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David Kalt is a serial entrepreneur who founded Reverb.com. Celebrated for designing “more fair” platforms—prior to Reverb, he disrupted the options trading business—Kalt is passionate about improving customer experiences and providing pathways to accomplishment and success.
In Episode 7 of Inside the Noise, Guitar Center CEO Gabe Dalporto interviews Reverb founder David Kalt about providing opportunities to emerging entrepreneurs, how he overturned less-than-fair business models and why he feels AI will never disrupt the “magic” of human creative collaboration.
“We made some really nice waves with Reverb, but I’m most proud about going back to how we disrupted the options trading industry,” Kalt tells Dalporto. “It mostly catered to institutional investors and retail investors were getting screwed. I felt the same about musicians. When I owned Chicago Music Exchange, as a dealer, the amount I could offer a person selling their guitar was 50 cents on the dollar. They would rarely get enough money to buy the instrument they really wanted to play. There was a disconnect between the market dynamics and the needs of the musicians. But with Reverb.com, I saw I could put a price guide out there and get individuals to sell alongside dealers to create true liquidity. Suddenly, the market for a Taylor 814 guitar wasn’t going to be $400 wide, it would be $50 to $75 wide and there would be 30 of them to choose from.
“So now people stopped hoarding guitars. They bought what they needed, and they also started figuring out how to make money flipping guitars. I take a lot of pride in the vision that made guitar buying more affordable for musicians and creating a platform where they could feel the same joy and excitement I felt in owning a guitar store.”
Catch the full conversation and other episodes of Inside the Noise with Gabe Dalporto on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any of your favorite major platforms. When you subscribe, you’ll get new episodes every Tuesday at 3 p.m. PT.