Posts from marketplaces

ADP announced this morning that they have acquired our portfolio company WorkMarket.

This is a bittersweet moment for me.

WorkMarket has been a big part of my personal portfolio for almost eight years.

USV and Spark seeded WorkMarket in June 2010, backing two serial entrepreneurs Jeff Leventhal and Jeff Wald.

The idea was to create a cloud based SAAS application to allow enterprises to manage their contingent workforces which were growing in size and complexity. It seemed like a timely opportunity at the time and it was. Eight years later the SAAS contingent workforce management market is in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually and WorkMarket is the creator and leader of it.

But like all startups, the WorkMarket story has a number of twists and turns. The market was a bit slower to develop than we had initially hoped and it wasn’t until the last few years that big companies started to include contingent workforce management in their SAAS budgets.

We also lost one of the two founders, Jeff Leventhal, when he stepped aside at the end of 2014 and was replaced as CEO by Stephen DeWitt who was recruited to the opportunity by Jordan Levy, who has been everything you could ask for in a co-investor.

The last few years at WorkMarket have been amazing. The senior team that Stephen and Jeff Wald built is among the best that I have had the opportunity to work with. And the contingent workforce market really exploded in 2016 and 2017.

But like all exploding markets, the expanding opportunity brought a lot of new entrants and buyers interested in getting into it. And one of those big companies, ADP, made us an offer we could not refuse, both in terms of the financial opportunity and the fit with their business. ADP has been helping enterprises, large and small, with human capital management solutions for decades and has the customer base, market knowledge, and capital to lean into this opportunity in a way that a venture backed startup never could.

So WorkMarket is now part of ADP and I am pleased with that outcome. Jeff Wald will take over leading WorkMarket for its next phase and he is well suited and deserving of that role. He has been the one constant for the eight years that I have worked on WorkMarket. Everyone else who was there at the start has come and gone. But Jeff and I saw it through from start to finish and I appreciate that very much.

I also want to acknowledge Stephen and the senior team of Grady Leno, Jim Chou, Marcy Shinder, and Tom Benton. As I said, this is an amazing team and it has been a pleasure to watch them build the product, market, and customer base. They are all superstars in my book.

This is the way of the VC business. You get inspired by an idea and a couple founders. You spend a lot of time helping them build something. You give a piece of yourself to the business. And one day, you are done. That day, for me and WorkMarket, is today and I have enjoyed the ride very much.

Etsy, now twelve years old, remains the best place on the Internet to find something unique and special for your holiday gift giving.

If you want to reject the sameness of Amazon and Walmart this holiday season, head on over to Etsy to do your shopping.

Here are two suggestions for holiday shopping on Etsy:

Holiday Gift Guides

Cyber Week Sales

Happy Shopping!

Yesterday was a big day for Etsy, a company that I have been invested in for eleven years and on the board of for ten of them.

The company launched Etsy Studio, an entirely new marketplace dedicated to craft supplies.

Craft supplies have always been available on Etsy and still are. But they are a category and, while they make up a material amount of the total volume sold on Etsy every year, they are not front and center in the buyer experience. Etsy thought they could do better for buyers of craft supplies and so, about a year ago, they went about making an entirely new marketplace dedicated to craft supplies.

Etsy Studio leverages all of the considerable investments Etsy has made in its technology stack over the years; search, discovery, checkout, promoted listings, machine learning, and more.

Etsy Studio launches with over 8 million items, compared to something like 200,000 to 300,000 at a typical craft store.

In addition, Etsy Studio features project-based shopping.

You find a project you want to do, like this paper flower spring wreath, and Etsy Studio will allow you to fill a shopping cart with everything you need to make it.

If you are a crafter and are looking for a better way to buy craft supplies and find new projects to do, check out Etsy Studio. I think you will find it to be a delightful experience.

Our portfolio company Kickstarter became a Public Benefit Corporation in the fall of 2015. I blogged about it at the time. A Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) is a specific type of corporation that allows for public benefit to be a charter purpose in addition to the traditional corporate goal of maximizing profit for shareholders (from Wikipedia).

One of the requirements of being a PBC is that you publish an Annual Benefit Statement after each full year as a PBC. Kickstarter published its first Annual Benefit Statement yesterday. You can read it here.

Here are some bits from the statement:

• Our CEO’s total compensation in 2016 was 5.52x the median comp of all non-CEO, non-founder employees in 2016. A 2015 study by Glassdoor found that the average CEO earns 204x the median total worker compensation.
• As of December 31, 2016, our team was majority women (53%), as was 61% of our Senior Team and half of our Executive Team.
• 100% of our interns in 2016 joined us from New York-based organizations fighting inequality: Coalition for Queens, Prep for Prep, Ladders for Leaders, Tech Talent Pipeline, and ScriptED.
• We donated 5% of our after-tax profits to six organizations working to build a more creative and equitable world.
• We took advantage of two tax credits in 2016 and paid a combined effective tax rate of 25%.

I would encourage you all to read the entire statement. It stayed with me all day yesterday. I am proud to be a Director and investor in Kickstarter which is showing the world that you don’t need to choose between making money and doing right. You can do both at the same time.

