The Magic of Marketplaces with Colin Gardiner

Colin Gardiner === Sean Lane: [00:00:00] Today's episode is sponsored by the Rev Ops experts at Full cast. With me is their head of customer success, Tyler Simons. Hey, Tyler. Revenue efficiency, sales productivity are everything today. How does full cast go to market planning platform help Rev ops teams achieve these types of goals? Tyler Simons: Well full cast lets you build better territories so that the right resources are always focused on the right opportunities. When reps are motivated and zeroed in on their targets, they'll be more successful and bring in more revenue. Sean Lane: That sounds great. I do a lot of that planning and spreadsheets today, and I'm pretty happy with my spreadsheets. How is full cast any better than that? You Tyler Simons: must get rid of the spreadsheets Sean Lane: because spreadsheets Tyler Simons: create lag and errors with full cast planning and updating happen automatically all in one place. Best of all, it automates all common headache inducing planning activities like territory rebalancing, account hierarchies, [00:01:00] routing, and more. So when you're faced with those go-to-market plan changes, Sean Lane: which Tyler Simons: you know what, they happen all the time. Full cast Sean Lane: has your back. Alright, you got me convinced. Where do I learn more about Full Cast? Our website, full cast.io. Hey everyone. Welcome to Operations, the show where we look under the hood of companies in hypergrowth. My name is Sean Lane. While we say we look under the hood of all companies on this show, I'd say we've probably spent most of our time looking at B two B software as a service companies. That's the world. I know. That's the world most of our guests have known, where we have not spent much time at all until today is on marketplaces. I feel like somebody told me early in my career how hard it is to run [00:02:00] two-sided marketplaces, and I've kind of steered clear of them ever since. That is again, until today the person to expose me to marketplaces and our guest today is Colin Gardner. Colin is unique because he's led both product and revenue teams at marketplace, companies like Roly, outdoorsy and tripping.com, and today he's putting that expertise to work as both an advisor and an investor in all things marketplaces. Now, because I'm an admitted novice in this area, I asked Colin to give me the true intro to marketplaces, but our conversation quickly evolved from there. In our conversation, Colin teaches me about four different types of marketplaces. He talks to me about what marketplace liquidity is and how to create it. And if you stick around till the end, you'll get to hear why he thinks that learning economics is the most tried and true way for you all to evaluate the world. But like I said, I wanted to start simple. [00:03:00] So before we get too deep, I asked Colin, what are marketplaces Colin Gardiner: and how do you build them? Marketplaces are like very simple in some sense, right? What you're trying to do is bring together buyers and sellers to create liquidity. And you know, I apologize for the jargon, but liquidity, all that means is like you're just trying to increase the probability of a transaction happening between two parties, right? And so very simply, and why it's. Just like Jenga is that you are adding supply, you're adding demand, you're building it up, and if it ever gets out of a balance, it just topple over. Right? And like that's the, I think the mental model I was trying to go at there, but it's hard. It's like, you know, you do SaaS or anything like this, it's like you build your product and you gotta find customers, right? It's like a very linear kind of concept, right? And with marketplaces, it's like you got two constituencies at a minimum and you're trying to get them to come together at the same time. Coordinate. And make a transaction happening. So it happened. And so it's just like one of those things where it's like difficult, inherently difficult. And that's why they're fun. That's why they're awesome. And [00:04:00] that's why you see some of the, the biggest companies out there with like large market caps, Airbnb, Uber, things like that. Amazon, right? They're marketplaces. And B, they're big because it is hard to do, it's hard to do aggregation at scale and create liquidity, but when you do it, it has like an outsized outcome. And that's why they're really fun. And Sean Lane: so maybe you can expand on that last piece about the outsize outcome. 