YouSaid · the spoken record

Casey Winters

lines on the record: 93
first: 2023-03-30
most recent: 2023-03-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Blog Not near as frequently as you at KCAccidental.com. You can find me on Twitter at OneKan. And yeah, just pay it forward. Help your companies build better products and better businesses. That's all I care about.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kalulla recently came out with her second album, Raven, which is really great. I've been listening to that. Orbital came out with a new album called Optimal Delusion. That's been pretty good. And then an oldie but goody is de la Souls music finally came out on Spotify. And the stakes as high is like one of my favorite hip-hop albums ever. So I've been jamming to that.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I preach like cross functional teams and alignment pretty aggressively. So how do you get people from all the different functions alied on the same OKRs and work? Cross functional team is pulling rank. It means something's fucked up on the team. But something we started doing more recently at both Eventbrite and whatnot is just designating the person on the cross-functional team who drives the project. At Eventbrite, we call it the driver and whatnot. We call it the DRI directly responsible individual. But once that person makes the call, it's disagree and commit time. There's no escalation path. Like if you're not the DRI and you're on the team and they made the call, all right. It's time to sign up and go forward on that decision. And if they made the wrong decision later, okay, we'll learn once we ship.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I've been doing. Other things like The Last of Us is great. I really enjoyed the video games severance is great. Station 11 is great. I loved the book too, but I thought that was really good. Movies? There haven't really been a lot of great movies lately, but I did rewatch chicken and screaming from the 90s. And it really holds up well. I don't know how many of you have heard of it, but it's about a group of college kids who graduate, but they just decide not to leave campus and start their lives and they just stick around campus. So I really enjoyed that one.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely the goal by Elihu Goldrat, which explains how my brain works pretty well. Thinking fast and slow by Danny Konman. I took a lot of the behavioral economics classes in my MBA program and then his book came out like the year after. So I just absorbed it as quick as possible.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so if what your plan is to use paid acquisition on top of a freemium model to get a percentage of people to convert and hopefully stick around forever, I'd pivot right now. I just can't see it working. So how do you pivot? Well, how do you make it social so that people are bringing in other people? How do you get a supply side to the content or education or whatever you're building and make it in the supply side's interest to refer people? You have to do something that's either building some more organic growth loops into the business or building network effects into the business or else we could go spend two hours and model out exactly when you're going to run out of money. Like it's just that predictable. And, you know, a lot of founders don't like to hear it when I tell them that, but I'd rather them hear it now than learn it three years from now.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a great point. It was an interesting case study between Calm and Headspace. Calm remains like 10 people forever. And headspace had gone into like, you know, hundreds of people and calm, like basically never lost money. And that allowed them to be, you know, allowed them to pivot easier during, you know, massive changes like app tracking transparency, like through a wrench into all paid acquisition. So if you're not losing money, like cool, you have time to figure out how to like grow again. But if that increases your burn by like $100 million, you have a lot more of a panic on your hands”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mind boggling. You run out of humans It's really hard. So, if you can retain people incredibly well, meaning those people just never churn, yeah, you've got a great business, but look at the effort, the companies that have done that are doing to do that. Spotify doesn't make profit. Netflix, Amazon, just spend so much money to try to do that. And how replicable is that for a startup? I'd rather say like, let's try and get some network effects involved here. Let's get our customer acquisition cost to zero, you know, let's think about other ways to monetize because this alone feels like hard.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what network effects allow you to do is they allow your product to get better faster than the customers you target get worse. Normally through increased selection, like some of the examples we gave with DoorDash and others.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learn, like, you know, when the retention dips and when you can no longer leave your profitably acquire users. And if you want to look at like a model in real time, just look at Bluprint. The company raised $300 million in an IPO that valued it at $2 billion. It's worth $50 million today on the New York Stock Exchange. And I think people understand now if they didn't before that paid acquisition tends to get worse as you scale. You know, you target the best customers first. They have great conversion, great retention. And then as you expand, you're targeting new customers. Every one of those metrics gets worse until it's no longer profitable. Maybe two years from now, it maybe five years from now, but eventually it'll be no longer profitable.