YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Jordan

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72
first
2022-05-10
most recent
2022-05-10
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “My dad was really smart. He was at Harvard at like 15 or something like that. I think they ask him to age a little bit before they let him come back. And my mom just had incredible level of ambition, particularly for us kids. And that combination, I think, is I'm nowhere smart as my dad or my brother. I was a pretty good student and learned pretty well. And then I think my mother gave me the drive. I know a couple very high performing execs who were essentially orphans by the time they were in their 20s. You get drive. If you're on your own and there's no backstop, it's pretty good for providing motivation.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “The people who saw something in me that made them want to, as strangers usually, invest time in going. I mean, it's just remarkable. It was the parents of friends. It was my boss. It was the head of admissions. It's just all these people who, I told the head of admissions, I couldn't afford to go to Stanford Business School. I was on my own working two jobs, the insurance job during the week and the restaurant during the weekend. And it was in Philadelphia and you were asking me to go California and take on like $70,000 in debt. I can't do it. She called me back the next day and goes, I couldn't sleep at night. You have to come. We'll figure it out. You'll be out of debt in two years. That's like a half to come. And she talked me into coming and it was a very good decision in retrospect for me at that time. It was remarkable generosity. And hopefully I can pay it back.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I'll be a reference or something when they're going for their second or third job, but all the effort is get them started. Get them in the flow”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “A job, not really. I've been pursuing academics and athletics at elite levels for years. And so then how do you help them figure out, okay, what do I like to do? Where's my skill? Where's my interest level? And then typically if you can get in their first job, they can figure it out from there. They're launched and then they progressively optimize and things like that. If I can help them launch very high satisfaction.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Getting them started. That's it. My kids are 27. They had great education. They both went to Stanford. And they come out and they have no idea what they want to do. How do you find it? And by the way, for me, it's a journey. It took me 15 years to find Silicon Valley and technology. And I found my life's calling after a whole lot of looking. And so it's implausible that someone come out and figures it out on step one. The conversation always starts with, oh, I'm now out of school. They tell me I have to get a job. What do I do? And you're just working with them on, okay, you're trying to figure out what their interests are. You're trying to figure out what assets they have, what networks are they in? You know, a lot of the people I work with are former Stanford athletes being an elite Stanford athlete means you pretty much couldn't get an internship because you have to work on every summer. So you're starting out with these exploration conversations of have you ever?”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And just pay it forward. The satisfaction is high. The frustration is, I haven't figured out how to scale it. It is still one at a time. The good news is there's a lot of the people who I think I positively touched, and that's great satisfaction. Still having cracked the code in how do you do it at scale? How do you have the bigger impact than doing it one at a time? And it's a one at a time thing. If you have any ideas, let me know.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I'm passionate about it because I benefited enormously, and a friend gave me a practice that I've been trying to implement with modest success. There are three or four people who kept me from driving into a ditch. I lost my father in my teens, my mother in my 20s, and there are people who took disproportionate interest in me and who were formative in my life. Ms. Mask at high school, Rick Thatcher at an insurance company Cigna. It was Kathy Quinn at Stanford business school. I mean, these people just went out of their way to throw me on the right path when I was doing it. So by the time I invest now is completely pay it forward. I don't think I'd be where I am and have the opportunities I had if it wasn't for these people. And if I can be that person for someone going forward, it's honoring what they did for me. I don't have much spare time. I put a lot of it into trying to help people impress me who might not have the same obvious opportunity. And it's completely pay it forward when they ask.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Dude, you can't do that. If you want to play, you got to dial that down. Guy always weighs me by 85 pounds. If you run businesses, you get pretty good at having the tough conversations. You know, there's an investment of time, an investment of the payoffs are huge. It's such a good group of folks.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “You had to finesse people into the game because there's a famous adage among hoopsters that you really get someone's personality on the basketball court. Craig Robinson played basketball with Barack Obama to try to assess his character when he was dating Michelle. When you figure out a pretext where, hey, we have an open space today. Do you want to run? And then you're basically assessing them both level, but much more for no asshole rule. It's one of the runs where people play a team game. It's not run down and hoisted. It's set picks, play defense. That's why the D1 players like it because it's real basketball, not jungle ball. That was challenge one. People, you know, stop playing, so you have to have new blood and you do that well. The other is enforcing the Moors. One former NFL player who has a pretty good temper scared the shit out of one of these six, four hundred pound guys. And so I get the very fun conversation to go up to said hothead and say.