'cause I hear you saying look like. This thing's really hard. Anytime I've heard people talk about marketplaces, like, yeah, like you gotta manage both sides of this thing, like stay away. And yet we have so many of them, and the ones like you said, are very successful. So why do people pursue this business model that is, as you said, so inherently Colin Gardiner: difficult? Yeah, I mean, I, I think it's for the, the outcomes, right? Like they really do provide outlier outcomes specifically in the venture world, and I think that's why you see a lot of people doing them, but they're low probability of success. I think that's the thing. You'll see SaaS side, there's probably much higher, like likelihood of survival, probably just company-wise, and so you'll [00:05:00] see more funding go into those things. But for a marketplace, If you get it right, it's like magic, right? Like that's the thing. And they create these incredible network effects that have staying power, right? I mean, it's like eBay. It's like thing's been there forever, right? Like no matter what you do, what verticals you slice off, it's still there. And I think that's just a testament to the power of like, once you bring buyer sellers together and you create that liquidity and that network effect is just really hard. Right. And I think that's why people like it because they have staying power. They produce really large amount of margin over time, and they're just compelling businesses if you get them right. So here's what I've learned so Sean Lane: far. One, marketplaces are hard. Two, the outcomes can be outsized. And three, it's all about creating liquidity inside of these marketplaces. And we're gonna talk a bunch more about liquidity, but. Colin says that liquidity is increasing the probability of a transaction happening between two parties. So it makes sense that this should be the [00:06:00] North star of every company building a marketplace. So if that's the most basic knowledge that I need to understand marketplaces, I. The next level deeper is wrapping my arms around all the different types of Colin Gardiner: marketplaces. So I'd say one variety. First is horizontal versus vertical marketplaces. I probably already said this. Horizontal marketplaces go across many categories, right? So they're just horizontal nature, very similar to SaaS in the sense that like they go across a bunch of different industries, right? There are a horizontal marketplace or is a vertical marketplace. Industry or sector specific. Within that, there's a couple flavors of the mechanics of a marketplace, and so there's what we'd call a double commit marketplace, and I'll come back and tell you what these, each of these are. There's a double commit, there's a buyer pick, a supply pick and a marketplace pick model. And so what do those, what do those mean? There's just a bunch of jargon right now. So the double commit is both parties have to agree to a transaction. So like very early days of Airbnb, for example. Sean, I'm interested in your apartment. I ask you, [00:07:00] is it available? You say, yes, it's available. I say, okay, great. I wanna book it. Then you agree, lemme book it. That's like the double commit, very canonical form of marketplace, but also very heavy in friction, right? Like there was a lot of cost for us to do that time, energy. Then there was the, I said the the buyer pick model, where largely the supply side sets their offerings. The buyers come in, decide what they want, and that's kinda what you see with like Airbnb with Instant Book or any of these travel marketplaces, right, where you can come in and you can just instantly book it like the buyer decide. Then there's the supply pick model, right? Where the supplier gets to pick from the demand side who they service. Largely Uber kind of sits in this bucket, Uber and Lyft, and then there's a marketplace pick model. What's that? This is like the holy grail, right? It's like the marketplace matches people and that's just it. Those have the highest liquidity typically, and the lowest friction cost because they basically can do all the work for you. And I do think longer term, like things like AI are gonna really help enable a lot of that. And so I'm [00:08:00] excited. I'm just really excited about the future of marketplaces with technological enablement for like lowering search costs. At the end of the day, Sean Lane: and one of the things that I think about as you're kind of describing those different motions is everything that kind of has to be true under the hood of these companies in order to make any of those four flavors work. Right? And like you said, SaaS pretty simple. We build this customer journey. We go out, we try to find customers, bring customers along that journey, and do our best to reduce the friction at each point. But like if you are in an operations role inside of one of these different marketplace companies, can you maybe just like talk a little bit about what that looks like and kind of, do you think about optimizing for each group separately? Is it together? Like how should you even begin to build that kind of like frictionless Colin Gardiner: experience? Yeah, it's a great question. The end product right is a transaction. And so a lot of the way to think about operations in a marketplace is how do you facilitate the transaction and how do you provide what I call liquidity services, like services that [00:09:00] help increase the probability of a transaction occurring. So