Marketplaces and SaaS platforms

Project-based workers are an exploding population: 59 million Americans performed freelance work in 2020, representing 22% year-over-year growth an... (2021)

A venture capitalist draws on expertise developed at the premier venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and as an executive at Uber to address ... (2021)

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 ... (2018)

[Dear readers, this essay is on the future of marketplaces. Is there still room for marketplace startups to innovate? We answer, emphatically, yes!... (2018)

The six years I spent building products at Airbnb, scaling the marketplace over 100X, transformed how I understand the work of starting a marketpla... (2017)

In 2012, Spark Capital took a look at the marketplace startups carving out niches from CraigsList. Today, those startups have raised $8.87B in fund... (2015)

The past and future of marketplace startups -- where are we? Ever since eBay popularized an internet meeting place for buyers and sellers of, well,... (2019)

On new creator platforms, individuality is a feature, not a bug. "The top-earning writer on the paid newsletter platform Substack earns more tha... (2019)

“Everyone's always looking for the hack - what's the channel that will unlock something big? But every time we looked for a reason we weren't growi... (2019)

NFX Managing Partner Pete Flint talks to Thumbtack co-founder & CEO Marco Zappacosta about building billion dollar marketplaces. (2020)

The marketplace canon: 20 recently published pieces that helped shape our thinking on the business dynamics, historical context, and future of mark... (2020)

Shopify's Tobi Lütke knows the secret to massive scale. It's be a platform. Build a virtuous cycle and you’ll emerge the biggest winner of all. (2020)

Twenty years ago – in the midst of the Web 1.0 boom – expectations were high for B2B (product) marketplaces. The assumption was that online platfor... (2020)