Posts from marketplaces

I am the Chair of the Etsy Board and have been an investor and board member at Etsy since the mid-2000s. It is a company that I love and get great joy from being part of. Last year Etsy quietly launched a feature that has completely changed the way I use Etsy. It is called Etsy Lens.

Etsy has millions of items for sale in its marketplace but shopping on Etsy is generally not intent-driven. It is idea-driven. Most people don’t go to Etsy and enter “pizza oven” into the search field. A more common search would be “red pillow for my couch.” As a result, searching on Etsy can be a bit of a “hunt and peck” experience, even as the search on Etsy has improved enormously in the last few years.

I was in a coffee shop in a hotel in NYC this morning and saw an antique typewriter that I thought was great. I opened my Etsy app and got the search field.

I clicked on the camera icon and my phone took a photo of the antique typewriter:

I clicked the blue checkmark and Etsy gave me these search results:

I have been using Etsy so much differently since finding out about Etsy Lens. I see things that I like when I am out and about, use the Etsy app to photograph them, search Etsy for similar things, favorite and curate them in my profile, and then buy the ones I love.

When I showed Etsy Lens to the Gotham Gal, she said “Take photos of things you like to find things you will love.” That sums up Etsy Lens so well for me.

One of my favorite things about NFTs is that they contain a mechanism for the artist/creator to collect royalties on all of the sales that happen after the initial sale/mint. The creator specifies the royalty percentage when they initially mint the NFT and the NFT marketplaces/smart contracts collect the royalties on future sales and pay them to the creator.

Some forms of creativity have had ongoing economic participation by the creator for many years. In the music industry, there are publishing rights and recorded music rights that are paid to the creator and/or the creator’s financial partners (ie record labels and publishing houses). In the television industry, there are syndication rights. Many of the most successful musicians and television talent have made significant sums of money on these rights.

But for many forms of creativity, the ability to participate in the future value of the work has been absent.

So when I saw the NFT standard emerge, I was really excited about the potential for artists to participate as the value of their work escalates over time.

However, there are clouds on the horizon right now. Some NFT marketplaces have chosen not to enforce NFT creator royalties. There are some valid reasons for this and some not-so-valid reasons.

One valid reason is that “market makers” need very low transaction fees to provide liquidity to a market. A market maker is a participant that trades assets and does not hold them for long-term appreciation. They make money on the spread between where they buy and where they sell. These market makers ensure that there is always a bid on an asset that is being sold and an ask on an asset that is being purchased. Liquidity is essential for markets to work properly and so finding a way for market makers to avoid paying royalties is important. If a creator royalty is 20%, for example, a market maker would either need to underbid by 20% or overprice by 20% in order to break even. That’s not reasonable or feasible.

But there are also less valid reasons. Some newer NFT marketplaces are not enforcing royalties in order to take share from the larger more established NFT marketplaces. While one could argue that is the market working and competition is good for innovation, they are using the NFT creator as a “pawn” in this fight and that really sucks. The NFT creator’s only recourse is to “blacklist” certain NFT marketplaces that won’t enforce royalties and many are reluctant to take that step as it potentially reduces the interest in their work.

Yesterday, OpenSea, the largest established NFT marketplace, partially addressed this issue by announcing a “tool for on-chain enforcement of royalties for new collections.” This will allow NFT creators to require the collection of on-chain royalties when they mint new collections. It is not clear to me whether this tool will only work on OpenSea or if it will work across all NFT marketplaces. Obviously, the latter is the correct approach. OpenSea acknowledged that it does not yet have a good answer for existing NFT collections and is interested in hearing from “the community” on what to do about that.

Another important development in this area comes from USV’s portfolio company Uneven Labs which shipped the Forward Protocol a few weeks ago. The Forward Protocol allows NFT creators to specify that market makers/liquidity providers will not pay royalties on their assets but collectors/long-term holders will. This seems like an incredibly sensible approach and one that the creators and NFT marketplaces should adopt.

Here’s the bottom line for me. A critical part of the NFT innovation is the ability for creators to specify a royalty rate on their work and have it collected in the secondary marketplaces. This is every bit as important an innovation as on-chain art and everything else that comes from the NFT standard. Everyone in the NFT world; creators, marketplaces, collectors, market makers, etc, etc should insist that creator royalties remain a fundamental aspect of NFTs and do whatever is necessary to ensure that happens.

Podcasts have emerged as a major new category in media/entertainment/news/education etc. We have seen huge deals for big podcast hosts like Bill Simmons and Joe Rogan, both of whom did transactions with Spotify for nine-figure amounts. But as Spotify (and surely others to follow) lock-up top podcast content to strengthen their subscription offerings, we stand to lose something awesome about podcasts which is the ability to listen to them for free on any platform we choose.

