Recently, I hosted my eighth Marketplace Dinner. Marketplace Dinners are a series of happy hour-esque meetups that bring together founders and leaders at startup companies growing, you guessed it, marketplaces.

So far, we’ve gathered over 1,117 founders and leaders over eight events hosted at the offices of Thumbtack, Shippo, and DogVacay. In attendance were entrepreneurs and executors from Lyft, Airbnb, UpWork, eBay, Uber, InstaCart, and many more “unicorn” business marketplaces as well as burgeoning startups.

Each event is three hours of eating, drinking and telling tales of what it took to build a marketplace.

Why the need for Business Marketplace Dinners? Two reasons:

1 — Startup founders are incredibly collaborative and thoughtful.

As...