We built the marketplace. We didn't control what people listed on it. When the market corrected, some people blamed us for what they paid for a JPEG. But we're a marketplace, not a financial advisor.
A candle maker in Portland can now sell to a gift shop in Vermont without ever meeting them, without a sales team, and without worrying about getting paid. That was impossible five years ago.
Refurbished had a trust problem. People thought it meant broken, scratched, or someone else's reject. We had to fix that perception before we could sell a single phone.
The used car market is a $700 billion industry built entirely on mistrust. We thought transparency alone would be enough to win. We were wrong about the economics.
Amazon sells you the cheapest version of everything. We sell you the only version of something. That's not competition — that's a completely different value proposition.
I was a carpenter. I made furniture and couldn't find anywhere to sell it online. eBay was for used junk. Amazon was for mass-produced stuff. So I built Etsy.
Etsy isn't an e-commerce company. It's an economy. Two million sellers feeding their families because this platform exists. That matters more than the stock price.
SoftBank invested. Meta invested. Prosus invested. But the real investors in Meesho are the 15 million small sellers who bet their livelihoods on this platform every day.
eBay is a flea market. Poshmark is a boutique. The difference is curation, community, and the fact that our sellers are real people who style their listings like they're running a fashion brand.
We turned your closet into a store. Literally. Take a photo of your old dress, list it, ship it. 80 million people did that. Social commerce before anyone called it social commerce.
I built a stock market for sneakers. Literally. Bid, ask, price history, market cap — all the mechanics of a stock exchange, but for Jordans. People thought it was a joke until we hit $1 billion in GMV.
We expanded from sneakers to streetwear, electronics, collectibles, and trading cards. Anything with a resale market and a counterfeiting problem. That's a surprisingly large number of things.
Dan Gilbert — the Cavaliers owner — invested early. He said: you're building the NASDAQ of things. That phrase stuck. We're not an e-commerce company. We're a marketplace with price transparency. Big difference.
Amazon charges sellers 40% in fees. We charge almost nothing. Sellers keep more. Prices drop. Consumers win. This is not complicated. It's just a fee structure nobody else was willing to offer.
We are not a rental car company. We are a peer-to-peer marketplace. The difference is that we do not own a single car. Our hosts do.
I went to a street market in Bangkok and realized every small vendor there had amazing products but no way to sell them online. That was the spark for Zilingo.
Anyone can teach on Udemy. That means some courses are amazing and some are terrible. But the marketplace sorts it out — ratings do not lie.
The financial marketplace model works. Help people find the best products. Earn referral fees. Everyone wins.
We have 28 million listings. That's more places to stay than there are people in Australia. The supply side of our marketplace is not the problem.
The commission model was the key. Hotels pay nothing to list. They only pay when they earn. Zero risk for the hotel means everyone says yes.
Studios get less per visit through ClassPass than walk-ins. But an empty spot earns zero. We fill the seats that would otherwise be wasted.
Buying ClassPass was about owning both sides of the marketplace. We run the studios. ClassPass brings the customers. Together, that's an unbeatable combination.