The Lucent Perspective

Startup to Acquisition: Scaling and Disrupting Online Marketplaces to Millions of Users, with Shirish Nardkarni

• Rebecca Hastings • Season 1 • Episode 15

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I am thrilled to be joined by the brilliant tech entrepreneur and visionary, Shirish Nadkarni! With a career spanning decades, Shirish has left an indelible mark on the tech industry, contributing to the success of iconic products like MSN, Blackberry, and Rosetta Stone.

 

Shirish co-founded Livemocha, a language-learning platform that rapidly garnered 15 million users across 200 countries. His wealth of experience in launching, scaling, and even exiting tech businesses is nothing short of awe-inspiring.

 

In this episode, we'll dive deep into Shirish's remarkable journey, uncovering the strategies and insights that propelled him to success. From overcoming the intricacies of marketplace dynamics to the art of retaining end-users and even his thoughts on the future of tech disruption, Shirish will leave you inspired and informed.

 

Episode Outline and Highlights

 

●     [01:41] Shirish’s Perspective on Jumpstarting a Marketplace

●     [07:54]  Discussing Marketplaces Evolving into Monopolies

●     [12:48]  AI's Disruptive Influence on Established Marketplaces

●     [15:00]  The Potential Challenge to Market Monopolies by Social Networks

●     [18:08]  Transitioning from Founder/CEO to a Senior Employee

●     [21:30]  Going from Startup to Acquisition: Shirish’s Key Success Factors

●     [26:10]  Recognizing the Value of End-User Retention

●     [28:47]  The Impact of Immigration on Successful Startup Formation

 

How to Engage End-Users and Successfully Jumpstart a Tech Marketplace

 

Shirish’s astonishing career contains a series of achievements that impact millions of lives today. As I think about his career, I am fascinated by the number of products that he has been involved in which I used: Hotmail, the Blackberry, and Rosetta Stone which he sold one of his businesses. He co-founded Livemocha, a language learning platform, in 2007. They rapidly grew their users and client base to 15 million in 200 countries. I wanted to get Shirish’s insights on how they were able to gain traction in increasing their users and jumpstarting a marketplace. I was also keen to know his thoughts on jumpstarting a marketplace and how to overcome the chicken-and-egg issue of buyers and sellers. 

 

Below are some of my takeaways:

 

●     Focus on a specific category or geography

●     Focus on the supply side of the equation first

●     Local is the key to going global

●     The best PR is word of mouth - so focus on your product’s value

 


Rebecca Hastings, Founder and Director at The Lucent Group

Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hastingsrebecca/

Would you like to be a guest? Book a time to speak with Rebecca: https://calendly.com/rebeccahastings/discovery-call

The Lucent Group Ltd website - https://www.thelucentgroup.co.uk/

The Lucent Perspective website - https://thelucentperspective.com/

Rebecca has extensive talent and executive search experience supporting digital and technology businesses through complex changes and fast-paced scale-up periods. She works with businesses advising on C-level, technical, sales and commercial appointments, workforce planning, strategic talent management, recruitment processes and associated technology and employer brand development.

Rebecca Turnbull:

Welcome to the Listen perspective. I'm your host, Rebecca Hastings. I've spent over a decade working with executives in the tech sector, and help successful companies build their leadership teams and scale. During my career, I've been lucky to have the privilege of learning from many exceptional leaders. In these conversations, you'll get perspectives from peers, be inspired, and learn what it takes to become one of the best. This is your chance to listen to experts talking about the challenges, solutions, and the vital insights they've gained in their careers to date.

Unknown:

Those are very, very important things that a lot of people forget to do. You know, they focus on you know, marketing and fighting customer. But if you have a leaky bucket now I'm going to get the five

Rebecca Turnbull:

I am joined by Suresh Nadkarni to discuss marketplace, businesses, scaling and talent. She is actually joining us from Seattle today. He's had an amazing career building global b2c companies with 10s of millions of users worldwide. He's written two books, he is an investor. And he also serves on the board of Thai Seattle, I'm thrilled to be speaking with you today. When I was thinking about your career, I was totally struck by the number of products that you have been involved in, that I've actually used. So like Microsoft, Hotmail was my first email address. I think it's actually approaching its 30th birthday. If only I still work. MSN I had a Blackberry early on. And I've also used Rosetta Stone, which you saw on your businesses too. So let's just dive straight in. In 2009, you found dead life marker, which was actually the world's largest language learning site, I think you had over 15 million users and 200 countries, and then rosette as amazing as like such an achievement. And then Rosetta Stone acquired live vaca in 2013. So that growth was really fast. Tell me, how did you create a critical mass and achieve this growth so quickly?

