I am not quite sure where to start our story. While we are a very early stage company, the overall journey is much longer. Perhaps much longer. One extreme is when my wife helped me write a business school essay on my first entrepreneurial experience. From a very young age, I sold vegetables from my grandparents door-to-door. While I won’t bore you an autobiography; I don’t underestimate any item that has eventually culminated with me jumping off the entrepreneurial cliff.
Some context on the company today, I will probably dip back through history to touch on things that are relevant. For instance, working as a Venture Capitalist, living in Silicon Valley and my ridiculously, yet life-altering, job search while at business school.
Our current company is called Repiscore. We are a venture-funded startup trying to make the world a better place by making consumer-to-consumer transactions safer and more efficient. Kickstart Seed Fund and my good friend Gavin Christensen, provided the bulk of our seed-round investment, followed by a great group of friends. We have a small, young, but super hungry team of software developers, one PhD Economist, one Whiz Kid technologist and one muckraker/garbagetakerouter/chief annoyer. We are based in Salt Lake City and truly believe we can change the world (and make a lot of money doing it).
First question I always get is what would I use this for? Though people never quite say it that way. My answer: “well you know when your wife is at home during the day trying to sell that old TV on Craigslist?” Some guy emails/texts her wanting to buy it and all she knows is his name is “Nathan Atherley.” Of course she worries 1) Is this safe and 2) I really want a no hassle transaction where I get the $100, I believe, the TV is worth. I go on to explain that despite these fears “Nathan Atherley” does has significant information online and offline that helps frame whether he is someone you want to deal with and BTW he has the exact same problem with you. He is thinking equally extreme thoughts like “1) are there a pile of bodies in the basement of this house and 2) how crappy is this TV and am I willing to take that risk”
For economist or finance folks, our company is based on a paper that won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001 entitled “The Market for Lemons” written by Professor George Akerlof of the University of California Berkeley. In this paper, he depicts the used car market which I will illustrate with my example. Three people are selling similar 2001 Ford Taurus’, same mileage, same color, same paint etc. One has been pampered and driven at 45 mph its entire life (worth $8000), one is an average car ($6000), and one has beaten up($4000). To the average consumer they can’t tell the difference between any of the cars so the “market clearing price” or expected value is the average cost of the three ($6000). The problem is that the guy with the good car knows it is good so his incentive is to not sell the car and keep driving it 45 mph, thus leaving the average and bad car. This game gets repeated again since the new market clearing price is now the average of $6000 and $4000 (aka $5000) once again providing incentive for the guy with the average car to not sell. This only leaves the bad car or “Lemons” in the market to be sold. This market condition is due to asymmetric information. Meaning one person knows more about the product than the other. If you think about it, every single consumer-to-consumer transaction on the internet is exactly like this. You know if your TV is good, the person buying it does not. You know you are a good person and are willing to pick someone up to share a ride but the other person does not. Once again, incentives cause more lemons to be sold or transacted. In certain high ticket items there have been products to solve this problem. Most notable in the car market, Carfax, helps average consumers distinguish between good, average and bad cars.
Repiscore is “Carfax for people” (VCs love analogies). In addition, Repiscore allows the user to build, manage and utilize their own good behavior. Rather than recreating the wheel at every single website one uses. We all have Ebay accounts, an AirBnB account, an Uber Account etc but any good work done there doesn’t translate in any other website. Again in economic terms, Repiscore is reducing switching costs between web silos; driving the benefit to the user.
Okay, that was economically technical. But I wanted to first set the context in which all of my thoughts are focused on. I am unsure if anyone will read this, but I am unsure if I care (outwardly), but I am inwardly hoping everyone likes me/it/Repiscore (another topic for another post).
I am happy to take this in whatever way any readers would like to. Some topics that I think some of you might be interested in.
1)
Ideas. How much do they matter? How do you find “inspiration” and my response
to those who say they aren’t “Founders” because they can’t come up with
something good
2)
A personal tirade on the societal overuse of the word Entrepreneur
and Founder.
3)
Fundraising – a former VC and current Entrepreneurs perspective
4)
Team building – including finding that special someone
who you are getting “married”
5)
Mental Kung Fu:
My inability to separate business rejection and personal rejection. Entrepreneurial traits, that are unequivocally
in all good entrepreneurs. Never being
happy, a necessary driving force and the ensuing depression.
6)
Story time of stupid crap I have seen that people have
no idea is stupid
7)
Why the Bay Area will
never be displaced
8)
From a former VCs perspective what they look for in
investable companies
9)
Popularity and how “hot” companies create that buzz
Nathan
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