Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. And we're here today with general partner Jeff Jordan. Jeff, welcome.

Thank you, Michael. Good to be here. We're also joined today by Sam Gerstyn Zang, who's part of our investing team.

Thanks, Michael. Thanks, Michael. So, Jeff, you have written a fair bit and talked about what you define or call people marketplaces. Tell us what

those are and then let's get into kind of the marketplaces that you're seeing out there.

I mean, it's almost eBay meets services. So eBay, when I worked there, was economically

empowering literally hundreds of thousands or even a million people to earn part of all of their living

selling on eBay. With the advent of mobile phones, it's now possible for those same armies

of people to earn a living doing services. And that's what I refer to as a people marketplace.

Their service marketplaces build up around independent contractors.

So give us an example of some

of those marketplaces operating out there in the world today. You know, the Lyft is a great

example of a marketplace, Homejoy, Instacart, any place that, you know, people are performing a service

that can be done, can be, can be rented essentially

with labor. So in Lyft's case, it's my car, in Homejoy's case. Cleaning service, right? Home

cleaning. Why or what enables these kind of marketplaces, you know, today as opposed to five years ago

or even three years ago? You know, the mobile phones, the smartphone in your pocket, which is a little computer,

is essentially the enabler here.

Before, if everything would have had to been done in an analog way or just, you know,

scheduling would be hard, geographic location is hard,istics are hard. The mobile phone and the processing

power and the GPS capability is a real enabler to empower a distributed workforce to be really

smart and really efficient. I mean, I get that in the case of Lyft, right? So it's transportation,

it's people and, you know, automobiles moving around. How does that work in the

...