Unknown:

Yes, the it's a very interesting story. Because like Mocha to golf was a rocket. Once we launched it, I think there were several factors to our success. One was, we made it free to get started, which was unusual results on you know, you're paid X amount of dollars to buy, you know, a CD box. And so we made it free. We added a social networking component to it so that you could converse with native speakers around the world. And then we had great PR, honestly, we had a phenomenal article in The New York Times that just, you know, just tripled our user base almost instantly amazing. And you got great PR and other publications like Wall Street Journal, and International Herald, Tribune, and, and so forth. And then finally, we did use some sem in other countries. So we've gone to each country and kind of use sem as a spark to get it going. And then it was the viral word of mouth that really took over and drove our user acquisition,

Rebecca Turnbull:

see made it really easy for people to engage with the product in the first place. And you know, remove that obstacle, of course, quite costly, up front and subscription back then. And I love that you also looked at things a bit more locally for each market, because they want to be in different motivations and every country about what languages to learn and why.

Unknown:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, in fact, we had 30 different languages that you could learn through like Mocha, and you could learn learn in your native language, as well. So it made a lot easier for people to get started.

Rebecca Turnbull:

And marketplace searches so hard to get off the ground. Can you share some of the lessons you've learned about jumpstarting a marketplace kind of overcome that chicken or the egg problem that so many people encounter? Yeah,

Unknown:

I talk about that in my book quite extensively, because it is a challenge to get the marketplace going. And what I recommend is basically, to focus on a specific category or geography, and to focus on the supply side of the equation first. So I give examples of Instacart and DoorDash. Instacart started only in San Francisco initially. And they actually scraped the content, the grocery content from Safeway site and made it available even though that was not quite legal to do so. And then, you know, consumers would place orders they will take the orders and then turned around and ordered on Safeway on behalf of the consumers. Same thing with DoorDash for example, this out in Palo Alto, and they took the fall The menus of different restaurants in Palo Alto, and made that available on their website. And when somebody called in to, you know, order some food, they will turn around, and they'll take the order from the consumer, turn around and call the restaurant, place the order and then go pick it up. And then once they had some critical mass, then these companies were able to go to the surface of the world or local restaurants to really sign them up on their platform. So

Rebecca Turnbull:

being really local is potentially the key to going global.

Unknown:

Yes, yes. Start local, establish yourself, prove that the model works. And that lets you then go raise money from VCs, then that reason allows you to expand into other markets.

Rebecca Turnbull:

And I can see how harken back to what you were saying about some of the success with like, mocha combination of being really local and having great PR, it's going to make something much more likely to go viral and take off.

Unknown:

That's correct. Yes. Yeah, our growth was primarily viral, and took off not just in the US, but then countries around the world. In fact, countries like Brazil and China and India were bigger than us, for us.

Rebecca Turnbull:

And what was it that fueled the growth in those markets at that point.

Unknown:

So the PR, from the US trickled over into those countries. And as I said, we did some SEM, it was quite inexpensive to bid on, you know, bars, like phrases like LearnEnglish, and so forth. And then create a spark. And once you create them, that's par, then the word spread virally from there on?

Rebecca Turnbull:

And did you hire local talent to be those country managers? Or were you able to build a team all in one location somewhere doing that because it's so tricky to do

Unknown:

or not, we actually, they actually built it in the US. And then over time, we partnered with other companies. So we partnered with a very well known education company in Brazil, to then promote Nymo and Brazil.

Rebecca Turnbull:

Interesting. Now, I were talking a few minutes ago by getting word of my influence. I just recently spoke with Tabby kaka the CEO of curse has companies and Estonian companies. So it's it's spelled ke o s, but pronounced curse. Make a solution aimed at the CEOs of tech companies and marketplaces. It helps them to like drive loyalty from users and influencers and reward people who help you kind of like grow along the way. And I find this really interesting because influencer marketing is one way that people go about getting word of mouth. But it's it's really expensive. And people have mixed results with it. So this is quite an interesting tool to kind of like disrupt market share, potentially. You write about how marketplaces become monopolies. Yeah. Tell us how, how do they evolve into monopolies? And do you think that this kind of approach could maybe disrupt some of them?

