Marketplace Memo #2 - by Colin Gardiner - Take Rate
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👋 Welcome to the second edition of the Marketplace Memo. My goal is to share curated news, content, and stories I am seeing related to marketplaces with a splash of color from me. Please enjoy and share with others!
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Last week, I talked to two notable marketplace investors and got two wildly different worldviews. One conversation was very optimistic about the future of marketplaces and emphasized that now, more than ever is the time to invest in them. The other was a more sober and tortured view that they love marketplaces, but there haven’t really been any new breakout marketplaces in the past couple of years (at least in the West).
My two cents is that both are right. Marketplace strategies and opportunities as we know them are largely in decline, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t new surface areas for marketplaces to appear. Marketplaces are the nucleus of capitalism and they aren’t going anywhere. I hypothesize we will see a resurgence in marketplaces in the era of AI, but it will look different than we might expect. The playbooks of Airbnb and Uber are no longer fit for the new era, and the technology window driving those marketplaces has closed. We are entering a new era, and the only constant is change…