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Joe Lacob plays the lead owner of the Warriors, a couple others like that, but most of the game are former D1 athletes who are pretty young, pretty immersively recruit out of the Sanford football program. There's probably 10 people in the game running there. And they're early in their career. And what's great to see is people further along in their career helping the earlier in their career figure out, get the first job, grow. And so a whole lot of my mentoring comes out of that community where people I know and care for and respect are looking for the opportunities. The good news is we broken the gender gap. We've got a number of women who play in the community and are great members and have the same discussions and conversations there. So for me, the main reason I play now is I don't want to leave that community behind. I've been immersed in it for 20 years. It's a whole bunch of really good people that I.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “That's a little personal passion project. I play basketball forever. I'm pretty weird. I'm still playing at my age. My game is not improving these days. About 20 years ago, I took over organizing a game on the Stanford, played twice a week on the Stanford campus, gave me an opportunity to play, but it also gave me an opportunity to build a community of people. The number one rule is no assholes. The number two rule is we don't want to get hurt. I was responsible for 20 years for keeping the game alive, bringing in new blood, keeping the quality really high. And it's turned out, I haven't heard of any other game in the Bay Area that rivals it. It's been featured in the Ringer and featured on this TV show Silicon Valley. It's kind of fun, but I get inbound eagerly. I got two this week of people saying like, hey, I played at Arizona. I'm looking for a local run. Can I get into your game? We built a community and it's turned in, the Ringer story caught it pretty well. It's turned into a real community. I mean, people have each other's backs. There's a lot of mentoring going on. There's a huge age range and people. There are a couple of people like me.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Put on the shoes again and kick it up again. You want people who are immersed in the network and are the up and comers coming. So they really relaxed long operating experience thing. The other reason we relaxed it is it leads you right into white males because the only people had opportunities 20 years ago to run businesses were largely white males. So we wanted to get better diversity in the partnership and relaxing that requirement also help with that. We got young people who are in the flow, in the networks, and can be more diverse. There wasn't a archaic rule before. That is the key to the business is finding great investors who fit with the culture. And the big one there is teamwork. We over me, we at Knockwood managed to keep that as a core value in the firm. And if we can continue to scale that, that's really positive for the future.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “It's really hard, and it's the core of the business. Each of our fun families knock on wood so far or working. That means that the people who are running them, the partners who are running them are running them effectively. But we did have a not perfect hitcracker early on as we were trying to figure it out. It turns out the old operator has a couple issues with it. One is it's a young person's business. And that really comes through particularly in networks. I have a very good network in Silicon Valley. I'm very typical in that I'm still investing at my age. But my network is of my peers and they're not starting businesses anymore. You know, just Scott Cookett into it is not going to”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Ben is great on management. I'm pretty good on marketplaces. And so we went as a team. You get the firm. I think that people feel that energy and that commitment to the entrepreneurial process, helping people be successful is value one that's emerged over time. Value two is we're former operators. So we try a lot of things. Some work, some don't. But it's always moving and you're getting a firm and we're making the firm better every year. We're seeking to exploit our advantage because I think so. I think we're now a little over 350 employees at Injuries in Norway. That's probably more than our 10 biggest competitors in the US combined. We're making that investment out of partner fees, which other firms would take as direct income. We have an alignment of interest between our LPs, our companies, and us. We all do well if our companies do well. That investment is designed to help our companies perform and maximize.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “And as a result, you typically get a very consistent user experience at Andreas and Horowitz where anyone will help. An important one is we went as a team. Anyone at the firm will help any entrepreneur at any time. We all have our individual superpowers. Andrew's great at growth. Alex is smart as shit, knows FinTech better than anyone else's shit.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Zuckerberg came out here at no network. He had to ask Sean for introductions to meet interesting people and things like that. The biggest innovations when I joined were one, they had old operating people like me as the early founders and then two is they build out, they systematically build out networks that help the founders. And that model works well. It's created a lot of value for the entrepreneurs. And the good news is the entrepreneurs talk. The prominent entrepreneurs say this model does work. You check it out. I think that's been good. The other thing that I think has emerged over time, and I give Ben a lot of credit on this, is Ben wrote out a firm culture early on. And we really integrated it into the day-to-day operations of the firm in a pretty meaningful way. And the culture has things like we do first class business and the first class way. We play to win. We're stronger in our diversity. We respect the entrepreneurial process. And we live those values.