Operating experience across consumer, travel, insurance, and network businesses.
Colin Gardiner · Founder & General Partner
I built the marketplace fund I wish had existed.
I have spent 16+ years building, advising, and investing in marketplaces. Yonder is how I put that experience to work for founders at the moment it matters most.
The short version
I know how easy it is to misunderstand a marketplace too early.
At Outdoorsy, I helped build a low-frequency, high-value RV marketplace to more than $3 billion in rentals. Along the way, we raised a lot of capital and heard a lot of bad marketplace advice.
Investors wanted familiar SaaS metrics or a clean comparison to Airbnb and Uber. The real work was harder: unlocking supply, building trust, getting the economics right, and designing enough workflow around the transaction to make the market work.
I saw the same pattern again while working with Ancestry.com, Tripping.com, Roamly, and more than 100 marketplaces through Karta Labs. Great founders were building valuable networks, but too few early investors understood how to evaluate or help them.
So I started Yonder.
Operator first
Built, raised, advised, then invested.
Rentals while Colin served as an early operator, CPO, and CRO.
Venture capital raised across companies from the operator side of the table.
Marketplace and network-effect investments across industries and business models.
Companies built, advised, or supported from early traction through scale.
Founders, operators, and investors learning from the marketplace community.
How I work
Direct, practical, and in the details.
I do not pretend to have every answer. I do know the marketplace questions that matter, and I will tell you what I actually think.
Start with the transaction
Who buys, who supplies, why they transact, and what still makes the market painful.
Make the advice specific
Liquidity, take rate, trust, pricing, fundraising, and sequencing instead of generic startup slogans.
Say the hard thing early
Clear feedback is more useful than polite ambiguity, especially when time and runway are tight.
Open the network thoughtfully
Founders, operators, customers, talent, and investors when the introduction can genuinely help.
Read what I am thinking
Take Rate is where I work through marketplace ideas in public.
Marketplace company analysis, operating frameworks, fundraising data, and the patterns I am seeing across new markets.
Building a marketplace?