A marketplace, according to Karen Webster, is like a dance. With complex choreography, it requires precise steps and a balance of buyers and sellers — after all, it takes two to tango — to keep things moving as smoothly and easily as some of the bigger players, such as Uber and Airbnb, make it appear.
Focusing too much on the buyer’s satisfaction at the exclusion of the sellers’ can leave a marketplace off-kilter, Webster said, preventing it from igniting to scale. That includes scaling globally.