let's go into what that means. So classic operations issues in marketplaces, trust and safety. How do you verify buyers and sellers? How do you create process for that such that everyone feels that there's trust? Transaction transaction. So that's a big optimization area, right? For all marketplaces, like not just like identity, but fraud, you name it. Right? Again, on top of that, there's payments, right? Payments are really important. How does one side get money from the other? And so a lot of like operations goes into money movement, right? How does that happen? How do you hold onto funds in escrow essentially? Such that transaction's clear and then you can let the money go. So those are just like a few examples. But then again, you know, even bigger one is insurance, right? So if you take vehicle marketplaces like Uber, Lyft, outdoorsy, where I was, transactions can happen without insurance, but it's very. Unlikely. And it makes the market way less liquid when there's no insurance to cover essentially what's [00:10:00] happening during that rental period or that driving period, right? That that, for example, for outdoorsy, Sean, you've got your RV and you're like, okay, I'm gonna rent it. But you know, what I'm worried about is this guy, Colin, I don't know how good of a driver he is. How do I feel comfortable giving him my very expensive RV is gonna drive, hopefully doesn't run it into something. How do I get comfortable? And so that's where insurance is like really powerful, right? Because. It provides you that peace of mind such that you would want to rent it and thereby creating liquidity in the marketplace. You now are gonna list your vehicle and you feel comfortable. And so a lot of ways when I think about operations, right, it's not just like how do you make process or things like that. It's really about how do you drive liquidity. Like in the marketplace, like are you doing what you need to do to essentially make the market as liquid as possible and making that into process that's hopefully scalable over time, Sean Lane: regardless of which type of marketplace your company might fall into. Colin's last point there to me is the most important one for marketplaces. Your job as an operator is to create liquidity. It's the [00:11:00] same thing as when any SaaS guest that we've had has said that operators are there to create efficiency. The outcomes are the same. We're removing as much friction as possible on the road to revenue. That's it. That's the job. Now within a marketplace, Colin offered a few different levers to increase that liquidity payments, insurance. Those are clear to me and how you can make the marketplace more efficient by having those things in place. Check those boxes. But the other liquidity lever that he mentioned, trust and safety, that feels harder to measure to me. So how has Colin achieved that trust and safety in his past company? Nice. Colin Gardiner: I think Airbnb, Uber, you know, they're very 1.0 kind of stages. Maybe they were 2.0 and eBay and everyone was 1.0. But the the point being is that as we've kind of iterated and gone on, there's a lot more tooling out there now that's just like better. Like Stripe just has a lot of basic fraud detection things in it already. So a lot of things are out of the box. But in terms [00:12:00] of identity verification, like that's a big area still. Right. Obviously there's a lot of different SaaS platforms out there that like do that, but it's kind of like free refills now. You kind of need to start with that kind of level of, of, of safety built into the platform for people to even like trust it. And so as I look at it though, like most people will start and just see can we get liquidity? And then as they kind of go out from their periphery of customers that they kind of know. Like that. There's some relationship with, they're like, that's how they acquired them. And you get into completely net new people that just found you and you have no idea about their behavior, history, intentions, whatever. That's where you need to start. Once you get into that next set and next universe of customers and that frontier is you need to start introducing this. Safety element here. Being able to say, you know what, we don't let everyone on the platform. You have to like self-identify and give us information about you such that we trust that you're a real person and have the intent to transact and not fraud, you know, defraud people essentially. So that's kind of how I think about [00:13:00] it. Does all of Sean Lane: that create a higher barrier to entry for these small companies who are trying to get a marketplace off the ground? Like, I think again about the, the alternative of like, just like launching an M V P. You can't really do that when it comes to people's safety, right? Like so for the companies that you work with and you advise, does that make it harder for them to kind of take that first step in terms of getting a product out into the marketplace? Because there's so