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when you look at how they do it, they're either doing it with massive op-ex and economies of scale or through a network effect or some other bespoke growth loop that's not that easy to replicate. So Duolingo has a strong data network effect. The lessons get better, the more people use it. You know, B, the company I'm on the board of, has a cross-site network effect between creators who create the content and the listeners. And the creators bring a lot of distribution from their existing social networks to bring new people in the app to listen. Netflix and Amazon. They spend billions of dollars on content. So I think the default path of like, I'm going to spend money on paid acquisition. I'm going to retain half of my audience year over year. That's just a path to going eventually. And I think what's interesting about these businesses is you can model it. So you can learn when it's going to happen.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you look at who's actually been able to do that at scale. And it's a really small list. Netflix in the US, Amazon Prime, Spotify, Duolingo, I think is emerging as one of these players that's making it work.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do stick around. They tend to spend more. Either they buy more seats if you're a seat based model or they use the product more if you're a usage model. So the SaaS company just makes more money in year two, year three, et cetera. So consumer subscription just doesn't have any of these benefits. Consumers are way less predictable. They tend to retain worse than businesses. And they also don't have net dollar retention characteristics. So if the user retains paying you in year two, you probably make it the same amount that you made from them in year one, not more. What that means is you need higher user base retention than it be to be SaaS businesses with more unpredictable users. And it's a lot higher than I think founders tend to think. We're talking and we're”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think in order to understand these businesses, you have to start with why do investors like B2B SaaS? Why do they like B2B subscription? And I think the way most respond to that question is like, oh, predictable revenue, right? And it's like, sure. I mean, that's cool and all, but I think that's actually not the most important. So I'd argue there's two great attributes of B2B SAS. One is that businesses are more predictable in how well they routine. They're rational. You can understand who are good versus bad businesses for your product, as well as which ones are going to grow versus go out of business. And more importantly, the second thing that's great about B2B SaaS is net dollar retention. So what is net dollar retention if you don't work at SaaS? Well, as a SaaS company, some of your customers are going to churn. Some of your customers are going to stay. And normally outside of potentially current macroeconomic conditions with all the layoffs, when customers...”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you think that's unique to you because you are already a top one percenter substacker? Or is that a meaningful number for newish players? Like if I finally switch my email list to substack, which has been on my list for a long time”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think they were able to abstract away the version of what you just said to something that was actually useful, which is, yes, I don't want more emails to subscribe to. But I do, I am fundamentally interested in more articles relevant to my interest. And no one has really solved that super well. Twitter was a very hacky form of that, you know, where I follow you and then I see when you post a new blog because you tell everyone on Twitter you post a new blog, but it isn't built for that. Whereas the substack reader will now allow me to be like, oh yeah, sure, I'll subscribe. So I really like what they've done. It'll be interesting to see how big a business that is and how it all plays out. But I think their execution has been really solid.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly, right? It's like the primary value prop of why supply signs up is that you're going to bring them extra business. And if you have buyers and sellers, but the primary reason supply signs up is for tooling or payments like how Eventbrite started, that's not really a marketplace. You know, I call it a SaaS-like network. Some people might just call it a SaaS business, a payments business, whatever the case may be. But it doesn't really have those cross-side network effects that we associate with marketplaces.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you're always going to use that same supplier, there's no need for me to show you the rest of the inventory. And basically all marketplaces win, unlike we mentioned, selection and unique selection. And then there's, of course, the marketplaces that win with like standardization of like, I can get it at any time. It might be from different people, but I know the Uber car is going to be there in five minutes or whatever. I don't care as much who the driver is. So one of those has to be there. And you just find in a lot of these examples, like, there isn't really that much of a discovery need for who the demand side would be in this theoretical marketplace when you dig into it.