Yesterday, on Valentine’s Day, Etsy invited press to its headquarters in Brooklyn and took the covers off a bunch of things they have been working on for most of last year and will launch shortly. For those that don’t know, USV was one of the first investors in Etsy and I have been on the Board of Etsy for over a decade now.

Here are the details of what they talked about and showed yesterday:

Etsy Studio – This is a brand new marketplace, built from the ground up, to allow makers of craft supplies, large and small, to reach crafters all around the world. Etsy Studio will compete with retail stores like Michaels and others but with ~200x the inventory. A typical retail craft store will carry 30,000 to 40,000 SKUs. Etsy Studio will carry 8mm SKUs at launch.

Etsy also plans to bring the “joy of crafting” to Etsy Studio with its signature design and ease of use, but also with content and projects that connect what you want to make with the supplies you need to make it.

Etsy Studio will launch in April.

Etsy Shop Manager – Over the years Etsy has offered sellers the opportunity to use Etsy tools in a variety of places. They can use them on Etsy.com, they can use them in a craft fair with Etsy’s mobile apps and card reader, they can sell on their own website powered by Pattern, and soon, they can sell on Etsy Studio. And sellers can use Etsy’s advertising services, payment services, and shipping services on most of these sales channels.  If you follow this trend, it is clear that Etsy wants to help sellers sell wherever they want to sell. Etsy Shop Manager is an entirely new interface for sellers to manage their business. It puts all of the Etsy seller tools in one place and helps sellers decide which tools and which sales channels to use to grow their business.

There are a bunch of other things Etsy has been building to make all of this work like structured data and search, a new and better way to manage inventory, and the ability to check out with as many items in your basket as you want.

Since I started working with Etsy over ten years ago, they have been committed to a single idea – that there is an emerging economy of creative entrepreneurs who power a personal form of commerce that is better for everyone. Here are some stats that show the power of that idea:

• Today, there are active Etsy sellers in 99% of the counties in the US and almost every country in the world.
• Half of Etsy sellers start their shops to meet a financial need.
• 87% of Etsy’s creative entrepreneurs are female.
• Etsy’s 1.7 million sellers are able to create jobs and incomes for themselves and build value in their communities by connecting with 27 million buyers all through the Etsy platform.

Companies like Etsy don’t come around that often, but when they do, I am drawn to them. They are mission driven and they make things happen that need to happen. It’s very fulfilling to work with companies like this.

New York State put a law on its books this week making operating “ticket bots” illegal:

using ticket bots, maintaining an interest in or control of bots, and reselling tickets knowingly obtained with bots constitutes a class A misdemeanor. As such, violators could face substantial fines and imprisonment

As someone who has often lost out on tickets and was forced into the secondary market at double the price (or more), I appreciate the effort here to curb this abuse of the system.

But I do wonder if there are technical or market based solutions that would be more effective. And I wonder how New York State is going to enforce this new law.

A market based solution could be some sort of auction mechanism that effectively sells the tickets at “market value” and takes the profit out of scalping. Of course the effect of that might be to increase the cost of tickets to everyone and that might not be ideal. If that were paired with some sort of discount for fans and/or fanclub members, you might be able to keep the prices affordable for real fans and take the profits out of the scalping business.

Anyway, I am not griping about this new law. It could help at the margin. But I do yearn for a more elegant and market based solution that fixes the issue more systemically.

It’s Black Friday, the official start of the holiday shopping season. Here at AVC, we recommend shopping where you can find unique items that allow you to express your individuality. Etsy.com, of course.

One of the things I am most proud of about our portfolio at USV is that we have invested in a handful of companies that are slowly but surely changing the way content creators reach their audience and make money doing that. I like to think of it as the evolution of the studio model that has prevailed in content for as long as I’ve been alive. Some of the companies that would fit into this category are Kickstarter, SoundCloud, YouNow, Splice, VHX, Mediachain, and Wattpad.

Wattpad is one of the most interesting of the bunch. Wattpad is a community of readers and writers that operates natively on the web and mobile devices. It is, along with Kindle and Audible, one of the “big three” in the Books category on mobile phones.

Wattpad has a global monthly audience of 45mm people, mostly young and trending female, that read stories that are written on Wattpad for the community of readers that is there. That’s a big number. And that has gotten the attention of the film and television business. In 2014, Wattpad author Anna Todd’s serialized story After (over 1.3 billion reads and more than 6 million comments) was optioned by Paramount and is now being developed into a feature film (it has also been published as a book by Simon & Schuster).

So Wattpad has created Wattpad Studios to help other authors on Wattpad do the same thing. And yesterday Wattpad Studios announced a partnership with Turner to create stories for Turner’s Tales From The Crypt.

The global internet allows anyone to be a writer and anyone to be a reader. The stories that emerge from this community powered content creation and consumption model on Wattpad are rich and diverse. And so it makes a ton of sense that Wattpad would help these emerging storytellers reach a broader audience through the power of film and television. This should be a good service to the Wattpad writer community and a good business too.

Our portfolio company OB1 launched the Open Bazaar p2p decentralized marketplace protocol recently. Here’s a video where OB1 founder Brian Hoffman explains what Open Bazaar is and why they built it.