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Mark may have mentioned this. Blood of the influence was actually Michael Ovitz, who built CAA from nothing into the most powerful man in Hollywood kind of thing. What he did is he went into an industry that was largely a loose conglomeration of individual partners who had their own book of business and their own relationships and just turned it on its head and build out a set of expertise that benefited the talent so that the talent's relationship was more with the firm than it was within individuals. Another talent firm, William Morris, you walk in, you'd have the relationship with Jimmy and you know Jimmy for 20 years. You walk into the conference room at CAA and there'd be a dozen people in there. It's domestic distribution, international distribution, publishing music. And there was the experts in each one. So Mark and Ben kind of applied that logic early on and said, okay, entrepreneurs, what do we lack? We lack some guidance and definitely lack networks.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It is that creativity, that trying different things, Ben tried different communities, early influencers actually ended up being an important part of there before they were called influencers. I give these entrepreneurs just unbelievable credit for wandering through the desert, drilling holes, looking for water. Sometimes they find it, and Pinterest would be a great example of that. Ben's persistence. And he tried 49 different things, the 50th worked.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I had the luxury of avoiding those three years when Ben was walking through the desert. I give Jeremy Besssemer big kudos for investing early and finding that. But the big one is there's all the revisionist stories on, oh, it just worked and things like that on a ton of them. They had to flail for product market fit. Pinterest was clearly one of those. Airbnb was clearly one of those. The Airbnb booked chronicles all the weird things they did, including a serial box selling serial boxes of Republican and Democratic convention to make money called Obama O's and Captain McCain's. And they're not collectibles, but they literally sold real cereal boxes.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Most trips, you want to do something when you get there. That's another example of the companies saying, okay, adjacent opportunity, same transaction, can we grow this business?”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Do really well. Also, the use cases eBay when Jeff Skull wrote the original business plan, it was all about collectibles. They anticipated building a business on collectibles and antiques. That definitely was the early 10 polls. But then other people started using eBay for other reasons. It was great for overstock merchandise. So you could get new inbox merchandise at a steal because it didn't sell in the stores and they're trying to move the excess inventory. Hard to find things. things where the hot Christmas present every year something blew up on eBay i need the new PlayStation console we would sell 80% of the units that Microsoft produced would sell on eBay during a Christmas season so all these new use cases came up and then enabling them making the discoverable creating the awareness that was also a massive growth vector and Airbnb's done a little bit of this with their experience business it's a new layer it sits adjacent to trip”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “So, yeah, kudos to him. And by the way, eBay never even used Bob's check. They always had the money in the bank. It was just security money. It's one of the best venture investments of all time.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “The person who made the eBay investment was Bob Cagel. If memory serves me right from Michigan, that I do know, and he collected duck decoys from an artist named Oscar Peterson. And the only reason I remember that because of the pianist. And when Pierre went in with his auction web website, which also had Area 41 and Ebola on related pages on the same site Bob was looking at it's black and white, types in Oscar Peterson. He's used to driving all over Michigan trying to unearth a duck decoy and all of a sudden five pop up on eBay. That was the Eureka moment where he said, oh my God, I don't have to drive around Michigan all summer.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Because it took huge amounts of friction away. Each of those product improvements accelerated growth. The book makes the point early on eBay was kicking Amazon's butt early on. It tells you only the paranoid survive is there's probably the long-term lesson from Andy Grove. At that point, it was the product innovation that was fueling the growth in the energy.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “And then go to the post office because you have to mail it. There's a book about the founding of PayPal that I just finished reading. It was really fun because it took you through all the play-by-play at the time. eBay had bought a company called Bill Point when I was joining the company. And early on I was supposed to be running it. Meg said, oh, yeah, as you're running services and that's a service. And so he then had managed to circumvent my layer and continue to report directly to Meg, which in retrospect is probably the best thing that ever happened to my career because Bill Point became absolute roadkill to PayPal. The PayPal guys did a phenomenal job and the eBay people did not layering in electronic payments and the ability to pay in two minutes took the transaction from hellishly hard to pretty darn easy. And that then we build a payment business on top of eBay after we bought PayPal, but much more, it helps accelerate the eBay marketplace.