Marketplaces, Influencers, Pax8 and SMBs with Shirish Nadkarni

Shirish Nadkarni is a serial entrepreneur with proven success in creating multiple consumer businesses that have scaled to tens of millions of users worldwide. Shirish was the co-founder of Livemocha, the world’s largest language learning site with 15+ million registered members from over 200 countries. Livemocha was acquired by RosettaStone in 2013. Prior to Livemocha, Shirish was the founder of TeamOn Systems, a mobile wireless e-mail pioneer that was acquired by BlackBerry in 2002. The TeamOn technology served as the core foundation for Blackberry Internet E-mail which serviced over 50 million BlackBerry users. Shirish started his career at Microsoft where he engineered the acquisition of Hotmail and launched MSN.com, which became a leading web portal in the early days of the Internet.

Shirish received his MBA from Harvard Business School and a BSE in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan. He serves on the board of TiE Seattle where he chairs a number of programs including the GoVertical Startup Creation Workshop, the TiE Entrepreneur Institute and the TiE Seattle Angels initiative.

He is the author of the award-winning From Startup to Exit: An Insider’s Guide to Launching and Scaling Your Tech Business and the forthcoming title, Winner Takes All: Case Studies in How Online Marketplaces Are Creating Modern Monopolies.

00:00 Intro
01:15 What are the basics of a marketplace?
02:09 What happens when adding an influencer model?
03:29 How do we achieve critical mass?
04:35 Do you market the marketplace?
06:23 Pax8’s version of a marketplace
08:50 What does this look like for small businesses?
10:20 Creating a marketplace
11:50 What regulation makes sense?
14:09 How to learn more

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