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So take square or substack or Patreon or Eventbrite, right? All of these are examples of SaaS businesses that in providing the SaaS service deal with the customer and the customer's customer, right? Makes it a lot easier because you already have a relationship, they already know your brand, whereas like Stripe, when we buy things, we don't know if we're buying it through Stripe, right? Like it's just a SaaS tool that's white labeled in the back end. We have no idea. So I think that's the first element, right? There's a lot of businesses that look like that, but it is a subset of SaaS businesses that look like that. And then secondly, those customers that you're building a relationship with, they need to have a reason to transact with more than one of your current customers on the supply side, right?”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas marketplaces that add a SaaS component, as a customer acquisition tool, like their or a workflow or attention tool to increase retention or reduce disintermediation, I think you'll see that be a lot more common approach and much more replicable.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's right. So I think I don't know when it was just maybe like 2015 or whatever, a bunch of investors started writing about SAS to marketplace transitions. And that's the transition of Emprite's going through. It's going to work, but it's hard. And it's not replicable for a lot of other SaaS businesses. You need to have a direct relationship with your customers' customers, first off, those customers need to have needs beyond that single supplier. Usually it's like a discovery value prop, you know, for other suppliers. And you need to build like this totally new skill set to build tools for your customers customer who is very different from your current customer.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a wholesale marketplace between independent retailers and brands so that you can sell products at these retailers like a boutique in your local neighborhood. So FAIR built the Mark's place first. And then it later built a SaaS tool that allowed the brands to onboard their current retailers into the platform and get better terms on payments and free returns. And it didn't charge anything to use the SaaS tool for any rebookings that happened through that platform. But what that did is it onboarded more independent retailers that they could cross-sell to other brands without needing to use a sales team. And when they cross sold, of course, Fair did take their percentage on those transactions. So I think that model has worked out really well and fair has grown quite quickly.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those real cross side network effects. And that would mean that creators start selecting event bright because of all the demand Eventbrite has versus the quality of the SaaS tools. So that's obviously something we're working on. FAIR is a company I advise more recently that I think has unlocked this model in the reverse where”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's OpenTable. So look, this is definitely the strategy we're working on with Eventbrite, where we started with something that was more SaaS-like, enabling EG payments and certain tools to make Event Creators business more efficient. And we're layering in more of the traditional marketplace value prop of demand, you know, driving more sales for these event creators. And I would say it's got a ways to go to be working really well. And what is working really well look like? It's when the marketplace model unlocks those cross-site network effects that make it easier to grow. So, you know, event creators, when event bright started, they would just go do their own marketing to bring people to Eventbrite to transact on their events that they had listed there. And now Eventbrite drives 25% of the ticket sales itself. And that percentage is growing faster. That's amazing. Yeah. It's growing faster than the rest of the business, which is great. But it probably needs to be closer to like 50% to unlock.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make, which is why restaurants are willing to pay higher fees. Like these restaurants are not stupid. They're not being misinformed, right? So Open Table, well before there were any delivery startups, was like, we're going to fill up your tables and we're going to give you the software that helps you manage your tables most effectively to make the most profit.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, sure. So Open Table promised both a SaaS tool that would help you understand what tables are open and where to seat people. So for the host in the front of the house in a restaurant, but also bring in additional reservations to fill up your restaurant, right? Because I think what people misunderstand about restaurants is they're like, oh, these restaurants are these incredibly low margin businesses. And it's like, yeah, they are because they're paying in the rent no matter what happens. So once you're already paying the rent no matter what happens, you're incentivized to pump as much food out the kitchen and to get as many people seated in houses as possible. So people would say like, oh, grubhub and DoorDash are charging too much. And it's like, no, like delivery orders and catering orders are basically pure margin to restaurants. The chefs are already there. The rent is already being paid. The more things we pump out of the kitchen, the more money we get.