What Isn't Even Visible

A-Frame at 10,760’ outside the ghost town of Saints John, Colorado. 

From Patagonia, With Love

"I was an engineer by training. I like building things, and marketplaces are hard to get right. You have two sets of customers, and that makes it more than twice as challenging. Their incentives and what they want from the marketplace are not always aligned. The product is essentially the guardrails and rules of the marketplace. Figuring out one cohesive set that serves both sides well is really hard.

Most startups go after one vertical or service. When I joined Thumbtack, they were 20 people and they were already serving nine hundred and some service categories across the US. It wasn’t another SF thing. It wasn’t the textbook approach of get one market right and then scale, they figured out a way to let the demand guide the company where it needed to go. The engineering team is absolutely incredible. They realized early on that growth has to be product and data driven.

I would like to see Thumbtack be the destination for services the same way that Amazon today is the destination for products. I want Thumbtack to be that place where if you ever needed to hire a person to do something for you, you’d come to Thumbtack.”