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Boris Wertz

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31
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2015-12-28
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2015-12-28
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  1. “So we invest in this company called Head Out, which is a mobile first marketplace for travel experiences. So they're currently active in six cities, including New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, LA, Chicago. And they basically let you kind of buy tickets and access to travel experiences for the next 24 hours, kind of upcoming 24 hours. So think about it as a hotel tonight for travel experiences. We just love that space because there's, you know, when you think about how it's been done today, there's no real good mobile place to do that. It's a pure mobile use case. I mean, you're traveling in the city. You want to go to a show. You want to have a helicopter flight. You want to visit the Empire State Building, whatever it is. And you can quickly find these attractions on your mobile phone, book them right away and enjoy.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think gross merchandise sales and take rate, I mean, gross merchandise sales being kind of the top line, kind of what is the volume you're creating through your marketplace and then take rate is what do you take out of that? I mean, what are your revenues relative to kind of the gross merchandise sales? That very quickly describes the size of your marketplace and kind of your opportunity.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It's Fred Wilson's AVC.com. Fred has been blogging since, I don't know, 2007, 2008. He taught me a bunch of things when I was not yet a professional investor. And to this day, I learned tremendous amount from his blog post.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “As much as we're excited about on demand, I think it's also a little bit overhyped at some stage people said I'm going to create the Uber for X for vertical X. So there was a lot of this on-demand for here, Uber for X, et cetera. I think people have forgotten to look at kind of the underlying drivers of Uber success, like why was Uber success? And it just doesn't work for every vertical. Underheight is a much tougher question because quite frankly, it feels like right now the hype cycles get much quicker. Blockchain, virtual reality, augmented reality, drones, something new comes up. And within a few months, it feels like people are all over it and hyping it up. So right now, I feel like there's not a single underhyped. Underhead sector”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Hard things for hard things by Ben Howitz. It's just a fantastic management book that addresses all the hard things that you need to figure out as a CEO founder in a company. It always sounds so easy to run a company. It's actually so tough and there's so many little questions you have every day and some also very big ones.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think ultimately always buy feedback from entrepreneurs, how happy are they working with us? Would they work with us again? And even if we don't fund them, right, do they feel that we treat them fairly in the process? Did they take something away from talking to us, et cetera? Ultimately, we're here to serve entrepreneurs, to help entrepreneurs and their feedback and their recommendation to work with us is ultimately driving our success.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Happen and customer is going to love it, but it's certainly a very interesting development that potentially you might not even have a centralized marketplace that governs the marketplace, but it's actually completely decentralized.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So I think a little bit further out, we're kind of fascinated by this whole development of decentralized marketplace built on the blockchain super, super early. And the question is, will these decentralized marketplaces ever make money, right? Or is there just a protocol that provide kind of the framework for marketplaces but can't generate money on its own? Yeah, will you ever, I mean, right now there's a lot of illegal activity going on there in these dark marketplaces, like weapons and drugs and so on, but will that move out of the illegal space and actually become marketplaces where legit products and services are being sold? So the whole idea is like, is the next generation of marketplace completely decentralized? And I don't think we're fully convinced yet that this is actually going to”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, it could be DoorDash. It could be a company we invested in boosted fuels that does on-demand fueling off cars. So there's a few of those categories that are just gigantic categories where just for the combination of a service brought to you instead of you going to get the service and mobile, you create some real customer value.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Mobile first marketplaces and on-demand marketplaces are still something that we getting excited about. We've seen a few that have already scaled, Uber being the best example, but have also made a few bets in that market that just came online this year. I think there's still a bunch of opportunity left in the on-demand space and kind of mobile first space. Secondly, I think...”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “But there were tons of trust and safety features, tons of inventory management tools for sellers. So you developed this whole ecosystem around your marketplace and make it much more efficient and defensible.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “basically build a business around it. You see that are now happening on Airbnb where people aggregate apartments and kind of almost are managing dozens of apartments and become like professional sellers. So how can you support these power sellers? Because ultimately they're going to provide a much more professional service or much, much better quality of service to your buyers. And how can you scale it up? And last but not least, a thing that we're always thinking about, like how can you then develop that into a whole ecosystem and platform? And that's everything from additional services that are being created around the marketplace. You look at eBay, for example, there were a lot of things that were developed around the eBay ecosystem. I mean, PayPal is probably one of the most important things, like a payment system.