20VC: What Makes A Great marketplace Founder, The Key Metrics Marketplace Success Is Centred On & 3 Ways To Prove To Investors You Are A Domain Expert with Karthik Sridharan, Founder & CEO @ Kinnek

Karthik Sridharan is the Founder & CEO @ Kinnek, the platform which empowers small business owners to take control of their purchasing operations. Kinnek have been crushing it lately and have raised funding from some of today’s leading investors including Matrix, Thrive, Version One, Naval Ravikant and many more incredible names. As for Karthik, prior to Kinnek he was the lead architect of research systems at the hedge fund, AQR and before that spent time at the likes of JP Morgan and Merril Lynch.

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In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Karthik made the transition from hedge funds to founding Kinnek?

2.) How does Karthik view market networks as opposed to marketplaces? What are the differences and where would he position Kinnek?

3.) Is GMV the sole metric that marketplace founders should focus on? How does GMV affect Karthik’s few on take rate, transaction size and frequency? What other metrics should marketplace founders be measuring themselves against?

4.) How does Karthik view the competitive landscape with the likes of Alibaba in the space? Is expansion into Asia part of upcoming plans for Kinnek? How will Karthik approach that?

5.) Kinnek has raised funding from the likes of Thrive, Matrix and Version One. How did Karthik find the fundraising process? What did he do well and what would he improve on for the C round?

Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:

Karthik’s Fave Book: The Code Book by Simon Singh

Karthik’s Fave Blog: On Startups, Tom Tunguz

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