How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, and more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack, Reforge)

25:23On SEMTAC, you have electricians who only want certain types of jobs, but they only wanted if they're available that day. And they might take a job and cancel it because something better comes up. And so this makes for a very fuzzy definition of supply. and you have various different set of needs. One electrician wants something, the other one has a very different perception of the same unit of demand, right? And that makes it very, very difficult. So it's feasible, but I would say that is not a compelling attribute for a building in marketplace. So a relatively yeave form set of needs. And the last one I mentioned is a high enough bear in the matchmaking or the creation.

26:04I think how hard it is for people to find each other today and how much effort do they have to put in to vet each other? I think is another great sign. If it the higher it is, the bigger the opportunity, because he means it comes in, implement the right processes to simplify this exchange of value. Awesome. I'd love to know if there's any examples you can think of of bad marketplace ideas that people have tried, but I'll summarize the three points you just made, which I love. So these are signs that this is a great opportunity for marketplace business that there's a lot of fragmentation on both sides There's not just like a small number of Companies or customers on on one side or the other because if there are why did they need you?

26:48They'll just find like there's five airlines or whatever, you know, you don't need like a marketplace to Match with an airline Then two is there's uniform needs the needs are basically consistent like I just want to stay in a home I'm going to a car to take me somewhere. I want to plumber. And then there's a barrier, there's complexity to the match making and helping someone book the thing, work with them like finding a car. I imagine is like, I'm not going to just flag down a car. Right, there's challenge there. I'm not going to just go and ask them, can I stay in your home? There's challenges there.

27:19Exactly. Awesome. Are there any examples of companies you've seen that are just like that will never work as a marketplace or here's like a funny example of a marketplace that's tried to be a marketplace and it's not. I don't have a creating example of that, but I can give you a tangentially related example of a marketplace that, I don't want to throw anyone in the bus, I respect the company and the effort, but Sidecar at the time was another red -sharing company competing with Lyft and Uber, and there's, I'm sure, a whole bunch of of lessons there. They ended up sort of closing. But I think one really interesting direction that they took pretty early on to differentiate themselves was in my mind, perhaps very naively, a mistake.

28:08They decided to give complete control to the user. Where as a user, you had a whole bunch of filters, you could decide like, I want a car that's at least like 2015 or newer, I want to drive it that's at least like this or newer. And so I think the theory was sort of reasonable on paper. It was like, hey, let's give people more control over it. You have those other players out there, you have Lyft and Uber, and people feel forced in this standardized experience. We're going to compete by giving you the choice. You get to decide the experience that you want. I think in reality, it just fragments your marketplace even further, right?

28:45and you have this hyper fragmentation marketplace and I think it hurt their SLA is like quite drastically. If you think about ETA, when you ask explicitly, you're like, yeah, sure, I worry you a car and you're like excited to like 2020. Not realizing that you just lost like 10 minutes because now we had a great driver but they have a Honda Civic from 2018 and it's not the special that you wanted. So I think people who build marketplaces This is the time to want to give a lot of control to the users, because this is what users want, or this is what comes up oftentimes in user feedback. Like, oh, we have those two distinct group of users.

29:22Those ones, they really want new cars. Those ones, they don't want new cars, right? And so naturally, you have a product team that builds the toggle to get new cars. And I think the mistake is that you, you know, unknowingly fragment your supply in a way that has a much more meaningful impact on the health of your marketplace than you suspect. I think this is another awesome example of this like don't over listen to users and do what you think is going to be best for the business and this is not even a marketplace. Lesson it's just generally you don't want to give users more options than they will need to be successful and happy.

30:00And like I think psych are did that because they were trying to like differentiate from lifting over like what can we do differently in the as give people all these options. I think they even let drivers choose the price that they're offering, the right at, which made it extra complicated. They're like, oh my God, all these cars, the different prices. But I respect their attempt, because they were just the third wheel. No point intended. It's also like, ironically, it's almost the opposite advice that I usually give to companies who struggle with market health. It's, if you have different verticals, try if possible to open up your supply walls.

30:34Like your user is telling you like X, but try to give them like something that is tangential to what you think they want because odds are that they are actually fine with it. There's this amazing example from the Themptike. It's the smoke machine example. So a Themptike, now this specialized little bit more in home services, but years ago they were also doing a lot of events. So yeah, DJs, photographers. And a lot of people were hiring for wedding DJs on the platform. And one of the checkboxes was a smoke machine. And it turns out a lot of people are checking this. You're like, yeah, Holly, yeah, I want a smoke machine in my wedding.

31:14And unknowingly to them, obviously, only 5 % of our DJs had a smoke machine. And so you would carve out like 95 % of our supply. And when we talked to users, they were like, I don't care. That much about the smoke machine. I didn't realize that this was ultimately going to remove half of the supply. So work on ways to make this sort of checkbox effect that ranking, but not the actual filtering. It's a great example of how you can listen to users and tweak the experience, but simplify their cognitive load by knowing like, hey, we know you prefer a smoke machine, but we're intelligent enough to know like it's probably not a deal breaker for you.

31:54I love that example. The other thing that I think is important to talk about briefly is when you're thinking about building a marketplace, a lot of times they fail because the business model just doesn't work. I think about a company like Cherry that tried to do Uber for car washes. And in theory, there's like a smart idea of I'm going to just do on -demand car wash. The problem is no one's going to pay what it costs to do that to the like a car wash person shows up and washes your car. I think cleaning is another example. There's also just like, Exactly. Another one that comes to mind. Oh, exactly.

