I think when you're running a marketplace you tend to sit in your ivory tower a little bit looking at stats and thinking I'm like if only we could get people to do x it'd be better for everyone right I certainly you know did that in my career I think um that's missing the point that we're humans and I
think sometimes we act in ways that are non -deterministic uh or kind of intuitive but my take is I'm a huge believer in market forces and empowerment so provide guard rails for what a good experience is near marketplace set a clear bar for quality and provide the right coaching and tools for supply
to be successful and then take a step back and see where the gaps are and invest more and hands -on tactics just to close those gaps more specifically today my guest is ben lazier ben was vp of product and growth at thumbtack where he rebuilt the product team and thumbtacks growth strategy re -architected
the revenue model and helped 3x thumbtacks growth within three years prior to thumbtack ben was at lift for over six years where he was employee number 30 and led product and growth for the driver's side of the business and at one point reached 1 % of us workers driving for lift every month he currently
spends this time advising marketplace teams and founders teaching a reforge course on marketplace growth and most recently started a healthcare company called nura that connects you to a care advocate to help you navigate the healthcare system in the u .s in our conversation we go many layers deep on the many
key elements of building and scaling a marketplace business including what to focus on pre -product market fit how to know which side of the marketplace to prioritize what product market fit looks like how to track liquidity what causes most marketplaces to fail and how to avoid a bunch of examples of really
clever growth strategies especially on the supply side and some really interesting stories about how lift was able to compete with uber early on with one tenth of the resources as a bonus ben also shares insights into how the european product market is different from the u .s product market and what he
encourages european companies to change in order to operate more effectively and be more innovative this episode is for anyone building or thinking about building a marketplace business if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or youtube it's
the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously with that i bring you ben lasier ben thank you so much for being here welcome to the podcast thank you so much it's so good to be here thanks for having me it's absolutely my pleasure okay so you are one of the most
knowledgeable and experienced product leaders in the world on building and scaling a marketplace company and so i want to spend the bulk of our time talking about and essentially extracting as much wisdom out of your brain on how to build and scale a marketplace business so that founders and teams that are struggling
with building their marketplace company or just thinking about building a marketplace business can save a lot of time a lot of pain uh how does that sound to you that sounds amazing that's a high bar but i will try to lead up to your expectations i'm confident we will hit that bar let me start with just
setting a little context and for folks that aren't super familiar with what is a marketplace business they hear this term marketplace company uh what's the simplest way to understand what makes a company a marketplace company in a marketplace business i mean like you mentioned i love marketplaces i
think uh i've been building and scaling marketplaces for you know i think almost 15 years now and wow i feel like they add just such a fascinating dimension to the challenge that we work on as spms you know it's this hidden dimension that you yet uncover when you work on marketplaces and i think on paper
what makes a marketplace is pretty straightforward right it's two or more sides that are distinct uh you know from one another and they provide value to each other and then you have an intermediary trying to facilitate that exchange of value in the middle so that's pretty simple sort of explanation i
think in in practice it's always a little bit more nuanced on the fringes right you have all those interesting dimensions like how involved is the intermediary defines how managed the marketplace is something like krixis is super hands -off unmanaged and something like lyft starts to be more into the semi
-managed where the platform significantly shapes the transaction and this exchange of value right so um i think that's how i see it but there's all all those sort of like fascinating you know variations of marketplaces i guess this episode is brought to you by epo epo is a next generation ab testing
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i want to get back to that because that's a really important point but just just to even clarify this point a key part of a marketplace is that the company doesn't own the supply right that's in a sense kind of what defines their marketplace versus they're just selling stuff totally yes yes and i think
again like you have companies that claim to be sort of managed marketplaces i think depending on like how you want to look with investors perhaps you'll pick like one angle or the other but that's where you get into like you know sort of gray waters but yeah like the marketplace implies this concept
of too independent and you know supposedly autonomous parties that you help connect and and provide this exchange of value for them awesome okay so let's come back to that because that's a really important topic and it's something that every marketplace kind of trends towards or thinks about is just
like we're gonna control the supply we're gonna manage it we're gonna maybe own it in the future but let's come back to that so you work with a ton of marketplaces you've built a bunch of marketplaces what do you find is the biggest struggle to building a successful marketplace business the most common problem
people run into i think there's two types of challenges i guess there is uh you know when you're talking about creating a marketplace and then there's when you're talking about scaling a marketplace for creating a marketplace i see many founders that are pre -product market fit super eager to nerd out
on marketplace dynamics they're super excited to launch a marketplace we all are and they want to talk about supply and demand they want to look at all kinds of ratios they want to they show me economic papers and ask like how could we apply this principle to my company and here my advice is generally
always if you don't have product market fit if you don't have a good enough growth strategy for at least one side of your marketplace just forget about all this marketplace stuff right focus on this core exchange of value go deep with one side of the marketplace and see if you can rely on some crutch
some hack for the other side for the time being right you see companies like um you know Airbnb and thumbtack doing this with Craigslist pretty early on to jump sell their growth as just countless examples but you know don't get distracted by you know this shiny and cool sort of intellectually challenging
idea of working on a marketplace and nail the basics of your product market fit um at first so just to spend a little more time there to make this even more real so you're saying that pre -product market fit before you find that anyone really wants what you're building focus on figuring out a way to
grow one side of the marketplace so maybe just two quick follow -up questions how do you know which site to focus on initially and can you give an example i think thumbtack may be a good example of this of how they did that which side to focus on is like there's different approaches to this but generally
people will take the hardest side and so if you know uh for i'll take the example of thumbtack because we're going to talk about it so thumbtack is a home services marketplace to help you find plumbers electricians and um the sort of the the harder side there was uh was a demand like there is there's
supply you can like sort of look for you can open the yellow pages you can like find plumbers somewhere but the hardest question was can we go out there and can we find people to uh you know to who want to uh you know do something in the house we have like projects that need to be done right what is the core
growth strategy for us to to acquire those people to find them and what kind of retention can we create can we create a delightful experience for them uh you know to come back to our platform and want us to take care of their home for them right pick the hardest side is sort of my advice um and then
how some companies sort of do this again like i think there's a lot of different ways to do this but a common advice is find a way to jump start one side right find a way to like hack one side play one player mode is uh what it's also also called sometimes but you know try to find a way to tap into
existing channels that have one side of your marketplace are really latent um and so again you have countless businesses that have been built off of craigslist i think you know thumbtack was partially like one of them and the idea was like hey like we can find you know all those great pros on thumbtack
we can when we have someone who wants a job uh oh you want your kitchen remodel we can like you know behind the scenes go and post a job on craigslist and then we'll bring on like you know all the contractors who are like browsing craigslist looking for a job right we'll bring them to to our platform
that's an example of like how you know that way you worry around the core you worry about the core value proposition of can we get people to come back to our platform can we create this delightful exchange value are people trusting us do we have the right checks in place to make sure that you are hiring
throughout person uh what will make you come back and once that's done then you can focus around how do i build a flywheel on the supply side and how do i manage and how do i make sure i have enough plumbers for you know per market or something like that when you say buying the hard side how do you
find that any advice you can give founders and teams in general i would say it intuitively like the teams know like especially the teams are like in the weeds uh they know they know like well yeah we can get no x but what we really struggle with is getting students to look at this right that's sort
of your sign and i think um sometimes it takes you know someone else to like make you think about it to reflect like actually yes you're right like this side is it's obvious we know how to get it we just don't have the right supply for it and we don't know where to find the supply boom that's that's