many things that they have to. Basically have as table stakes. Colin Gardiner: I mean, I think it's kind of a dual-sided problem. Like one, the tools now exist so they know they can have it. Right. And they're relatively inexpensive, like at low scale, but it is a scaling problem, like if you scale fast, right? And a lot of these costs are on the supply side typically to get supply on. So, Aren't necessarily scaling with revenue right away because you need that supply first, right? Typically, yeah. I mean, most of the time there's always like, you can, you wouldn't start your marketplace if you [00:14:00] couldn't find demand, right? For what you're gonna offer. I know that sounds really basic, but like some large time horizon, most things become demand constrained. So if you can't find demand, Upfront, don't start that marketplace. But the the point being is like supply side edition doesn't just necessarily equal to transactions right away. Right. And so there's like usually a high cost, like the customer acquisition cost of supply in the early years is way higher than it is like in subsequent years. And so I agree like that. There is a problem there, right? Like an inherent like you. Acquire supply scalably upfront to really like keep the marketplace growing. But there's also some costs that, you know, I've experienced in many of the marketplaces I worked that just we're like, oh my God, we have like, these are good problems to have, but we have a lot of cost of like verifications, stripe, connect fees. Like, you know, all these things are scaling right faster than potentially like revenue scaling, right in that moment. And yeah, it's gonna overtake it no problem. But there is a, there's a cost there. And so when you come back to the funding world, you know, and you're [00:15:00] thinking about like marketplaces, why they may be attractive or not, right? It's, they do have a lot of capital requirements to get to sufficient scale. Like most marketplaces won't produce sufficient margin at until they get to scale, right? Because there's like inherent economies of scale that happen. And that marketplaces that get to scale have large network effects. And then they also largely acquire most of their customers organically at that point, which has high margins, right? And like great LTVs over time. So they're tricky, right? That's the point. Sean Lane: This episode is sponsored by full Cast, the company that helps operators build better sales territories. Their platform focuses the right sellers on the right opportunities, making them unstoppable and the cherry on top. Full cast automates common go-to-market activities like territory rebalancing, account hierarchies, routing, and more. So the plan is always in sync with operations with full cast. Say goodbye to go-to-market planning headaches, and hello to your [00:16:00] own personal planning assistant. Learn more about full cast today by visiting full cast.io. Okay, back to Colin. Before the break, Colin was teaching me about some of the financial challenges that come with scaling a marketplace. Which got me thinking, are there a whole different set of marketplace metrics that are unique from SaaS metrics that I need to learn about? Turns out, Colin Gardiner: yep, there are. If you hear A R R M R R, I would probably be, that'd be a question mark me. I'd be like, whoa. Not that these businesses can't have those types of revenue, but that's typically not a phrase you would hear, right? So you, you get to hear even more fun phrases like G M V, which is, or G B V, there's a bunch of different G S V acronyms for it. But the, the essential idea is like gross revenue, right? And G M V is gross merchandise value. G S V is gross service value, g booking value. They're all the same concept. And the idea is that, Platform, like how do you measure how much throughput went through the platform? And [00:17:00] so like let's say you're selling a car and the marketplace keeps a small portion of it. What you're talking about with gross revenue is how much car sales volume went through the marketplace, right? Not how much revenue the marketplace kept outta each of those transactions. And so that's I think, one of those big distinctions. Like people see this big top line numbers from marketplaces and gross realistically. A hundred million in revenue in their pocket. It's more about what would call the take rate, which is how much marketplaces keep out of every transaction. And then ultimately that's like net revenue in that context. So that would be like the big things I would say about marketplace is really different. And then down from there, like as you start to think about mechanics of a marketplace, You really care about liquidity again, like, and that comes down to a lot to like the buyer to seller ratio, what they call the marketplace ratio of essentially how many buyers per seller does it take to make transactions occur. And those are like the very fundamentals of understanding the health of the marketplace [00:18:00] and how it's doing. And so I. They're tricky, right? Because you don't know some of these numbers until you get to scale. You don't know what good is, right? You can understand, like take Uber for example. An Uber driver can drive one car at one time and has, let's say 12 hours of the day they can drive, right? And if each just frees the math, like each ride is an hour, they can max if. 12 rides. Right. And it can do more than that, I'm sure. But the point is like, that means that there's like for mature, like, you know, full capacity utilization marketplace for ride share, that's 12 to one ratio, right? And it's probably a little bit lower. And so you kind of know. It's like, well, for every piece of supply I can add, they are on the average going to service X amount of buyers. And then that tells you how many buyers do I need to go acquire for that market? And that's how you start to understand and operate the marketplace and get balance of liquidity that is balanced so that you're not lopsided, right? There's not supply that's just sitting there not getting anything, and then [00:19:00] they churn, right? And then you drive up your cac, or you have so much demand and not enough supply that all these buyers are coming, can't find anything. And they never come back. Right. So that's the tricky part. Right? And that's where the like liquidity metrics really matter. And where I spend a lot of my time and energy as I, you know, work with marketplaces is like, how do we balance that? How do we get that right so that we can scale like a, a good or a virtual good? They typically have like really high buyer seller ratios, right? That's like one of the attractive qualities to courses I imagine of why we see so many of them and people doing it is that you can sell essentially. Amount of them, or at least the population you can sell to, right? Or, oh, I, people can buy as many as they want. But anyway, the point being is like, yeah, you can have these really high kind of buyer to ratios potentially, whereas more traditional markets like like Etsy, that market, it's just how many can you make, right? Or how many do you have in stock? Right? Like that kind of limits essentially what you can do. Fair Physical goods a little different. And so the every marketplace has its natural gravity, right? Like they just are a little bit different. And then, you know what [00:20:00] also impacts these things is the price, right? So how much does it cost? There's inherently, the higher the price of the good that goes up, right? The less buyers there are inherently for it. It's just the fact of the matter. So like higher a marketplaces have lower F in them typically, right? So think about like a home marketplace, like Zillow or like this is people are gonna buy on a frequency of every years and they're gonna do it infrequently. But it's still a good marketplace, right? They just inherently are different, and so they have different ratios and there's no like one is better than the other, right? Comparing high frequency marketplace to a low frequency marketplace kind of misses the point, I think, because their AOVs will be very different. And the behavior is very different. And so, I mean, that's kind of what I like about them is they're so unique. Everything is D like no, no. Two are the same. And yes, there's some good advice from each of 'em that transfers, but they are kind of like, you just got like a living, breathing thing. You gotta [00:21:00] gotta like go touch 'em and understand it and really adapt each of them and apply the best practices of what you've learned. Sean Lane: It sounds so obvious and basic after hearing Colin explain it right? Of course, the dynamics of a real estate market like Zillow will be different than the handcrafted paperweight that I bought on Etsy, but understanding how all of these dynamics relate to one another, how they balance each other out, that's where the true understanding comes from. By the way, if you caught take rate as one of the metrics that Colin mentioned, that also happens to be the name of his newsletter, so check that out too. But to bring us back, if you are an operator learning all of these dynamics of your marketplace business, you're gonna be on the lookout for an opening, a wedge that you can push into and ultimately move the needle on one of the many levers that's available to you. How do you do that? You focus Colin Gardiner: as always. You gotta like separate the trivial many from the vital few, right? And, and really focus. And I, and I, I [00:22:00] kind of couch it as ruthless focus on what matters, which is liquidity in your core groups. And, and so much of like what I preach right or wrong is, You find your wedge a very specific niche that you push into for your marketplace, right? Like, and you really focus in and dive down on that, and you create liquidity in that, right? And then you expand out from there, right? And, and like the canonical example is like Amazon with books. Like they started