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Got one job marketplace, but it's not blue collar, it's healthcare, incredible health is a marketplace for currently hiring nurses. It's a good example of LinkedIn does not work for nurses. I mean, because what's important in nurses is all your licensing and your qualifications and your experience. And it's a set of very unique attributes that, again, LinkedIn as a horizontal platform can't do. So incredible health is a vertical play trying to do healthcare well. healthcare hiring well and rip it out i mean blue collar is the same kind of thing linkedin does not do it well indeed and the job boards are not particularly great there should be a marketplace approach onto it and so lots of people are aiming at it and hopefully someone catches fire soon”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I respect Marco a lot as an operator, but I don't think the definitive marketplace has yet been built there. And so those three segments are three that our team will meet all day long with entrepreneurs looking because someone's going to crack it. It's a question of when.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “There are three segments I've been looking at since I've been at venture capitalist and still I'm not sure I've yet found the solve. And there are three key remaining businesses on Craigslist. One is rentals. So I've got to play there belong, which is doing a very nice business. But my kids still use Craigslist as the primary way to find places to rent, and it's a terrible experience. Half the things on there are already rented. There's no information. But Craigsler's has a network effect and that one hasn't ripped off. So one is rentals. Two is blue-collar jobs. There is no good site right now for blue-collar jobs. Again, it lives largely on Craigslist. If you run a restaurant, you're running Craigslist ads trying to find, and there's, again, terrible user experience, puts all the effort on the hiring manager. And then the third is the service sector, home services of some kind. Thumb tax making a good play, trying to flip from lead gen into a marketplace.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “They were at the top of our marketplace 100 list that we recently put out. And StubHub was another that built a really big business in competition with eBay. So it's a really traditional trade-off on you might not be able to replicate the horizontal, but can you rip out verticals?”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “On because half was a hybrid between eBay and Amazon. He did a really nice hack where all items were listed under a UPC code, which meant it looked like an Amazon, if you look at Amazon Marketplace and click to other sellers, that is what happens. And I've been told by sources that Amazon in building marketplaces called it the half killer. So eBay bought half, but then Amazon knocked it off. And so that then became the other key competitor that we faced. But you need something extraordinary like that to lose a network effect, which eBay clearly has done. So actually, read a story, interview with Jamie Ayanone, the head of eBay now, who worked on my team back in the day. And he's trying to get a much better vertical approach. I mean, he's now authenticating sneakers and trading cards and things like that, trying to improve the vertical competitiveness because, for example, on shoes, goat and stock X done a heck of a job.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “On a transaction basis, Google was a preferred destination. I was at a intuit management conference where I spoke right before Cheryl Sandberg spoke. I hung around to hear Cheryl's story. And she goes, oh, we knew early on that our main competitor was eBay. And like, I'm just sitting there like, holy cow, that was not what I would expect it to come out of her mouth. I expected Yahoo or something, some search engine. No, it's eBay because of the commerce angle. So eBay had heard, I think, a lot by Google. And then we knew Amazon was going to launch a marketplace. Actually, my relationship with Josh Koppelman, our first round capital, started when he had started half.com. Josh, among other things, he was great at getting publicity. So he bought out a town in Oregon that was called Halfway, Oregon and gave him two computers and a couple thousand dollars and they renamed themselves half.com Oregon. So brilliant. And then he registered the URL eBay.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Figure it out. There had to be that consistency of user experience. So we were worried about getting hollowed out one. Two was a completely orthogonal approach to the marketplace. I always say, you're not going to see the person catching you in the rear view mirror. You have to look in the side mirrors because they're going to come from an angle. And my read on what happened to eBay was two things. One is eBay early on, I used to say, was everything you couldn't find in a mall. You could buy you on eBay anything you could not find in a mall and Amazon was everything you could find in a mall. What happened one was Google became, okay, we're going to help you find anything in the world. And that became an alternative to buying on eBay. You could Google something and find sellers that would have it. And the sellers actually liked having a Google transaction more than an eBay transaction because they own the user is they then have the ability to directly remarket to that user where on eBay we controlled that relationship. So even though eBay was cheaper.