the side that you should be focused on that then you find a way to like add source your demand subsidize it find some other way and like focus on on this side that you have no idea how to grow like that's that you should have a reliable growth strategy for for the site in my experience it's almost always
the supply side is what you need to work on because once you have awesome supply people are going to be really excited to tap it like uber drivers airbnb homes uh professionals on thumbtack is that your experience too yes i would say um supply is the hardest side maybe like eighty to ninety percent
of the time yeah i totally agree yeah i was trying to think of like counter examples but i can think of one i just know that there are yeah there's one i know which is rover based on research i did because it turned out it was really easy to find people who want to walk dogs and watch dogs for 50 bucks
an hour whatever it was like a very easy value prop and so that they had a wait list they just like so many people i also task grab it is the one i know about where they had so many people wanting to be taskers whatever they call them right i was going to mention that could be as well i heard there's
a core part of figure out how to grow that part how to grow the hard part generally the supply side you shared a couple examples are there any more like clever things you recall that you might be able to share of just ways people grew supply early on that could inspire people that are trying to figure
this out right now yeah i think there's a couple of you know uh like common like tactics i would say like pretty early on that um i think companies like rely on so we've talked about jump starting one side of the marketplace with you know like it may be with femtack and lift also leverage jump boards
um you have uh uh also a lot of companies like building like value -added services like pretty early on as like a core way of retaining supply like pretty early on like let's build you know a really compelling basket of value for the supply and this is going to be like the thing like appeals everyone
uh so uh you know like open table did this like really well with like all the restaurant services other things that i've seen people use like really well early on or uh like you know converting your your supply into demand or demand into like supply uh pretty early on so lift we tried that uh it actually
didn't work at lift but i know uh other marketplaces i've been like pretty successful with like you know with with that um just to make sure people understand that one it's a really interesting one is in the list example of being convincing drivers to become riders convincing riders to become drivers
and mostly the latter convincing riders to become drivers yeah exactly in our case that lift early on we were you know we had a wait list on the demand side because we just couldn't uh you know onboard enough supply and so we had this idea of like having a pop -up instead of saying like no drivers available
it would be like hey sorry all the drivers are taken do you want like people making 50 bucks an hour right now do you want like hop on your car and drive uh and we had like some conversions but it felt a little distracting to the overall experience and wasn't like a huge driver of uh of supply but i
know that for uber it actually was i think they had like a non like a relatively meaningful uh amount of supply coming wow how does that make you feel that uber figured out a better way to approach this and made it work that doesn't feel and it's a different audience you would think that the lift sort
of passenger and driver is sort of a more uh you know likely to like flip back and forth between the two um i don't know i don't know i um some cam at uber outdid you guys oh no yes on a couple of other things and we had to do them on a few other things so okay okay that's right so essentially what we've
been spending some time on here is just when you're starting a marketplace figure out which side you need to drive because that's what will unlock this opportunity there's a hard thing that nobody's ever done before and most of the time it's build a bunch of supply that nobody has done before and there's
all these tactics right to do that and all of this is as you coming back to kind of the main question i ask we've gone on this awesome tangent is uh pre -product market fit before you even know this is a thing spend time most of the time building supply to see if demand customers actually want this thing
right exactly cool and then i think there's a different set of challenges i think another like the other pitfall that i see um is uh so pre -product market fit people tend to be distracted by those marketplace dynamics like we talked about instead of doing what we just talked about for companies that have some
sort of scale and product market fit to me that the place where i see people getting tripped up most often is the concept of marketplace liquidity or how to manage the health of a marketplace and to me liquidity is how marketplaces win right it's it's this measure of your ability to match buyers and sellers
efficiently right it's it's how quickly and efficiently people can find what they're looking for on your platform so you can picture a Venn diagram one circle is this is what supply wants to sell and another circle is this is what demand wants to buy and your liquidity is you know the overlap between those
two circles right so for let's take the example of Lyft or Uber because we talked about them you know it might be for all the people who open the app with the intention to book a ride how many of those actually turn into a ride right and this metric um liquidity it's it's a direct multiplier on the efficiency
of your marketplace it's literally at the center of your vision it's what you exist as a marketplace is to connect the two right and it's it's also the ultimate engagement loop the more supply you have the more choice people have the better the service is the more likely it is that it turns into a transaction and the more
likely it is that they come back and so it's really this incredible sort of circle and what i see is people sort of you know uh missing how critical this component is in the marketplace uh struggle to define it for the business and most importantly is struggle to build like an actionable playbook against
it like okay like how do i manage this okay it's what do i do about it basically is there a metric you recommend people specifically look at to understand liquidity i think the metric that i like uh the most is sort of a uh a predictor of liquidity so your liquidity might be like uh it's typically a measure
of you know demand utilization right like it might be i'm looking for you know like something on there maybe like how many of those searches with intent actually turn into a transaction right so it's your fill rate of your tent full demand typically and that that's really indicative of the net output
of your marketplace um and so that gives you a sense of like the the health of your marketplace but it can be influenced by a whole bunch of different factors right so if you think about you know for uh for thumbtack it can be influenced by if there's a snowstorm out there if like the competition is like
bidding if there's a whole bunch of you know exogenous factors that come into play and the metric that i think is slightly more actionable um is a little harder to define but so much more you know helpful in my opinion it's what i call like a market health metric and this is basically think of your
proxy that is the best predictor of your liquidity so i'll use the example of lift you know you have your liquidity is you know your demand utilization it's uh you know how many app opens turn into a ride and what predicts this right like what will predict you and deciding to book a ride for lift uh
and for uber it was etas uh so we knew that if we had uh if the closest driver was at least three minutes away from from you or closer then you we had hit a ceiling you were more than like experts and likely to you know to convert and book a ride if it's more than two minutes if it's five then maybe
you check at uber maybe you walk maybe you take the bus if it's two minutes it doesn't make a big enough difference you're just gonna book the ride anyway um so find this sort of like threshold find this sort of predictor that tends to plateau that correlates strongly with retention but with also like
sort of the transaction happening and that's the metric that you can predict that's a metric that's so much more actionable for teams to work against if you're a supply team now you can think of okay i'm adding a hundred supplies into the platform i want to know what you know uh you know if it's actually
reducing etas in this case or like i can look at correlations like this uh and uh you know sort of uh limiting some of the effect of those exhaustion factors that that i mentioned awesome so essentially watch uh fill rate is the term that you use that a lot of people love which is just like people with intent
converting so they are being examples exactly the way we did airbnb is we we looked at people that are searching with dates as intentful users and then how many of them convert to booking so that's basically what you're trying to get to and your point here is that's kind of the output metric that's
like where what you want to move but in order to move it there's something that is the biggest lever to moving fill rate and in your experience and i've seen this exact same thing it's usually amount of supply you have enough good supply and so in the case of lift is do you have enough cars do you have enough
homes do you have enough plumbers on thumbtack and that's usually where you can actually impact fill rate sweet yeah exactly and that becomes the goal the team that becomes the focus of the company basically drive that up in all the little markets you're in all the categories you're in exactly yeah
completely awesome you mentioned this idea of product market fit and the things change pre -product market fit post -product market fit uh classic question i'm curious if you have any insights here just like what is tells you that you've climbed that hill product market fit that you might have product
market fit or you definitely have product market fit in a marketplace it's hard because to me uh the two are most independent maybe this is a hot take but i feel like product market fit is independent of your marketplace dynamics you might have like you know a great product and it provides amazing value
to both sides but you have yet to crack the you know the flywheel on the supply side for how to bring those people you don't have the right your product channel fit for example and so this will have a massive impact on the dynamics of your marketplace and so to me my answer would tend to be uh you know
