Ramesh Johari

“Those were early days of where this industry was, and I've had a kind of lengthy career now thinking about those kinds of problems. So I'm pretty excited to talk about it with you.”

“When I want to stay somewhere when I'm traveling, a friction is, who's willing to give me their room? I mean on principle, there's people who are willing to let me stay in their living room, but I don...”

“So you flash forward to 2023, and here we are with technology undergirding pretty much every kind of commerce now. And it means we can architect and re-architect the marketplace kind of on the fly, an...”

“And these frictions that are getting taken away, they're getting taken away because of data and data science. So I really want to highlight three pieces of this for people, which I want you to think o...”

“Get all this back in, and what does that do? Well, that lets us do a better job finding potential matches and make potential matches in the future. Every single thing I just said, finding potential ma...”

“And I feel like every marketplace that you could think of in any vertical has those three problems to deal with and relies on algorithms in data science to help them solve it. And in turn, that is I t...”

“That is such a fantastic question, and I want to preface what I say with a couple of comments. So one of them is that I've worked with a lot of different marketplace companies, but anything I say is p...”

“But the other more important thing I want to say is that I'm a professor at Stanford, and there's a reason I'm not a successful scaled entrepreneur of marketplaces, and that's because I probably haven...”

“The most important one is this. What I've found talking to people who want to start what they think is a marketplace is that they think too much about a marketplace before they're a marketplace. That ...”

“So what's the moral there? The moral is a marketplace business never starts as a marketplace business, because what we think of as a marketplace business is something which at scale is removing the fr...”

“So that's like, how do you get that flywheel going? And again, many people have written about how to take liquidity, scaled liquidity on one side, and use it to attract the other side.”

“If you don't have either side, don't worry about it. Don't worry about being a marketplace. Worry about scaling one side. And in that world, it opens your visibility up completely into the advice of m...”