I have spent my career building and backing marketplaces.
I was an early operator, CPO, and CRO at Outdoorsy. I have helped raise more than $250 million across companies, worked with more than 100 marketplaces, and now invest through Yonder.
Early marketplaces are easy to misunderstand from the outside.
At Outdoorsy, I helped build an RV marketplace to more than $3 billion in rentals. Along the way, we heard plenty of advice from investors who were evaluating marketplaces like SaaS.
The actual work was getting owners onto the platform, building trust between strangers, pricing the service, and making a complicated rental simple enough to complete.
I saw the same pattern 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.
That is the gap Yonder is built to fill.
Built, raised, advised, then invested.
- Marketplace building · Operating experience across consumer, travel, insurance, and network businesses.
- 16+ years
- Outdoorsy · RV rental volume during my tenure as CPO and CRO.
- $3B+
- Fundraising · Venture capital I helped raise from the operator side of the table.
- $250M+
- Career checks · Marketplace and network-effect investments across industries and business models.
- 50+
- Marketplace work · Companies I have built, advised, or supported from early traction through scale.
- 100+
- Take Rate · Founders, operators, and investors who read my marketplace work.
- 5,000+
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.
- 01
Start with the transaction
I start with who buys, who supplies, why they transact, and what still makes the transaction hard.
- 02
Make the advice specific
I focus on liquidity, take rate, trust, pricing, fundraising, and sequencing, not generic startup slogans.
- 03
Say the hard thing early
Clear feedback is more useful than polite ambiguity, especially when time and runway are tight.
- 04
Open the network thoughtfully
I introduce founders to operators, customers, talent, and investors when the connection can genuinely help.
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?