Join us June 18th for an evening of networking and sharing strategies as industry leaders compare their playbooks for winning as a marketplace. Menlo will unveil our State of the Marketplace Report and predictions for the future. Attendees will include marketplace leaders, founders of up-and-coming marketplace companies and influential media covering this category.
VCs love marketplace businesses because they tend to be winner-take-all. Marketplaces are one of the few business models that demonstrate true network effects: supply and demand follow each other. When one company controls a market with strong network effects, it can absorb the majority of supply and demand, generate huge profits, retain customers and keep competitors at bay.
At Menlo, we aim to identify winners--or those businesses about to break out. As investors, we arm them with capital and industry expertise that gives them an “unfair” advantage.
Hosted by: Venky Ganesan and Steve Sloane, Menlo Ventures.
Manish Chandra is the Founder & CEO of Poshmark and drives the vision, strategy, and growth for the company. Under Manish’s leadership, the company has grown to become a leading social commerce platform for the next generation of retailers and shoppers. With Poshmark, Manish has applied his 20+ years experience building and scaling companies to build a new class of fashion marketplace where the deep connections between users fuels massive engagement and growth.
Prior to Poshmark, Manish founded Kaboodle, the first social shopping company, which was acquired by Hearst Corporation in 2007. Before Kaboodle, he held executive positions at Versant (NASDAQ: VSNT), Versata (IPO 2000, acquired by Trilogy), and Sybase (IPO 1991, acquired by SAP). Manish received a BTech from IIT Kanpur, MS from UT Austin, and an MBA from Haas School of Business.
Mary is an expert in two-sided marketplaces, having a knack for solving consumer and merchant challenges through mutually-beneficial services and models. After co-founding ClassPass, Mary co-founded MealPal to make mealtime pickup convenient and affordable. Prior to MealPal, Mary spent ten years creating business and marketing strategies for big brands and startups through her time at Betterment, Vistaprint, and MBI, Inc.
Aaron Easterly is Chief Executive Officer of Rover.com, a sharing-economy marketplace that matches dog owners and dog sitters online. He brings 15 years of tech-industry experience to the company, which was named a 2018 Most Innovative Company by Fast Company and "Next Tech Titan" by GeekWire in 2019.
Prior to Rover, Aaron was a General Manager at Microsoft, where he managed search, display, and contextual ad marketplaces worth $3 billion. Ernst & Young announced that Easterly is an EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2014 Award winner of the Emerging category for the Pacific Northwest. He was named a “40 under 40” recipient by the Puget Sound Business Journal. Originally planning to be an
academic economist, Easterly received an A.B. degree with honors in Economics from Harvard College.
Cameron Poetzscher was the Global Head of Corporate Development at Uber and oversaw all M&A, including the establishment and sale of Uber China as well as several other groundbreaking deals, and was involved in over $20B of fundraising. He also served as Head of Finance prior to the arrival of Uber's permanent CFO.
Prior to Uber, he had over 17 years of global investment banking experience at Goldman Sachs, advising some of the most sophisticated and demanding clients (from Fortune 50 companies to pre-IPO start-ups backed by leading VC firms) on numerous complex, high-profile M&A transactions, IPOs and other financings across five continents.
