> Examples of bad markets ... Marketplaces - suddenly you have 2 businesses instead of 1 It'd be far more accurate to say that marketplaces are very difficult

> Examples of bad markets ... Marketplaces - suddenly you have 2 businesses instead of 1 It'd be far more accurate to say that marketplaces are very difficult products/services to build out, not bad markets. And you plainly don't have two businesses, the two sides of the marketplace are not separate businesses at all, they're two required aspects to that one business. That's not uncommon in business. If you open a convenience store you don't just need inventory, or a building/location, or employees, or customers, or a POS system, you need all of those things, that doesn't mean it's multiple businesses. There are few better businesses than marketplaces once you get one established. They're monsters then. You have to nearly intentionally screw them up to lose the captured market. Just ask eBay, across its existence it has just about done every variety of thing wrong you can (not at the same time), and its monopoly remains 20+ years later, printing fat margins the entire time. Nobody can unseat it. There it is, $2b-$3b in operating income year after year. Amazon tried to take them down and failed spectacularly. What eBay does isn't complex per se, it's that they successfully built a marketplace, and that tends to come with a huge moat. Etsy will likely enjoy a similar moat, assuming they don't do anything drastic to mess it up.