How to grow a marketplace from start to scale (podcast)

Building an enduring marketplace is a near impossible feat. Marketplace founders are often challenged by the “chicken and egg” problem. How can you create demand for your platform when there is no supply, or vice versa? And if you are able to pass that hurdle, how do you scale to liquidity, where supply and demand are balanced and transacting at volume?

Over the past twenty years, we’ve seen the rise of some massive and extremely lucrative marketplaces. Craigslist and eBay, for example, took a more decentralized, horizontal approach. In recent years, we’ve seen another shift in marketplace strategy with companies like Airbnb and Uber that have centralized operations while attacking a vertical space. Today, there seems to be a marketplace for almost every vertical out there.

In our latest podcast, Greylock Partners growth advisor in residence Casey Winters invites Eventbrite VP and GM Brian Rothenberg to riff on starting and scaling marketplaces. Brian has a deep background in marketplaces  —  he was a product manager at Yahoo! for the company’s local marketplaces businesses, founded a local services marketplace called SkillSlate, and served as TaskRabbit’s co-head of marketing before joining Eventbrite as VP of growth. Before heading growth at Pinterest, Casey ran marketing for Grubhub.

The pair dive into marketplace strategies and share how they’ve solved growth and operations problems in their past roles. This podcast is packed with helpful content and advice for anyone starting a marketplace business or ready to take theirs to the next level.