225. Crisis Coverage w/ Sarah Tavel - Consumer Marketplace Investing; Why Aggregate GMV is a Red Herring; and Minimum Viable Happiness as the Key to Market Leadership

Sarah Tavel of Benchmark joins Nick on a special Crisis Coverage installment to discuss Consumer Marketplace Investing; Why Aggregate GMV is a Red Herring; and Minimum Viable Happiness as the Key to Market Leadership. In this episode, we cover: Background and path to venture? Quick overview of the thesis and your focus at Benchmark What are your thoughts on platform VC? What tactics or approaches do you use in the process of "scaling your founder"? You sit on the board of some companies, such as HipCamp, that have been greatly affected by the pandemic -- What are some of the creative responses you've seen from portfolio companies? Is there anything fundamental to Marketplace businesses that you think will shift as a result of the crisis and changes in consumer behavior? In the food delivery space, we recently witnessed DoorDash unseating the larger incumbent: GrubHub, with the greatest market share. DoorDash started after PostMates and years after Grubhub... how'd they do it? Do you currently see or do you predict more situations where a startup capturing more supply will lead to displacement of a large tech company as mkt share leader?... if so, in what markets? Recently, you published a series of newsletters talking about the hierarchy of marketplaces... first off, what are the three phases that you've outlined here? Why is a push to aggregate GMV across many markets, less important than dominance in one market? What is Minimum Viable Liquidity? How do you define/measure happiness? At what levels do you know you've reached MVL or MVH? Level 2 of your Marketplace framework... Can you talk about what it means for a marketplace to "tip" and how do marketplace based businesses achieve this? Is there something specific that happens w/ the metrics of a businesses that show that the marketplace is tipping? Do different stages of fundraising map to these phases? The third phase you refer to is the 'Outrun' phase... walk us through the main focus areas in this phase. Homogeneity of the buy-side as a negative... can you expand on this? How does your evaluation of a marketplace based business differ whether it's a b2b company or a b2c company, if at all? Let's say you are approached to invest in a Consumer Marketplace company with $10M in GMV, a 25% take rate, and 20% MoM growth for the last 6 months. Catch is you can only ask for 3 data points to make your decision. What 3 questions do you ask for? To listen more, please visit http://fullratchet.net/podcast-episodes/ for all of our other episodes. Also, follow us on twitter @TheFullRatchet for updates and more information.