Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, and I would say I'm pretty skeptical of those because they're just not really building the network effects on the demand side. They're just more like SaaS businesses. I think those struggle to be multi-$100 million in revenue businesses because the take rate is typically like a third or a fourth of what a DoorDash can charge. Perfect segue to my next question, and I only have a couple more. There's this concept and I think pull from marketplace founders to add a SaaS tool, eventually, and have both business models. Then there's often the reverse, where a SaaS company wants to add a marketplace. I know this question is something you get a lot, and so just a question for you. Does this work? Are there examples where they've added this additional way of making money? Which direction do you find is most often successful and not successful? The canonical example that a lot of these founders use is OpenTable. That always felt really unfulfilling to me because it's very old at this point. Probably the younger people listening to the podcast are like, "What's OpenTable?" I think that business has incredibly underperformed the market it operated in. It had a good exit. It sold for $2.6 billion, I think, to Booking.com, but Booking subsequently wrote that value down below a billion, so that's not really the outcome I think we're looking for, traditionally, in marketplaces.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.