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Peer Effect
Best way to scale? Your peers have the answers.
This is the podcast for scaleup founders looking for insightful, actionable wisdom from some of the best operators around. Each week we’ll explore one secret that other founders and experts are using right now and how to implement it.
It’s practical wisdom to build the company AND life you want. Hosted by renowned founder coach and advisor James Johnson.
You’ve survived to £1m, now let’s scale to £10m+.
Peer Effect
Loving what you do and doing it well with Jeremy Gottschalk of Marketplace Risk
Jeremy is the Founder of Marketplace Risk, which runs the largest marketplace conference in the world.
Today he takes us back to January 2015.
At the time, Jeremy was attending a business class, working towards his MBA.
Jeremy was going through a professional identity crisis and kept wondering what his next move would be.
Between working full-time whilst adding value to people’s lives he created something bigger than he could have ever imagined.
Jeremy recounts how finding his North Star guided him through his journey and helped him imbibe the importance of enjoying what you do and doing it well.
In this episode we discuss,
● Focusing on adding value and stepping away from the money-making mindset
● The importance of finding personal success and satisfaction.
● Enjoying the journey rather than focusing on the destination.
Jeremy's journey serves as a reminder of the importance of aligning our professional lives with personal happiness.
Join today’s episode where Jeremy’s reflection provides a fresh perspective on the meaning of success, emphasising the need to follow a life that brings happiness and adds value to the world.
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Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
I'm delighted to welcome Jeremy to the show today. He's the founder of Marketplace Risk, which has the world's largest Marketplace Risk conference and quite a few interesting things to say today. Welcome, jeremy. Hi, thanks for having me. Life's looking good now, but we're going to go back to moment in time before. When are we going back to?
Speaker 2:It's January 2015,. Sitting in my business school class at Kellogg, the amount of time that I spent leading up to deciding to get my MBA, spending the amount of money and the time and all of the energy for it. There was a considerable period leading up to that of kind of this. I guess I'll call it a professional identity crisis, Like where do I want to be?
Speaker 1:And did you find, while doing the MBA, that it gave you that time to really think about what next?
Speaker 2:I think the feeling is that you're going to come out and be a CEO, and the reality is the way I experienced it and, I think, a lot of others. You really just build on things you already know and industries you're already in. It doesn't necessarily make you into a CEO, but it kind of helps you move in a specific direction.
Speaker 1:So, mid-MBA, you had this time to think you're being sort of influenced by the people. You're enjoying it. What's the epiphany that you have in this class? That's really driven subsequent behavior.
Speaker 2:One is for me. What I kept hearing was from many professors, and particularly in this class, was how are you creating value, solving a problem? It was a lot more philosophical than it was practical, than it was professional. And the accounting classes, the finance classes I'm the biggest math loser on the face of the earth so they were interesting to gauge where you're not at, but they weren't helpful in this exploration, I guess you'd call it. It was really when we started talking about creating value and solving a problem, filling a need and how different businesses are successful. That's where I started applying it to my own life and my own experiences to start to figure out that what I had been doing not exactly in that form, but was there's a huge need here, and try to figure out where you can meet the need uniquely, meet the need where it's not being met and what that might look like.
Speaker 1:So, actually stepping away from how do I make as much money as possible, or how do I structure this in a clever way to do this, or, practically, how do I do it, let's start with how can I add value to the world?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So so we have the largest marketplace conferences events in the world. The first four that we hosted were free, we didn't charge anybody, and it didn't actually really start out to be a business right. So, just along the lines of what you just said like there was never this, this notion that this is going to lead to pots of gold it was more that I enjoyed doing this. I was experienced. I wouldn't call myself an expert at certainly not that time, but I had a pretty significant experience and there was value in sharing that. There was value in bringing bringing these people together. The iterations of what we've built, you know, include podcasts and virtual content and a lot of stuff, but it really started as one conference. We never charged anybody to attend it. We just encouraged people to come and learn but also share, and so it was that that kind of what we ended up creating was like a market, but that platform, that medium, that that we created, is what eventually really took off.