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The canonical example that a lot of these founders use is OpenTable. And that always felt really unfulfilling to me because it's very old at this point. Probably the younger people listening to the podcast are like, what's OpenTable? And I think that business has incredibly underperformed the market it operated in. So it had a good exit. It sold for $2.6 billion, I think, to Booking.com. But booking subsequently wrote that value down below a billion. So, you know, that's not really the outcome I think we're looking for traditionally in marketplaces.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Door dash sort of thing. And I would say I'm pretty skeptical of those because they're just not really building the network effects on the demand side. They're just more like SaaS businesses. And I think they'll struggle to be multi-hundred million dollar in revenue businesses because the take rate is typically like a third or a fourth of what DoorDash can charge”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, clearly they took advantage of the zero interest rate environments that we talked about earlier. That is not a replicable strategy in 2023. So any approach to compete with them has to be competing on a very different angle because, yeah, they can spend you into the dust. So, you know, we'll see if anyone's able to build a way that creates new supply and market. I think you and I've seen a couple of earlier stage examples of that. We'll see if any of them scale or something that feels cheaper or more fun on the demand side. That would be like another way to potentially disrupt things. I think another thing that was working pretty well to before the pandemic in building disruptors was focusing on the pickup use case, which, you know, DoorDash cannot do as easily. They've tried, right? But like their whole value prop is the delivery network, which you don't need for pickup. But of course, the pandemic put a lot of those startups grinding to a halt as well. So, you know, there's always angles, but you're going to need to be incredibly clever because just attacking with a war chest is not really going to work.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Like if the market's rewarding it, the market will probably find a way to make it profitable. And essentially when everyone's find a more efficient network effect for demand on the marketplace side, you probably need to copy that as soon as possible. And if you can't copy it, own it, right? Like buy it. And I think we've seen this a few times. Like, Rover and Wag was another interesting example of this, where they found a more frequent use case that fit the same supply and demand. And, you know, Rover just copied it as soon as possible. And that ended up working out for them in a way that it didn't as much for grow-up.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Grop probably could have acquired them multiple times for whatever reason it never happened. It would have seemed pretty risky had Grubhub done that. Investors probably would have hated it, but it would have been their Netflix moment where Netflix betted all on streaming and they bet right. And this is all incredibly easy to say in hindsight. But I think what I've learned now that I'm more senior in my career is during existential threats, you know, it's like when Naseem Talib says the only rational reaction is overreaction. Unless you have a real viable reason to assume otherwise, you've got to assume the disruptor is right and base your strategy on them playing an optimal game. And whereas I think Grub assumed the disruptor was wrong and that it would all play out eventually in their favor. And it clearly did.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do you do? Go to investors that you promised high growth and high profits and say you need to raise more money in debt to compete with negative margin upstarts in a way that will destroy all that potential profit you mentioned? The stock would drop ninety percent. A lot of your employees would leave because their stock is now worthless. And on top of that, building a delivery network is a heavy operations play that much is none of your core competencies. So to me that feels like a death sentence. So I think the only play here was to buy DoorDash as early as possible. And let DoorDash and their operationally heavy culture eat Grubhub from the inside out.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On top of that, all this corporate ordering that we got from Seamless no longer mattered because no one goes to the office anymore. So this gambit really paid off and DoorDash just took the market. Grumpub then tried to copy the approaches of DoorDash and Postmates and they wrote kind of this famous letter saying that they still thought the approaches were stupid, but their hand was forced, which is kind of funny to read in retrospect. So, you know, a lot of armchair thinkers are like, how could Grubhuff have been so stupid to let DoorDash take the market that they built? And look, I'll admit, Grubhub made some mistakes. But I think it would have been extremely hard for GrowHub to come out on top here. So let's say in 2014, after UIPO, you do actually think what DoorDash Postmates and Uber are doing are smart.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And part of what they use that money for was to lock up agreements with national chains, which GrubHub never worked with. It was always like the local mom and pops and promotions and discounts on the demand side. So all of this is happening. And then the pandemic hits. And all of those negative margins turn positive for Doordash for the first time, if I understand things correctly.