Marketplaces provide an easy way for buyers and sellers to meet and transact.
Marketplaces have two key qualities:
1 – New marketplaces are difficult to start, because of the “chicken-and-egg” problem: buyers will only join a marketplace where they can find many sellers and sellers will only join a marketplace where they can find many buyers.
2 – Once started, marketplaces can grow to be large, high profit margin businesses, because:
- Every new buyer can add value to every seller, and
- Every new seller can add value to every buyer
- New competitive marketplaces are difficult to start (see # 1 above).
An example of this is Amazon’s failure to build a successful auction marketplace competing against an already established ebay: http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/04/early-amazon-auctions.html
The Marketplace Syndicate invests in marketplaces which meet many of the ten key factors outlined by Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital:
Gil Penchina and Jeff Epstein lead the Marketplace Syndicate.
Gil was an early (pre-IPO) employee at the original marketplace - eBay, as well as an investor in Indiegogo, AngelList and other marketplaces.
Jeff Epstein is an Operating Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, a Lecturer at Stanford University and the former CFO of Oracle.
He serves on the Boards of Directors of The Priceline Group (world’s largest hotel marketplace and owner of Open Table, world’s largest restaurant marketplace), Shutterstock (leading B2B marketplace for images, video and music) and Auction.com (world’s largest online marketplace for real estate). He’s an investor in Raise (gift card marketplace) and EatWith (marketplace for dining in the chef’s home).
More about Gil:
Gil Penchina is a serial entrepreneur and prolific angel investor.
He currently runs a $5 mm per deal seed fund via AngelList that is crowd-sourced from 500+ influential Silicon Valley angels and is recruiting partners to join him.
He is a co-founder of Fastly, Board member at Vouch Financial. Previously he was CEO of Wikia, now a top 50 website and a member of the pre-IPO team at eBay. Before eBay, Gil worked at General Electric, Bain & Co. and started two small technology companies. He has a Bachelors in Engineering from the University of Massachusetts and an MBA from Kellogg.
In addition, Gil has been an active angel investor in 70 companies over the last 12 years including firms such as Linkedin, Paypal, Datanyze, Contactually, Indiegogo, Evite, ZipRealty, Plusmo, Couchsurfing, Songpop, Wealthfront and many others. His portfolio is available at: https://angel.co/penchina
- See more at: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/gil-penchina#sthash.nDYIeJly.dpuf
More about Jeff:
Jeff Epstein serves on the Boards of Directors and Audit Committees of Kaiser Permanente, The Priceline Group, Shutterstock, Global Eagle Entertainment and several private companies.
He is the former Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Oracle, one of the world’s largest and most profitable technology companies, with a market value of over $150 billion.
Prior to joining Oracle, Jeff served as Chief Financial Officer of several public and private companies, including DoubleClick (sold to Google), King World Productions (sold to CBS) and Nielsen’s Media Measurement and Information Group.
Earlier in his career, he was an investment banker at The First Boston Corporation. He holds an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar, and a BA from Yale College, where he graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa.