32:28Where it's just like someone, how come does stuff for you? Something, yeah. Yeah. And so I guess is there anything you want to add there, just like this is another reason your marketplace might fail? Maybe just let me expand on this question. Just one of the most common reasons marketplace has failed in your experience. And I think it's important to say most marketplace ideas fail, just like most startup ideas fail. The most ideas, period to your thing. Most ideas, period fail. Same coming back to most of the things you're going to struggle with are the same things that every company struggle is with outside of a marketplace.

32:58So let me just ask is maybe specifically with their marketplaces or even broadly, what are the biggest reasons that marketplaces fail? I think three things come to mind. One is this concept of liquidity that we've talked about. So you need to kick off this flywheel. You need to build enough of that sort of density within your marketplace. and depending on a business, you can take a lot of time or money and without the right to diagnostic framework, you can end up burning out of both. And it's like this is the thing one. And I felt this at Lyft, I've seen this at other companies, this rush, we have to get to this point otherwise.

33:35We know it's kind of a losing battle until we have enough density for both sides to have a good enough experience. The other one that I see is ignoring one side. So we talked about doing that when you're early on. But I see a lot of larger companies operating for too long as one -sided businesses. Many large marketplaces only thinking about their demand side funnel. So they run ads, they get clicks, they turn those clicks into dollars, and they try to get enough supplies that intuitively the experiences get enough for users. And my advice is if you're doing this, you're missing out on half of your business.

34:15And the trick is marketplaces are very laggy. So once your network effects start to die down and it turns into this moment of panic of, oh, shoot, we forgot about half of all users. We forgot that sellers are people too. And they're all leaving. And now we need to completely transform our product to save the ship and to create a compelling by the proposition on their side. So that's the other thing that I see is businesses realizing that they are marketplaces with true marketplace needs like too late in the game. And the last one is a quality. I think we talked a little bit about the quality before, but it doesn't mean that you always need to have the best quality in your marketplace.

34:54But being a marketplace implies a level of curation, right? You need to be intentional about the quality that that you aim to provide. And I think a lot of companies don't have necessarily that intentionality. And you have this constant push of supply, if only we lower our bar a little bit, we could get more supply. And so until you end up with all experiences at some point, you found some e -commerce website, you look for something, and there was also like, oh my god, this looks super shady because all the sellers don't look that great. That's a quality problem. And so you need to be intentional about your quality.

35:27And I think that's another area where my companies feel. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now, you can assess risks, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market -leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risks. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews.

36:13Get $1 ,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta .com slash Lenny. That's V -A -M -T -A dot com slash Lenny. Kind of as a segue from that idea of quality. I want to talk about managed marketplaces managed supply. So I think the reason quality is so such an issue for marketplaces is because you do not own the supply and control the supply, your marketplace, you're not just selling something. Quality is innately going to be a challenge. Airbnb doesn't own homes, Uber doesn't control employee drivers. They can't even legally tell them exactly what to do because their contractors, so quality is always this ongoing challenge with marketplaces.

36:53So there's always this push towards making it more of a managed marketplace. We like give people a lot more instruction. Maybe they sort of own some of the supply. Maybe they invest a lot in training, all that kind of stuff. And like in the perfect world, not in like an idealized world of quality will be best if you own it. But then you're no longer marketplace, your business model sucks. So I guess just any thoughts on marketplaces that are considering becoming more managed Any advice on when it makes sense to move towards that spectrum and how far to go? I think when you're running a marketplace, you tend to sit in your every tower a little bit, looking at stats and thinking, I'm like, if only we could get people to do X, it'd be better for everyone, right?

37:36I certainly did that in my career. I think that's missing the point that were humans. And I think sometimes we act in ways that are non -deterministic or kind of intuitive at a different example, but like we'd originally sell leads to pros like plumbers and electricians, and of those leads, obviously only a fraction would turn into actual jobs and revenue for those pros. So we also saw that those pros were always great at converting leads into jobs, and so naturally we thought that we could provide a more consistent experience for customers and for pros by improving their ROI and selling bookings directly to those pros.

38:15It's a common marketplace move going from some version of lead to direct booking. And they did it all great. We knew we were going to improve the ROI by something like 20%. Maybe we lost this and pros hated it. They hated it because they actually subconsciously liked the feel of the sale. They loved this contact with customer and they sometimes completely overestimated their ability to close the customer. They were like, you took all those fun calls. They kept me busy. I felt like I was hustling. I was like about to close this customer. And so no matter what the data says, if like, oh, we increase the earnings by 20 % like the pros don't feel this way.

38:53And it's the right to, you know, to show however they want. And we saw the same thing at Lyft when trying to, you know, make drive earnings less volatile. We had to like fight a lot of that perception and a lot of that peak end effect. So my call out here is any attempt at control can be really tricky and backfire in ways that are unpredictable. You also touched on sort of employment classification right in the US when you're talking about controlling supply like all the lawyers like no no no that's not something that we do because if you control your supply then there can be legally classified as employees and be entitled to a whole bunch of benefits.

39:29So my take on this in general is I'm a huge believer and it really depends on the type of company I should say obviously but my take is I'm a huge believer and market forces and empowerment. So provide guard rails for what a good experience is in your marketplace, set a clear bar for quality and provide the right coaching and tools for supply to be successful. And then take a step back and see where the gaps are. And invest more and hands on tactics, just to close those gaps more specifically. So lots of like coaching tools that left Uber did it like most sort of a marketplaces like provide some sort of coaching, you have like a review system, perhaps you have like stars for your you know sellers, you know, for sellers who fall below the threshold, then like coach them, provide them the right tools, the right guidance, what is the standard that you have on your marketplace and help them, you know, meet that bar and for people who like fall in, you know, for the gaps that you have, then that's when you invest in like sort of more hands -on tools.

