We're sharing a community announcement on our blog from Mike Williams, announcing a new addition to our community Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR) program. This was originally shared as an announcement post in the community here.
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Hey all, you might have noticed a mention of it before, but I’m excited to announce that Blake Hirt is officially our newest community Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR).

As a quick reminder, we recently created our Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR) program to help leaders from later stage marketplaces start sharing their marketplace experience & insights through content, engage with founders, and start to build up more visibility as leaders in the community. You can think of EIRs as sort of "Mentors" or "Partners" that other startup accelerators have, but our benefit of being able to scale this through the community. Our EIRs are specialists (product, marketing & growth, ops, legal, etc) that are active in the community to help answer questions, create posts sharing their specific experience, join our office hours as guests, and more to help provide support to founders in the community.
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With that being said, many of you probably know Blake from some of his recent posts (links below for reference), but he has some great marketplace experience previously at Uber and also working with earlier stage marketplaces here in the community. This is typically on finding product-market fit and growth right after.
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I’m excited to have Blake officially join us as an EIR, where he will be helping provide additional support to founders & teams in the community. You’ll start to see him sharing more longer-form posts, answering questions in the community, and also joining our office hours as a guest (like yesterday). You can also reference the following posts he’s shared for examples:

• The anatomy of a successful marketplace‍
• The anatomy of a successful marketplace (Part 2): Solving a persistent, painful problem‍
• How activation is often the most underrated growth lever
  

Lastly, I wanted to mention that we’re going to be building out our EIR program and will be sharing about new EIRs soon. We’re also very fortunate to have top minds like Blake join us as EIRs, so a huge thanks to our EIRs for investing their time, energy, and making it a priority to support founders here. Also, a big thanks to Danny Martinez for helping us initially build out our EIR program.

If you’re a later stage founder or leader, you can also reference our Everything Marketplaces Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR) Manual to learn more about this program. You can also reach out to me directly if you’d like to discuss if it might be a good fit for you being involved with the community more.

Not an Everything Marketplaces member? You can request access to join us here.