We love network effects. And we decided we want to share that passion more broadly. So - 🥁DRUMROLL 🥁: You are receiving the first edition of the marketplace snippet. 
What you can expect: a 5 minute read packed with valuable 🔮 insights, 💡priceless resources and a good dose of 🤓reads we like.

This edition is curated by Magda from the Speedinvest x office in London  
We hope you like it. If you have any suggestions or feedback  👉hit reply 👈to let us know. 

This month, along with our friends from Battery Ventures and Autotech VC, we hosted our semi-annual signature event The Marketplace Conference in Berlin. Over 570 people attended our event, including 126 investors, 28 corporates and 376 founders from all over Europe and beyond. During those few hours we have officially registered over 252 1-to-1-meetings, but we bet the best happened behind the scenes. Curious?
📷 You can see what the cameras registered here 📷 and follow us on Twitter for more updates. Missed the conference and having the FOMO? We’ll be soon releasing early bird tickets to our San Francisco edition and release talks from the last event on Youtube!

• 💡Casey Winters, Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite, writes about turning SaaS businesses into marketplaces. Why this matters? As Casey writes, this transition worked for Opentable, but it is not as easy. His blog post explores key considerations startup founders should keep in mind before making this move.
• 📱Jimmy Wales, you-know-the-wiki-guy, launches facebook competitor. Why this matters? Creating new social media platforms, as Google can confirm, is undoubtedly challenging. However, in the times of fake news, growing mental health, anxiety issues and information overload, people start to seek alternatives. The Wikipedia founder takes on the challenge to create a platform that would not be powered by advertising spent.
• 👟Rising customer expectations led to creation of more specialized, vertical marketplaces in many different areas from agriculture to sneakers. This created an opportunity for formation of tightly-knit communities around specific topics. Now, large brands such as Nike are starting to pull out from the generalist giant Amazon to offer their products on smaller, but specialized platforms.
• 🔮How to kickstart a marketplace - should you be looking into the next big growth hack? Lenny Rachitsky, ex product lead at Airbnb provides insights on why is it important to work out the fundamentals first instead of looking for magic formulas. Practical tips those who haven’t started yet!
• 🧮How to calculate unit economics for a platform business - great post by Patrick from LeadX Capital Partners on how to approach the topic.

• 🌎GP Bullhound releases its Global Marketplaces Perspective with insights on recent trends, metrics, public market analysis and valuation benchmarks. Key trends identified include continous growth of the food delivery category and its various forms, the rise of conscious customer and sustainable commerce as well as growth of B2B specialists.
• 🗒️Marketplace checklist - how to analyze labor marketplaces by Mike Ghaffary. The article discusses the rise of labor and highly managed marketplaces that can facilitate more complex services which require more regulation and vetting.
• 💪The rise of superplatforms - Stuart Mills, a behavioural economist explores the parallel between nationalisation of railways and democratizing ownership of the dominant platforms.

• 👗Newest circular economy unicorn: Vinted, the marketplace for second hand clothes raises €128 million from Lightspeed Ventures, Sprints Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Accel and Burda Principal Investments at over $1bn valuation.
• 🎾Endurance event marketplace Let’s Do This raises $15M series A led by EQT with participation of Serena Williams, Peter Flint and Usain Bolt.
• 🏬Property management platform Plentific raises €29.1 million in a Series B led by AO Proptech, with support from Target Global and Round Hill.
• 🐮Marketplace and networking site for small-holder farmers WeFarm raised $13 million in a Series A led by True Ventures.
• 🔮Experience marketplace Pollen raises $60M from Northzone, with support from Sienna Capital, Draper Esprit, Backed and Kindred.
• 🏗Marketplace for on-demand services and skilled labor in the energy industry Rig Up raises $300 million Series D round led by Andreessen Horowitz
• 🏎Used cars marketplace Frontier Car Group that targets emerging markets nabs $400 million from OLX Group, who will become their largest shareholder.

• 💰Digital coaching platform CoachHub raises €10M from HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, Partech, yours truly Speedinvest x and RTP Global. BTW, they are also hiring! 
• 💪Tier Mobility becomes the first scooter company to roll out operations based on swappable batteries and - from behind the scenes - about our journey with Tier Mobility “From foundation to >€50M series B in 1 year”.
• 🎖Kodit.io - one of the leading instant home buyers in Europe - expands to Poland and Spain. On the side, also wins Startup of the Year Award in Finland. Congrats, Team Kodit!
• 🎤And lastly, our own Speedinvest x reverse pitch - let us know how did we do.

• Oliver Bruce (@oliverbruce) of Micromobility Industries to stay up to date on all things micromobility
• Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan), previously Growth PM at Airbnb, because of his insightful series about how to kickstart and scale a marketplace business
• Brianne Kimmel (@briannekimmel) for sharing interesting thoughts on the convergence of SaaS and marketplaces

Thanks for subscribing and following us. We hope you enjoyed reading this first edition of the (Monthly) Marketplace Snippet. Did we get anything wrong or miss something? Many of our readers are smarter and more informed than we are – please hit reply and let us know when we miss something!
 

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