like pretty like classical it would be like you know measure your product market fit the way you would for a normal company so like yeah you know i like the uh it's a bit of an art more than science but i like the the classic you know like if we were to take this product away you know like uh what percentage
of users uh you know would be like significantly uh you know disappointed or have no other solution right so questions like this i think go to the heart of how valuable is your solution to users and you can do this on the supply side and the demand side then hear more my advice is typically like to
consider that you have two product market fits essentially you want to make sure that you have like a compelling enough value proposition on both sides of the marketplace and very often at the beginning you find product market fit on the demand side but you realize like it's not compelling enough uh
for your suppliers because your margins are too high or something like that so realizing that you have like both those things but i think you can measure them in a way that's like relatively traditional um and that's independent of marketplace sort of i love that we actually just had sean ellis on the podcast
talking about that exact survey uh the sean ellis test of asking people how disappointed would you be if they left if the product didn't exist and uh i just love that you keep coming back to this point that i 100 agree with that most of the challenges you have with a marketplace business are like 90
are the same challenges you'll have with a non -marketplace business and people over focus on oh i need to think of this like a marketplace and all the marketplace science behind all this stuff and really it's all the same stuff every founder is dealing with product market fit except you have two sides
of it uh growth strategy but you have two sides of it so i love that you keep going back to that something that i definitely want to touch on is when people are thinking about starting a marketplace company what are signals that a marketplace is a good model for the idea because i think a lot of people
come into it like i want to build a marketplace oh i'm going to connect these two sides it's going to be great there's no there's no marketplace in this business in this vertical what are signs that marketplace dynamic and a and a business model is right for an idea versus no it's not no one ever say
like oh i'm going to build Airbnb for x right it's not something that people say uh i think um the the signs that that come to mind are one higher fragmentation i think you want this long tail of buyers and sellers without a handful of big players controlling the market because this is where you can provide
value by doing this job of aggregation right i think you also want a relatively uniform uh set of needs uh that means that it can be like your supply can be commoditized to some extent this is what's so tricky by the way about um you know services service marketplaces like semtech because unlike ebay
where sellers you know they just want to sell very clear and distinct inventory on some tech you have electricians who only want certain types of jobs but they only wanted if they're available that day and they might take a job and cancel it because something better comes up uh and so this makes for like
a very fuzzy definition of supply and you have very like you know different set of needs like one electrician wants something the other one has a very different perception of the same unit of demand right and that makes it very very difficult so it's feasible but i would say that is not a compelling
attribute for building a marketplace so a relatively uniform sort of set of needs and the last one i'd mention is um a high enough bear uh in the matchmaking or the creation um i think how hard it is for like people to find each other today uh and how much effort do they have to put in to vet each other
um i think is another great sign if it the higher it is like the bigger the opportunity right because it means like you come in implement the right processes to simplify this sort of like this this exchange of value awesome i'd love to know if there's any examples you can think of of bad marketplace
ideas that people have tried but i'll summarize the three points you just made which i love so these are signs that this is a great opportunity for marketplace business that there's a lot of fragmentation on both sides there's not just like a small number of companies or customers on on one side or the other
because if there are why did they need you they'll just find like there's five airlines or whatever you know you don't need like a marketplace to match with an airline uh then two is there's uniform needs the needs are basically consistent like i just want to stay in a home i want a car to take me somewhere i
want a plumber and then there's a barrier there's complexity to the matchmaking and helping someone book the thing work with them like finding a car i imagine is like i'm not gonna just flag down a car right there's challenge there i'm not gonna just go and ask someone can i stay in your home there's
challenges there exactly awesome are there any examples of companies you've seen that are just like that will that will never work as a marketplace or here's like a funny example of a marketplace that tried to be a marketplace and it's not okay i don't have a great example of that but i can give you
so like a tangentially related example of a marketplace that i don't want to throw anyone on the bus i i respect the the company and the effort but sidecar at the time was another ridesharing company competing with left and uber and there's i'm sure a whole bunch of sort of lessons there they ended
up sort of closing but i think one really interesting direction that they took pretty early on to differentiate themselves was in my mind perhaps very naively a mistake they decided to give complete control to the user where as a user you had a whole bunch of filters you could decide like i want a car
that's you know at least like 2015 or newer i want a driver that's at least like you know this or newer and so i think the theory was you know sort of reasonable on paper it was like hey let's give people like more control over it you have those other players out there you have left and uber and people
you know feel sort of forced in this standardized experience we're going to compete by giving you the choice you get to decide the experience that you want i think in reality it just fragments your marketplace like even further right and you have this like hyper fragmentation your marketplace and i
think it hurt their you know their their sla is like quite drastically if you think about eta when you ask explicitly you're like yeah sure i'm wearing you a car and you're like excited to like 2020 not realizing like you just lost like 10 minutes because now you know we had a great driver but they
have a Honda Civic from 2018 and it's you know another special that you wanted so i think uh uh you know people who build marketplaces tend to want to give a lot of control to the users because this is what users uh want or this is what comes up oftentimes the user feedback like oh we have those two
distinct group of users those ones they really want new cars those ones they don't want new cars right and so naturally you have a product team that builds the toggle to get new cars uh and i think the mistake is that you uh you know unknowingly fragment your supply in a way that has a much more meaningful
impact on the health of your marketplace than you suspect i think this is another awesome example of uh this like don't over listen to users and do what you think is going to be best for the business and this is not even a marketplace uh lesson it's just generally you don't want to give users more options
than they will need to be successful and happy and like i think sidecar did that because they were trying to like differentiate from lift and over like what can we do differently and they're like let's give people all these options i think they even let uh drivers choose the price that they're offering
they're right at which made it extra complicated they're like oh my god all these cars at different prices but i you know i respect their attempt because they were just the third wheel no pun intended it's it's also like ironically it's almost the the opposite advice that i usually give to companies
who struggle with um you know market health it's you know if you have like different verticals like try if possible to like open up your supply walls like your user is telling you like x but try to give them like something that is tangential to what you think they want because odds are that they are actually
fine with it there's this amazing example um from the femtik it's the the smoke machine example so femtik now they specialize a little bit more in home services but a few years ago they were also doing a lot of events so you had djs you had photographers uh and a lot of people were hiring for wedding
DJs on the platform and one of the check boxes was a smoke machine and it turns out a lot of people are checking this you're like yeah hell yeah i want a smoke machine my wedding and unknowingly to them obviously like only five percent of our DJs had a smoke machine and so you would carve out like 95
percent of our supply and if when we talked to users uh they were like i don't know i don't care that much about the smoke machine i didn't realize like this was automatically going to like remove half of the supply and so uh you know work on ways to like make this sort of checkbox affect the ranking
but not the actual filtering is a great example of how you can listen to your users uh and you know tweak the experience but you know simplify their sort of cognitive uh you know load by knowing like hey we know you prefer a smoke machine but we're intelligent enough to you know like it's probably not a deal
breaker for you i love that example the other thing that i think is important to talk about briefly is when you're thinking about building a marketplace a lot of times they fail because the business model just doesn't work i think about a company like cherry that tried to do uber for car washes and in theory
there's like a smart idea of i'm gonna just do on -demand car wash the problem is no one's gonna pay what it costs do that to the like a car wash person shows up and washes your car yeah i think cleaning is another example there's also just like exactly another one that comes to mind oh exact yeah where it's
just like like someone hell come does stuff for you something yeah yeah and so i guess is there anything you want to add there just like this is another reason your marketplace might fail maybe just let me expand on this question just what are the most reason what are the most common reasons marketplaces
