Marketplace lessons from Uber, Airbnb, Bumble, and more | Ramesh Johari (Stanford professor, startup advisor)

**Ramesh Johari** (0:00)
Marketplaces are a little bit like a game of Whack-a-Mole. Like one example that I came across with one of the companies I worked with that I love is our new supply side was having a pretty bad experience. So what we decided to do is build some custom bespoke features that were really going to direct them to more experienced folks on the other side of the market. Good.
And then, yeah, lo and behold, pretty soon those metrics start to look better, but then we're looking at, we're like, wait a second, now the existing folks on the other side are having a worse experience.
So you kind of whiplash around, you're like, oh, wait a second, we better do something about that. So we take them, we try to match them up with the more experienced folks. And now suddenly, month after that, you're like, you know, wait a second, and your metrics just keep moving around. And that's because the whack-a-mole game here is, ultimately, a lot of marketplace management is moving attention and inventory around. Many of the changes that are most consequential create winners and losers. And rolling with those changes is about recognizing whether the winners you've created are more important to your business than the losers you've created in the process.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:00)
Today, my guest is Ramesh Johari. Ramesh is a professor at Stanford University, where he does research on and teaches data science methods and practices with a specific focus on the design and operation of online marketplaces. He's advised and worked with some of the biggest marketplaces in the world, including Airbnb, Uber, Stripe, Bumble, Stitch Fix, Upwork and many others. And in our conversation, we get super nerdy on how to build a thriving marketplace, including where to focus your resources to fuel the marketplace flywheel of growth, why data and data science is so central to building a successful marketplace, how to design a better review system, why as a founder, you shouldn't think of yourself as a marketplace founder, but instead simply as a founder, also how AI is gonna impact data science and marketplaces and experimentation, and so much more. If you're building a marketplace business or thinking about building a marketplace or just curious, this episode is for you. With that, I bring you Ramesh Johari after a short word from our sponsors.
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