Name: Growing a marketplace company | Carwow founder James Hind on raising VC Investment by Balderton in Later
Duration: 18 min 55 s
Description: CEO and Founder of CarWow James Hind chats to Ben about running and growing a marketplace business. Amongst other things, James reveals how cold calling VCs and angel investors actually works; he advocates taking the plunge with TV advertising, so long as you keep your eye on the stats; and he offers some hints & tips for entrepreneurs trying to spearhead their own marketplace business.

Later

CEO and Founder of CarWow James Hind chats to Ben about running and growing a marketplace business. Amongst other things, James reveals how cold calling VCs and angel investors actually works; he advocates taking the plunge with TV advertising, so long as you keep your eye on the stats; and he offers some hints & tips for entrepreneurs trying to spearhead their own marketplace business. 

Growing a marketplace company | Carwow founder James Hind on raising VC Investment

Maja Kecman joins Ben Goldsmith to talk about both product and app innovation in healthcare. 

Maja currently leads Helix, a team of designers embedded in St. Mary's Hospital, and is currently spending the summer on a secondment at Balderton. 

Listed below are a few key questions in the podcast: 

2:10 How do you get a product to market in healthcare? 

4:30 How does a product innovation in healthtech evolve? 

7:15 Can MVP-style thinking and procedures be applied to healthtech?

9:00 Due to the specialist nature of healthcare innovations and high up-front cost in product, does the funding procedure look different. 

1130 Do VCs in healthtech need to be doctors or medical experts?

1430 What is your piece of advice to an inventor/entrepreneur in healthtech

1615 Is the NHS a good or a bad thing for healthtech?

1850 Due to the recent proliferation in healthcare apps, Maja forwards the idea for a system by which the NHS (or another qualified third party) offers a mark of approval to healthcare apps. 



Where the NHS can improve & product innovation | Maja Kecman on Health Tech

Joe Steele, CEO of Bookatable, chats with Ben Goldsmith about how Bookatable have grown to put millions of diners in touch with 12,000+ restaurants in 19 European countries every single month...

0:00 Intro: How the Bookatable business evolved from Livebookings. 

1:54 Why Bookatable's offering to restaurants is key to success.

3:00 Supply versus demand

4:40 It's a crowded market for both restaurants and customers... how does Bookatable achieve cut-through on such scale?

7:30 Bookable isn't just for good deals, you've got a deal with Michelin! How does that work behind the scenes?

9:05 Who are your customers? Does the Michelin deal help bring in more foodies? 

10:30 Running a marketplace business with lower margins and/or purchase figures is hard: how you make the numbers work? how do you get the best LTV out of your customers?

13:00 Great advise from Joe Steele to future marketplace entrepreneurs: if you're running a marketplace business, your P&L needs to be built and structured entirely differently to other businesses, as success looks different to you. 

15:10 Who is Bookatable's key demographics? 

17:40 Is there a mobile versus desktop split in terms of experience or user behaviour? 

19:30 Bookatable is huge now. Does the service differ from city to city, or country to country? 

21:10 Stockholm v London v Munich: the differences in expectation for both restaurants and customers. 

23:20 How should a marketplace business enter a new market? And why you shouldn't just try and 'copy/paste' your business model






Becoming a dominant Marketplace | Joe Steele, CEO of Bookatable

Rob Moffat, Principal at Balderton, recently hosted an Academy session at Seedcamp. Following his presentation to our Founders, Rob joined our own Dave Haynes for this podcast to give his investor view on understanding customer acquisition costs. 

Rob talks through different marketing channels and how more startups are using mobile, TV and even direct mail, as search engine marketing becomes more expensive. Pulling on his experiences working with Balderton investments such as Wooga, Qubit and HouseTrip, Rob provides an overview of cost per acquisition (CPA) and lifetime value (LTV) and the risks of blending the two. Giving a summary of what VC’s look at when analysing your marketing data. The full presentation Rob gave our teams is available here:

http://www.slideshare.net/robmoff/understanding-customer-acquisition-costs-a-vcs-view


Rob Moffat, Principal at Balderton

So... about those bots. Bots bots bots. Bots!

In this episode of the botcast, a16z partners Benedict Evans and Connie Chan -- along with Chris Messina, longtime advocate of the open web and more -- pull apart various threads related to the topic of bots, mobile, and beyond: the (evolution?) from web to apps to messaging to bots; chat as an interface; “conversational commerce”; and so on. They also discuss why framing messaging through the lens of WeChat both reveals useful things (what works/ might not work) and not-so-useful things (such as seeking the “WeChat of the West”).

More importantly, how can we keep bots, and what they represent, in perspective -- beyond the fad? Especially when it comes to considering innovation on the 'web' vs. 'mobile' (remember the mobile browser!) and when it comes to removing friction (vs. adding limited interaction). What contexts (like customer service) are most useful for thinking about bots? And how can we even know, given it’s early days yet and we haven’t moved much beyond the command-line interface... 

Finally, as computing moves outside the classic work-centric paradigm to room- and urban-scale, how do we think about integrating online and offline, ubiquitous and “diffuse” computing through bots?