Speaker 1:And maybe just for this moment. Let's just clarify. We talked about marketplace risk. What sort of marketplaces are we originally talking about and what sort of risk so we can see the impact on the?
Speaker 2:world. So when we're talking kind of marketplaces, we're talking digital marketplaces, and when we're talking about the risk, my focus primarily was in services marketplaces. So senior care, childcare you know pet care, anything tangentially related to that, because the risk there is a lot higher. Right, you're dealing with people. In the case of childcare and senior care, you're dealing with vulnerable populations. They're being left with strangers, etc.
Speaker 2:The goods marketplaces there's risk as well, but it's not human risk. So, starting with those, you've got obviously the risk of fraud and someone buys something that doesn't get shipped, someone ships something that's wrong, something's broken, etc. You can quantify the value of those things pretty easily and get insurance for it, but there's those risks. When you're dealing with services and people and even expensive properties, the risks get infinitely bigger, in large part because you're dealing with everything from what could be physical harm, abuse kind of all the way up to death, right, and then, of course, later, on top of those, what I'll call like the practical risks, you've now got regulatory risks and the industry, because it's growing, is a lot more regulation. So there's kind of risks all around and the unique part of a mobile or a web app connecting people is you just have that risk of the anonymous, the unknown person.
Speaker 1:And, in a way like if it's something that's breakable and replaceable, you can ensure it. Human being damage is already done, so it needs to be prevented in the first place.
Speaker 2:Right. And so the way that we always looked at risk was there's a risk to the company, right. There's a reputation risk, legal risk, but then there's always a risk to your community, right? So Airbnb, for example, if they had a lot of fraud on their platform starting out or bad things happening to people, they would have just never grown. Uber, the same thing. There are a lot of publicized things that have happened on those platforms, but they are minuscule relative to the amount of transactions that have happened on their platforms. So there's the risk to the community as well. That, I think, is in some ways bigger than to the company, because the company is protected with insurance etc. And the reputation is, I think, more important when, when, when it comes to something bad happening to your users.
Speaker 2:I was a lawyer who had been practicing in this area since the eBay and Craigslist days. There weren't many of us, I was, so I had, you know, let's call it about 10 years of experience doing this kind of. Since the beginning, I was becoming a free agent, in the sense that I didn't want to do what I was doing anymore. I wasn't going to be working in a law firm, and so I could bring all of this knowledge, information to what are demographically very young leaders. The CEOs, the founders of these companies skew very young and, as a result, they have less business experience right, and they have these huge risks at their doorstep. And so who was going to be the person that connects all of these things right and gets them to understand not only the risks but the ways to mitigate those risks, which are actually not super complicated? You just have to spend some time on them and prioritize them, and so, ultimately I think that that's the way I saw myself was was bringing all of this information to these people. So it's really interesting.
Speaker 1:So you, at this stage, you've progressed to the lawyer, you're going to an MBA, you've gone there with, maybe, the expectation of transitioning to be a VC or a CEO. Everyone around you is aiming to be a CEO or a founder or sort of build something big and in this class, this kind of this, this, this you have this epiphany of it's all about value and actually that's what you want to focus on, and today you've got a very successful company. But at the time, was there any reservation about focusing on adding value rather than the financial side?
Speaker 2:Because I was working. I had a full time job. I wasn't taking really risks. I was. This was something I was doing on my spare time, on the company time as well, with their support. But I really had the luxury of just following these things and spending time on it, without the pressure of having to generate income. Because I was, I was still working full time.
Speaker 1:There's two things come quite a lot in this podcast. One is the success takes longer than people think like. So it's a 10 year game, not a two to three year game, and what it sounds like is, by the time you actually officially started post MBA, your actual probable start date was maybe four to five years before you actually started. I mean 10 years by experience, but maybe even just this. The solving this particular problem was maybe four to five. Is that right?
Speaker 2:You know, when I learned the basics right to solve this, I would say, right, 2010 is really when I started getting my my hands dirty. 2015 is when I I I guess I felt I had enough experience that I could teach somebody somehow, right? I don't know what that looked like, but that there was. There was value in my knowledge and people needed to know it. I found I sound like the town gossip, but no, it's actually in the business context that there was. Just there was this information that that I just knew people didn't know and they should know.
