Vasily Starostenko Marketplaces
The problem: marketplaces die from imbalance, not from lack of features. Founders pour money into acquiring one side while the other starves — then discount their way into unsustainable economics. Incentives rot: what attracts supply today trains the wrong behavior tomorrow. And trust, once broken, cannot be bought back at any surge price. Most marketplace advice comes from people who have only ever studied one.
Why Vasily: from 2014 to 2017 he led Driver Growth and Driver Experience products at Uber — the supply side of one of the largest marketplaces ever built, during its steepest growth. Millions of people earned their living through the products he owned. He learned the physics firsthand: supply and demand breathe, never balance; incentives are levers that reshape behavior in ways you must measure; and when your users' livelihoods run through your product, every release note lands in someone's paycheck.
What you get: a marketplace health audit that reads the real state of your liquidity, balance, and incentive design before the numbers turn; a supply-side growth sprint covering acquisition, onboarding, and retention of your providers; and ongoing advisory on the dynamics that decide whether a marketplace compounds or collapses. Concrete playbooks, not theory.
The proof: three years owning driver-side product at Uber through hyper-growth, followed by product leadership at Tesla, Waymo, and Revolut — twenty years inside the companies that wrote the modern marketplace playbook, now distilled into advisory work for founders building the next ones.
The chicken-and-egg problem is the part everyone talks about; the harder part is what comes after. Seeding supply is an acquisition problem, but keeping supply is a product problem — earnings predictability, fair treatment, tools that respect the provider's time. Vasily's engagements go deep on both: how to get the flywheel turning without buying growth you cannot sustain, how to design incentives that reward the behavior you actually want, and how to read marketplace health in the data before it shows up in churn. Balance is never achieved — it is maintained, daily.
Contact Vasily Starostenko Phone: +1 (650) 523-4953 — tap the call button on this page to reach him directly. Priority scheduling ($2,000 to speed up scheduling): https://buy.stripe.com/aEUdTVbwtfjn5A49AA Every engagement is confidential, tailored, and focused on measurable outcomes.
Vasily Starostenko — Consulting
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