Unknown:

Yeah. So interestingly, we talked about the fact that marketplaces are hard to get off the ground. But once you get them off the ground, and you create critical mass of suppliers and consumers, then network effects kick in. And basically, it becomes a virtuous flywheel where more suppliers join the platform, because a lot of consumers and then more consumers join the platform because there's a wide array of suppliers. As an example, today in the US, you have Amazon and Walmart. But Walmart, sorry, Amazon is the 8000 pound gorilla, the monopoly in the market, because there are two and a half billion suppliers. That is Walmart has only 50,000 suppliers. And it's very difficult for suppliers to multitenant meaning they to be on both marketplace at the same time, because it's a lot of time energy just to be on one. And so these network effects really kick in and then they create the barriers to exit and prevent other companies from establishing market share in that domain.

Rebecca Turnbull:

That is fascinating to think about the power that their supply side has. And so going back to monopolies Do you think that companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, are abusing their monopoly power or or half abuse their monopoly power? Yeah, unfortunately,

Unknown:

even though these are all great companies, there's a significant temptation to abuse your monopoly power and talk about that in my book. Basically, you know, Amazon and Apple have self referenced their own products. So Amazon has a private label business. So if you're looking for iPhone cable, they have a product from Amazon Basics that you can purchase. Similarly, Apple has Apple Music versus Spotify and so forth. So if you search for Music application, Apple Music both come up first, even though Spotify is more popular and a better music solution. So self referencing is, is one issue. The other issue is, in the case of Amazon, you know, to D radically, you know, people in the company are not allowed to access proprietary data about suppliers, or wherever the private label team, there's been reports about them accessing that information to decide what markets to enter. And then they it's not okay, hey, this is a good market to enter because of this data, and then they'll go to the same manufacturer, get them to manufacture that that item, and then they will self preference themselves in the search. So that's, again, you know, an abuse of monopoly power that needs to be prevented in the future.

Rebecca Turnbull:

So what kind of regulation do you think is missing these days, because marketplaces are now very much online, and then they're not physical places we go to that often.

Unknown:

Yeah, I'm not generally a big fan of regulation. However, in this case, there's clearly been incidents of abuse of monopoly power. And I think that, you know, preventing self preferencing, you know, really having policies to not access proprietary supplier data, all of these things can be regulated. And, you know, in the US, for example, the Congress, again, in our they've done actually a lot of research themselves on these monopolies, they just have to enact to prevent these abuses of our power.

Rebecca Turnbull:

And the example you gave there, it's really interesting, because you can put as much regulation in place, but the reality is, it's a people problem. It's to do with like, ethics cultures value, and you're managing your workforce. And you could put all the regulation in place. But if you don't get that foundation, correct, you're going to have problems, people aren't going to abuse their position when, you know, by proxy, they deserve some of the power of the business they're in.

Unknown:

Yeah, that's right. You know, again, all these companies are great companies, they're very well run. They do have internal policies, but they're not, you know, they don't, unless they have, you know, regulation to prevent these kinds of abuses, you know, their internal policies will be lacks. And that's how these problems start. And so having some level of regulation, and regular little regulatory body that is checking in to make sure that these companies are following those regulations is very important.

Rebecca Turnbull:

Yeah, totally. And in terms of like, disruption in marketplaces, I know that that's something that you've looked into quite a lot. How do you see AI disrupting the positions of established marketplace? At the moment? You know, is it a threat? Is it an opportunity? Is it a total non event?

Unknown:

Yeah, I mean, I think AI can, in certain situations, disrupt, potentially disrupt, you know, marketplaces, though, all of these companies we talked about are investing heavily in AI themselves, to provide better recommendations and so forth. But I can see, for example, you know, Airbnb, which is a marketplace, for, you know, homes, and rental lawns, and so forth, I can see, you know, just like Chad GPT disrupting it, where somebody could go in and say, do a marketplace, you know, just plan my trip. For me in you know, I'm planning to go on these dates, you know, what my preferences are, what kind of a home I would like, and then make that selection in for me and pipeline, my entire itinerary for me. So, that happening in the future, your interaction with the marketplaces to AI, and they different than the traditional interactions that you have. But then again, I think people in the company like Airbnb, or the very smart people, they will themselves take advantage of AI and reach out to see if they can be disrupted.