40:33There's a great, this is one of the things that we did that lift also with the rental company that we spent up. I'm happy to tell you more about that. That's interesting. I'd love to hear about that. Before we hear that, is there any marketplace that has been very good at up -leveling quality without becoming managed? That did this really well that you can think of? Yeah. There's a talent marketplace called TupTow. and they are specialized in industry, have a really high bar for quality. They claim to only have like, sort of the top 1 % top 2 % I believe, you know, of talent out there. And they have really amazing sort of like set of checks and processes.

41:18There's this sort of funny story from them, but apparently they advertise something like, maybe like a 3 % sort of a pass rate for their town. So they only like on board like 3 % of the people who apply. And allegedly their actual pass rate is even lower than that. But they thought that if the actual number, it would sound fake. And so they actually like actually say 3 % because like 1 % would sound like two ridiculous. And it would discredit sort of like their town. So they're one company that does a tremendous amount of work for vetting quality early on with a ton of different checks, but also maintaining that quality throughout with the right coaching tools with your education and stuff like that.

42:06That's a really good example. So basically they just vet and only approve high quality supply in their case. It's mostly engineers, right? I think on top tell. Correct. Yes, it's most engineers, designers, I think. Which you can only do if you have so much supply that has so much interest in becoming coming part of your platform, but that's a really cool example. Basically, it's just like only allowed really high quality supply. Let's hear this rental car story. So this is a lift trying to do rental cars, right? Correct. Yes. Yes. So this is a little bit of context. I was leading the driver's side of product and lift and General Motors had invested half a billion dollars in our less -round funding.

42:45And this is Christmas Eve. I always remember I got a call from Liftsio and Joe Motors CTO and we decided to build a rental company essentially and the reason for it was really fascinating. GM had all those vehicles that were coming off of lease and they were forced to sell at auctions. They didn't know what to do with and from our perspective we had this massive supply gap we've talked about this before but with this huge supply crunch we were growing super fast and couldn't hire drivers fast enough, non -board drivers fast enough. And when we looked at the market, we realized that 50 % of the job seekers and welfare recipients don't have a car.

43:25So that was like, that was our supply gap. This was a huge pool of people that we just couldn't tap into because they didn't have a car. And so by renting cars, we could essentially manufacture or unsupply. We could doubt this up and down. We could be very surgical about how many vehicles do we bring in, which markets do we bring this in at what price? We can even offer to pay for the car if they drove 30 hours a week and complete transform the lives of those people. Now we allow them to have true mobility. They can go by groceries, they can go take the kids on vacation. So a huge win -win for everybody with something like this.

44:02And I think in three months, we'd built rental company from the ground up. And within 18 months, I think we were like the fourth largest rental fleet in the US. And but all this sort of a stand from like this gap that we saw from like, okay, like it's it's not about like controlling Like the drivers general. It's about like, okay, we want to be surgical want to control like the quality of the cars in the platform. So we talked about that That's a great example in the markets where We thought the vehicles of quality was too low. We knew we could onboard like more rental vehicles You know, that were like more recent to like raise the average sort of like a age of a vehicle in the platform So it gave us more control, you know, by, you know, in a much more surgical way, I guess.

44:44So it's not that you were launching a rental car service. The idea was add supply and give drivers a car so that they could become drivers. It was a bit of both. We actually launched like it was, we had vehicles that drivers could rent from from lift and to drive on the platform and also to drive for their personal needs, essentially, but yeah. Got it. Okay. And then this actually work and have impact. Was this a good idea? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It had tremendous impact. Like I mentioned, we scale this sort of exponentially to become, I think, again, like the fourth largest rental fleet in the US because it was, you know, it was so effective for us both because we had the right amount of control, but also those drivers were incredibly loyal to us.

45:35If we had a whole bunch of other incentives that we could do, we could offer to pay for the car. But only if you don't drive for the competition for Uber, for Uber. And only if you drive at least like 30 hours a week. So this again provided us with, you know, again, like much greater retention, much higher, like engagement. And was a real incentive for us, but also for the developers. Awesome. And maybe the reason this most interesting is this is along the spectrum of a managed marketplace. It moves closer to like you guys sort of like are paying and covering costs of cars It makes it less just like this simple highly efficient marketplace Exactly.

46:16Yeah, it's the marketplace version of you know, maybe like your like black car fleet owner has like their fleet of equal They have like people so it this was like the the marketplace version of doing that and it's also just a differentiator Because Jim and you guys were close and so you had this lever that other that say that Uber didn't have Amazing. Another area that I know you spent time on that I think is really interesting and I think it would be helpful to people here is the mentorship program and kind of the ambassador program that you have that lift and how that helped you scale much more quickly than other folks were able to you can you share that story.

46:51Pretty early on at left, this was 2014, 2015, maybe Uber was basically like 30XR size. They packed 30 times more revenue, more people, more liquidity, like everything can think of, right? They were growing like crazy. And we had a bit of the six -dimensional moment, as you can imagine, where we were wondering how we're supposed to compete with that, right? And we had to be like super clever. Everything that you did at the company had to be 10 times more efficient, like per person than the competition just to survive. Like that was the bar, just not to die. And put a lot of pressure on us, but we basically found kind of a clever way of onboarding drivers at the fraction of the cost and resources.

47:35So let me give you a little bit of context on how the onboarding flow worked. So the time, the last step to get onboarded as a driver was after you back on check and your driving record check came back, You had to do a visual inspection of your car, a quick test drive, some light training, and we would check your documents. We would check that like you are the person with the driver's license and all those things. And Uber at the time would launch a team on the ground. They would go and open an office and they would have DMV style, group onboarding sessions and car inspections. And we did this as well in our first sort of like three -to -form records.

