What factors determine success for broad B2B marketplaces like Faire compared to specific verticals like Mable?

To me, it's the complexity and the fragmentation that exists in the marketplace. The more complex and fragmented the market, the more likely you will have these many-to-many relationships, which get harder to manage without a software layer. We try to assess how custom the workflows are between the various stakeholders and constituents in the marketplace? To my earlier point, can you prevent this constant multi-tenanting to create stickiness in the marketplace? And is the behavior in the market converging or diverging? As you add more and more participants in the marketplace, do they act the same, or does the behavior become more divergent based on the types of participants? 

For example, when you look at Faire, they aggregate a wide range of goods. The buyers and sellers themselves are highly fragmented, but the dynamics aren't that complex, although I’m sure they will disagree! They are more similar to a B2C transaction in many respects because you've got these SMB or solopreneur folks on one side. But when you look at someone like a Mable or Notch, with arguably larger businesses, there's just more complexity in the transaction. Even the breadth of SKUs is so much more dramatic. Any single player might potentially be offering thousands of SKUs. 

When we're trying to invest and looking at the opportunities, we start with an initial set of goods and SKUs. When we looked at Notch in their earliest days, they were focused on just produce, and we had to get comfort that produce on its own was a big enough problem. We learned along the way that produce is great if you happen to be just a produce vendor, but a lot of these vendors sell many other SKUs outside of produce. So there’s this pull from the market to service their entire business. As you add additional categories and coverage, the marketplace becomes more sticky. It starts with depth in specific categories and rapidly moves towards breadth. This phenomenon repeats itself in each geographic region you support.