Mike Ghaffary (Canvas Ventures) - How to Evaluate Online Marketplaces, Why This is a Contrarian time to Invest in Consumer

Mike Ghaffary is a General Partner at Canvas Ventures, one of the premier thesis-driven early-stage venture capital funds in San Francisco that invests in Fintech, Digital Health, Marketplaces, and New Enterprise. Prior to Canvas, Mike was a General Partner at Social Capital and as an angel investor, some of his investments include Strava, Skip Scooters, Pocket, Philz Coffee, Atrium, and Superhuman. He also has 10 years of operating experience as CEO of Eat24, VP Business and Corporate Development at Yelp, Director of Business Development at TrialPay, and co-founder of Stitcher and BarMax. And before that, Mike started his investing career at Summit Partners.

For this episode, we talk quite extensively about evaluating marketplaces. Mike has written a few articles on the subject, the one we touch on is “Where I’m Investing and 15 Marketplace Questions”.

Two books that have impacted Mike professionally and personally is Give and Take by Adam Grant and Drive by Daniel Pink

You can follow Mike on Twitter @newmike for updates. You are also welcome to follow your host @mikegelb and @consumervc for updates.

On this episode you learn -

What attracted Mike to working in startups and becoming a founder? How important having operational experience is? What’s makes him excited to invest in consumer tech in this current climate?
What is a marketplace? An overview of the advantages of marketplaces. What marketplace founders need to consider when identifying and building marketplaces? Cross-side and same-side network effects & negative network effects. How important is having your own unique distribution? Evaluating switching costs.
Online customer acquisition costs for both supply and demand. The current outlook of online CAC in today’s climate.
One thing he would change about venture capital. How an entrepreneur should think when a venture fund says they need a lead investor in order to invest?

...and much much more!

If you would like to follow along you can click “Subscribe” on the Apple podcast app or whichever platform you are listening on. If you enjoyed the episode, feel free to also leave a review. You are also to see all episodes here and learn more at www.theconsumervc.com and follow Mike on Twitter or Instagram