Marketplaces and SaaS platforms

Investing in Wrapbook - Andreessen Horowitz

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

The Cold Start Problem

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

Introducing the Second Edition of “The Guide to Marketplaces” - Version One

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 ...

What's next for marketplace startups? Reinventing the $10 trillion service economy, that's what. at andrewchen

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

Four Questions Every Marketplace Startup Should Be Able to Answer

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

Unbundling Craigslist Garners Big Funding - $8.87 Billion Raised to Date by Startups

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...

a16z Podcast: What’s Next for Marketplace Startups (Hint: Services) – Andreessen Horowitz

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

The Passion Economy and the Future of Work

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

How to Kickstart and Scale a Marketplace Business – Phase 1: Crack the Chicken-and-Egg Problem (Part 1/4)

“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...

difference between Marketplaces vs. SaaS - a16z

How Billion Dollar Marketplaces Are Built with Marco Zappacosta, Co-Founder & CEO of Thumbtack

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

Required Reading for Marketplace Entrepreneurs

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

Shopify's Tobi Lütke on Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman

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.

B2B Marketplaces Revisited - Version One

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...