> There's a reason everyone has a clever idea for a marketplace - they don't require you to actually build a standalone, unique product. And the technical barriers to entry are lower than high tech (like cybersecurity).

This wasn't one of the lessons in the article, but hopefully it was learned: marketplaces are by far the hardest kind of online business to succeed at. The reason is simple: you must satisfy not just one but two entirely different sets of customers: buyers and sellers.

It's not 1 + 1 but more like 2 x 2 thanks to the bootstrapping problem. Buyers will only go where the sellers are, and sellers will only go where the buyers are.

So I kind of disagree with the author about the mote. A successful marketplace has a gigantic moat - its successful bootstrapping phase where the founders accomplish the extremely difficult task of attracting enough buyers and enough sellers to create an actual marketplace.