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “It was really interesting early on at eBay, first you're worried about okay, someone's gonna build Amazon auctions, Yahoo auctions. We quickly figured out that wasn't going to happen. We had enough of a lead in that marketplace business. We had the buyers. We were pretty good. came to believe that there were two threats to what them was a pretty strong monopoly. One threat was we get hollowed out vertical by vertical by specialized marketplaces because one of the benefits of the horizontal marketplace is the consumer can go to anywhere they want and find what they're looking for. One of the negatives is it's really hard to tailor the experience to the unique attributes of that vertical. So we spent a lot of time trying to figure out, okay, how do I go part way, have enough tailoring that it's helpful to use our experience, the horizontal platform remains coherent. If you dropped into tickets, this doesn't work like collectibles. How do I buy this?”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “I think Fiji just announced it would be over a billion dollars this year. Amazon showed that's very high margin income. So the existence of that ad business means he can provide a very compelling value prop to the consumer because they don't have to pay the full fare for the delivery. They get it partially subsidized through the advertising.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “That was pretty bad. The work I did that weekend was around profitability. And it turned out that he was just starting to do deals with grocery stores where the grocers would give him better pricing and share some of the incremental revenue from the economics. And that at scale would dramatically improve his economics. So one is you had to believe he'd get to the deals with the grocers. And then could he get the price parity? And he laid out this waterfall of this is how I'm going to make money. And it was very detailed. That purva superpower is optimization. He's just said, these are the 19 things we need to accomplish to make the unit economics work. And I'm halfway on this one and just laid it out. And I even looked at that sheet in a while, but I mean, it largely came true. He made the unit economics work. The big swing was he got the deals with the grocers and then the advertising.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “I don't not look at it if the margin's not bad. In the extreme case of this was Instacart. The time we invested, he was earning something like $12 order in money to Instacart. And he was spending about $30.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Human connection and live like a local. You're not in Faidi and sterile hotel. You're in the mission. Aroma's wafting into your Airbnb. You're living like a local. Each one of the founders have a superpower and good ones figure out how to lean into it, how to supplement me with the errors that are less.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Right. But when he got it right, it was like a eureka moment for me. Like, oh, I get it now. And that ended up in the couple campaigns, live like a local, belong anywhere, that it wasn't just accommodation. It wasn't economics. It wasn't this.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “I think that's a lot of it. For me, that's something I definitely try to assess. Do they know it? And you have really frank conversations with entrepreneurs because my partner Ben wrote about the imposter syndrome. We all have had the imposter syndrome. I've had it as an operator. I've had it as an investor. You know, it's just kind of like, what am I doing here? I'm in this room and trying to figure it out. The other thing is every one of the founders of the businesses that took off has superpowers of some kind. Now, they're often the superpowers overdeveloped and the non-superpowers are underdeveloped. And so there are always gaps as well. The ones who really figure it out lean into their superpower and then supplement them with their team and the areas that they may not be. So one of Brian's superpowers is brand and communication. I mean, he is just world class at that. I've learned so much from watching him develop the position, the brand positioning for Airbnb. And it took him like a half decade to kind of get it.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “You're doing okay. Ben Silberman once we went to Sun Valley together, the Allen Company conference, and we're flying back. I go, how's your conference? I always make sure I disappeared at some point in mountain bike just because I can't do constant socializing. He goes, I had 51 meetings with different people at the conference. And I go, what the hell? You're not fundraising? What do you do? He goes, everyone there has some special power and I wanted to know what they are. He invested 26 hours or something like that into self-improvement during a investor conference. And it's just that mentality. If you find entrepreneurs with that kind of hunger and thirst, I want to get better. I know I need to get better. I'm going to invest time and get better. It's a pretty good attribute.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “All of the best entrepreneurs I've met just go to school. Mark clearly was doing it. He's reached out to me. He's reached out to other people. Brian Chesky has a kitchen cabinet of like a dozen people who are world class in their area of expertise that he pings with. John Donoe happened to be one managing army. John Ivey happened to be one on design. I mean, John Ivy.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Hiatus between PayPal and OpenTable. I got an outreach from a young man named Mark Zuckerberg who was running the Facebook and had just relocated to California. I was like, okay, I'm intrigued. I've heard of this thing. It's supposed to be really cool. So I go meet with him. And then we have tea on University Avenue to tell you how long ago it was because he can't do that anymore. And I said, why'd you reach out? He goes, well, Sean Parker told me to. He said, you're one of the better operators in the valley. And I'm like, okay, Major Street. Sean Parker's recommending me around what he's sitting down for. He goes, well, people who know me know that I've never run a business before. I go, okay, I got that. Yeah. People who know me may not know that I never worked at a business. You don't know pay bands and OKRs and all the arcane knowledge that comes from being an employee is like, nope, none of it.”