Speaker 2:And yeah, I think that's right. I mean we're going on. You know by that we're going on 13 years, but yeah, I mean it does. It does take a long time. I think you know again what success means. You know it's always interesting what success means to different people, because I've always said you know happiness just having enough money to be happy and do the things you want to do and you know, I could have had that as a lawyer, because they pay you too much money and you can, at that point, buy your happiness. Or you can, you know, go into a. When I went in house, you could spend your time managing people where you're not actually working. I mean, you're working, but you're working less and you're getting paid good money. You know, for me it was when I really started doing all of the things that I wanted to do on a daily basis and following them wherever they went right. And so, yeah, I mean in terms of where we're at now, I would say it was a solid 10 years.
Speaker 1:But it sounds like this this definition of success as following where you're adding value and following a life that makes you happy. Is that right? Would you define it as those two things?
Speaker 2:I think the description of it is creating value. I don't think I went into it thinking like I want to spend the next 10 years creating value. It just happened to be that I was pretty quickly able to connect a need with my experience and kind of the intersection of those things was the value that I was going to create.
Speaker 1:It's very interesting. So, having now looked back at this, just talk it back through. Is there anything that's that's jumped out for you today?
Speaker 2:You know, before we talked, I never, I've never, really thought about this kind of career progression trajectory, what actually motivated what it's. You know, again, I've had the luxury of doing what felt right and the luxury of a good education, and so, you know, I was, I've been able to, to really lean into things that were interesting without pressures of, you know, raising a family or or, you know, having to. So you know, I've just kind of wandered my way and never really thought about a lot of these things as much as in some, really at all, until, kind of, you and I talked about this and really what, what drove it right? Like what were the underlying reasons and motivations for getting me from point A to point B and C or D or wherever it's going? And it's funny because when, like I said before, you know, people think I have this master plan right, because we've created these, we wrote, we have been writing a wave of a business model that has created a ton of value, raised billions and billions of dollars in venture funding, right, I mean, I didn't invent anything here, I just kind of rode the wave and was at the right place at the right time.
Speaker 2:But you know, I never really thought about, like I never created or designed a plan to do this. So in some ways, just you know, having these conversations like making me reflect on, well, what was it right? Because I could have easily gone you know a million different paths. It certainly got hard. There's various times where it was very difficult, where you second guess yourself, where you're sure you're doing, you know, taking dumb risks, and you stick with it right. And so the thing that kind of got me through a lot of that and what I still think, think about well, I think about now that I didn't really think about then was like this this need that we're meeting and helpful to look back at some of those pivotal moments, some of those junctures, and just kind of think about, well, what, what motivated you then? And and then leveraging that, I guess, for the future.
Speaker 1:That was what came to mind. We were just saying that like I'm curious as to how that might impact you moving forward.
Speaker 2:Right. So it's interesting because we've had the luxury of really not having any competitors right. So the I say that not with arrogance, but you know you really can't screw it up when you have no competitors, because we were kind of the only game in town and we still are to some degree. There's a lot more, there are a lot more, there's a lot more attention being paid obviously to this industry following, you know, venture funding. There's obviously the million market places in every region and country, and so they're bound to be competitors and others in the space that we will compete with, whether they're direct competitors or not.
Speaker 2:And and you know, the thing that I I always think of, and every time someone has kind of come and gone, because there have been, I would say, blips is, you know, if we continue to meet a need and we do do it well, right, then we welcome all the competitors in the world, because if and truly if they're going to do it better than us, then great, you know, we'll go do something else. But to me, you know, the I don't say my North Star, but you know I've not chased the dollars, I've not chased any title, I've not chased anything other than enjoying what I'm doing and doing it well.
Speaker 1:Jeremy, that's been really really interesting, Thank you. Thank you very much for sharing.
Speaker 2:I really enjoyed the conversation and it's been super reflective for me.
