmade goods. But as they were running up to going public, they started to chase GMV. And what that looked like is that they started to have a lot of mass produced goods on Etsy. It drove me crazy at Pinterest, because there was this one seller of these scarves, that was clearly a mass produced scarves, and they were spamming Pinterest constantly with pins of those scarves. And it was just very clear that Etsy had kind of lost its way in that moment. They would start to chase GMV growth. They were going beyond what they actually stood for, and they ended up having a real reaction from the sellers that were making handmade goods and the buyers. It was this big erosion of trust, and they ended up, I don't know if it was related, but it ended up precipitating, I think, a CEO change, to the CEO that is there now and who has obviously done an incredible job building Etsy from there. Yeah, we had the VP of product from Etsy on the podcast. And we talked about that actually, what that transition was like, because it was pretty dramatic. They went from very warm, fuzzy, cozy vibes to, "We need to build a business that lasts. Let's change the way we operate." While we're on this topic of what gets you excited about marketplaces, this is something Mike suggested I ask you, so I love that you get excited when it's a small market, very contrarian, what else, when founders are pitching you, let's say with a marketplace, what else do you look for? Whatever you can share off the top of your head that you look for that gets you excited about marketplace.…

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