The difference between a marketplace and a community

It’s hard to overstate how much power online platforms now have across the globe.

They enable us to easily book a room in São Paulo, scan the news headlines in Nairobi, search for a job in Wellington, and connect us to the people, products, and services around us.

The dominant model for all of this activity is the modern marketplace.

Amazon, Airbnb, Didi Chuxing, Uber, Stripe, WeWork, these are all marketplaces, designed for people to buy and sell products and/or services. The model also extends to social media, where platforms like Facebook have marketplace features and are also viewed as a marketplace for information, ideas exchanged, views shared, beliefs tested etc.

But a marketplace isn’t a community, and as it turns out the difference matters quite a bit.

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Creating a talent pipeline that doesn’t look like the one you already have

For many companies fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion are considered an extra, something you do on top of the business model you already have.

In others, it’s a competitive point, one that opens the door (and tries to keep it open) for talented folks in customer service, engineering, marketing, design, operations, and more. 

In a very small number of companies / organizations, it is a core part of their DNA from the start, doing the work it takes to not only recruit and keep a wide range of talent, but also put ownership, responsibility, and impact into those hands. 

If you’re not in that last group, but you want to be, you may be asking yourself “where can I get 100% amazing talent that is also diverse and inclusive?”

Having worked on it as a hiring manager myself over the years as well as closely observing others, my experience is that there are two ways to do it. Great companies do both. 

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Do 85% twice

Every now and then, someone “explains” to the internet what 10x looks like.

Sometimes they do it with a good deal of expertise, like Ken Norton’s 10x Not 10% post from a few years ago breaking down how to think much bigger. Often it’s done with less finesse, like this recent thread of tweets about the mystical 10x engineer from Shekhar Kirani of Accel Ventures.

In those cases, writers choose to weigh the obvious (that some people have extraordinary talent) over the also obvious (glorifying + excusing behavior of high performers actually destroys teams).

There may be some value to aiming very high and never accepting the possibility of failure, but another way to look at it is that the best people on a team never aim for 10x. They get to 85% of what they can see should exist, make sure it works + everyone is involved/understands it, and then once they're done they go back and do 85% again with a result far better.

Simply put, they just move faster than everyone else, they’re more iterative, and they are willing to consider outcomes other people don’t. That doesn’t require any inherent genius (though in some cases it helps), and it doesn’t have to destroy the people around them either.

Long story short: if you do 85% x 2, you’ll almost always learn more and get closer to the moon pie in the sky idea you had anyway.

What adding value looks like

One of the first pieces of startup jargon you’ll hear when creating a company is the importance of focusing on pain points, and adding value.

It’s a simple idea: talk to potential customers, find out what’s not working, create an experiment that addresses that pain point, and see what happens.

In lean startup language this is often called a MVP (minimum viable product) but it’s been around since the scientific method was invented, and maybe even longer.

For the most part, big data sets aren’t necessary at this stage. If you listen to your customers, look at their habits with respect to your product vs. what they do otherwise, you’ll find out quickly if you’re adding value to their life and/or work.

But adding value can work in a lot of ways, not all of them are real and/or sustainable on even a medium range much less long-term. Lyft and Uber used claims of revolutionizing transportation to create artificial growth and “solve” a pain point for consumers. Yet, both companies have heavily subsidized the cost for a majority of riders, and lost billions of dollars each year.

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A metric for investing in your team

Here is a thing not many people will say out loud: investing in your team is hard.

Often, it is an expected part of a founder, executive, or leader's job but not valued in the same way that revenue, customers, product use etc. are even though investing in your team is what helps you hit those goals.

Coaching / leading a team is also the defining factor in whether or not you are creating sustainable and responsible growth with purpose, with equity...or just floating some line about diversity or meritocracy.

How you design your internal choices (or not) and enable your team to keep iterating, changing, updating, seeing opportunity individually + together, that's the whole battle.

You'll never hear this at a board meeting or on a quarterly earnings call, but it matters.

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