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Attractive it is to users and vice versa. So at that point, Grubhub's put in a very peculiar position. It had gone public after raising $80 million in venture capital and raising $100 million in an IPO, telling investors it's an extremely profitable, high growth asset light marketplace. But now it's got disruption pressure from operationally intensive negative margin delivery services that were raising $100 million every six months from the private markets. So what Grubhub assumed is that these businesses were just structurally unprofitable and that VCs would stop subsidizing them eventually. Of course, that didn't happen. They kept raising more money. DoorDash eventually raised, you know, multiple billions of dollars in this market.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Grubhub operated in these dense cities and suburbs like in New York, because those were the only places that had restaurants that had delivery. DoorDash, when it started operated in less dense suburbs and worked with restaurants that had never done delivery before, and they would provide the delivery drivers themselves. So this allowed DoorDash to grow without much competition in the early days. And these companies also took some real gambles. One of the things they did is they delivered from restaurants they didn't have an agreement with. And that caused controversy and lawsuits. But what it meant is when these companies did launch in the cities to go after Grubhub, it felt like DoorDash and Postmates and Uber had dramatically larger selection of restaurants to choose from. And Grub was definitely no longer near comprehensive. And, you know, back when we talked about cross-site network effects, the more selection of restaurants,”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Postmates and DoorDash were the first two that rose to prominence. Who breeds would come later, but they actually started with a pretty different business model. And this is an extremely different business. You're hiring drivers. You're managing logistics. So we call this a heavily managed marketplace model. As you are now facilitating the transaction versus just connecting buyers and sellers and taking payments like Grubhub did. So on the one hand, you have Grubhub, this extremely high margin business, and these businesses coming up are actually negative margin businesses, at least they were for a long time. So in 2013, Grubhub acquired Seamless, its closest competitor at the time. And Seamless still had a lead on Grub Hub in New York, partially because it had this corporate program where law firms and banks and consultants got lunch stipends you had to redeem by ordering the food through seamless.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One important thing to remember is Grubhog was an asset light marketplace model. Restaurants did their own delivery through their own delivery drivers that they hired. And I wrote this post for Andreessen Horowitz a few years ago about supply strategies and marketplaces. So in that, like, you really need to be comprehensive or have Even if we didn't work with them directly for online ordering. So what happened about a year before I left Grubhub was that these competitors started to raise their seed rounds or series A's to build delivery networks.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“assured it it's a great question and I think people do mistake any form of network effect as this perfect form of defensibility They're the best form of defensibility, but that doesn't mean they're immune to disruption. And I think the main way this happens with cross-site network effects that we typically talk about for marketplaces is when a disruptor dramatically expands selection. So I want to be clear. I left Grubhub at the end of 2013 before said lunch was eaten. So what I'm communicating is more like public knowledge of watching these amazing companies compete rather than like being inside the fire at the time.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's take some inventory, right? So I think Zillow is really interesting in that a real estate listing site is not particularly an interesting product, but the ability of saying very rarely do both sides of this network, people who are buying homes and selling homes need to connect. But I can find a way for the brand to connect with both of them by giving real-time pricing information on the value of homes. And that creates a much stickier product for both sides. I think that was a pretty genuine innovation that other people have tried and rarely been as successful with. So that's one that definitely sticks with me off the top of my head.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree, right? I think they're a great form of defensibility first off. So do they make sense for every business? No, but in a lot of cases, in order for you to evolve properly and continue to grow, they can become a necessity.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But all of them have to become either cross-side and or data and network effect businesses over time. The only companies that stay direct network effect businesses are these pure communication tools like Messenger, iMessage, WhatsApp. And there isn't a clear path to make money with those. But if you want to sell ads, you're becoming a cross-site network effect business. And also creators versus consumers creates a cross-site network effect business. If you want to get better at personalization, guess what? You're recommending content by leveraging data network effects.