fail in your experience and and i think it's important to say most marketplace ideas fail just like most startup ideas fail the most ideas period fail i think most ideas period fail same coming back to most of the things you're going to struggle with are the same things that every company struggles
with outside of a marketplace yeah so let me just ask is maybe specifically within marketplaces or even broadly why are the what are the biggest reasons that marketplaces fail i think a few things come to mind one is this concept of liquidity that we've talked about right so you need to kick off this flywheel
you need to build enough of that sort of density within your marketplace and depending on a business it can take a lot of time or money and without the right to diagnostic framework you can end up running out of both and so it's like that's the same one and i felt this at lift that i've seen this at other
companies this like rush like wow we we have to get to this point otherwise like we know it's kind of a losing battle until we have enough density for both sides to have a good enough experience the other one that i see is ignoring one side so we talked about like you know doing that when you're sort
of early on but i see you know a lot of uh larger companies operating for too long as one -sided businesses uh you know many large you know marketplaces only thinking about their demand side funnel so they run ads they get clicks they turn those clicks into dollars and they try to get enough supply so that intuitively
the experience is good enough for users and my advice is if you're doing this you're missing out on half of your business and the trick is marketplaces are very laggy so once your network effects start to die down it turns into this moment of panic of oh shoot we forgot about you know half of all users
we forgot that sellers are people too and they're all leaving and now we need to completely transform you know our product uh to to save the ship and to create a compelling value proposition on their side so that's the other thing that i see is business is realizing that they are marketplaces with like
true marketplace needs like too late in the game um and the last one is a quality i think we talked a little bit about quality before but it doesn't mean that you always need to have the best quality in your marketplace but being a marketplace implies a level of curation right you need to be intentional
about the quality that you aim to provide and i think a lot of companies uh you know don't have necessarily that intentionality and you have this constant push of you know supply if only we lower our bar a little bit uh you know we could get like more supply right and so until you end up we've all experienced
this at some point you found like some e -commerce website you look for something and there is also like oh my god this looks super shitty because all the sellers don't look that great right uh that's a quality problem right and so you need to be intentional about your quality and i think that's another
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management and streamline security reviews get one thousand dollars off vanta when you go to vanta .com slash Lenny that's v -a -n -t -a .com slash Lenny kind of as a segue from that idea of quality i want to talk about managed marketplaces managed supply so i think the reason quality is so such an issue
for marketplaces is because you do not own the supply and control the supply you're a marketplace you're not just selling something quality is innately going to be a challenge airbnb doesn't own homes uber doesn't control employee drivers they can't even legally tell them exactly what to do because they're
contractors so quality is always this ongoing challenge with marketplaces so there's always this push towards making it more of a managed marketplace we like give people a lot more instruction maybe they sort of own some of the supply maybe they invest a lot in training all that kind of stuff and like
in the perfect world not unlike an idealized world quality will be best if you own it but then you're no longer marketplace your business model sucks so i guess just any thoughts on marketplaces that are considering becoming more managed any advice on when it makes sense to move towards that spectrum
and how far to go i think when you're running a marketplace you tend to sit in your ivory tower a little bit looking at stats and thinking i'm like if only we could get people to do x it'd be better for everyone right i certainly you know did that in my career i think um that's missing the point that we're
humans and i think sometimes we act in ways that are non -deterministic uh or kind of intuitive um at i'll mention another theme like example but like we'd originally sell leads to pros like plumbers and electricians and of those leads obviously only a fraction would turn into actual jobs and revenue
for those pros so we also saw that those pros were always great at converting leads into jobs and so naturally we thought that we could provide a more consistent experience for customers and for pros by improving their roi and selling bookings right directly to those pros it's a common sort of marketplace
move going from you know some version of lead to a direct booking and did it look great we knew we're going to improve the roi by something like 20 percent maybe and we launched this and pros hated it they hated it because they actually subconsciously like they like the thrill of the sale right they
love this contact with customer and they sometimes like completely overestimated their ability to close a customer they were like you took all those those phone calls they kept me busy i felt like i was like hustling i was like about to close this customer and so no matter what the data says it's like
oh we increase their earnings by 20 percent like the pros don't feel this way and it's the right to you know to feel however they want and we saw the same thing at Lyft when trying to you know make driver earnings less volatile we had to like fight a lot of that perception and let that peak end effect
so my call out here is any attempt at control can be really tricky and backfire in ways that are unpredictable uh it also touched on sort of employment classification right in the US when we talk about controlling supply like although lawyers are like no no no that's not something that we do uh because you
know if you control your supply then uh there you can be legally classified as employees and be entitled to a whole bunch of benefits so my take on this in general is i'm a huge believer and it really depends on the type of company i should say obviously um but my take is i'm a huge believer in market
forces and empowerment so provide guardrails for what a good experience is in your marketplace set a clear bar for quality and provide the right coaching and tools for supply to be successful and then take a step back and see where the gaps are and invest more and hands -on tactics uh you know just to
close those gaps more specifically right so lots of like coaching tools that Lyft Uber did it like most sort of uh marketplaces like provide some sort of coaching you have like a review system perhaps you have stars for your you know sellers um you know for sellers who fall below the threshold then
like coach them provide them the right tools the right guidance what is the standard that you have on your marketplace and help them you know meet that bar and uh for people who like fall in you know for the gaps that you have then that's when you you invest in like sort of more hands -on uh you know
sort of uh tools and this is great this is one of the things that we did at Lyft also with the the rental company that we spent up i'm happy to tell you more about that that's interesting i'd love to hear about that before we hear that is there any marketplace that has been very good at up -leveling
quality without becoming managed that did this really well that you can think of yeah there's a talent marketplace called TapTow um and they are specialized in uh in this they have a really high bar for for quality uh they claim to only have like some of the top 1 top 3 percent i believe uh you know
of of talent out there uh and uh they have uh really amazing so like set of of of of checks and processes uh there's uh this um sort of funny story uh from from them but apparently they're there's they advertise something like maybe like a 3 percent uh you know sort of a pass rate uh for their talent
so they only like on board like three percent of the people who apply and allegedly their actual pass rate is even lower than that but they thought that if they actually advertised the actual number it would sound fake uh and so they actually like they actually say three percent because like one percent
would sound like too ridiculous and it would discredit sort of like their talent so they're one company that does a tremendous amount of work for uh you know vetting quality early on with a ton of uh you know like different checks but also maintaining that quality so throughout with the right coaching
tools with uh your education and things like that that's a really good example and so basically they just vet and only approve high quality supply in their case it's mostly engineers right i think on top tell correct yes it's most engineers designers i think which you can only do if you have so much
supply that has so much interest in becoming part of your platform but that's a really cool example basically it's just like only allowed really high quality supply let's hear this rental car story so this is uh lift trying to do rental cars right correct yes yes so this is um a little bit of context
i uh was leading the driver's side of product at lift and general motors had invested half a billion dollars in our last round of funding and this was christmas eve i always remember i got a call from uh lift ceo uh and general motors cto and we decided to build a rental company uh essentially and the reason for it
was really fascinating gm had all those vehicles that were coming off of lease and uh but they were forced to sell at auctions they didn't really know what to do with um and from our perspective we had this massive supply gap we've talked about this before but with this huge supply crunch we you know
were growing super fast and couldn't hire drivers fast enough couldn't onboard drivers fast enough and when we looked at the market we realized that 50 of the job seekers and welfare recipients uh don't in the u .s don't have a car right so that was like that was our supply gap this was a huge pool of people
that we just couldn't tap into because they didn't have a car and so by renting cars we could essentially manufacture our own supply right we could dial this up and down we could be very surgical about like how many vehicles do we bring in which markets do we bring this in at what price right we could even
