Dear readers,
Many of you may have read the recent New York Times article “Uber and Airbnb Alumni Fuel Tech’s Next Wave” which is about how alumni of successful startups often split off and start new companies, and how ecosystems of investors/advisors form around these new companies to support them. In the NYT article, I mention that a16z has invested in 2 ex-Uber teams, and today, I’m excited to announce the first one — Pietra — a new startup building a marketplace for the jewelry industry.
In the announcement, I talk both about Pietra, and Ro/Pan and the team and also about the characteristics of ex-Uber alumni that make me excited to invest in them: 1) the ceo mentality of ops teams and “programs and platforms.” 2) unique expertise with marketplaces and network effects, and 3) deep scaling and technology infra.
I included the entire Pietra announcement below, which was originally published on the a16z blog here.
Thanks!
Andrew
Marketplaces, Pietra, and the Network Effects of Next Startup Talent
One of my focus areas as an investor is marketplaces, because I’ve seen firsthand how they can transform an industry — especially when they also have network effects that can lead to huge scale and impact. And while marketplaces have been evolving into new areas for a while — including services — I especially love how marketplaces show up in interesting and sometimes unexpected places, places where technology has not gone before.
One such area is jewelry (yes, jewelry!). Even though gemstones and jewelry have been at the center of art, commerce, and culture since the dawn of human civilization — going from stone jewelry created 40,000 years ago in Africa to the trade routes between East and West to Fifth Avenue in New York to the Instagram feed on your phone — the technology for discovering, designing, and purchasing jewelry online hasn’t evolved much at all. Yet jewelry is one of the categories that could benefit most from modern trends such as social media, mobile, and mass personalization. This is especially true for the incredible variety of artisans and boutique jewelry vendors out there who currently can’t access bigger markets, or the deep technology expertise and stacks of bigger players.
That’s why I’m excited to announce Andreessen Horowitz’ seed investment in Pietra, a new startup focused on a marketplace for the jewelry and especially the diamonds industry. If you wanted to buy a diamond engagement ring, the process goes something like this: “Do you know where I can buy a diamond?” “I might know a guy.” That “guy” (more often a family business, an aggregator, or other player) then sells you a diamond with very little transparency into supply, pricing, or other things. That kind of exchange is ripe for technology to come in between and mediate things — not only efficiently connecting suppliers to buyers, but also expanding supply and demand for both sellers and buyers beyond local limits.
Jewelry represents $200B+ of annual spend, but remains a highly fragmented and opaque market… it’s yet another way marketplace businesses can provide more transparency, variety, and even education for consumers. So Pietra aims to fully modernize the jewelry buying experience across every touchpoint by offering beautiful, mobile-first product discovery; chat and collaboration tools to better engage, negotiate, and purchase jewelry; and vetted suppliers, along with curated product lines from boutique jewelers, influencers, and celebrities.
The team comes with decades of deep expertise in fashion, luxury commerce, and marketplaces. Co-founders Ronak Trivedi and Pan Pan are two of my former colleagues from Uber, where they led key efforts on UberPOOL and grew it from a new product only available in San Francisco to a global product supporting hundreds of millions of trips per year and billions in gross bookings. That kind of scale matters in a market like this. In fact, many of the core marketplace lessons and mindsets from Uber — combined with the team’s experience in the jewelry industry, deep customer insights, and passion for design — led to their starting Pietra.
I’m also personally very excited about the new wave of “network mafias” coming from people trained at Bay Area startups who go on to do new and different things, often borrowing from lessons learned in their previous startups. Classic examples include Paypal, and more recent examples include Square and others. For Uber alumni in particular — which I can personally speak to since I worked there for three years — there are three mindsets that are compelling to me and that I love seeing in startup founders are: (1) an entrepreneurial mindset that’s baked in at all levels; (2) specialized expertise that can transfer across industries; and (3) technical challenges coupled with networks of talent.
Because rideshare grew city by city at Uber, it led to an entrepreneurial team structure where each city had a General Manager (GM) who served as the de facto CEO of the city, acting like a mini-startup in the context of the larger organization. Surge pricing and driver incentives were first manually implemented by local teams with SQL queries and spreadsheets, and only later widely implemented in code by the software teams at headquarters. When I first joined Uber, each product team was also set up to be full stack, without dependencies into other teams, allowing them to build fast and iterate quickly to solve challenges. This kind of mindset — everyone’s the CEO of their own mini-startup unit — is key to fast cycles of innovation.
To make rideshare work as a global product, folks at Uber had to solve challenges in areas as diverse as Jakarta to Portland to ridesharing and food delivery. Whether it was solving the cold-start problem in a new market, or figuring out the best pricing and incentives, or growing network effects in a highly competitive market, those insights can be translated to new industries. Starting any new company requires founders to turn a series of insights into actions and products.
To be clear, it’s not just marketplace expertise that’s important here — it’s also about solving deep technical challenges at scale in areas such as machine learning, data, infrastructure, mapping, automation, and much more. But the social aspect of the Uber alumni network is also appealing, with a rich ecosystem of folks advising and angel investing in companies, paying it forward and creating a new generation of startups.
I’ve said it before: technology changes, but people stay the same. Whether it’s applying new behaviors and technologies to evergreen things — like jewelry! — or the evergreen turnover of a new wave of entrepreneurs founding the next generations of startups (in developer APIs, video streaming, SaaS, etc.), I’m excited to see what everyone does next. And I’m looking forward to investing in more companies like Pietra.
