YouSaid · the spoken record

Marco Zappacosta

lines on the record
24
first
2018-04-20
most recent
2018-04-20
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

  1. “Yeah, both of those things I would expect happen in the next five years. But going back to sort of my last answer, I would really say I want us to become a verb. And that's something that I think we can do over the next five years, to become that solution that is so trusted that when somebody says, hey, Harry, you know, a good plumber, I want the answer to be, oh, just thumbtack it. That's the way you solve this problem. They'll connect you with a great guy. That's the magic that we're after.”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “My big sort of fear or anxiety is around building a household brand and building an experience that is consistent and reliable enough such that we become the default starting point for all of these searches. We're solving a big problem. We're solving a problem that nearly everybody in the country and ultimately the world has. But there's never been a go-to solution for it. There's never been a brand either like offline or on that is sort of the destination for this stuff. And I'd argue it's primarily because of how hard it is to get all these various categories and all these various price points and all these various types of demand fulfilled consistently. And so that's the challenge in front of us, being able to credibly tell a customer, hey, Thumbtack is the best place to hire a professional for whatever you need done and delivering on that promise is what I spend a lot of time thinking about.”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It's the best. I love having him in my corner. He's botted us from the beginning and he's been a fan and a supporter ever since. We're very thankful to his Open Angel Forum. That's where our angel round in 2010 really started to come together and got us a great group of people involved. So it's one of those lucky things that happen that I will always be thankful for.”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “It's an impossible question. The book I'm reading right now, which I love, is called The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles Mann, who's a historian. And he wrote this book 1491 and 1493 about pre-colonial America, which were incredible. And this book is about the 20th century environmental movement and the two schools of thought that emerged, the sort of conservation environmentalism and the sort of techno-optimistic sort of environmentalism. And it's interesting. He does a great job of not telling you sort of what's the right way forward, but just presenting the challenges we face when it comes to water, energy, and the like through the lens of these two approaches and these two men who sort of started these movements. It's a beautiful book.”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think that may be true in these more commoditized services. So I think ride sharing could be. Where if you ask I care about in a ride Office, like it's as fast as possible and as cheap as possible. And unfortunately, that means the driver is going to continue to be squeezed, so much so that they're looking to replace the driver Software in our marketplace, you're looking to hire a talent Do something you can't do yourself. Say be your wedding Photographer, tutor your child and the SATs, paint the exterior of your home. And therefore, there's a lot of discretion that goes into it. And you're interested in finding the right match for you. And if we do our job well and we match efficiently and price appropriately, both sides should be happy. Both sides should have a high MPS. That is absolutely our goal.”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “That's bogus. I think True of Airbnb, and it shouldn't be true of a service marketplace either. I think TaskGrabbit's challenge is that it commodified the Side of the platform. And therefore, To the customer was speed and low prices. And in that sense, yeah, it's. Dollars an hour and are able to different Price. Now”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “We're live in every city in the United States. We have pros just about everywhere. And now So it's a different problem for us than most.”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So we actually went nationwide very, very early in our history because we found a supply side acquisition strategy that could really fill up the network everywhere. And so at this point, we actually have a paying professional in all but one county in the United States. And so geographically have managed to be very, very broad. And the benefit of that is it has let us then leverage marketing channels that are not geographically specific. So we can buy remnant on TV or online independent of where it's going to show because we have supply everywhere. So this is actually a challenge sort of jump starting a new market that we haven't really had in a long time. So it's something that we don't have like a playbook for. When the day comes that we ultimately go international, we'll have to really think through that. But for the time being, SumTech is already nationwide.”