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, so I mean, it's kind of what I would call the good problems to have. And, you know, not a lot of marketplaces even get to that point. But once you get to that point, we're always thinking about a few things. The first one is you see that at every marketplace, once you scale, once you get media attention, kind of trust and safety becomes more important because you might attract fraudulent suppliers or buyers. And suddenly that whole aspect of trust and safety in a marketplace becomes important. The second thing is you see in almost every marketplace that they usually start out on the supply side with very small sellers, hobby sellers or people that only put a little bit of their inventory onto the marketplace. Over time, like most of the development and the scaling of the marketplace is driven by power sellers. So the people that have”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Exactly. I mean, they figured out New York was a gigantic market. Everybody who has ever traveled to New York knows that it's super hard to get a hotel room at a reasonable price. So they figured out, hey, this is like, we don't have to nail much more than just this right now. And just focus on getting this scaled up. And you're going to have something that works really well.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Sometimes there's a few hot spots, one hotspot, but it might be three or four that work really, really well, and then double down on these things and cannot try to accelerate the development in this area.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, I mean, you're continuously trying to evaluate kind of do you have, you know, where does supply in relation to demand stand, right? So one of the things we always concept we're thinking about is hotspots. So when you look at the marketplace and you see the first transactions happening between buyers and sellers, try to understand what type of transactions work really well, right? Sometimes it could be around when you think about a product marketplace around a certain price point or in a certain vertical or a certain kind of buyer and supplier. And trying to figure out what does work really, really well because, I mean, you're going to have a lot of noise in the marketplace, a lot of random transactions that are not really repeatable. But what are the things that work in well? And then double down on these things and trying to scale supply and demand in this subset of the marketplace.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “From individuals or kind of rooms from individuals that had never been on the market to kind of paying for inventory, Uber has done a very good job whenever they launch a city to initially pay their drivers, kind of drive around idle just to have inventory and be quick to pick up the next passenger once there's an order coming in.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, I mean, that's really kind of the core element and the core challenge of any marketplace. Like, how do you figure out this chicken and egg problem? And it often takes a long time to get it going, right? And the beauty is once you figure it out and kind of the network effect starts, it's almost unstoppable, right? And you create something that is very, very defensible. So the right answer, it depends on the marketplace and kind of the structure of the marketplace. But ultimately, you usually always have to start with supply and kind of getting something onto the platform that people can buy. Otherwise, there's just nothing there. And there's different strategies to do that depending on the vertical, either going after very unique inventory that nobody has really gone for. Think about Airbnb that kind of opened up the whole market of apartments.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “And we get this pitched all the time. I think very specific niche marketplaces. And I think they can be great businesses. I mean, the question is a little bit when we look at those, we look at those opportunities through the lens of a venture capitalist that needs to make a certain return for the fund. and hence cannot pass a requirement to invest in companies that can scale to $100 million in revenues in the next five to seven years from when we make the investment. So some of these marketplaces will provide tremendous value to the buyers and sellers. I think they make the operators also very happy because they can be very profitable businesses. They might just not be venture of capital fundable VC fundable. But that's fine. Not every business needs to be VC fundable. Sometimes you just raise a little angel money.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And sellers, then size of the market, the underlying market is always interesting or kind of important. Sometimes you might start in Indonesia as the typical example of eBay starting kind of collectibles and then growing to this huge marketplace around all sorts of products. But ultimately, what is the kind of market you can address? So that's the most important criteria.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I think the second thing is kind of what is the underlying relationship of buyers and sellers and sometimes buyers and suppliers, they prefer what we call a monogamous relationship kind of staying with one provider. Think about a doctor. Think about often a cleaning lady, a cleaning personnel. Once you found somebody that does a great job, you don't want to necessarily go to somebody new the next time you're in need of that service. Very different to a cab driver and kind of Uber. Like you couldn't care less who's driving you from A to B as long as they do safely. Is it a transactional relationship or a monogamous relationship? And it's much easier to build a big marketplace if you have a transactional relationship between buyers.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, I mean, there's a few articles written about kind of attractiveness of marketplaces. And, I mean, reality is that you're never going to meet all of criteria. So some of the most important criteria that we always feel should be met is, first of all, kind of fragmentation of supply and demand. The whole idea, the more people are on either side of the marketplace, the more value as a marketplace can bring. If there's only 10 companies or 10 people sitting on each side, they can coordinate it themselves pretty nicely. Very different story if it's thousands, tens of thousands and millions, right?”