Rebecca Turnbull:

Totally. And I guess in terms of, like, the strategies that leaders should be deploying your other than, like really building that invisible AI component into your marketplace business. You know, it's going to be Victus. But people are just not going to even realize this was happening sometimes. Yeah. Is there anything else that you think leaders should be deploying or, you know, developing expertise in?

Unknown:

Well, the thing someone thinks that, you know, Amazon, for example, should be careful about in terms of their monopoly power. is these days, a lot of youngsters as you know, We are on tick tock, and large brands are on tick tock and large shopping is starting to happen on tick tock laughs product search, you know, today I got, I'm on a product, I go to Amazon to search for that product and nobody all there is something out there that meets my knee. But these days, teenagers are turning to places like tick tock to search for products and and see product recommendations and and then make their decision and choice. So social networks may eventually disrupt some of these marketplaces. And Charlie seminoff The car

Rebecca Turnbull:

fascinating. So I want to talk about another part of your career at life. Malko was actually the second company that you built that was acquired, the first one was team on which Blackberry or Research In Motion acquired. And then it became the core foundation for BlackBerry email with over 50 million users. Yeah, so that made you a relatively early stage member of the BlackBerry team. Tell us what's it like the movie,

Unknown:

I saw the movie, the movie was a bit of a satire about the the kind of exaggerated some of the personalities, the two, you know, CEOs, the CO CEOs of blackberry. But, you know, they were both very, I got actually worked at both the founder and the CEO of BlackBerry very closely, while I was there. They're very smart. People almost like, you know, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer at Microsoft. And it was great to work with them and learn from them as to how they were evolving background was quite a phenomena at that time, people were referring to as Crackberry. And it was a bad one, or to carry a Blackberry with you. So that you could always be in constant communication with your team or that your customers and so forth.

Rebecca Turnbull:

Yeah, it was like it was a rite of passage, getting your first BlackBerry made you feel very grown up when I remember, I had a university getting my first job which needed one. So

Unknown:

yeah, and I still read wrong. Yeah, I still miss the physical keyboard on my iPhone, I use iPhone these days, and, and I get frustrated trying to type on a glass keyboard. And I miss somebody out there who, you know, come up with a, you know, a Blackberry style device. But unfortunately, we don't have that option anymore.

Rebecca Turnbull:

Now that ship has sailed, but it also uses BlackBerry was like an absolute rocket ship when you were there. And it's, maybe for younger listeners, it's not something that they would be as familiar with outside of, I don't know, maybe cybersecurity if they're in that space these days. I know you are actually stayed there for a few years post acquisition. And that really caught my eye, as quite often, like when I work with vendors, and they sell their business, I frequently see that they stay there for like 12 to 18 months. And they'll maybe say, Oh my God, I don't they don't really know what to do with me, I don't have that much work to do. Or they, you know, geographically, they might just not, you know, the team just may not translate, and they might not want to relocate. But I'd love to know more about how you did that transition from like, Founder, CEO to senior employee going to build on what you've already done, because that's quite rare.

Unknown:

Yeah. But though I was committed to I was excited to be part of blackberry, I was excited to take our technology, BlackBerry, internet, email, and make it widely available throughout the world, as discussed, as mentioned, be that as we speak, we had 50 million BlackBerry Internet email users around the world. So I was quite committed to making sure that we got that work done. And we had carriers around the world offering the solution. And once that was done, it took about, you know, three, three and a half years, I decided to leave and start my next journey with like Mocha, but it took some time initially. It's always difficult, you know, with the new product, new technology to convince the, you know, the mothership to take that on. But we've ultimately successful that

Rebecca Turnbull:

that's quite interesting for me, because it sounds like they identify the kind of life purpose that you had ends allowed you to kind of fulfill that mission and really leverage that. So, you know, they didn't see this as a bolt on which I think is maybe the trap Some companies are falling into when they're not leveraging that founder expertise because even if you don't need, like someone to be the CEO, they have just so much knowledge about the product. And they should be out there evangelizing for you. They they should never be a loose end. Speak to a headhunter about being little the same, certainly,

Unknown:

no, I did. It took some, you know, there were some challenges. For me to integrate technology into Blackberry. There were teams within the mothership that were had a different vision from us. Ultimately, our customers spoke on our behalf. And they said to BlackBerry that, hey, we loved the team on technology. And this is how you need to integrate the technology. And then the Okay, finally heard that message loud and clear. And then that work happened it took, so it took some time. It was not immediately it took some time. But finally the right thing happened. And you were then able to, you know, be part of the BlackBerry offering, especially as we went towards the consumer market,

