‘My perspective is to always be transparent.’
Jeremy Gottschalk, General Counsel and Marketplace Risk founder, discusses the importance of an awareness of risk management strategies for startups and platforms. With the traditional focus being on growth, Jeremy believes VCs aren’t thinking about risk, trust and safety issues. In his own words, he evangelises risk management and wants people to start thinking about it from the early days of platform development or startup creation. He feels VCs should be encouraged to think about asking risk-related questions when working with startups for better outcomes.
Key Insights
- The importance of risk, trust and safety in developing a marketplace or platform
- The need for VCs to be educated on the role of risk mitigation
- How transparency is vital to build trust
- How regulation struggles to keep up with technology
If you would like to hear more from Jeremy’s experience, why not have a listen at:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3dInIdaSBvoDD0Wi9mQnt1?si=JilvyfNDRgOQQXqu4W8Djg
for the full interview.
The following is a short excerpt from Trust in Marketplaces featuring conversation between Jeremy Gottschalk (founder of Marketplace Risk) and Chris Downie (CEO at Pasabi).
Chris Downie: I wonder, because you’re touching on your experiences as a lawyer within the sharing economy companies, how directly has that affected the direction of Marketplace Risk? And does it continue to kind of affect the direction of that?
Jeremy Gottschalk: Yeah, I would say it’s the foundation of everything we do. When I left a law firm in 2010, I would say my billable rate was close to $500 per hour, which no startup can afford. But I enjoyed working with the startups. I enjoyed working with those creatives, in the legal world… When I went to law school, I don’t want to say law school beats the creativity out of people, but you’re following precedent; you’re trying to stay within the confines of the law. There’s not a ton of room for creativity… or perhaps I was a bad lawyer, I don’t know!
But when I went into the law firm, the first time I really saw the opportunity to be creative and think creatively and to solve solutions very creatively was working with startups who were doing things that we had never imagined before. Keep in mind this was the early 2000s… so this is eBay, Craigslist days. And there are all these startups doing really interesting things and as a lawyer there’s no law to look at. It’s common sense; it’s understanding an industry; it’s giving them truly business advice. But in many cases, just really creative business advice that you hope holds water, you hope they never end up in court or get sued. So, very quickly I realised where I wanted my career to go working with startups.
So, when I went in-house, and we had truly no resources other than law firms, when I started working with other founders and executives we started essentially putting all our problems on the table. And going around and seeing who had solved them, who had dealt with this and how in a best practice micro kind of way. And that really is the foundation of everything we do.