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Published before, but nobody really kind of put it together, put it into a whole framework, and put it into kind of concise guide. And I think that's the feedback we've gotten. It's written very simply, very nicely, and it's not too long, but at the same time has enough depth to really answer some of the most important questions that every marketplace entrepreneur should have.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Support one-to-one to our entrepreneurs, our own portfolio companies, but also entrepreneurs outside. But that's not always scalable. So to publish our content and what we learn in a certain way is always a way to try to reach as many entrepreneurs as possible. And last but not least, I think we like to make sure that people understand what we at version one get excited about how we think. So the moment we talk to entrepreneurs about funding, they already know a little bit about us in the same way that we know a little bit about them by looking at the website or the mobile app they've built. The second part of your question was kind of what is new in the marketplace book. And I think the major value out of that book, it's a very concise 50-page guide to, I would say, everything you need to know about marketplaces. There's a lot of ideas that happen.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “First of all, thanks for the praise. We've got a tremendous amount of great feedback from around the world, and we're a little bit surprised how far the book has already traveled in the last two weeks. You know, when we put out content either in the form of blog posts or kind of a book like that, we always think about three things. The first one is by writing content and thinking through a specific question that we have in our head, we learn a lot. And sometimes you might have a pretty unprecise idea about something in your head and then you start writing and structuring the article. And it turns out that you learn quite a bit in that process. So from that point of view, party, we learn through this process. The second one is we want to be as supportive as possible to entrepreneurs out there and the whole sort of ecosystem and part of me do that by providing help.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “The first generational marketplace were mostly centered around products, but the whole services category hasn't really been nailed. And I think that's partly all of that on-demand trend mobile trend again. Like Uber has been one of the biggest marketplace successes, and it has unlocked kind of the whole transportation vertical as marketplace. So looking back as general vertical marketplaces, mobile being a new use case and kind of then the whole on-demand services industry that has unlocked tremendous amount of marketplace potential.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, I think there's a few reasons for that. I mean, eBay was kind of the first real big marketplace launched over 20 years ago. And I think for the longest period of time, there wasn't a lot of innovation. People felt like, okay, they have nailed kind of that area. And there was much potential. I think three things really happened in the last five years, roughly. First of all, I think people looked at vertical marketplaces. And vertical marketplaces probably wasn't large enough of an idea back in 99 just because there weren't too many people on the internet. Today, when you have like billions of people on the internet, a vertical marketplace can suddenly become very attractive. And so, you know, there's this famous chart of looking at all the Brexit categories and seeing how people have basically built vertical marketplaces around it.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Books market convinced me. When you get these passionate customer stories almost on a daily basis where people thank you for creating a box and being part of the company, then you suddenly realize in a very personal way how powerful marketplaces are.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “I think the one thing where I always kind of got astonished by the power of marketplaces when I heard personal stories of our customers at a books, right? There were people that were looking for a book that they had read in their childhood or that were covering a specific topic that they were interested in for years and years going from book fair to book fair, going from one antiquarian bookseller to another, always kind of trying to scout through these local inventories that were limited. And they found eight books and suddenly they had 100 million books at their fingertips. They could browse through local inventories across the world. And most of the times, they found the book they had been looking for for such a long time. So just the power of bringing together buyers and sellers in a relatively small market like hard to find.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “So after that, I thought I wanted to figure out if I was also a good investor and trade angel investing for a few years, basically took my proceeds that I made from the Amazon sale and invest in about 35 internet and mobile companies and started to develop a really good investment thesis, had some early wins, some early exits, and then decided to do that professionally and raised a first fund version for inventors. Fund one was an $80 million fund and currently we are investing out of our second fund, which is a $35 million early stage fund.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Yeah, I mean, it was a little bit random in a certain way. I always knew I would love to become an entrepreneur. But in 99, internet 1.0, kind of the big bubble, there was an incredible excitement around the internet. And I thought like I just have to be part of it. So I started a company with a few friends called Just Books, which was an online marketplace for hard to find books. We started that company, raised some money, built it to Europe's market leader, and then sold it in 2002, two years later to our competitor in Canada called ABOX. And then consequently, I joined ABOX chief operating officer and continued a few more years there until we sold it to Amazon. So that was kind of my entrepreneurial career in technology that happened almost overnight and then lasted for eight years until we sold that company to Amazon.”

    2015-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: The Ultimate Guide To Marketplaces with Boris Wertz, Founding Partner @ Version One Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source