Rebecca Turnbull:

and with 50 million users, then certainly the customers were speaking saying, you know, 50 million times we want this. And another thing when I was looking into your background that was quite interesting is like, you've not just had success as an entrepreneur, but you've clearly got like a passion for entrepreneurship. I know that. Like regarding your success, you actually sold both of your businesses and for under four years, from startup to acquisition. Yeah. So what do you think set you up for that in terms of like, knowledge, education, skills, mentorship, because there's not many people who have got that kind of consistency of being able to do something that you're doing it more than once is, it's a challenge, it takes so much energy,

Unknown:

right. But I was very fortunate that I got a great education growing up. And also then when I came to the United States, went to some of the best schools in the United States. And then I worked at Microsoft, which was a great education by itself. And this was when Microsoft was in its early days, and, you know, fighting hard to establish Windows and Windows applications, and so forth. So there's a lot of learning that I got from being part of Microsoft. And then it was learning on the job. You know, when I first started my first company, our team on there really were no resources. You know, you couldn't go read a book on not ownership, like you could today. So I had to learn on the job, I had a great board, that, and some great mentors that helped me along the way. But you learn you make mistakes, and you learn from those mistakes, and you make sure that you don't make the same mistakes again,

Rebecca Turnbull:

and you mentioned your board there. How did you go about like selecting and choosing who would be on your board? And like what was like in your mind? Like, especially the second time that you went through that process?

Unknown:

Yeah, actually, it was very different. For the first time, I was fortunate that two of my board members were executives, and Microsoft, I knew and I had worked with in the past, and they're very smart operators. So they had a great deal of operating experience that was very helpful. With my second company, I wasn't as lucky. Unfortunately, the investors get to Gillette select who gets on your board, and the folks selected did not really have operating experience. And so they made a number of mistakes that cost the company or you know, over time. And so it becomes very important. You know, when you are raising money to make sure that you're raising money from the right set of investors and that investors have the right partners been assigned to your company as board members, they can, it can make a world of difference in terms of either your success, or the mistakes that you can make.

Rebecca Turnbull:

And it's not just who's on there, but it's how you interact with them. And you know, how they respond to you. They can give you a lot of value. Right? So I know you're really actively involved in entrepreneurship education with Ty Seattle. Yeah. And your first book was actually like from startup to exit and Insider's Guide to launching and scaling your tech business. It provides so many valuable insights. What are your top tips for leaders in a scaling business or leaders in a business that aspires to scale?

Unknown:

Yeah, there are a couple of things that I think people need to focus on. One is establishing a company culture because as you grow rapidly If you have to hire people that are compatible with your company culture, so, but first you have to establish your company culture, you have to write it down. And you have to articulate that constantly, as you work with employees so that, that culture then gets propagated to the next set of employees, and then the next set of employees and so forth. So that's one aspect. Second aspect, I think is, is customer success and customer support, making sure that your customers love your product, that they continue to, they don't just buy it and don't use it, they actually buy it and are happy with it. Because, you know, word of mouth can be very powerful, as we saw with love Mocha, and making sure that customers are really happy with the solution is super important.

Rebecca Turnbull:

That's so interesting, for a couple of reasons. One of the things that I've observed over the last couple of months is, you know, in the UK, you know, since there's been like restrictions on funding into early stage businesses this year, there's a lot of businesses that seem to be cutting back on Customer Success teams, it's, you know, they seem to be maybe sometimes going a little bit before marketing, or even the talent functions. And this is interesting that maybe there is indicative that there's businesses that are looking, you know, cut their costs. But you know, if you're, if you're not providing value, you're not going to retain your customers. gonna cost you more,

Unknown:

yeah, retention is one of the key metrics that I focus on. Especially when I'm evaluating investment opportunities is more to understand, you know, how your cohorts of end users are performing over time, you know, how many of them are retained as customers over a period of time, and if the retention curve is flat, meaning that it's, you know, people are not churning away from your product, that's a very good sign on, that's why I think it says that it's important to invest in customer success, invest in customer support. So that, and this CEO should really, and the head of product should really play, pay very close attention to what kind of feedback customers are providing, you know, making sure that bugs are fixed. And, you know, customers are getting the sponsors and, you know, in short period of time, and so forth, those are very, very important things that a lot of people forget to do. You know, they focus on, you know, marketing, and you know, X in acquiring customer. But if you have a leaky bucket, you know, I'm gonna go get the flash.