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Things like direct mail or offline ads can be more effective. So there's no one answer. And it's about building the analytical framework to understand where the holes are, how much you can pay, and tracking the efficiency of filling them everywhere. It is an analytical challenge almost above all else”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Silver bullet. I think the answer is different in when you are starting early on and you're trying to jump start a marketplace where you have to really find a way to entice the supply side to join before you have liquidity and sort of demand to offer them. But then once you have that demand, it's all about being super efficient, about recognizing where the holes are, how much you can spend to fill those holes, and then being very thorough in testing the various channels online and off to attract professionals. Something that we see is that different categories operate in very different ways. So creative services, think photographers, DJs are very digitally savvy and tend to have Facebook pages about themselves and talk about themselves on social media. And so we can target them more easily on Facebook. Home service companies like Plumbers, HVACs tend to be a little less tech savvy and harder to reach through digital channels.”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Sure. I mean, we have a unique challenge, I think, among marketplaces in how many distinct markets we need to fill. So if you think about an e-commerce site like Amazon, they effectively have one network per country or, you know, in some cases one network globally. A local marketplace like an Airbnb has a localized network. So it's true in sort of these different geographies. We have a local network as well, but one that is highly differentiated by category. So for you in London, if you're looking for a plumber, you could care less how many caterers and tutors we have. All you want is plumbers. And so we have, you know, on the order of 100,000 unique different markets to fill across 100 cities and 100 metros and a thousand different categories. So supply side acquisition is something that we have worked very, very hard on for a long time. And the truth is there's no”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I think this goes down to hiring a great CFO and one who can help impose the discipline around doing what you say you're going to do. And from a budgeting standpoint, yeah, you have a lot of money in the bank, but you still need to be deliberate. You still need to justify these investments and understand how they're going to play out and have a rationale for it.”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Again, it goes back to what you're optimizing for fundraising can only be evaluated in light of the objective that the company is trying to achieve. We're trying to shoot the moon. We want to be a household brand. We want Thumbtack to become a verb. And to do that requires making these big bets. And that takes capital. And that's on the product and the platform, as well as ultimately the brand and the marketing of it. And we pursued a fundraising strategy in support of that vision. It's not necessarily right or wrong, but it was the right thing to do for us.”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “So, honestly, it catalyzed it. We raised our A in January of 12. We began testing sort of new models, not much later in the spring of 12. By the fall, we had a very strong hypothesis on what it was Bested that out. And then finally, in sort of January and February of 13, we flipped the marketplace. And so February and March were the first months that this new model was rolled out nationwide. We weren't going to get stuck with sort of decision paralysis or get caught in a local maxima just because we were sort of scared of how to unwind that. And so that meta sort of fact, I think, helped a lot too. But, you know, we're a marketplace. So no one expected or wanted us to have a subscription-based business. Which is great in a lot of contexts, but not in the marketplace.”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “A household brand, and to do that meant sort of sacrificing the sort of short-term past to do the right thing for the long-term health of the business. And we went for it. In retrospect, it was obviously the right call, but at the time, it was super scary.”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “That was scary. So, you know, the background here is we really struggled to raise our Series A. And the primary feedback was that we hadn't shown an ability to monetize this marketplace, which was valid. And so sort of at the last minute, we put in place a subscription model, which we knew was imperfect, but had the benefit of being easy to implement and quickly show that we could make revenue. Then we were in this position where we'd scaled that thing up, honestly, just because the marketplace was growing and doing well, you know, subscriptions are a pretty static monetization method and marketplaces are highly dynamic. And so we just had less control over what are the key variables, the price of one of these connections than we wanted. And so this was one of those moments where you have to go back to what you're optimizing for and what you're playing the game for. And for us, we wanted to build a big, independent framework.”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I think it can come in a lot of different ways, but I would definitely encourage founders to have a weekly or every other week phone call. Ours is 30 minutes. We often use 10 to 20 minutes. Sometimes we use the whole thing. Rarely we skip it, but it does happen. And it's just someone I trust a lot, someone who knows the business and cares about the business and has seen a lot and can help me. Honestly, just move faster. I've never done this before. And so there are definitely times where I don't know what the range of possibility is. And so having him sort of fill in that gap gets me to make a decision much faster than I otherwise would be able to.”