But the counter weight to this trend is the growing size of the “live reads” ad market. This is when a podcast host reads out an advertisement on the show. This has been a staple of talk radio for many years. I remember Howard Stern doing live reads for LoJack back when Howard was on CBS Radio. Live reads are powerful and a form of influencer marketing. If you love Howard and he waxes eloquently about LoJack, you love LoJack. Or so it seems.

The live reads ad market for podcasts was in excess of $700mm in 2019 and seems headed to a multi billion dollar ad market in the coming years. So there is certainly a lot of money out there for podcast hosts who want to stay free and independent, or are emerging and building an audience.

And that is where Gumball comes in. Gumball is a marketplace where advertisers post live read ads and podcasters pick them up and read them on their shows. Ad-buying opportunities within podcasts have historically been manual and limited, not unlike the process of purchasing web ads pre-2000. As podcasts continue to gain market share, Gumball’s self-serve ad marketplace has the opportunity to be as transformative to the podcast industry as Google Adwords was for web ads. 

Gumball is a subsidiary of the Headgum podcast network. Headgum is a network of owned and operated comedy podcasts as well as third party podcasts that join the Headgum network for distribution and monetization (via Gumball).

USV has been looking for an opportunity to invest in podcasting that fits with our thesis and we found it with Headgum and Gumball. We like the way that Headgum’s owned and operated content, its Headgum network content, and its monetization platform Gumball all fit together and enhance each other. We made an investment in Headgum recently and blogged about it on the USV blog this morning.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw this tweet by my partner Albert:

I clicked on the underlying tweet thread and learned that some countries have adopted an approach where everyone wears face masks when they are out and about. That way, if you are infected and don’t know it, you won’t spread the virus to others. It requires everyone, or most everyone, to adopt this approach, which is why they call it Masks4All.

So I went to Etsy (Disclosure: I am the Chairman of Etsy and own a large amount of stock) and bought some face masks for my wife and me from a number of Etsy sellers. These are not medical masks. They are fabric masks, some with filters, some without filters. And we have been wearing masks when we leave our home ever since.

In the following days, every time we would go out to the market or for a walk, we would notice more and more people wearing masks. We are in Los Angeles right now and I would guess that at least half of everyone out and about in LA right now are wearing masks in public. It could be even more than that.

Last week, federal and state and city government officials started recommending wearing masks in public and we started to see even more people wearing masks.

Around the same time, Etsy started to see a lot of people coming there to find and purchase fabric masks. So they put out a message to all of their sellers (they have over 2.7mm sellers) asking them to make fabric masks if they can sew and work with fabric. And they massively increased the number of sellers making masks and the amount of mask inventory on Etsy.

If you go to Etsy and search for face mask (or mask or fabric mask or something along those lines), you will see this:

You can drill down and find the right kind of mask for you, your kids, your parents, or whomever you want to buy one for.

I like this story for a lot of reasons. For one, it shows that tens of thousands of individuals can come together and quickly ramp supply of something that everyone wants to buy right now. We don’t have to be reliant on a single large supplier. Second, by using fabric masks, we leave the medical mask supply for the healthcare workers which is critical right now.

And maybe most importantly, masks can become personal. Mine is different than yours. Maybe I have a bunch of them for various moods, days, times of day, etc. Like t-shirts or hats.

If we are going to be wearing masks in public for a while, we might as well treat them like any other item of clothing we wear, make sure they are comfortable, fit well, and look good too.

And Etsy is a great place to shop for things like that.

Our portfolio company Open Bazaar released a new mobile app called Haven today.

The idea behind Haven is:

Finally, people anywhere in the world can connect directly to each other using their mobile devices and trade privately with no credit cards, no banks, and no tech companies tracking their activities, or charging listing and transaction fees. 

Here’s what the front page looks like:

And here is what an item listing looks like:

Note that you can pay for this coffee maker in Bitcoin and Litecoin.

Haven is built on the Open Bazaar protocol:

Haven creates a mobile window into the groundbreaking OpenBazaar network powered by cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin and Zcash (Ethereum coming soon). Over 250,000 nodes have been created by people using this peer-to-peer network since the release of version 2.0 and tens of thousands of listings have been put up for sale from crypto tokens to original paintings by popular artists to business services. OB1 expects Haven to rapidly bring even more users onto the network who are eager to shop, chat and send cryptocurrencies privately from their mobile phones.

If you want to check out Haven, you can do that here.

One of USV’s newest portfolio companies, Otis, had a coming out party yesterday.

The idea behind Otis is that cultural assets like fine art, rare books and comic books, jewelry and watches, sneakers and skateboards, etc are appreciated by everyone but are only collectible/affordable by wealthy people.

Otis intends to change that by securitizing these cultural assets and selling them off in shares for as little as $25 per share. These fractionalized cultural assets will be shown publicly while they are owned collectively.

You can see how this all works by downloading the Otis mobile apps here.

I did that yesterday and I have already set myself up to try to buy a share of Kehinde Wiley’s Saint Jerome Hearing The Trumpet Of Last Judgement on August 13th.

I’ve also opted to be notified when these assets “drop” so I can purchase a share of them too.