48:09But you can imagine the overhead, right, in the lead time. You have to go and you have to find office space, sign a lease, hire employees who are like huge, huge lead time. And we thought about it at the time, a huge competitive different theater for us was our brand. As a passenger or as a driver, what would you use a platform with lower liquidity? As a driver, you had lower earnings guaranteed. As a passenger, you had like with longer wait times. Why would you use a service like that? You do because of the brand, because of its values, it's how it makes you feel. And so we had the pink mass dashes at the time.

48:44We had this very strong brand identity. I think a lot of that has been lost now. But we also had this amazing community of drivers who were fierce advocates for the brand. And so what we did is leveraging this community and building essentially a soft onboarding supply engine where we would pay our best drivers $35 per mentor session. and mentor session was essentially replacing his onboarding flow. So it was basically another driver looking at your vehicle, the check all your documents, take photos of your driver's license, and all that stuff, and take you on the short ride along. And the benefits of this were absolutely mind blowing and kind of unexpected for us on all sides.

49:25First, the mentors were our very best drivers, and they were evangelists for the Brian, right? So what they did was they would share like personal tips on winning where to drive, right? Oftentimes they share the contact info. And this created tremendous leverage and social proof for those new drivers who were on defense about taking the stitches into the car. It's actually quite funny because with the brightest minds in the company, like writing the best marketing emails and copy, like, hey, I'm on the lit, hop on the car and drive this set of day. And you had all those drivers, all those mentors, like, don't listen to those lifts guys.

49:58Like, here's what you should do. Go on Tuesday at 2 p .m. text me, I'll tell you where the good spot is, and this is how you're going to get rich and make a lot of money. In this recommendation lever was just so much more powerful than anything we could be telling you. And so very efficient activation lever for the new drivers. For us also very incredibly scalable. We could fly a small team to rigorously vet and onboard maybe up to 10, 20 top drivers and then they'd fly to a different market. And we would let the rest of our drivers be onboarded by those mentors. And even for those mentors, for those like top drivers, it was an incredible recognition lever.

50:40For them, if you were like a 4 .9 driver, you had enough rides, you knew you had a chance to make it into being a mentor. And this provided additional earnings opportunity for you. If you did two mentors sessions in an hour, you could make 70 bucks an hour. You could take a break from driving, you're tired, and just do some of those. It felt like getting promoted at a job, right? And so you actually had a huge impact on the retention of our very best drivers, which was kind of unexpected. So a lot of really, really interesting benefits. And we actually leaned into this and built like, a couple of really fascinating variations of this, for a while, but this allowed us to match most of Uber's footprint with like a tenth or 20th of the resources that, you know, at incredible speed, I guess.

51:21That is an amazing story. And it's such a great lever that I totally agree. I don't hear people using it. I wonder why. So what I'm hearing is it was cheaper. The drivers were making money. I imagine the drivers trained by the mentors and it had been better drivers. That's what we said. It had been the host that came in through our furl and it had been better hosts for whatever reason. And you're saying basically this is what allowed you to compete with Uber at a much smaller scale and much less money raised. Amazing. Thanks, Emily. You said there's a couple of variations. Did there anything interesting there to share, just like things that you built as a follow -up based on the success?

51:58So the next step in that journey was basically we were growing like crazy, but now we had what cracked the activation phase, but now we had a whole bunch of people dropping off in the fund before activation. So they didn't enter their SSN, they didn't enter their info for us to run all those checks and the previous steps of the onboarding floor. So we built a team of hundreds of account executives and their job was to pick up the phone and call those drivers. And so we had the same moment, like, could we get some more best drivers to do that for us? And empower them to be a part of this. And so we did this and we launched another role with we call them recruiters.

52:37And so as a recruiter, as a driver, you could just like, if this was quiet, you know, on the road, you could just like, hop on your phone and you would have like a mini sound dashboard where you could like claim leads. And this was like a driver who had dropped off in the funnel and you had like a tool your phone number, you could like, just call them and text them. And same thing, those guys were at performing our very best of like train sounds people because it's not like, hey, it's Ben from Lyft, like hop on the road please. It's like, hey, my name is like, you know, James and I'm a fellow driver as well.

53:07like, lift told me that you have complete application, like, there are many questions, doing like, come to your house, we can do this together, and we would pay them 20 bucks per person that they, like, converted to activation. And so, something like incredibly scalable for us, another way for us to reward and recognize like our best drivers. And you've also provided like a really interesting way for us to like, smooth out the supply demand, the problem with the marketplace like lift, is that, you have like, those big spikes, like everyone wants to drive on a Tuesday at 2 p .m. but everyone wants rides on a Saturday at 2 a .m.

53:43And so how can you manufacture demand during those low -today times? This was a great way to do that. Now you can wait on the road and still make money while sitting in your car while waiting for the next ride. So this was another iteration of this model that was really cool. Amazing, that is so cool. I just know the feeling of being on a team like coming up with this idea and being working must feel so great. Just like holy shit, look at all these cool things that we can do with our supply. Something I wasn't going to get into, but it might be interesting just to hear if you have thoughts on this.

54:16So I'm looking at... So I've been a huge fan of a lift from the beginning. I used to lift the very first weekend. It came out in San Francisco and there was like five drivers. It was like a beta test. I was friends with someone that worked at Lift really on and it was just like, man, lift the best. I was like, all lift, Uber sucks. I hate that. I want to give the fist bump or the mustache so great. Today though, I was just looking at market caps. So Uber is worth $150 billion. Lyft is worth $5 billion. I'm curious if you have thoughts on just... Like, it feels like Uber has won at this point. And I don't know where Lyft goes.

