The ultimate competitive advantage is turning your customers into investors
EJ: You started talking about web3 and one of the things I've seen, that's interesting
to me is this company called Braintrust-are you familiar with it? What are your
thoughts around their model?
Braintrust is a freelance marketplace on the development side, but one of the things
they do that is interesting is they give governance tokens or the ability to participate
in the decision-making to people who sign up and refer others. Have you thought
about something similar for Lawtrades or is that just too far outside the scope?
Raad: I think we've definitely talked about it for the last year or two and seeing a
company like Braintrust come out and actually implement it is really interesting.
We didn't want to be the first company to do it, especially within a regulated
industry, like legal, where it was just hard enough to even exist and compete
directly with some of these traditional players, but I've been tracking them.
It's a really cool idea. There's definitely some overlap. We do something very similar
and I know we briefly chatted about our RUV, which allows us to raise from our users
and our customers.
We're doing that in a similar way. We have town hall calls around new features. There's
a lot of elements of what we're doing currently in terms of making it very inclusive to our
users that we're doing without even offering a token.
I know that their token is listed on Coinbase. I think it's still too early to tell if that’s really
driving a lot of the growth around the supply side. We'll see for sure. It's a different
audience as developers, and designers.
We've taken a different approach in terms of our fundraising strategy, but I think at its
core, what we're both trying to do is get some skin in the game from our users on
both sides of it. I think that it is an ultimate competitive advantage if you turn your
customers and your supply side users into investors and give them on some of
the upside.
What would Uber look like if they did that for their Series A and allowed their drivers
to invest into their round. I'm definitely interested in this space and there's a lot of
dynamics within a marketplace model where offering a token and incentivizing
people to complete profiles or make referrals, can give them some credit or some
portion of the earnings.
I'm curious to see how it will turn out. But I'm glad that there is a company that's
doing it right now.