uh you know offer to pay for the car if they drove 30 hours a week and completely transformed the lives of those people right now we allow them to have true mobility they can go buy groceries they can go take the kids on vacation uh so a huge win -win for for everybody uh you know with with something
like this and um i think in in three months we'd built you know rental company from the ground up and within 18 months i think we were like the fourth largest rental fleet in the u .s and but all this sort of stemmed from like this gap that that we saw like okay like it's it's not about like controlling
like the drivers in general it's about like okay we want to be surgical we want to control like the quality of the cars on the platform so we talked about that that's a great example in the markets where we thought the vehicles of quality was too low we knew we could onboard like more rental vehicles
uh you know that were like more recent uh to like raise the average sort of like uh age of a vehicle and platform so it gave us more control uh you know by you know in a much more surgical way i guess so it's not that you are launching a rental car service the idea was add supply and give drivers a car
so that they could become drivers it was a bit of both we actually launched like uh it was we had vehicles that drivers could rent uh from from lift and uh to drive on the platform and also to drive for their personal needs essentially but but yeah got it okay and then uh did this actually work and have impact
was this a good idea yeah okay yeah yeah it had uh had a tremendous impact like i mentioned i think we scaled this uh sort of exponentially to become i think again like the fourth largest rental fleet in the u .s uh because it was uh you know it was so effective for us both because we had the right amount
of control but also um those drivers were incredibly loyal to us uh we had a whole bunch of other incentives that we could do we could offer to pay for the car um but only if you don't drive for the competition for uber for uber uh and only if you drive at least like 30 hours a week uh so this again like
provided us with uh you know again like much greater retention much higher like engagement uh and uh was a real incentive for for us but also for for the drivers awesome and maybe the reason this most interesting is this is along the spectrum of a managed marketplace it moves closer to like you guys
sort of like are paying and covering costs of cars it makes it less just like this simple uh highly efficient marketplace exactly yeah it's the marketplace version of you know maybe like your like black car fleet owner has like their fleet of vehicle and they have like people so this was like the the marketplace
version of doing that and it's also just a differentiator because gem and you guys were close and so you had this lever that other let's say that uber didn't have amazing another area that i know you spent time on that i think is really interesting and i think could be helpful to people here is the mentorship
program and kind of the ambassador program that you had that lift and how that helped you scale much more quickly than other folks were able to can you share that story pretty early on at lift this was 2014 2015 maybe um uber was basically like 30 exercise they had 30 times more revenue more people
more liquidity like everything you can think of right they were growing like crazy and we had a bit of this existential moment as you can imagine where we were wondering how we're supposed to compete with with that right and we had to be like super clever everything that you did at the company had to
be 10 times more efficient like per person than the competition just to survive like that was that was the bar just not to die and uh put a lot of pressure on us but we basically found kind of a clever way of onboarding driver drivers at the fraction of the custom resources um so let me give you a little
bit of context on how the onboarding flow worked so at the time the last step to get onboarded as a driver was after you back on check and your driving record check came back you had to do a visual inspection of your car a quick test drive some light training and we would check your documents we'd check
that like you are the person with the driver's license and all those things and uber at the time would launch a team on the ground they would go and open an office and they would have dmv style group onboarding sessions and car inspections and we did this as well in our first of like three to four markets
but you can imagine the the overhead right in the lead time you had to go and you had to find office space sign the lease hire employees who had like huge huge lead time and we thought about it in at the time a huge competitive differentiator for us was our brand as a passenger or as a driver what would you
use a platform with lower liquidity as a driver you had lower earnings guaranteed as a passenger you had like with longer wait times why would you use a service like that um you do because of the brand right because of its values it's how it makes you feel and so we had you know the pink moustaches
at the time we had like this like very sort of like strong brand identity i think a lot of that has been lost now but we also had this amazing community of drivers who were fierce advocates for the brand and so what we did is leveraging this community and building essentially a self onboarding supply
engine where we would pay our best drivers 35 per mentor session and mentor session was essentially replacing this onboarding flow so it was basically another driver looking at your vehicle uh to check all your documents take photos of your driver's license and all that stuff and take you on a short
ride along and the benefits of this were absolutely mind -blowing and you know kind of unexpected for us on all sides first the the mentors were our very best drivers and they were evangelists for the brand right so what they did was they would share like personal tips on when and where to drive right
oftentimes they'd share the contact info and this created some tremendous leverage and social proof for those new drivers who were on defense about taking this transition into the car it's actually quite funny because with the brightest minds in the company like writing the best marketing emails and copy
like hey like drive on you know hop on the car and drive this saturday and you had all those drivers like all those mentors like don't listen to those those guys like here's what you should do like go you know on tuesday at 2 p .m text me i'll tell you where the good spot is and this is like how you're
going to get right this is how you're going to get rich and make a lot of money right and this recondition lever was just so much more powerful than anything we could be telling you right and so very very sort of like efficient activation lever for the new drivers for us also very you know like incredibly
scalable right we could fly a small team uh to rigorously vet and onboard maybe like 10 20 top drivers and then they'd fly to a different market and we would let the rest of our drivers be onboarded by those mentors and even for those mentors for those like top drivers it was an incredible recognition lever
for them if you were like a 4 .9 driver you had enough rides you knew you had a chance to make it into being a mentor and this provided additional earnings opportunity for you if you did two mentor sessions in an hour you could make 70 bucks an hour you could take a break from driving if you're tired
and just do some of those it felt like getting promoted a job right and so you actually had a huge impact on the retention of our very best drivers which was you know kind of unexpected so a lot of like really really interesting benefits and we actually leaned into this and built like a couple of really
fascinating variations of this you know for a while but this this allowed us to match most of uber's footprint with like you know a tenth or a 20th of the resources that uh you know uh incredible speed i guess that is an amazing story and it's such a great lever that i totally agree i don't hear people
using and i wonder why so what i'm hearing is it was cheaper the drivers were making money i imagine the drivers trained by the mentors ended up being better drivers that's what we said are being be host i came in through a referral ended up being better hosts for whatever reason and you're saying basically
this is what allowed you to compete with uber at a much smaller scale and and much less money raised amazing exactly you said there's like a couple variations you did is there anything interesting there to share just like things that you built as a follow -up based on the success so like the next step
in that journey was basically um we were growing like crazy but now we had what cracked like the the activation phase but now we had a whole bunch of people like dropping off in the phone like before activation like so they didn't enter their ssn they didn't enter like the right info for us to run like
all those checks and the previous steps of the onboarding flow and so we built a team of you know hundreds of account executives and their job was just like pick up the phone and like call those drivers and so we had the same you know how moment like could we get you know some of our best drivers to
to do that for us and empower them to like you know to to to be a part of this and so uh we did this and we launched like another micro sub role with we call them recruiters and so as a recruiter as a driver you could just like if this was quiet uh you know on the road you could just like hop on your
phone and you would have like a mini sales dashboard where you could like claim leads and this was like a driver who had dropped off in the funnel and you had like a tool you phone number you could like just call them and text them and same thing those guys were outperforming our very best of like trained
sales people because it's not like hey it's ben from lyft like hop on the road please it's like hey my name is like you know james and i'm a fellow driver as well like lyft told me that you have a complete application like have any questions don't like come to your house where you can do this together
and i knew we'd pay them 20 bucks uh you know per person that they like convert it to activation uh and so something like incredibly scalable for us another way for us to uh to reward and recognize like our best drivers and he also provided like a really interesting way for us to like smooth out the supply
and demand the problem with the marketplace like lyft is that you have like this big spikes right like everyone wants to drive on a tuesday at 2 p .m but everyone wants rides uh you know on a saturday at 2 a .m right and so how can you manufacture demand uh you know like during those low utilization times
