“Creative intensity” is the rate at which products or services go stale and new ones must be created. It is the key factor in predicting the future of marketplaces.

On the left, the marketplace model will ultimately go extinct. On the right, it will persist.

A thread 🧵👇

When Airbnb and Doordash went public, they became two more data points in a long trend toward marketplaces with higher commissions and that do more work to justify those commissions:

But a business that does all the "work" and takes a 100% commission is… not a marketplace. It’s a big supplier.

Does that mean that marketplaces are just an intermediary step as an industry transitions from many independent suppliers to consolidated super-suppliers?

This “work” includes 3 things:

🤝 Coordination: making the product or service legible (categorizing, pricing), matching buyers and sellers, establishing trust

💸 Capital: the full cost and risk of doing business

💡Creativity: figuring out what to sell in the first place

This framework from @onecaseman and @GiladHorev give us some good categories to describe how marketplaces are evolving to do more and more of this