consumer-marketplace
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Minou Clark Learned to Read the Room. Then She Changed It.
A theater kid became a student of algorithms, then took that education into the corner office. At RealSelf, Minou Clark is proving that attention matters most when a company knows what to do with it.
Gene Miguel Put the Comic Shop in Your Pocket
He spent weekends behind convention tables, watched collectors wrestle with dated tools, and turned the nuisance into Shortboxed. Gene Miguel’s useful trick was treating fandom as product research.
Lana Elie Built Floom by Letting Florists Keep Their Point of View
A bad bouquet exposed a good business: give independent florists better tools, preserve their taste, and make the internet feel a little less generic.
David Oates Built Curtsy by Listening to the Closet
A teenage web designer, a moped full of takeout, and a stubborn three-year pivot led David Oates to a useful idea: marketplaces grow when ordinary people can participate without becoming professionals.
Tim Hyer
Tim Hyer is the co-founder and CEO of Trusty (YC W22), a private marketplace and agent-to-agent matchmaking network for off-market real estate. A Duke-trained designer who has bought homes eight times, Hyer built Trusty to bring transparency and real conversation to what he calls the largest financial purchase of most people's lives - creating a place to find, discuss, and transact on homes whether or not they are formally listed.
Melody McCloskey
Melody McCloskey is the founder and CEO of StyleSeat, the largest online marketplace for beauty, grooming, and wellness services, connecting over 350,000 independent beauty professionals with 10 million+ consumers across the United States. She co-founded StyleSeat in 2011 alongside Dan Levine, bootstrapped the company for 18 months before raising $40.7 million in venture funding, and has helped power over 200 million appointments while generating $12+ billion in total revenue for small businesses. A San Francisco native who studied French and International Relations at UC Davis, McCloskey built StyleSeat out of her own frustration with booking beauty appointments, turning a personal pain point into a platform that fundamentally reshaped how independent beauty professionals run their businesses. She is also an angel investor and Cleo Capital scout, focused on backing female-led startups at the pre-seed through Series A stages.