54:50I know your heart is with Lyft and you work the Lyft for a long time. I know it's not... It doesn't feel great to see how things have played out necessarily. I'm curious just to hear you take on just like, why do you think Uber did if you look back that allowed them to basically win? And where do you think Lyft goes from here? What do you think happens with Lyft? Like, they're still worth five billion. It's so a huge, amazing, successful business. But just where do you think things go? Yeah. I think it all went south when I left the company. I'm just kidding.

55:24No, again, I have to, I have to call it the fact that I haven't been close to, like, sort of, left and, you know, their business and strategy for, you know, like many years at this point. So, I think this is the greenness of all this is my very naive perspective. But I think to me, perhaps the biggest blow to Lift's business was somewhat inherent like the vision. Lift's vision was always anchored around transportation. People transportation. The founders were deeply passionate about moving people. They were passionate about transforming the way people move around in the city. they wanted to just change like how cities are designed, how roads are designed.

56:08And so that meant investing in dynamic shuttles and things like that. And there's a lot of experimentation that went to that. But it also meant that lift never invested in things like food delivery or goes in parcels and things like that. And I think that crashed them during COVID, essentially. I think Uber had, I think at some point, their slogan was moving in bits and atoms or something like that. But I think it implies this notion of being a logistics platform for assets in the world for transporting people, for transporting things, and I think they built the invested a lot in trucks and food delivery and alcohol, those really exotic things that lived had never any intention to invest in, not even because of resources, but because this was a distraction from our vision.

57:09We wanted to change people, move around in cities, want to reinvent public transportation, but we did not want to be a door -nash confeder and help you get the donuts during COVID. And a huge part of it also was leaning heavily in night shirt rides. like this was like, you know, again, how do you reinvent public transportation? It's like every car is a dynamic bus. And now like there's a bus line, the bus line is like, always running, right? It's always like by your house. So a lot of our investment, I think, and thinking went in like that direction. And the last thing that people wanted with COVID was to be in a car with like five strangers.

57:44And but what people wanted is like food delivered to the house, right? And so that's sort of a, I know that the business like, you know, had a huge blow during COVID, whereas I think Uber was able to like rebound on much more quickly because of how diversified the business was. And so it's funny now because I think lived actually killed shared rides, which was just so core to their identity to be like the first ones like to launch this. And so yeah, the new CEO, I think, killed the shared rides, which I'm really excited about. But yeah, so I think it indicates like a very different vision now, a very different direction for the business.

58:17And yeah, that's my take, I guess. Interesting. So essentially, COVID really affed them because their strategy was always about transportation. And when nobody needs a ride and actually people want food, strategically, Uber made a really good move, expanding into food delivery, which I think was a bigger business than rides for a long time. I don't know where it's at today for Uber. And Lyft didn't have that. And it's hard to recover from a time like that. So it sounds like it's a combination of strategy was pointing Lyft in a certain direction, and circumstances in the world just like made it.

58:50And losing bet. I'm looking at the, so you left in 2019, March 2019. And is that what you're talking about? Yeah. And it's like all downhill from then. And then during, and then during COVID, actually, when there's a big bomb, which I think when people started writing again, and then it went down again. So I think there is a correlation there. So there we go. That's the thing. don't ever fire Ben don't let Ben Lee that's their take it. I was not fired yeah just to be clear. I'm just okay I was just different ways you might leave a company don't happen. I'm kidding. Okay so there's two more things I want to spend a little time on before we close up.

59:30One is you you're working Europe so you're a product leader in Europe and I want to hear a little bit about what it's like to be product person in Europe and then two I want to hear about the startup so at this point no one can actually fire you if you're on company that you're running. And I want to spend a little time here. Usually we don't spend time on this sort of stuff, but you're working on something very cool. I think is going to be really helpful to a lot of people and they're really meaningful way. So in a spend a little time there. So, but before that, so you, you're living in France now, you, before you started your company, you're interviewing for CPRO roles in France, you work with a lot of French companies, European companies.

1:00:03I'm curious what you've noticed might be different in the cultures of tech companies and France in Europe in general versus the US. It's been really fascinating. I think so. My entire career has been in the US, and I'm just trying to understand, so talk about that European and the French market in particular, so it looks like. My read so far is that product management has really exploded, I think in Europe in recent years, but the market dynamics are still quite different. In the US, I think you have this inherently very liquid and dynamic market. I think, at this point, the interpretation of it, but I think it leads to greater ownership and accountability for people and product at all levels.

1:00:48So product managers and leaders, they join a startup and you're immediately in charge of a really meaningful piece of the business with genuine autonomy oftentimes, right? doesn't always happen, but you know, oftentimes I think that's the case. And if things don't work out, well, you know, there's this expectation that you'll be managed out. There's just our countless memes on LinkedIn about the 10 -year of CPS, tech companies to illustrate that. I think in France that the market is just much less liquid. So it's incredibly difficult to change jobs and it's very expensive to fire someone in France.

1:01:22So it seems to lead to two effects beyond the obvious job security. One is, I think PMs tend to have less autonomy and ownership and a little bit more like micro management. And they're also less business owners than they can be in the US. And then see, like, sort of founders and mattress struggling to let go of control a little bit more, again, because you know, I send a sendable in a way, you don't have like as much sort of a control also as you do in the US. And so it is too a lot of like really fascinating sort of effects. you have startups who tend to wait a little bit longer before hiring, especially in product.

1:02:00The art of product is a little bit less of a thing. You have a lot of amazing pms in France, but the recognition of the craft is a little bit different outside of the people who practice it. And you have a lot of real interesting outsourcing also. You see startups and companies of all sizes actually relying on great product studios like Muzah to build end -to -end products from the ground -up. So something that's been really really interesting. Another slide that I see is this is like a dominance of business over tech in France. There isn't as much of a cult of technology and software engineering in France as there is in the US.