this was a great way to do that now you could like wait on the road and like still make money uh you know while just sitting in your car while waiting for the next ride so this was another sort of iteration of this model that was like really cool amazing that is so cool i've just i just know like the feeling
of having of being on a team like coming up with this idea and think working must feel so great just like holy shit look at this look at all these cool things that we can do with our supply something i wasn't gonna get into but i it might be interesting just to hear if you have thoughts on this so i'm
looking at so i've been a huge fan of lyft from the beginning i use lyft the very first weekend it came out in san francisco when there was like five drivers it was like a beta test i was friends with someone that worked at lyft early on and it was just like man lyft's the best i was like all lyft uber
sucks i hate that i want to give the fist bump or the mustache so great today though i was just looking at market caps so uber is worth 150 billion dollars lyft is worth five billion dollars i'm curious if you have thoughts and just like it feels like uber has won at this point and i don't know where lyft
goes i know you your heart is with lyft and you worked at lyft for a year and i'm curious just to hear your take on just like why do you what do you think uber did if you look back that allowed them to basically win and where do you think lyft goes from here what do you think happens with lyft like
they're still worth five billion it's still a huge amazing successful business but just where do you think things go yeah i think um it all went south when i left the company i'm just kidding no i and again i have to uh i have to call it the fact that i haven't been close to like sort of lyft and you
know their business and strategy for like many years at this point so uh i think this is the grain of salt this is my very naive perspective but um i think um uh to me perhaps like the biggest blow to uh lyft's business was somewhat inherent like the vision lyft's vision was always anchored around like
transportation people transportation the founders were deeply passionate about like moving people they were passionate about transforming the way people you know move around in the city they wanted to just change like how cities are designed how roads are designed um and so that meant uh you know investing
in like dynamic uh you know uh uh like shuttles and things like that and there's a lot of experimentation that went to that but it also meant that lyft never invested in things like food delivery or like goods and parcels and things like that and i think uh that crushed them during essentially um uh
i think um uh uber had i think at some point like their like slogan was uh you know moving in like bits and and atoms or something like that but i think it implies this you know this this notion of uh being a like a logistics platform for like assets in the world right for transporting people for transporting
things uh for transporting like uh and i think um uh they built they invested a lot in like you know trucks and you know food delivery and like all those like real exotic things that lyft had never any intention to invest in not even because of the lack of resources but because this was like in part
like a distraction from from our vision we wanted to change like how people like move around in cities want to reinvent like public transportation who we did not want to you know be a door dash confeder and help you get in doing this during covet and a huge part of it also was you know leaning heavily
in nakshad rides uh and so like this was like you know again how do you reinvent public transportation it's like every car is a dynamic bus uh and now like there's no bus line the bus line is like always running right it's always like by your house so a lot of our investment i think and thinking went
in like that direction and the last thing that people wanted with covet was to be in a car with like five strangers and uh but what people wanted is like food delivered to the house right and so uh that sort of uh i know that the business like you know had a huge blow during covet whereas i think uber
was able to like rebound much more quickly because of how diversified the business was and so uh it's funny now because i think lyft actually killed uh shared rides which was just so cold to their identity they were like the first ones like to launch this and so um uh yeah the new co i think i killed
the shared rides which i'm really sad about um but yeah so i think it indicates like a very different vision now a very different like direction for the business uh and um yeah that's interesting so essentially covet really f them because their strategy was always about transportation and when nobody
needs a ride and actually people want food uh strategically uber made a really good move expanding into food delivery which i think was a bigger business than rides for a long time i don't know where it's at today for uber yeah and lyft didn't have that and it's hard to recover from a time like that so it
sounds like it's a combination of strategy was pointing lyft in a certain direction and circumstances in the world just like made it and losing me i'm losing bet i'm looking at the uh so you left in 2019 march 2019 and is that working in public yeah yeah and it's like all downhill from then uh and then
telling during and then during covet actually when there's a big bump which i think when people started riding again and then it went down again so i think there is a correlation there so there are you that's the thing don't ever fire ben don't let ben leave that's your takeaway i was not fired yeah
just to be clear i'm just okay i was just uh different ways you might leave a company don't let it happen um i'm kidding okay so there's two more things i want to spend a little time on before we close up uh one is you you're working europe so you're a product leader in europe and i want to hear a little
bit about what it's like to be product person in europe and then two i want to hear about the startup so at this point no one can actually fire you you have your own company that you're running and i want to spend a little time here usually we don't spend time on this sort of stuff but you're working
on something very cool i think is gonna be really helpful to a lot of people in a really meaningful way so i'm gonna spend a little time there so but before that so you you're living in france now you before you started your company you were interviewing for cpr roles in france you worked with a lot
of french companies european companies i'm curious what you've noticed might be different in the cultures of tech companies in france in europe in general versus the us it's been really fascinating i think so my my entire career has been in the us uh and i'm just trying to understand what that that european and the french
market in particular looks like and um my my read so far is uh that product management has really exploded i think in europe in recent years but the market dynamics are uh are still quite different in the u .s i think you have this inherently very liquid and dynamic market um i think this is my interpretation of it
but i think it leads to greater ownership and accountability for people and product at all levels so um you know product managers and leaders they join a startup and uh you know you're immediately in charge of a relatively meaningful piece of the business with genuine autonomy oftentimes right doesn't
always happen but you know oftentimes i think that's the case and if things don't work out well you know there's this expectation that you'll be managed out this is just there are countless memes on linkedin about the tenure of cpos at tech companies to illustrate that i think in france that the market
is much less liquid uh so it's incredibly difficult to change jobs and it's very expensive to fire someone in france so it seems to lead to two effects beyond the the obvious job security um one is i think pms tend to have less autonomy and ownership uh and a little bit more like micromanagement and they're
also less business owners uh than they can be in the u .s and i see like sort of founders and managers struggling to let go of control a little bit more again because you you know it's understandable in a way you don't have like as much sort of a control as you do in the u .s and so it leads to a lot
of like really fascinating sort of effects you have startups who tend to wait a little bit longer before hiring especially product uh the the art of product is a little bit less of a thing you have a lot of amazing pms in france but the recognition of the craft is you know is a little bit different
outside of the people who practice it and you have a lot of you know really interesting outsourcing also you have you see startups and companies of all sizes actually relying on great product studios like mudza to build end -to -end products from the ground up right so uh something that's been uh sort
of um really really interesting um another slide that i see is you know this like uh dominance of business uh over tech in france there isn't as much of a you know cult of technology and software engineering in france as there is in the u .s and so the french iv league schools or business schools like
as you say and the most highly valuable skill that you get is soft skills around management and business it's you know it differs from like the stereotype of the you know CS degree stanford dropout uh you know that you have in instead of sequent valley um and i think because of a few of those things
that that i just mentioned less liquid you know job market but also like less liquid financial markets the last thing that i've observed that's kind of interesting is you know that's also around ownership i guess is like equity is much less meaningful in france so of the product leaders that i talked
to you know most of them consider their equity to be virtually worthless uh none of them know of anyone who's made a down payment on the house thanks to their sort of equity so it's seen as like a nice bonus but it's not the token of ownership and the the promise of future wealth that it can be in the u
.s when you join you know uh a startup for for exec roles i think it's often like sub 10 of their total compensation whereas you know in the u .s it's very often like more than 50 of your competition will be will be but it's also been really interesting to just see like how vibrant the star culture is here
in france you have like a truly exciting innovation happening especially in ai you have a lot of like french companies at the forefront of this like mr lai and hugging face and things like that and and also how how it's been exciting to see how the government is leaning into that as kind of a catalyst
