At Version One, we love marketplaces. Just look at our portfolio, and you’ll understand how important we think marketplaces are to the future of commerce. Over the past year, we have focused much of our blog content on helping marketplace founders build their companies. That’s because we realized that while there is a lot of great information for tech startups, not much of it deals specifically with marketplaces. And anyone building a marketplace company knows that marketplaces face unique challenges – including how to solve the chicken and egg problem with supply and demand and how to monetize when services are delivered offline. To that end, we put together a handbook, A Guide to Marketplaces. It compiles many of the insights we’ve learned from working with great marketplace companies and analyzing the industry. We hope the handbook helps you in your own journey to break down walls in how goods and services are bought and sold. There’s no single way to build and scale a marketplace, but the book can help you figure out your own path to build supply and spark the virtuous circle of supply and demand. Lastly, we’d love to hear if you find the content useful. What should we expand on? Did we leave anything out? Please leave a comment below or reach out to us directly.

David is ten and a half years old when he becomes the de facto family shepherd and he's twelve when a man called Agent Samuel declares David will be the next ruler of Israel. One of those things seems more likely to happen than the other, even with the strange man's reassurances, and David's not surprised when it turns out to be the sheepherding side of things. Initially, at least. However, time passes. Years pass. David becomes President Saul's unofficial musical therapist, developing a close friendship with his son Jonathan--the man who should be ruler next. He defeats Goliath, the result of genetic experimenting done by the Philistines, with nothing more than a rock and a slingshot, and quickly becomes a beloved hero of Israel. And the more experience that David gets, the more that people become obsessed with him, the more he is willing to concede that maybe that Agent Samuel guy was onto something. He's not the only one who sees his rise in popularity, though; President Saul is keeping a close eye on him, too. A deadly eye. And it soon becomes evident that David will either live to see himself become President or a legend forever remembered as the man who defeated Goliath. CAVALIER is a modern day retelling of the early life of King David, from when he first becomes a shepherd to just before he becomes ruler over Israel. It is a Featured work in the Spiritual section.

For months Summer is trapped in a cellar with the man who took her - and three other girls: Rose, Poppy, and Violet. His perfect, pure flowers. His family. But flowers can't survive long cut off from the sun, and time is running out...