1:02:41And so the French Ivy League schools are business schools, like Ash to say. And the most highly valuable skill that you get is soft skills around management and business. It differs from the stereotype of the CS degree Stanford dropout that you have in Silicon Valley. And I think because of a few of those things that I just mentioned, less liquid job market, but also less liquid financial markets. The last thing that I've observed that's kind of interesting is that's also around ownership, I guess, is equity is much less meaningful, by in France. So of the product leaders that I talked to, most of them consider their equity to be virtually worthless.

1:03:20None of them know of anyone who's made a down payment on a house, thanks to their sort of equity. So it's seen as like a nice bonus, but it's not the token of ownership and the promise of future wealth that it can be in the US when you join a sort of for for exact roles. I think it's often like sub 10 % of the total compensation, whereas in the US it's very often like more than 50 % of your compensation will be equity. So that's been kind of interesting in It was like the dynamic, but it's also been really interesting to just see like how vibrant the sort culture is here in France. You have like a truly exciting innovation happening, especially in AI.

1:03:57I have a lot of like French companies at the forefront of this like Missed Rallye and Hagenfais and things like that. And also how it's been exciting to see how the government is leaning into that as kind of a catalyst for this innovation thing. The French government has dedicated something like a 2 .5 billion dollars in funding to support French AI excellence by 2030. So they're running a lot of internal government incubators to try to disrupt some of the, you know, government functions from the inside. And they're hiring like top talents to do that. It's, I've met so the people working on this.

1:04:31It's just really fascinating. It's, it makes me super excited about, you know, what a federal startup to ask with would be inventing the D &B would look like. So, yeah, it's been really exciting to like see sort of like the the whole space and how it differs from the US. Fascinating. Do you, so I know there's also like AI regulation that feels really strange in Europe, but I think that's EU based, right? Not like France specifically. Yeah, that people are not excited about. There's just like a lot of fear of AI and so there's a lot of regulation talk. And I know you're a big Android guy. And a lot of the features like Gemini, all this is only available in the US.

1:05:08and now that I'm in France, I see a difference a little bit. Interesting. So the cultural difference as you spoke of, do you think they're rooted in the fact that people don't move jobs often? Or is it like culture? People just don't learn to work in the way that people learn to work in the US in the product role? Like what do you think is the root of why things are so different? I'm not quite sure. It's a good question. My take and I think this is I'm sure very naive and reductive and I know I this is like you know one of my sort of core principles I'm sure I'll also have a new tunnel vision on this a little bit, but to me like One of the biggest difference that I see is really around like this concept of ownership and accountability Whereas in the US and again, I saw it.

1:05:57I'm sure you said it or maybe you see it up like a lot of companies not everywhere, but a lot of companies will you know So hired you, give you a big chunk of the business, and it's up to you, you know, prove yourself out, right? Like you have six months, you have a year, like, you know, it's up to you, you know, actual impact. I think that the French employment model is less conducive to like this type of dynamic because employment is like much more rigid. So you have much less of this like, you know, higher now and like prove yourself out. It's much more of like prove yourself like beforehand.

1:06:29And if you've made about a higher than as a founder, like you become perhaps like a little key G about your vision, you want to be more hands -on because you made it about higher, so someone perfect, and you'll kind of make your work, but it means you'll be more hands -on and the work of PMs daily and perhaps you'll think, oh, maybe I don't need product mattress who won my vision, or higher project mattresses and stuff like that. It's perhaps slightly more conducive to those types of dynamics. And you're saying that's important because it's harder to fire people in France and in Europe? Yeah, I think so.

1:06:59It's not just about firing, I think, to be clear. I just think it's culturally the market seems like a lot less liquid end -economic. So people don't move around as much. They kind of stick around for a long time. Yeah, exactly. Got it. And it sounds like there's also just a cultural difference of founders innately or much more I am in control and I'm not going to hire people and trust you to take this thing up. I am just going to run the show. It's basically Paul Graham's founder mode is like already instilled in everyone. Maybe, yeah, maybe, maybe a little bit. And I think also it's this culture like business, so like very business -centric sort of culture.

1:07:35You have, and it makes sense, right? Like the markets, you have less venture capital, you have less, less the cuisine and the financial markets as well. And so when you raise funding, you need to have like a strong business. The business case is at the center of your habit business. Whereas I think oftentimes in the US, you have again, it's a little bit or it can be a very like take a product centric through a lot of the world. We will be like this product. This is like the vision of the product. And sometimes even like, the business model will follow, right? And in France, I think like the business model has to be like front and center.

1:08:15Perhaps for you to be able to raise the venture capital for each of you to like even exist, right? So it means like it attracts a lot of like business minded entrepreneurs much more. So perhaps then like tech minded or product minded entrepreneurs. got it. If someone wants to help their company in Europe and France operate more closely to the way companies in the US operate, do you have any advice for them? What do you know you might want to talk and work with a lot of companies in Europe? What do you help them change and see differently? Yeah, it's a good question. I have not fully cracked that and think it's a really hard question.

1:08:54I'll give you some sort of small pointers that have helped at least some of the companies that are talked to, but the one is equity. I think there's a desire from a lot of the founders that I talked to to give equity to employees, but because it's not in the culture yet, I think employees also have an under -appreciation for equity. While it's nice, I don't know what's going to happen. I just work for the CEO anyways. There's less of this sense of ownership that you can have in the US. And so I think like, learning into that and investing in like, you know, education around equity, it's the case also in the US, I'm convinced like, you know, 80 % of people just don't feel interested in like their equity, but I think like, learning into that, especially in Europe, to like, help understand how people understand like the value of their equity, help them by, you know, you know, telling more about like the story of the business, you know, the trajectory of the business, why it matters for their future equity, I think, anything along those lines, I think, can help cultivate this greater ownership mindset, I think, for people.

