Transcript
Introduction
Patrick
This week's episode is part of an experiment, and so requires a longer than normal introduction. I've come to view this podcast as a learning tool, a means to understand a new topic in a short window of time. One of those areas is venture capital and startups, an area that one year ago was completely foreign to me. I think the best way to learn is aggressive immersion in the topic, along with some consequences, what we often call skin in the game. Accordingly, this is a conversation with a founder of a startup in which I, personally, am an investor. I say this in full disclosure because I believe in being very transparent with you, but also because I obviously want this business to do well. Part of the reason I invested was because I thought I could personally affect the outcome, in part, by exposing the model and ideas to you all. I deeply respect your opinions and collective breadth of knowledge and welcome thoughts that you have on this startup and this topic.
The founder in this case is Brett Maloley. His company is called Ladder. Ladder represents an overlap of many topics we've explored together over the past year. We've talked about venture capital, health and wellbeing, the difficulty of fundraising, and parallel outcomes and startups. We also spent an entire episode with Alex Moazed talking about the business model that Ladder is pursuing. This is what Alex calls the platform business model and what my favorite technology writer, Ben Thompson calls the aggregator model. Alex wrote the book, Modern Monopolies about this model, which describes how companies like Uber, Airbnb, and others serve their clients. Platform companies sit at the intersection between consumers and producers in a given category helping make life easier, cheaper, and/or better for consumers and more profitable and flexible for producers.