with books and they had a lot of advantageous qualities. What is the advantageous quality of books? They have no shelf life, right? Like they don't like, yes, you can have inventory risk of holding it, but they're not gonna go bad. Starting with groceries would probably have been a terrible place to start. And so that's the wedge. And they eventually became a horizontal marketplace versus a vertical one. And so just kind of a like conceptually, that's how I think about it. And in terms of like internally, how do you prioritize? I think you really need to lean into like what you expect your network effect to be of your business. So like, lemme give you an example. Uber, you know, just using some very [00:23:00] common examples. Uber has a very local network effect, like almost in a city, right? Wide. Supply and demand need to be like in close proximity to each other. Whereas like Airbnb or any other travel marketplaces, like they don't necessarily have to be next door. And the fact that you probably don't want them next door, you probably want them in another city or country and you wanna go to them, right? And so there's a global network effect, right? And so as you think about that, Your mark definition of core categories or markets is really defined by the patterning of the buyers and sellers, right? And so for Airbnb, like it behooved them to get supply everywhere, whereas Uber, they, you can, they very much have the playbook of market by market, by market, and it just depends on the type of network effect that you have, right? It also depends on like the how disaggregated both sides of your marketplace are. Whether they're very similar or not, and we can go into that a little bit more. I mean there's like super interesting on that piece as well of like what makes a good marketplace and what doesn't. Sean Lane: Yeah, I mean, I would love to hear more from you on that. And I would also be [00:24:00] curious whether you have kind of that more I. Local versus global network effect. Does that, I would imagine then impact the way you might organize the inside of your company to work with React to support that network effect that you're trying to build? Colin Gardiner: Yeah. I mean, the network effect is also very hard to build, I should say. Like it's not just like, just appears out of the sky shows up and you got it right. You have to build it over time and it's like imperceptible until it's perceptible, right? It's like just you don't really know you have it until. You have it and you realize maybe I don't, I don't even need to do anything. 'cause this business will just keep running itself, essentially. That's like one of the, kind of the beauties of network effects, right? Is that like you realize that you're doing a lot of things to, you know, you've been in this mode of build, build, build. We went from zero to one, one to two. Now you're maybe in the three to four phase, and after that, after four you're like, wait a minute, we're doing all these things. But is it really moving the needle? Like this thing seems to be going on its own. Sean Lane: Interesting. And so when you say an aggregated versus disaggregated network, what do you Colin Gardiner: mean by that? [00:25:00] Yeah, so on marketplaces, if you're thinking about the opportunity set of like what makes for really interesting marketplaces, it typically lands in the categories where things are disaggregated. So they're like, Not already aggregated. There's like many buyers and sellers, and they're not really brought together in any aggregated fashion. Somewhere on top of that, the layer is maybe the buyer or the supply or the seller side. They don't look alike, they're not homogenous, they're heterogeneous. They're not to use like the biology and statistic terms here, but that's kind of just like how it's referred to is like. So a heterogeneous supply side would mean that things don't look alike. They're not interchangeable, they're not a commodity. Airbnb, Homes are generally different, whereas hotels are very similar. Right? And so they're closer to a commodity than houses. Right? And so what's important there is that as you build a marketplace with a heterogeneous supply set, realistically [00:26:00] for demand to come to book, that they really have to come to you, right? Which creates a strong network effect because there's a lot uniqueness of that supply. Those tend to be like really strong network effect businesses over time. Is it sufficient? No. The network effect will not save you. You have to build it and you have to do a lot of things to nurture it. But realistically, you can architect a lot of things that matter and picking your playing field of where you're going after, such that you pick a marketplace where there's essentially a high cost to aggregation and the supply is very unique, tends to lead itself to a really good longer term market. If that sense. Sean Lane: It does, and I think to your point, it's not the only thing. But if, if the takeaway from this