1:09:58And then, I think another big piece again is, at least to me, this is a big recipe to successful product teams is to develop teams that revolve around this concept of ownership and accountability. Teams are like, clearly owning a huge, or there's not to be a slice of the business, like not feature teams, like, you know, shipping maybe desks, but teams that have clear accountability with consequences, but also like clear ownership and leeway to do their best and to enter five. Again, I usually don't spend time on the sort of thing, but I just think what you're working on is extremely cool. And I think it's going to be really meaningful to a lot of people.

1:10:38And so I just want to spend a few minutes giving you a chance to talk about what you're going to know. You started a company. Is this your first company that you're, you've started? It is, yeah. First build, then set projects, but first time. Yeah, yeah. There's a LLC, there's a C -Corp, or yeah, it's like file, there's paperwork. Amazing. Talk about what you're building, help people know how to find it, if it's right for them. Yeah, I have to say, like, entrepreneurship has been a very humbling journey. I think that the Zerda one is way harder than anything else have done so far. And I feel like when you used to building and scaling products within companies, you kind of tickful -granted.

1:11:13At least I did. I think for granted that the problem space has already been validated, right? You have like some pretty even if you launch a new vertical like you know, there's like an existing user base There's a validation of the problem space. I think going to truly zero is like felt at least to me like super overwhelming and lonely But also super exciting right with tons of condensed learnings. It's been like a really relaxing journey. So What brought me there is my wife said to have some about three years ago now, it's partially why we decided to move to France last year, just for a couple of years.

1:11:47And she's had this undiagnosed condition and chronic pain. And we saw just like how much of a nightmare it was to manage her care and to navigate the healthcare system in the US. So, would wait, you know, three months for an appointment for a neurologist, then they'd see her for maybe eight minutes. Average appointment time in the US is between like 10 and 12 minutes. They'd dump a bunch of jargon. and say, like, it tastes a little bit normal. Sorry, like, you should just go see this other specialist instead. We'd wait another three months, see another specialist, and then with a lot of anxiety, a lot of pain as you can't imagine, like all those things.

1:12:19So you have another eight -minute slide with someone, and it's like, oh, why didn't the neurologist do this test? Like, I can help you. This makes sense. And so you just like, it ended up feeling like incredibly isolating. The whole time, we just felt completely alone. It was just like, I sent Google. We felt we kept getting conflicting advice from doctors and I was spending all my time researching specialists, what solutions to consider, you know, to spend all my nights reading through like research papers, to like I was like, hey, what is the academic consensus on this particular treatment that the doctors don't seem to know about, right?

1:12:54And yeah, throughout this whole process, it felt like no one really had her back. No one within the medical system was fighting for her, the way that your family doctor, might have fought for you 20 years ago knowing everything about you and being like Lenny, like, you know, let's talk about this. I know your uncle had this, but like there's this sort of like a sense of advocacy that came from your family doctor that just doesn't exist today, right? It's not in the coming for doctors to have thousands of patients that they see like just a few minutes each year. So digging into this, which is realized that we're, you know, it's not a nice, that case you have, you know, half of Americans have at least like one chronic condition or have to deal with some sort of like complex health issues largely on their own.

1:13:32You see a lot of those large online communities revolving around like chronic conditions or chronic pain and trying to make sense of it and advocate for themselves. And I think I want to be clear, in my mind, the problem is obviously not about the practitioners, right? It's systemic. It's just growing financial pressure from private equity firms. It's just countless other factors. But you see the physicians being overwhelmed over work, you know, burning out and you see that pressure just only increasing, I think. So I basically spent the next six months just talking to hundreds of patients and doctors and experts.

1:14:07And what we built is basically a platform to help people fight for the health. And so we want to close the gap between patients and the health care system. There's this critical layer of the system that's missing, I think. People are navigating life threatening or debilitating conditions largely with Google. and at some point you just get tired of fading for yourself, right? So we connect people with complex conditions, typically, with their own health advocate. So it's essentially like their own health assistance. They're available 24 -7 to help you navigate your care. So we find appointments for you.

1:14:40We help you prepare your appointment. We make sense of a diagnosis, test results. We spend hours researching solutions and potential treatments. And just more generally, we do everything we can to help you to better advocate for themselves. basically. And yeah, we launched in the US, early version of this a few, a few weeks ago, and the engagement has been like really, really, really mind -blowing so far. I know we're helping cancer patients, people with a lot of those, like, niche chronic conditions, and, uh, but like harassing the doctor's office, like, hey, like, we still haven't received that referral, like, all the things that you just get tired of doing when you're, you know, dealing with like so many appointments and when you're having to measure a condition like this.

1:15:22And our mental model is, what would we do if this user was our partner or our parent? You'd likely spend all night coming to research, you'd call all the providers in the state to be like, hey, who has an appointment? Because there's no PTI available for next like two months. We'll find you a PTI available like, you know, sooner, right? So we're building the engine to do that at scale, essentially, and making people feel like they're not alone and that's someone who's fighting for them. Super cool. It's sad that we need something like this, but we do because the healthcare system is so not ideal.

1:15:53And so it's basically someone in your corner that's just, that's like in the inside that knows how these things work that is there to help you through the process. What's the, what's the company called? Where do people find it? Yeah, it's called the Nora Health and Nora Psaid is NoraNURA .ME. Awesome, and we'll look through in the show notes and just to be clear, I'm not an investor. I'm just like excited about this thing because I think a lot of people need this just to look back to, whoa, we've been talking about, it's not a marketplace, how would you describe this business in relation to marketplace companies.