for this innovation i think the french government has dedicated something like a 2 .5 billion dollars in funding to support french ai excellence by 2030 so they're running a lot of internal government incubators to try to disrupt some of the you know government functions from the inside and they're hiring
like top talents to do that it's i've met so the people working on this it's just really fascinating it's makes me super excited about you know what a federal startup task would be inventing that dnb would look like uh so yeah it's been really exciting to like see sort of like the the whole space and how
it differs from the us fascinating do you so i know there's also like ai regulation that feels really strange in europe but i think that's eu based right now like france specifically yeah yeah that people are trying are like not excited about there's just like a lot of fear of ai and so there's a lot
of uh regulation talk in i know i'm a big android guy and i a lot of the features like gemini all this like is only available in the difference a little bit interesting uh so the the cultural differences you spoke of do you think they're rooted in this in the fact that people don't move jobs often like
what do you or is it like culture people just don't learn to work in the way that people learn to work in the us in in the product role like what do you think is the root of why things are so different i'm not quite and i know i this is like you know one of my sort of core principles i'm sure i'll also have a new
tunnel vision on this a little bit but to me like one of the biggest difference that i see is really around like this concept of ownership and accountability whereas in the us um and again i saw it i'm sure you saw that there maybe you see that a lot of companies not everywhere but a lot of companies
will you know hire you give you a big chunk of the business and it's up to you to like you know prove yourself out right like you have six months you have a year like you know it's up to you to like show impact i think the the french employment model uh is less uh can you see if you like this type of dynamic
uh because employment is like much more rigid so uh you have much less of this like you know hire now and like prove yourself out uh it's much more of like prove yourself like beforehand and uh and if you've made it about higher than as a founder like you become perhaps like a little bit cagey about like
your vision you want to like be more hands -on because you made it about higher it's not like someone perfect then like you'll kind of make your work but it means like you'll be more hands -on in like the work of pm's uh you know daily and perhaps we'll think like oh maybe i don't need product managers
who want like on my vision or higher project managers or something like that right so it's perhaps like slightly more conducive like those those types of dynamics and you're saying that's in part because it's harder to fire people in france and in europe yeah i think so it's not just about firing i
think to be clear i just think it's like culturally the market seems like a lot less like liquid uh and dynamic so people like people don't move around as much they kind of stick around for a long time yeah exactly yeah got it and it sounds like there's also just like a cultural difference of like founders
innately are much more i am in control and i'm not gonna hire people and trust you to take this thing off i am just gonna run the show like it's basically paul gramm's founder mode is like already instilled in everyone maybe yeah maybe maybe that's a little bit and i think also it's this culture like
business so like very business -centric sort of culture you have and again it makes sense right like the markets you have less venture capital you have less you know uh less the cuisine the financial markets as well and so when you raise funding you need to have like a strong businesses like the business
gaze is at the center of your business whereas i think oftentimes in the u .s you have again it's a little bit um it's very typical but it's a very like tech or product centric view of the world or it can be uh you know a very like tech or product centric view of the world like we will be like this product
this is like the vision of the product and sometimes even like you know the business model will like will follow right uh and uh and in France i think like the business model like has to be like front and center perhaps for each like be able to raise venture capital for each be able to like even exist
right so it means like it attracts a lot of like business uh you know minded uh you know entrepreneurs much more so perhaps than like a tech -minded or product minded entrepreneurs got it if someone wants to help their company in europe and france operate more closely to the way companies in the us operate
do you have any advice for them what do you i know you met when you talk and work with a lot of companies in europe what do you help them change and see differently yeah it's a good question i i haven't not fully cracked that and i think it's uh it's a really hard question i'll give like some sort of small
pointers uh that have helped at least some of the companies that i talked to but the one is equity i think there's like a desire from a lot of the founders that i talked to to like to give equity uh to employees but because it's not in the culture yet like i think employees also have like an underappreciation for like
equity uh like well yeah it's nice but like i don't know what's going to happen like i just work for the co anyways um there's less of like this sense of again like ownership that you can have you know like the in the us and so i think like leaning into that and investing in like you know education around
equity it's the case also in the u .s i'm convinced like you know 80 percent of people just don't fully understand like their equity but i think like leaning into that uh especially in europe to like help understand how people understand like the value of their equity help them uh by you know telling
more about like the story of the business uh you know the trajectory of the business why it matters for their future equity i think any anything along those lines i think can uh you know help cultivate this like greater ownership mindset i think for for people um and then um yeah and then i think another
like big piece again is at least to me this is a big recipe to successful product teams is to like develop teams that revolve around like this concept of ownership and accountability teams are like clearly owning a huge you know or it doesn't have to be huge like a slice of the business like not feature
teams like you know shipping maybe guests but teams that uh have clear accountability with consequences but also like clear ownership and leeway to do their best and to and to thrive again i usually don't spend time on the sort of thing but i just think what you're working on is extremely cool and i
think it's going to be really meaningful to a lot of people and so i just want to spend a few minutes giving you a chance to talk about what you were going to know you started a company is this your first company the year you started it is yeah it is okay amazing then like set projects but first yeah
yeah yeah there's a lc there's a c corp or yeah it's like filed there's paperwork uh amazing talk about what you're building how people know how to find it if it's right for them yeah i have to say like entrepreneurship has been a very humbling journey i think that the zero to one is is way harder than i
think us have done so far and i feel like when you're used to building and scaling products within companies you kind of take for granted at least i did uh you take for granted that the problem space has already been validated right you have like some brand equity even if you launch a new vertical like
you know there's like an existing user base there's a validation of the problem space i think going to truly zero is like i felt at least to be like super overwhelming and lonely but also super exciting right with tons of condensed learnings it's been like a really really interesting journey so uh what brought
me there is my wife started to have some health issues but three years ago now it's partially why we decided to move to france last year just for a couple of years and she's had this undiagnosed condition and chronic pain and we saw just like how much of a nightmare it was to to manage you know like
her care and to navigate the healthcare system in the u .s so would wait you know three months for an appointment for a neurologist then did see her for maybe eight minutes average appointment time in the u .s is between like 10 and 12 minutes uh they dump a bunch of jar even uh see like hey tester look
normal like sorry like you should just go see this other specialist instead would wait another three months see another specialist and then and with a lot of anxiety a lot of pain as you can imagine like all those things you're like you have another eight minute slide with someone and it's like oh why
didn't that neurologist do this test like i can help you like this you know this makes no sense and so you just like it ends up feeling like incredibly isolating like the whole time you know we just felt complete alone it was just like us and google uh you know we felt we kept getting conflicting advice
from doctors um and i was spending all my time researching specialists what solutions to consider uh you know i'd spend all my nights reading through like research papers uh to like i was like hey what what is the academic consensus on this particular treatment that the doctors don't seem to know about right
and yeah throughout this whole process it felt like no one you know really had her back no one within the medical system was was fighting for her the way that your family doctor uh you know might have fought for you 20 years ago knowing everything about you and be like lenny like you know let's talk
about this i know your uncle had this or like there was this sort of like a sense of of advocacy that came from your family doctor that just doesn't exist today right it's not uncommon for doctors to have thousands of patients that they see like just a few minutes each year and so digging into this we
just realized like we're you know this is not a nice let case you have you know half of americans have at least like one chronic condition or have to deal with like some sort of like you know complex healthy issue largely on their own uh you see a lot of like those you know large online communities
revolving around like chronic conditions or chronic pain and trying to make sense of it and advocate for themselves and i think i want to be clear in my mind the problem is obviously not about the practitioners right it's it's systemic it's just growing financial pressure from private equity firms it's