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Make us successful, but doing it wrong can be a gigantic waste of time and money. And so having someone who can just give you a few data points and say, hey, here are the couple of things that we wrestled with. Here are the pros and cons of that one. Here are the pros and cons of this one. Here's my gut on where you guys should probably net out. It's so valuable. Also, he knows the people really well. And so people issues come up all the time. And having someone who is sort of a stepped removed who's not necessarily on the exec team to just say, hey, this is going on with these two people. Like, what's your take? How do you think about that? So as like a sounding board for me, it's immensely valuable.”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, so I'll be honest, first one, it was proposed, it felt like a lot, and I was worried that it was going to be either a waste of time or sort of micromanagement. But it's been hugely valuable. And the benefit is there's no prep. There's no agenda. But every week there's something on your mind. And so knowing that I have that call on Tuesday means that I file a few things away every week and say, okay, this is a perfect thing to bring up with Brian. And honestly, it's often fairly tactical things. And it's like, hey, we're in the midst of thinking through a benefits review and we're thinking about self-insurance, like give me your thoughts on self-insurance in the next five minutes. And it's not that that's the final answer, but somebody like Brian, who's on the board of Dropbox and Qualtrics companies who are a couple years ahead of us, has just seen them go through a lot of these same questions. And it's the type of question that's not going to”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Long term product strategy, things that are going to play out over quarters and years that are really important to get right and think through ahead of time. And again, a lot of the value is in preparing for it, in thinking through the various options and the pros and cons. And then it's about getting real sharp on the answers and hearing the feedback from these people who have the benefit of not being too far in the weeds, but enough context where they can really be helpful. Kind of need someone who's not all the way in to be able to call out your blind spots.”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, I mean, there's sort of like three chunks. One is just the administrative part that just needs to get banged out at the start. So approving minutes, option grants, all the sort of legal procedural stuff. Then there should be a business update and sort of a financial component. But really, it's about reflecting back how you did against the goals that you set out for yourselves. And ideally, it's not so much of the reporting of like, here's what the number is, but much more about here's what happened. Here's why we exceeded or here's why we fell short, here's what we learned, here's where we were wrong, and just providing that insight, which I think is honestly most valuable in preparing rather than necessarily the discussion that it fosters. And then the real meat of the conversation is a discussion around one, maybe two key strategic decisions that the company is facing. So it could be something about entering new markets, fundraising, thinking about a hiring plan, thinking about sort of a”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “So I think probably the appropriate term would be to say partners. I think too often founders are intimidated by the board and sort of see it as a sort of group on high that needs to be answered to when really these are smart, capable, hardworking people that you should partner together to navigate through this sort of very challenging environment. And I think fundamentally the board is an accountability mechanism and it's a way for you to audit your own progress and hold yourself accountable to whether you did what you said you were going to do. And then it's a brain trust of very strategic hopefully and very sort of long-term and thoughtful people that you can bad ideas around with that you can test things out, that you can sort of get smarter about how to make some of these big decisions. It is a skill though and you have to really practice and work on it.”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “And yet, here was this massive category, not plumbers, it's not just home services, it's all local services where you had to work hard to spend your money. And it wasn't because there weren't great professionals who were ready to do the work. It was literally a market failure, a problem of discovery that these two sides couldn't easily find each other and transact. And, you know, we looked around and we saw that no one was really sort of doing anything innovative in the space and we figured that's a big important problem and one that we're excited to dedicate ourselves to. And here we are still at it.”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Sure. So we kind of did what you're not supposed to do, which is decide to start a business and then go hunt for an idea. However, I think that actually gets a very bad rap here in the valley. And it's a very tried and true method. You know, Amazon did that, Microsoft did that. And what I had coming into this was a relationship with a couple of guys who we had worked together in college and kind of started this nonprofit together. We had a lot of fun doing that, but decided to sort of change industries, start a technology company, and really go hunt for a big problem. We literally said to ourselves, you know, what's the biggest problem that we can solve with technology and one that we believe is inevitably going to be solved? And so we just started talking and talking about the world and sort of things that we thought were broken. And the observation that led to all of this was why is it so hard to hire a plumber? You know, when you think about it, the universe typically makes it very easy for you to spend money to get what you want.”

    2018-04-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source