1:16:22We're ignoring the marketplace dynamics. I'm following my own advice. I'm just starting one side of the marketplace. How that vacates, we're gem -sarring this side for now, and we're only focusing on what I think is going to be the hardest side for us, and it's going to be demanding. How do we find those people? How do we create the right development position for them? That's what we're focused on. And so in the future, there may be a marketplace component. Yeah, exactly. Interesting. Very cool. Ben, is there anything else that you want to share, mention, leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

1:16:59No, no, thank you. Well, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Ben, are you ready? I'm ready. It's the right first question. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? I'll give you books in different directions. One is misbehaving, the making of behavioral economics. I'm really interested in behavioral economics. I love this intersection between economics and human psychology. It's a great analogy for products. That's a great introduction to this field. The second book that I recommend a lot is Range, Why Generalist Triumph in Specialized World by David Epstein.

1:17:38I've always felt curious about a lot of things, but it's made me feel like I'm decent at many things, but I'm good at nothing. I'm very good at nothing. And so even my career, I see like all those PMs where like machine learning gurus leading conferences on weekends that are contributing to I think things and I just feel like a journalist, you know. So if you feel this way, this is a good book to make you feel a little bit better by yourself in your position to them, at least it did for me. And last one, nothing to do with business, but Immune by Philip Dettner. This is the creator of the YouTube channel, Kirskozak's, I don't know if I'm pronouncing this right, but it's a science sort of channel.

1:18:11If you're even remotely curious about how your body works, how your immune system works, it's an amazing book that's really fun to read, super entertaining, and just great sort of biology and fun book, I promise. I've been trying to get the author of range on the podcast. I have not had success yet. So if anyone knows him, his name is Epstein. There he is. Okay. David Epstein. David Epstein, please connect me. I would love to have him on the podcast. I really love his message of just the most like basically it's the most successful people or is it that you should be a generalist or that you can be very successful as a generalist.

1:18:49Is that the message? You can be very successful as a generalist. Yeah, I completely agree that's been me to next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed? TV show. I haven't seen anything lately that's been like my blowing but I'll share an old new one. I've rewatched the last of us recently and I just it's an old favorite. I just I loved like the game played the game many years ago and love the T -Shop. When the next season coming, I'm excited for that. I know because I know the game has more. 2025. Yeah. Oh, man. That's so long. Okay. And get to know the next question.

1:19:22You have a favorite product. You recently discovered they really love. Maybe a little bit behind the curve on this one, but I've been loving the ARC browser. I don't know if you use it, but I love ARC. It's my number one. My main browser. Absolutely. I love it. It's amazing. So yeah, you know about it. Yeah, it's been really fun. Yeah, it's like just the onboarding of the ARC browser is such a lesson in onboarding. They do such an amazing job. So like that alone is a great thing to do as a product person, just see how they do onboarding. I was like, I've been using Chrome for like 12 years or I don't know how many years, like it feels like such high friction to change my entire life in like eight seconds.

1:20:00It was done. It felt like home. Wow, this is way faster than I expected. two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to you repeat yourself share friends or family? I don't have anything like particularly philosophical unfortunately. I lived in bio for years. I live now in the French Alps, so I have a frame with John Merzquot. The mountains are calling and I must go. I feel like this is a, it's my sort of grounding place. Like the mountains are my happy place and so I don't share that work often. I don't like peace out in the middle of meetings. Like the mountains are calling I must go.

1:20:32But it's been sort of like a grounding sort of a, yeah, I guess. That's beautiful. That just in my nervous system relaxes just hearing that quote. And I know you live in a mountainy part of France, so you've done it. You've you've listened to the call. Final question. You live in France. The Olympics are just in Paris. Did you go to any of the games? Did you watch any of the games? Anything stand out to you, but the Olympics that were not so far from where you are now. Good question. I did not see any live events, unfortunately. I perhaps like to highlight for me was I'm a big man, Biker, but in like the biking realm, I love the men BMX event, where like all the men on the podium were French.

1:21:22So this was like a kind of a great moment for France. I didn't even know that was an Olympic sport. So it's a BMX like Malm, like dirt by kind of race. Yeah, yeah. So cool. Amazing. Ben, thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Working for Xfine Online. And what else are you doing that people can check out if they want to learn more? And I can listen to this beautiful to you. Yeah, you can find me two things that are perhaps helpful for people out there. One is I have a report course. So if you're curious about Marketplace, if you want to dig deeper into Marketplace Growth, have a course on Reforge, we're about to do our sixth or sixth cohort, I think now.

1:22:04It's been going really well. We've been working with tons of really, really cool Marketplace that is going much deeper into some of the topics that we just talked about. So if you're interested in Marketplaces, I would say check this out. And on that real quick, is the customer ideal? Is it founders or is it like pms at larger Marketplace companies? Who is this perfect for? It's, we've had both founders and PMs and sort of like a heads of product, but it's my strong recognition. It's people that have product market fit. Again, per, or, per for conversation. If you don't have product market fit, you know, wait a little bit before enrolling in this course, focus on your core business before worrying about the market dynamics aspect.

1:22:43And then I get you off. There's something else you're going to point people to. Oh, and just Nora, the company that we're building, anyone that you know or if you yourself have chronic or complex conditions, and if you feel like you need help managing your health and navigating your care, you know, would love to help or hear how what you need and how we can help you. And our set is Nora .me and you are R -A. And then how can listeners be useful to you? If you have advice, if you know anyone in the space, if you're interested in like learning more about this. If you have advice, if you have learnings, if you know anything about this, I would love to hear it.

1:23:20If you have like hot takes to the back marketplace, if you disagree with and you have what I've said, I'd love to also hear it. I love it. Ben, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a dream come true, finally. Oh, we have podcasts. Same, same for me, Ben. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'spodcast .com.

1:23:59See you in the next episode.