conversation is how hard it is to build these, that one, like at least like greases the wheels for you just a little bit, right? Like if you can find that disaggregated unique cohort of, of things, then all of a sudden, like you are creating a niche for yourself, I think. That Like you're not just finding hotels. Colin Gardiner: Yeah, [00:27:00] exactly. Because you'll find there's a, if you go into something where there's already large players that have aggregated a lot of similar things, the relationship between the demand and supply side tends to be fairly monogamous too. Right. Where. I'm a Marriott person or you are a Hilton person or whatever, you know, like those relationships tend to form over time and then the marketplace isn't really needed as much It gets, is what that's called, where the buyer and seller just go platform essentially. Whether explicitly or just because I like that and I'm gonna go back and use it again. Right. I joined their reward and loyalty program because that makes sense. So that just like conceptually is a piece here too, that's just important to all of it. Is that the marketplace is, are hard. Partly because you pick it a hard thing to solve because those have like the most need for a marketplace. But also because even in places where there's clearly demand and supply, they may not facilitate a marketplace that can take good unit economics because those relationships [00:28:00] between the buyers and sellers aren't sustainable over time through the marketplace. They'll go off platform. So just conceptually, like I find that really like fascinating overall. Sean Lane: Yeah. And I mean, the other thing that you just made me think of that I hadn't thought of in, in the rest of this conversation is that concept of going off platform, the inverse of which is them coming back. Right. And so I would imagine in this list of unique marketplace metrics, like I. The return rate of those folks, or retention rate, whatever you would call it, to come back and use that marketplace again for another experience has gotta be one of those liquidity levers, Colin Gardiner: right? Yeah. It's super important overall for marketplaces, right? I mean, largely it's defined by like the purchasing behavior, right? Again, if you have a high A O V low frequency marketplace, you may have the supply side do a lot of transaction, but the demand side. May come once every couple years. Right. But overall, it's always something people look at, right? When they're evaluating marketplaces, specifically investors and [00:29:00] operators is like, what kind of l t V growth do we have? Because this isn't a SaaS business where it's like they sign a contract, they get billed monthly. Every year. You know, it's like, it doesn't, it's not a line like this, it's not straight. And a lot of what you'll see is like, you know, for demand side cohorts, if it's a really like kind of a lumpy marketplaces, you'll see like line up first transaction flat line up. And so it's like a stair step. As you get more scale, it's evens out, but it's just, it's just different, right? Like these lower frequency marketplaces have very different buyer pattern than you would probably expect from like a scooters or something that is like high frequency used a. Sean Lane: Before we go at the end of each show, we're gonna ask each guest the same lightning round of questions. Ready? Here we go. Best book you've read in the last Colin Gardiner: six months. Ooh, I don't think I've read a book in the last six months. I hate to admit that out loud. Well, one book [00:30:00] I'll just recommend that I always loved growing up and like was really like foreign of Me is the Power of One. And it's a book about a boy growing up in South Africa through apartheid. And it's a, it's a fascinating book and I won't give a spoiler of what happens, but it's about his journey through life and his coming of age. So I, that one's always stuck with me. Sean Lane: Cool. All right, next one. Favorite part about working in ops? You're an honorary, honorary Colin Gardiner: operator here. No, no. Totally. So you know, as like someone building a marketplace, like the thing I enjoyed the most is putting into place things that like unleashed transactions. So like from an operations perspective, things that you knew could see where a bottleneck. And it's like as soon as you solve that process, it just drove efficiency in the business going, I'll also say, Costs or problems and turning them into opportunities. And that largely falls on the operations side of the business, right? Where like for example, we always viewed insurance as a cost center, we're outdoorsy and we were able to turn it into a [00:31:00] a profit center and actually spun a business out called Roly, which is zone InsureTech. And like that to me is like the power of being able to turn your internal processes into. That's awesome. Flip side, Sean Lane: least favorite part about Colin Gardiner: working in ops. The process, the banging your head against the, the wall or the table of like trying to get it right over time and then every edge case seeming to come up in serial every time. You gotta learn everything the hard way in serial, right? Like that's just how it works. It's like, I dunno, that's at least my experience on it. Someone who impacted Sean Lane: you getting to the Colin Gardiner: job you have today? Hmm. There's a lot. I mean, there's so many people on the journey that have been good to me, but I was thinking really hard the other day about like an experience I had. So I worked at the Federal Reserve as my first job outta college studying labor markets under Janet Yellen, which is super cool. But my like immediate supervisor, married daily runs the Federal Reserve Bank.