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As well as to other people who look like you and share similar interests. So one thing that's tricky about these network effects is most people talk about network effects in the context of social network, not marketplaces or SaaS like my background. And the thing that's really tricky in understanding social networks is they're traditionally described as these direct network effect businesses.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then there are cross side network effects where there's two distinct types of users. And adding an additional user on one side of the network makes it more valuable for all the types of users on the other side of the network and vice versa. So when a restaurant joins Grubhub, it creates more selection for users to order food. And when more users start ordering more food, Grubhub becomes more attractive for restaurants to join so they can make more money from delivery orders. The last network effect I focus on is data network effects. And that's when the quality or cost of something improves as more data is collected through the product. So when you save content to Pinterest, to a board, it gives Pinterest signal on the quality of that content, its relevance to other pieces of content since they're shared to the same board, and more signal on your preferences. And this allows Pinterest to better recommend more content to you.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so at its core, a network effect is when a product or a business gets better with more users or customers using it. And there's three types that I tend to focus on. So the first and probably the most well-known is called direct network effects. And that's when every additional user makes the product better for all the existing users. So when someone joins WhatsApp, other people can talk to them that they wouldn't be able to talk to them before. And that makes WhatsApp valuable more valuable for everyone.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was fairly low adoption for a while and leveraging basically restaurant authority. So if we were able to push on our restaurant customers effectively to say like, hey, if you use this, it'll get you more orders. We'll get you prominence in the UI, things like that, to then push down to their direct relationships with the drivers to get them to adopt.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Mike and Matt overruled me and pushed us to do it. And in the long run, it ended up being quite necessary because of the innovations around DoorDash and Postmates and later Uber Eats into having their own delivery network and us needing to counter that. That's, of course, a key piece of technology that needs to have parity with those new services. So that was an area where perhaps they were thinking a little bit more longer term than I was. I was not able to kind of get where they were going on the longer term time horizon of how this would be actually ultimately adopted and useful.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was at Grubhub, one of the ideas, one of the founders came up with was to build an app for delivery drivers. So at the time, restaurants had their own delivery drivers. They did not work for us. And we wanted to build an app for the delivery driver so you could see where the food was along the way. So you could know if it's a five minutes away, whatever, right? Domino's was the first to have done this at the time. And we thought that would make a bunch of sense. And I was just like, how am I supposed to convince the delivery driver who doesn't have a relationship with us to download the sat from Grubhub, to actually turn it on, to create anxiety for the consumer?”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of impact at Pinterest. But no one knew who I was. I didn't come from Facebook or Google like most of the other people are Pinterest. No one gave a shit about Chicago startups at the time. So, you know, when they didn't trust my proposals, I just went and talked to the heads of growth at all the startups they did respect. I talked to Dropbox. I talked to Facebook. And when they said all the same things I was saying, but I said that they said it, not me, that was sadly more convincing. But I didn't care because I still got what I wanted out of it, which is to do the right thing to grow the company.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to find ways to be contrarian and prove you're right. And different founders have different forms of feedback they listen to. It might be talking to other CEOs or other operators or trusted advisors, certain customers. Some might be very data oriented. So you just run the experiment and ask for, you know, forgiveness after you prove it worked, whatever. Like everyone's got like a different thing they respond to. So you try to figure out what actually influences, you know, the CEO and build that case, whether it's through an experiment, the right customer intro, the right external advisor. And if they rebuke that as well, then you got it disagree and commit or find a new company to join or start your own. Like I said, it's their company. They can make the call. I remember when I joined Pinterest, I was just coming off, you know, 100x increase in user growth from Grub Hub. And I was ready to drive the same sort of.”
2023-03-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source