E1010: TWiST Live! Thumbtack CEO & Co-founder Marco Zappacosta shares insights on pivoting to optimize for consumer experience, starting a company during the great recession vs. 2019, fundraising tips & the future of Thumbtack

This Week in Startups

Jason Calacanis

Technology

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2019

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

0:52 Jason intros TWiST Live guest and one of his first investments Marco Zappacosta & Marco describes how they met in 2010
2:28 What did Thumbtack look like back in 2010? How has it changed in 2019?
6:09 Dealing with regional price differences
7:58 How much has mobile demand increased since starting Thumbtack?
11:53 What was it like running a startup in 2010 vs. 2019?
14:38 Impact of starting Thumbtack 2 weeks before Lehman Brothers went out of business
15:43 How did Marco's first try at institutional fundraising go? What did he learn from a bad investor experience?
23:13 What should founders optimize for during fundraising?
27:50 What drove growth at Thumbtack? How did they reach $10M in revenue? How did they remain focused on digging after striking oil?
31:56 Focusing on output over input
35:07 Transforming the Thumbtack experience after hitting $100M in revenue
44:33 What has Marco learned about building a marketplace over the past decade?
52:22 How has the gig-economy impacted overall employment in the US?
56:59 What is private/public healthcare's impact on entrepreneurship in a society?
1:02:33 How is Thumbtack dealing with the scarcity of trade workers?
1:04:41 What advice would Marco give himself in 2010?
1:07:16 Thoughts on minimum wage?

Transcript

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0:50.8	hey everybody welcome to this week in startups.
0:54.0	We're live here in San Francisco.
0:55.0	And I'm really excited to have my good friend Marco Zappacosta on the program.
1:02.0	He is of course the founder of Thumtac which was I think the third
1:06.3	or fourth angel investment I ever made 10 years ago. Has it been a decade?
1:10.9	It started with the bang. You had a pretty good run out of the gate.
1:13.6	Yeah, I was a little weird.
1:15.1	It was a little weird.
1:17.0	How did we meet?
1:18.0	So you had posted about the Open Angel Forum.
1:22.0	Right. So pre-angel list, pre-basically easy access to angels, you said it's too hard for good companies to have investors sort of find them.
1:30.0	I'm going to host a dinner, apply, I'm going to pick the top 10 startups, I'm going to host to dinner apply I'm going to pick the top 10
1:34.1	startups I'm going to curate a list of 20 angels and I'm going to host you guys at
	...

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