Showing the way with Web3 Marketplaces: Braintrust - with Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski

Podcast Notes

Today we are joined by Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski, the Co-Founder of Braintrust — the first user-controlled talent network that provides enterprises with the highly skilled technical and design talent they need. In this conversation we explore how Braintrust operates, the providers they work with, and how staking Braintrust tokens — BTrust —  help to build trust and build quality of supply in the Braintrust network.

Prior to founding Braintrust, Gabe co-founded the home improvement marketplace Modernize.com. Recently he has consulted, advised, and invested in 50+ Silicon Valley startups including Thumbtack, Uber, Surfair and Lendinghome, Metromile and Massdrop. The first five companies he advised raised over $300M in follow-on funding.

Key highlights of the conversation

We discussed:

• How radically dropping for both sides of the marketplace provides incentives to stay on the platform and unlock a whole new type and scale of transactions
• How incentives can be used to make the network perform key value contributions such as referrals, vetting, and assessing the quality of transactions
• How Staking (of tokens) emerges as the new primitive of building trust in the network
• Using Web3 without making things overly complicated
• The institutional complexity of building for the web 3: one foundation, 6 service providers, and a community
• How SAFT bootstrapping can be used as a new way to valorize an early-stage company versus the traditional ways (discontinuous valuation steps at liquidity events).

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://boundaryless.io/podcast-music

Recorded on 11 November 2021.

Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of organizing at scale by leveraging on technology, network effects, and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.