I am not a sneakerhead but for those of you who are this might be of interest to you:

This is just the start of what will hopefully be a highly liquid secondary market for the trading and collecting of shares of cultural assets. The market is starting out highly curated by Otis but that may change over time as things develop.

USV’s focus right now is on backing trusted brands that can open up access to captial, knowledge, and well-being and Otis fits in all three of those categories. We are very excited to be involved in this ambitious effort.

Andy wrote about our investment in Sofar yesterday on the USV blog.

That is our practice. We publish our investment rationale on our blog every time we make an investment. It creates a permanent record of why we made the investment. It is interesting to go back and read them five or ten years later, regardless of whether they worked out or not.

Sofar is a company we have been following for seven years. We have been intrigued by this global community that has been building around the themes of meeting others in the real world, a shared love of music, and intimate spaces (often personal homes).

The Sofar community is large and sprawling.

The scale of the Sofar community, to us, is an example of “unspoken” value that Sofar has created for over one million people in 430 cities across 65 countries including London, Paris, New York, Sydney, Bangalore, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, and Seoul. In fact, more people will attend a Sofar in 2019 than will attend Bonnaroo, Glastonbury, and Coachella combined (also, 13 Sofar artists are playing at Coachella this year).

https://www.usv.com/blog/sofar

I just took a look at Sofar to see what events are happening in NYC in the coming weeks:

You can see the Sofars in the coming weeks near you by going here.

Sofar reminds me of our investment in Meetup, which we made twelve years ago. As Scott Heiferman, the founder of Meetup likes to say “use the internet to get off the internet.”

Sofar adds the element of music, performance, and intimate spaces. Andy describes all of this as the “Sofar container”:

Each Sofar has a few known constraints that make the show feel familiar: it will be in a unique space where you wouldn’t expect to see live music, an MC with a loose script will encourage you to get to know your neighbors, three performers will each play three to four songs, the address will only be revealed a day before the show, and the show will end early, by around 10:30 pm. This is what we call “the Sofar container”. The natural outcomes of the container are less tangible; for example, you will hear great music, you will feel safe and comfortable, you might make a new friend or you can attend solo, you won’t be judged. By bringing people together and creating spaces where music matters, Sofar broadens access to well-being – a core part of our investment thesis.
The beauty of creating a simple container, with known constraints, is that what goes into the container is dynamic. You don’t know who the artists are, who you’ll be sitting next to or what the venue will be like, but we believe that the essence of Sofar lies in trusting the container.

https://www.usv.com/blog/sofar

At USV, we are drawn to bottom-up networks instead of top-down centralized services; Etsy not Amazon, SoundCloud not Spotify, Wattpad not Kindle, Crypto not Fiat, and now Sofar not LiveNation.

I am excited that we finally found our way into the inside of this company/movement/experience. It feels so USV to me.

I don’t write a lot about Etsy here at AVC. It is a public company and I am the Chairman so I have to be careful.

But today Etsy is announcing something that makes me so proud. I have to tell you about it. Etsy is the first major online shopping destination to offset 100% of carbon emissions from shipping.

Here is Etsy CEO Josh Silverman’s blog post on this news.

Etsy has been committed to clean energy for a long time. They will power 100% of their operations with renewable energy by next year. But the company understood that they could not stop there and needed to think about the carbon footprint of their network of sellers shipping products to buyers. And so they have taken the next step of offsetting all of the carbon emissions related to shipping on Etsy. This initiative comes at no additional cost to Etsy buyers or sellers.

To celebrate the launch of carbon offset shipping on Etsy, they are going to do something tomorrow to make a splash.

To jumpstart our efforts and celebrate this milestone, tomorrow (February 28), we will also offset shipping emissions for the entire US ecommerce sector for the day. In the US alone, every day approximately 55,000 metric tons of CO2e are emitted into the atmosphere by delivering packages from online orders. Offsetting this impact for one day is the equivalent of protecting 100 square miles of US forests for one year.

https://blog.etsy.com/news/2019/on-etsy-every-purchase-makes-a-positive-impact/

I am a believer in doing well by doing good. There is a lot of that across our portfolio at USV and across our personal investments in tech and real estate. One of the good things we need to do for our world right now is reduce our carbon footprint. And we need to do that urgently. So I am thrilled and proud of Etsy’s leadership and work here. Well done Etsy.

I’m running an advertisement here today.

I’ve been Chairman of two public companies in my career and the leaders of those two companies sat down and talked yesterday.

I enjoyed watching that very much and hope you do too.

In this nine-minute video, Jim Cramer talks to Josh Silverman, CEO of Etsy, about what makes Etsy “special” and how being special allows them to compete and win against Amazon.

Etsy CEO on Amazon Handmade: It doesn’t really threaten our business from CNBC.

Disclosure: I am the Chairman of Etsy, have been on Etsy’s board for 12 years, and my wife and I own a lot of Etsy stock.