acrowdedspace.com

As everyone with access to the internet knows, Elizabeth Warren recently shared her hopes for breaking up some of the monopolistic power of so-called “platform utilities” or, as we call them, marketplaces. Amazon’s goal is to lower prices, decrease shipping time, and increase selection—value propositions that consumers benefit from tremendously. While I don’t believe any legislation is necessary, if you insist, any theoretical legislation should be focused only on allowing for fair competition of Amazon-built products vs other vendors on the marketplace. Also, smartly run marketplaces already enforce fair competition for their own products vs the various vendors.

I believe it’s naive to think that the same approach can both identify the worst and the best in a marketplace. Let’s talk about what elements could truly improve the ability of feedback systems to identify the best? I believe that behavioral data — data about time on page, click-thru %, % like rate, etc will be one of the more meaningful opportunities to identify the best in any network of lots of people or goods. Asking for relative vs absolute value (who’s better / best) 5) Using more social signals (like Dribbble)

The interesting thing that developed was a separation of time to discuss short term goals and long term brainstorming. It’s important to have time to talk about risky ideas, just as long as it doesn’t detract from the first priority of continuing to hit growth goals. When I was running the sales and customer service team in the early days, like most services, we would have a variety of complaints come in from buyers, freelancers, and other disgruntled people. My time at oDesk / Upwork directly led to my current venture capital career.

The theory is that the great big markets have been built and have strong network effects so any new startups will be stuck going after tiny markets or hopelessly competing for big ones. You just need to overcome the existing network effects, but since customer expectations are constantly improving and many network effects (without reinforcement) tend to plateau after a certain amount of scale, it’s only a matter of time before a big opportunity presents itself for the taking. 3) Niche Managed Marketplaces Now, by itself, that might not seem like it is a huge opportunity to just pick off 1 of 100 categories on a big marketplace, but when a managed marketplace attacks a vertical, they can typically take a much higher rake than a traditional horizontal marketplace and also have the opportunity to go much deeper in the industry. Mobile is Still the Next Big Thing – every time a new platform emerges, there will be opportunities to build new marketplaces if the incumbents don’t move fast enough.