We're sharing a community announcement on our blog from Mike Williams (Founder of Everything Marketplaces) that was originally shared as an announcement post in the community here.
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As we enter the next stage of growth for the Everything Marketplaces community, we're focused on now building a world-class team to help drive the mission and increase our ability to support founders. With that in mind, I'm excited to announce our new Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR) program and share that Danny Martinez is our first Everything Marketplaces EIR.

To share more about our EIR program, we’ve created this to help later stage marketplace leaders start sharing their marketplace experience & insights through community content, engage with founders, and start to build up more visibility as leaders in the community. You can think of EIRs as sort of "Mentors" or "Partners" that other startup accelerators have, with the added benefit we have of being able to scale this through the community. Our EIRs will be specialists (product, marketing & growth, ops, legal, etc) that will be active in the community helping answer questions, creating posts that share some of their specific experience & insights, joining our office hours as guests, and being available to work with founders so that we can offer more support to community members.

I couldn’t think of a better person to be our first EIR then Danny Martinez, who brings marketplace experience from previously being at top marketplaces like Airbnb and eBay. He also works with earlier stage marketplaces now and has been helping founders in the community with supply strategies, finding product market fit (PMF), and market expansion. Some of you will probably know him from some of his popular long-form posts that he’s shared (linked to below) or from being a guest on our recent office hours.

I’m excited to have Danny join us as an EIR to help founders & teams in the community. You’ll start to see him sharing more long-form posts, answering questions in the community, and also joining our office hours as a guest once/month. You can also reference the following posts he’s shared as an example of what’s to come:

• Sharing 3 ways you can foster trust as an early stage marketplace‍
• Deep dive post: Why you should prioritize high quality supply & listings for your marketplace‍
• Breaking down a great example of how Omacasa has high quality listings for marketplace supply‍
• Marketplace supply optimization checklist & examples‍
• How to get the flywheel spinning (and keep it spinning) with your first marketplace customers‍

Lastly, our EIR program is very selective to start with, but I’ll be announcing a few others that will be our first few EIRs soon. We’re incredibly fortunate to have top minds like Danny join us as EIRs, so a huge thanks to them for really investing their time, energy, and prioritizing helping us being able to support founders more.

If you’re a later stage leader, you can also reference our Everything Marketplaces Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR) Manual to learn more about this program. You can also reach out to me directly if you’d like to discuss if the program might be a good fit for you.

Not an Everything Marketplaces member? You can request access to join us here.