just countless other factors but we see the physicians being overwhelmed overworked you know burning out uh and you see that pressure just you know only increasing i think so i basically spent the you know next six months just talking to hundreds of patients and doctors and experts um and what we've
built is basically a platform to help people fight for the health and so we want to close the gap between like patients and the critical layer of the system that's missing i think people are navigating life threatening or debilitating conditions largely with with google and at some point you just get
tired of fighting for yourself right so we we connect people with complex conditions typically with their own health advocate so it's essentially like their own health assistant they're available 24 seven to help you navigate your care so we find appointments for you we help you prepare your appointment
we make sense of a diagnosis of test results we spend hours like you know researching solutions and potential treatments and just more generally we do everything we can to help you just better advocate for for themselves basically and now we launched in the u .s early version of this uh a few few weeks
ago and the engagement has been like really you know really really mind -blowing so far i know we've been helping cancer patients people with a lot of those sort of like niche chronic conditions uh and uh but like harassing the doctor's office like hey like we still haven't received that referral like
all the things that you just get tired of doing when you're you're dealing with like so many appointments and when you're having to measure a condition like this and our mental model is what would we do if this user was you know our partner or our parent right you'd likely like spend all night coming
to research you'd call like all the providers in the state to be like hey who has an appointment because there's no p t available for the next like two months like we'll find your p t available like you know sooner right uh so we're building the engine to do that at scale essentially and make people
feel like they're not alone and that someone is fighting for them super cool it's sad that we need something like this but we do because the healthcare system is so not uh ideal and so it's basically someone in your corner that's just that's like in the inside that knows how these things work that is there
to help you through the process what's the what's the company called where do people find it yeah it's called nora health uh and our website is nura n -u -r -r -a dot me awesome and we'll like tune in the show notes and just to be clear i'm not an investor i'm just like excited about this thing because i
think a lot of people need this just to glue back to what we've been talking about it's not a marketplace how would you describe this business in relation to marketplace companies we're ignoring the marketplace dynamics i'm following my own advice and i'm just throwing one side of the marketplace the health
advocates were you know like uh jump starting this side for now and we're only focusing on what i think is going to be the hardest side for us and it's going to be demand like how do we find those people how do we create the right value proposition for them so that's what we're focused on so and and so in the future
there may be a marketplace component here is what what i'm hearing yeah exactly interesting very cool ben is there anything else that you want to share mention leave listeners with before we get there very exciting lightning round no no thank you well with that we've reached our very exciting lightning
round then are you ready i'm ready all right first question what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people i'll give you books in different directions uh one is misbehaving uh the makings of behavioral economics i'm really interested in behavioral economics i love this intersection between economics
and human psychology like it's a great analogy for for product so that's a great introduction to this field um the second book that i recommend a lot is range why generalists triumph in a specialized world by david abstein uh i've always felt curious about a lot of things but it's made me feel like
i'm decent at many things but i'm good at nothing uh i'm very good at nothing and so even my career i see like all those pms we're like machine learning gurus leading conferences on weekends that are contributing to i think thanks and i just feel like a generalist you know uh so if you feel this way
this is a good book to make you feel a little bit better by yourself uh in your post -it syndrome at least it did for me and last one uh nothing to do with business uh but immune by philip detmer this is the creator of the youtube channel kurzgesagt i don't know if i'm pronouncing this right but it's
a the science sort of channel it's uh if you're even remotely curious about how your body works how your immune system works it's an amazing book that's really fun to read super entertaining uh and uh yeah just great sort of biology and fun book i promise i've been trying to get the author of range
on the podcast i have not had success yet so if anyone knows him uh with his name is eppstein there is okay david eppstein please connect me i would love to have him on podcast i really love his message of just the most like basically it's the most successful people or is it that you should be a generalist
or that you can be very successful as a generalist is that the message you can be very great i completely agree that's been me too next question do you have a favorite recent movie or tv show you've really enjoyed tv show i haven't seen anything lately that's been like mind -blowing but i'll share an old
new one uh i've re -watched the last of us recently and i just it's uh an old favorite i just i love the t -shirt like the game played the game many years ago and love the t -shirt when the heck's the next season coming i'm excited for that i know because i know the game has more 2025 yeah oh man yeah
so long okay and get to know though uh next question do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love maybe a little bit behind the curve on this one but uh i've been uh loving the ark browser uh i don't know if you use it but i love ark it's my number one my main browser
absolutely i love it amazing all right so yeah you know all about it yeah it's it's been really fun uh yeah it's it's like uh just the onboarding of the ark browser is such a lesson in onboarding they do such an amazing job like that alone is a great thing to do as a product person just see how they
do onboarding i was like i've been using chrome for like 12 years or i don't know how many years like it feels like such high friction to change my entire life in like eight seconds it was done it felt like home i was like wow this is way faster than i expected two more questions do you have a favorite
life motto that you often come back to repeat yourself share friends or family i don't have anything like particularly philosophical unfortunately uh i i lived in tahoe for years i live now in the french alps so i have a frame with john merese quote the mountains are calling and i must go i feel like
this is uh i it's my sort of grounding place like the mountains are my happy place and so uh i don't share that work often i don't like piece out in the middle of meetings like the mountains are calling i must go but uh but uh but it's been sort of like a grounding uh you know sort of uh yeah that's
beautiful that just in my nervous system relaxes just hearing that quote and i know you live in a mountaineer part of france so you've done it you've you've listened to the call final question uh you live in france the olympics are just in paris uh did you go to any of the games did you watch any of the games
anything stand out to you but the olympics that were not so far from where you are now good question i uh did not see any live events unfortunately um i perhaps like the highlight for me was i'm a big mountain biker uh but in it's like the biking realm i love the the men bmx event where like uh all
three men on the podium were were french so this was like a kind of a great moment for france i didn't even know that it was an olympic sport so it's a bmx like malm like dirt bike kind of uh race yeah so cool amazing fen thank you so much for being here two final questions working folks find me online
and what else are you doing that people can check out if they want to learn more and i can listen is beautiful to you yeah you can find me uh two things that are perhaps helpful for for people out there one is i have a reforge course so if you're curious about marketplace uh if you want dig deeper into
marketplace growth um i have a course on reforge uh we're about to do our fifth or sixth cohort i think now uh it's been going really well uh we've been working with tons of really really cool marketplaces going much deeper into some of the topics that we just talked about so if you're interested in marketplaces
i would say check this out and on that real quick is the customer ideal is it founders or is it like pms on market at larger marketplace companies who is this perfect for it's uh we've had both founders and pms and sort of like uh heads of product but it's my strong recognition it's people that have product
market fit again per or uh for conversation uh if you don't have product market fit uh you know wait a little bit before enrolling in this course uh focus on you know your core business uh yeah before worrying about the market post dynamics aspect and then i get you off there's something else you're
going to point to people too oh and just uh uh nura uh the company that we're building uh anyone that you know or if you yourself have sort of chronic or complex conditions uh and if you feel like you need help managing your health and navigating your care uh you know i would love to to help or hear
how uh what you need and how we can help you uh and our website is nura .me and you are r a dot me and then how can listeners be useful to you if you have advice if you know uh anyone in the space if you're interested in like learning more about this if you have like advice if you have learnings uh if you
know anything about this i would love to hear it uh if you have like hot takes about marketplace if you disagree with and you have what i've said i'd love to also hear it i love it ben thank you so much for being here thank you so much for having me it's been a dream come true finally same same for me
ben bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on apple podcasts spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes
or learn more about the show at lenny's podcast .com see you in the next episode