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  43. “We specialize a lot into verticals. We have a crypto fund and a biofund and a growth fund. But even within the venture fund, we have a consumer vertical, a fintech vertical, and an enterprise vertical. The entrepreneurs, you could pick everyone. Anonymous person walks in the door fintech. Anonymous person walks in the door, enterprise. Typically what the consumer founder is, typically they're really young, they're digital natives, and they've made observations about the state of the digital world that typically more senior workers with more experience don't make. So almost all of my strong entrepreneurs, the ones who've really broken out, they almost didn't have a job before they started the company. I think Brian worked a year or two as a designer at a firm in LA. Ben Stran had a couple years at Google as a PM or pervad a couple years at Amazon as an engineer. This one came home to me, not the investment I did directly, but in my”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Airbnb's been supply constrained almost since I got involved in the company. The supply is expanding, but they believe they'd do more business if they had more supply, high quality supply. So, I mean, it is interesting, particularly in the unconventional businesses. I mean, the first, I've said this publicly, the first time I heard the Airbnb concept, I said that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.”

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  45. “Biased towards the buyer's side of the equation. I mean, people come to Airbnb, hosts come to Airbnb because that's the largest guest network in the world. The more guests you have, the happier the host will be in the long term. You're kind of optimizing for buyers, for diners, for guests. And in spite of the fact that the other side is typically the one paying you.”

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  46. “And so BB and Open Table, we did things that the sellers, the business side didn't like. They viewed reviews on Open Table at OpenTable. I have like four web windows open. I have one for OpenTable. I have one for a map because we didn't have a map. I had one for Zagat and Yelp because there were no reviews. And you're like, okay, I think I see the path forward here providing integrated experience. So we go to the restaurant and say, yeah, we're going to debut reviews. And they go, you cannot publish a negative review from a customer. I don't know. You're my technology provider. What are you doing, you know, kind of thing? And you're just like, we did research. If a customer opened a review, they were twice as likely to make a reservation. You're working with them. And then finally, if we couldn't convince them, we gave them the ability to opt out. We will not show reviews on your page if you don't want it. Just know that every other restaurant's going to have reviews. You're going to look pretty stupid. So there are always those tensions I almost always...”

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  47. “Tensions are great because there's two sides or three sides, and there's always tensions. It started at eBay. The sellers paid us. And so the obvious thing, give the sellers what they want. But it turns out for me, what made eBay work was the buyers. So Amazon and Yahoo both launched auction products early at eBay. By the way, they were the gorillas at the time. I mean, particularly Yahoo, it was a hundred billion dollar market cap early. They launch auctions, they make it free. We charge a list. They made it free. Amazon made it free. And they quickly got millions of listings. But what they lacked were buyers. And so the sellers went there and it's like they put up billboards and no one walked by. So they came running back to eBay and redoubled their efforts on our platform. Long had the philosophy that why the sellers came is we had a robust buyer base. And so then growing the business requires optimizing the buyer's base.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Ironically, I met him at Stanford Business School, asked me to sit down with some of their entrepreneurs ten years ago, and one they sent in was Tony Zoo with Palo Alto Eat. And so I spent half hour with a guy. And by the way, he's delivering the meals after class is over. Personally, it was that early. So I knew him. And I just looked at that market and you got Uber or Caviar, order ahead. There were 15 of them. And you're like, okay. I envision a future where you go into Orange's hummus and they have 15 iPads or chip printers all spinning out orders. And how do you make money in that environment? Well, you cap Travis. Market dries up and Tony executes phenomena. That for me is the biggest exception to my rule. Need that theory of defensibility in a marketplace business and kudos to Tony. It's awesome performance.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Mattress in a box cup. I learn very early. I did D2C before it was called D2C. I had a decent portfolio, but there was no defensibility characteristics in it at all. So I stopped doing D2C like seven, eight years ago. And so I try to abide by that rule and that rule has served me pretty well. The one it didn't, ironically, was DoorDash. That's probably my biggest miss. And I had an opportunity to do, I think it was a B. Tony clearly was a kick ass under it.”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “I don't know. You can look at my career in tech, and it's almost a one trick pony. I look for companies that have the potential for a network effect. I typically look for companies that have potential for a network effect, often through a digital marketplace dynamic. One of the most important lessons for me, another lesson learned in the areas I invest in, which is largely consumer, I think it's critical you have a theory on defensibility. And for me, that defensibility typically has been network effect. I've done a few words, scale, a few words, something different. But there's theory. There are these incredibly attractive opportunities early on, mattress in a box. Companies went to $100 million in about eight minutes. Tiles to find things, $100 million in seven minutes, meal kits, $100 million in six minutes. And so you're looking at these just growth charts vertical and you just say, look at that. Isn't that attractive? What do you want? Growth. But then you say like, what happens when they're six?”

    2022-05-10 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Jordan - Building & Investing in Marketplaces - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 276] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source