[00:32:00] I didn't know what I was doing and she like gave me like a pretty hard review, my first like review cycle and, but then she came back and like picked me up. I like just excelled and I think that was something that was really formative for me because I realized you need like raw feedback from people. And you need to know where you stand. But if you're gonna give that, you also need to provide solutions for people. You can't just, just, just break 'em down and not help build them back up. And so that, that really helped me to be like super confident in myself and know, like come back from, I dunno, criticism and like harsh realities and adjust. So, I dunno. I was thinking about that really hard the other day and I like glad you. I Sean Lane: typically don't ask follow-ups on these, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna break my rule. Like how did she pick Colin Gardiner: you back up? I think I initially said to, after getting the feedback, like, here's what I'm gonna need from you to excel. Like, I wasn't gonna quit. So that was internally to me. Like I didn't wanna be a quitter on that front, but we basically, let's pick things I can be successful and do those [00:33:00] first. Right. Get momentum going. Right. Don't things you're. That's not a recipe for success. So we worked together to pick things where I could be successful, build my confidence back up, do it the way that was expected and the quality that was expected, and then build from there. We had to go back to rebuild the base, and that was how she really helped me. And also I took the time to ask more questions. She took the time to answer those more diligently, and that was like really powerful for me every time just compounded. That's great. All right, last Sean Lane: one, one piece of advice for people who want to have your job someday. Colin Gardiner: Oh, don't do it. No, I, my schooling, I did economics and math and I just fundamentally believe. Learning a framework for thinking about the world, like economics, right or wrong, like I'm not saying it's like the right way, but it gave me a framework for evaluating the world and I think people that don't have a really good framework for evaluating opportunity and how [00:34:00] potentially the world works or reason why really struggle to get into these positions. Of managing or building things because they don't have like a way they can like lean on a point of view and have a story and an arc and logic behind what they're doing, whether it's right or wrong. Those are like the requirements to like get to that. I always stress to people, it's like you really need to kind of come up with. Engender your own framework for how you think about the world and get that really strong 'cause that's gonna help like propel you further and evaluate opportunity like that. That's just how you're gonna do it. So economics has always been underlined, everything I've done and as I lean on it every day to get where I've been. Sean Lane: Thanks so much to Colin for joining us on this week's episode of Operations. Also, a special thank you to Mike Wilner and Barry Conrad and the team at Upside for introducing me to Colin. If you want to hear more from Colin, there's a bunch of places you can do that. You can [00:35:00] subscribe to that newsletter that I told you about, take rate, or you can listen to his podcast, want to be Angels. If you like this podcast, make sure you're subscribed so you get a new episode in your feed every other Friday. Also make sure you leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Six star reviews only. Alright, that's gonna do it for me. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time. Today's episode is sponsored by Full Cast, your go-to-market planning platform. If you've ever spent hours or days building territory and quota plans only to have them be out of date the second the reps hit the street, you need to check out full cast. With full cast, you set intelligent rule-based policies that automate all of the time consuming. Manual tasks that hit Rev Ops teams throughout the year with virtually no effort, operations will always seamlessly [00:36:00] align with your plan. Learn more about full Cast today by visiting full cast.io. Colin Gardiner: I.