a16z GP Jeff Jordan: The Ultimate Guide to Two-Sided Marketplaces | 20VC #966

Jeff, I am so excited for this. I've loved much of your writing before, so thank you so much for joining me today.

Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Not at all. But I wanna dive straight in, and a little bit on you. So, how did you make your way into the world of startups? And then, how did you make your way most recently to be a GP at Andreessen?

The world of startups was, you know, quasi-accidental. I was working at Disney and, um, you know, it was a great, uh, time to be at Disney. I ... Frank, uh, Wells and Michael Eisner were there. The company was doing great. But, um, then the internet came along and was t- you know, just it's like y- y- you had to get into it. So, I, I jumped outta Disney, uh, in, I was CFO at the Disney stores, became CFO of a, uh, publicly traded retail company called Hollywood Entertainment that had just bought Real.com, the super store for DVDs and, uh, VHS tapes to, uh, with the, uh, idea of doing video on demand. It was a great idea. It was about two decades too soon. And Net- Netflix ended up d- doing it after. But, um, that, that got me into tech, and then, uh, I just f- found I loved it and I stayed.

I wanna ask, you know, you have the most incredible operating career, as we touched on there. How do you think your operating career positively impacted how you think as an investor today?

Well, y- you know, when, um, the, the big d- uh, big job upgrade for me was, uh, when I g- I went to eBay and got to manage eBay.com. Um, Meg Whitman was my hiring manager at Disney way back in the day, and, and was looking for talent. And all the talent during the ... as the bubble grew w- you know, w- w- all the talent in Silicon Valley was grabbed up, so she went and found me and brought me into Silicon Valley. And so I think, um, doing eBay early, uh, meant there was no playbook. We had to write the playbook. And you get, you g- get to know a, uh, business at such an anatomical, uh, y- you know, uh, way. You're just building it from the ground up and, you know, you're, you're making a ton of mistakes, you're, you're trying to correct them. And getting that level of in- involvement in the network effect business I think gave me a pretty good sense for, okay, this business has the potential to replicate that network effect, this business doesn't. And, and largely as an investor, I'm a kind of a one-trick pony. Everything I would like to talk about as an operator and an investor, uh, i- it typically involves a network effect.

Can I ask, on the flip side, are there struggles or challenges with having had such operational experience and success and now, y- you know, uh, someone said it well to me the other day which is like, "Eyes on, hands off." (laughs)