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a16z Podcast: Bots and Beyond

So many modern e-commerce sites and marketplaces are really digital forms of their physical counterparts, which makes it easier to figure out how to present and sell products online. But in India, where many small towns do not have "organized" retail -- and have fewer big (let alone well-known) brands -- mobile and web retail is essentially "leapfrogging" over the physical department store phase to online.

So how do these new companies connect people to products when the logistics infrastructure hasn't been built out yet? (Imagine if instead of just partnering with carriers, Amazon had had to build not just its services, but delivery, from scratch in the United States!) Similarly, how do payments happen in an ecosystem that still relies more on cash than more "frictionless" credit cards? And how do you solve problems like discovery; design (different web/app versions depending on connectivity); the balance between notifications/ messaging/ and conversational commerce; and controlling vs. owning inventory and infrastructure?

Finally, given the fierce domestic and international competition around e-commerce in India, how do international startups like Snapdeal -- one of the largest online marketplaces in India, and interestingly one taking a full-stack approach -- compete with other players' deep (including foreign) capital and existing expertise? Especially in the context of "regulations"? In this episode of the a16z Podcast, we discuss all this and more with Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, the co-founders of Snapdeal, as well as a16z partner Anu Hariharan.



a16z Podcast: E-commerce, Payments, & More in India's Evolving Retail Landscape

If the next 20 years of startup-led tech innovation are going to be about addressing massive problems -- like health, energy, transportation, cities, education, and more -- it will mean more directly confronting (instead of stealthily bypassing) regulatory barriers and incumbent-driven regulatory capture challenges. 

So how can startups "growth hack" in a highly regulated sector? In this episode of the a16z Podcast -- the second of our podcasts from our most recent on-the-road trip in Washington, D.C. -- Evan Burfield, the co-founder and co-CEO of D.C.-based global incubator 1776, outlines the techniques (really, an art form) of "regulatory hacking". It's not just a way to enter a market, but a way to create a market ... much like Elon Musk did with Tesla: using the very system that drops lemons to make lemonade.

The technique begins by understanding informal and formal power; "power mapping" the influencers all across the chessboard (from the top down and bottom up); telling your startup brand/product story in a particular way; and then making your moves. Just as there's a playbook for navigating Silicon Valley, there's one for navigating D.C., argues Burfield; and while many entrepreneurs instinctively just want to get regulations out of the way, sometimes, you just need to know how to play the game.

a16z Podcast: The Art of the Regulatory Hack

One of the most important lessons of the internet age is what happens when we give people -- including companies, developers, engineers, hobbyists, and yes, even a few bad (or dumb) actors -- a new platform, along with the freedom to innovate on top of it. For example, who could have predicted how profoundly the internet would change our economy, given how it started off as a research project -- one where commercial applications were actually frowned upon in the early days?

Now, the U.S. is on the cusp of opening up another such platform for commercial and social innovation: airspace (think drones, the non-military kind). There's so many use cases for drones that we already know about, but what about new business use cases? And then, on the policy front, how do we calculate the risk of innovation on a platform made up of atoms (drones) vs. bits (the internet)? What are the pros and cons of registration? Because even though drones are like flying smartphones controlled by software, they're also hard objects that could fall out of the sky ... or go places where no one could go before, for better or worse.

The guests on this episode of the a16z Podcast -- continuing our D.C. and tech/innovation/policy theme -- share their thoughts on safety, privacy, paper airplanes, and what they think are some of the most exciting things now possible in airspace. Joining the conversation are Washington, D.C.-based Mercatus Center tech policy lead Eli Dourado, along with graduate research fellow Samuel Hammond; Airware founder and CEO Jonathan Downey; and SkySafe CEO and co-founder Grant Jordan.

a16z Podcast: Airspace as the Next Internet-Like Platform

There's no question automation is taking over more and more aspects of work and some jobs altogether. But we're now entering a "third era" of automation, one which went from taking over dangerous work to dull work and now decision-making work, too.

So what will it take to deal with a world -- and a workplace -- where machines could be thought of as colleagues? The key lies in distinguishing between automation vs. augmentation, argue the guests on this episode of the a16z Podcast, IT management professor Thomas Davenport and Harvard Business editor Julia Kirby, who authored the new book Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines. 

But the argument isn't as simple as saying humans will just do the creative, emotionally intelligent work and that machines will do the rest. The future of work is complex and closely tied to the need for structure, identity, and meaning. Which is also why linking the discussion of things like "universal basic income" to the topic of automation isn't just unnecessary, but depressing and even damaging (or so argue the guests on this episode).

a16z Podcast: Automation, Jobs, & the Future of Work (and Income)

Balderton Capital are one of Europe's largest tech VCs, investing the best breakthrough technology companies in the continent. This podcast will share weekly insights for those at the forefront of the European technology scene: our partners, investment team, portfolio companies, and other selected experts and contributors. The 'cast will be a worthwhile listen for anyone who is looking to raise venture capital investment, building a technology company from the ground up, or is enthusiastic about the London & European tech community. If you'd like to read news & updates from our team, check out our news page: http://www.balderton.com/newsfeed

Growing a marketplace company | Carwow founder James Hind on raising VC Investment

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