[vi-mode]

A wall of text intended as smart content marketing to get some awareness for a rather unknown investment firm or incubator--Crunchbase didn't show any raised funds, so I don't call them VC. The long, over-polite text, the fake landing, the ad test weren't required in the first place.

Why:

The immediate answer every experienced VC would give is a simple 'no, this isn't a VC case' without all this fuzz and waste of time.

This market is useless for VCs because it's prone to disintermediation. Once people form a long-term business relationship, it's easy and reasonable to kick-out the middlemen (eg Homejoy). Marketplaces without long-term relationships don't face this problem (eg Airbnb, Uber).

Disintermediation is a hard problem nobody solved. 101 of investing.

Edit: Just saw another user posted the same. What is interesting, PSL didn't answer to that user's thread which could be interpreted as approval. So, PSL's post shows well that most investors are not per se smarter because they invest money. They're just humans like all of us trying to get free reach for a day with 'random' blog posts.

[anstosa]

Ansel from PSL here. PSL Studio has raised $28.5M. PSL Ventures has raised $85M. We have spun out 20 companies over 4 years. 6 of which are in the 50 Seattle companies to watch in 2020 (https://www.builtinseattle.com/2020/01/21/50-seattle-startup...) and of the early-stage venture backed companies who raised money in 2019, over 12% where PSL companies.

[Traster]

Counterpoint: Wag raised $300m for an almost identical idea.

[Jasper_]

And how's that working out for them?

[poutrathor]

Maybe because Wag targets a market where workers are hoping in and off more than cleaners ? Or because people are emotional toward their pets' spendings ?

Maybe because investors throw money to many stupid things.

("we never know" "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take").