Rebecca Turnbull:

Yeah. And it's especially when, you know, a lot of people will only commit to a product for a year, maybe two is pretty quick detour. And especially when I know myself, if, if I'm buying software from my business, and after a year is not going well, the point of which I'm actually going to start thinking of like getting the replacement in, is it that you know, 18 months at the latest, because I want to have a transition period, potentially for certain tools. Yeah, yeah. So making that impact early on is also totally key. So one of the things that live maca did was help people learn a second language. And that really opens up access to career opportunities, especially at that point when he was like, globalization. And, you know, that was probably like the big trend, then. Yes. Given like your expense, extensive experience for startups and entrepreneurship, how do you see like the impact of immigration on the formation of successful startups in the US, and I'm in the UK, and I work with US businesses, as well as UK businesses. And we have issues to talent. Absolutely. In terms of access to talent in the UK?

Unknown:

Yeah, I mean, I've actually spent some time understanding this issue. And the data I've seen is quite extraordinary, in Silicon Valley. You know, because the core of entrepreneurship in the United States 50% of the startups have one at least one immigrant founder. That's, that's not it's amazing. That's half the companies being started. Our southern led to at least one immigrant founder. So Ghosal says a lot about America as a country in its ability to attract really smart people to come and work, study first and then work in the United States. Fortunately, this number has happened despite some of the immigration laws that are in place in the United States which need to be you know, it's very difficult for somebody who has an idea, but does not have green Are to start a business in the US, for example, there's no concept of a startup visa. So there used to be, you know, a lot of work to be done in terms of enacting immigration law to make it easier for more entrepreneurs to start businesses in the US. I'm sure that's true in the UK,

Rebecca Turnbull:

get is there's like, various visas, but some of them they only give a couple of 100 a year. And, you know, I think it depends where you are in the UK, how impacted you are, because it's, it's quite regional. I think that, you know, certainly, I'm based in Edinburgh, and, you know, it's in Scotland, we always feel like we could welcome more people from other countries. And you know, it's a, it's a diverse place, like a lot of a lot of innovation does come out of the universities here through masters students and PhD students, the UK, as well as other countries. But we have really noticed the impacts of Brexit, maybe a little bit more in some areas in terms of like tech, but other sectors which you would interact with. So yeah, definitely food for thought, I think that we talk so much these days about, you know, diversity being really good for business. And, you know, we need to make sure that there's the right kind of immigration mechanisms in place, that that can happen, and that there's good cross pollination of ideas and different perspectives brought to different areas.

Unknown:

Right? Yeah, then some really big companies like in the US, you know, Tesla was founded by Elon Musk, who's a immigrant. You know, one of the founders of Facebook was a immigrant. So really, very, very significant businesses that have been founded, you know, with the help of immigrants,

Rebecca Turnbull:

very much so. Well, thanks so much for joining me, and sharing all your insights and thoughts has been really interesting. I'm going to pick the link to your books, including the latest one, which is the winner takes all case studies on how online marketplaces are creating modern monopolies. So I'll put that down in their episode description. Sure, how can people connect with you if they want to discuss this further? Or, you know, discuss any kind of investment opportunities as well?

Unknown:

Yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn and Twitter. So I'm LinkedIn. Sharif. And so you can find me quite just with a search, you can find me quite easily on LinkedIn. I also have a website, which is www Shirish nadkarni.com. So the what are the ways in which you can connect with me and I love meeting really smart founders and, you know, learning about them. And then I'm available to provide advice, feedback, and investment as as needed.

Rebecca Turnbull:

No problem. Well, thanks so much for sharing all your insights on marketplaces, growth, talent and scaling. It's been a fascinating discussion. So hopefully we'll connect again in the future.

Unknown:

Absolutely. Thanks so much for the conversation.

Rebecca Turnbull:

Thanks for listening to the Listen perspective. I'm Rebecca Hastings, founder and director at the Lucent group, a tech sector executive search and talent consultancy. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share it with others, post about it on social media or leave a rating and review. If you're a company looking to hire top technology leaders, or you'd like to discuss your next move, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or send me an email to Rebecca at the Listen group at dog co.uk. Thanks again for listening today.