Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:01 Emil Michael from Uber is on our board and has been a advisor and partner and friend to me and homebound from the beginning, he is an exceptional human being and a wonderful partner. And one thing he reminds me of always is 70% of everything should always be broken and is so hard. If you come from a successful background, working in industries that are not growing, you know, five X in a year to think that everything is broken and like this can't be. And if you just can remind yourself, 70% of everything should be broken, then you can look at the 30% that's working and make sure it's the right 30, because you need to get the right 30, but then you can also just let go of the 70% that's broken and make sure that you're learning from it. And you're improving the right things. The thing that has to happen this quarter so that the company can unlock the next chapter, but that you're letting go things that don't matter. And so that perspective and having people who've seen the journey of building a company that's, you know, worth tens of billions of dollars, more than any other company in its space over time. Um, it's really helpful to have those people to remind you, this is, this is how it's supposed to be. You're you're right on the right track.
Speaker 2 00:01:16 So Nick, I'm really pleased to, to have you on scaling so far podcast. And I know our listeners, um, will be stoked to listening to the episode as well. Uh, we've been really looking forward to, to having this conversation. Um, so first off, thank you for making the time for us. It's hugely appreci. Thank
Speaker 0 00:01:33 So much for having me. I'm looking forward to the conversation as well.
Speaker 2 00:01:36 Awesome. And, and just, um, to kick off in your own words, are you able to share a bit more about your sort of personal story? Um, what did the journey look like for you? Um, leading up to the founding of home bound?
Speaker 0 00:01:50 Yeah, so I'll zoom way back out. So I grew up in Minnesota in a family where my dad was an entrepreneur and started a business out of our basement that eventually grew moved into offices and became a real company. Um, my mom was like a persistent Tandy woman fixing and taking apart all sorts of parts of our house forever. And so entrepreneurship and building things was sort of in my DNA from as long as I can remember. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and, um, fast forward, I went to, um, university of Michigan, undergrad for business, knowing that I eventually wanted to start a business like my dad, um, not knowing what it would be or what the journey would look like to get there. But knowing that, that was the general direction I was headed and I graduated, uh, in three years from Michigan. And so I moved to New York city by myself with no friends.
Speaker 0 00:02:42 And, uh, I took a job at Pepsi during the day, working on the Pepsi brand team. I wanted to learn big brands and understand how do you create power beyond what sugar water should feel like it has for consumers and was really excited about that job. Um, but then I met Steven Ross, one of the related companies, which is the largest developer in Manhattan. They build residential properties all over Manhattan and now around the world. Um, and Steven asked me to come work for him. He meant during the day, but I already had a day job. And so I said, well, I have a job, but I don't have any friends. So if you're up for it, I would love to work for you, but it will have to be nights and weekends. And he thought that just crazy enough. And so outta college, my first two jobs were working during the day for a sugar water company with this big powerful, incredible brand.
Speaker 0 00:03:30 And then working nights and weekends for one of the biggest residential developers in Manhattan. But there wasn't a strong brand. Nobody would ever say like, I just have to live in this type of house. Yeah. And so it was a really interesting juxtaposition early on in my career around, there are no really wonderful brands around home and home is the most important thing any of us will ever purchase and there's no brand around it. So that was sort of, that was something that really stuck with me. Um, and then I went from there and lived in a series of truly not nice apartments where I, I went to business school and then I stayed in Boston for a bit. And I, uh, came out to San Francisco and I would always do sort of quick renos myself, um, not well of all these places. And I got really hooked on the idea of being able to improve my space and fix things, build things.
Speaker 0 00:04:22 Um, and I noticed that lots of other people felt like they had no idea how to do that. And they were just trapped buying whatever existed already. And so thought a lot about democratizing the ability to create your own space and the ability to build something that felt like a home for you for, for your, so that was so that really important to, um, so thought about a, from business, uh, New York to business school, and then went to Bain where I spent almost a decade doing digital transformations for old industries and consumer companies trying to find their way into the digital age. And from there, um, ended up meeting the founders of Thumbtack really early. Um, Thumbtack is now the largest and fastest growing local services marketplace. But at the time it was a scrappy little startup with some of the most brilliant kind, uh, and dedicated people I had met.
Speaker 0 00:05:14 And I joined them to help really enable local trades to find work and homeowners to get things done. And so that was my first entre into tech and it was my first step closer to really helping people get things done around their house. And then in 2017, wildfires destroyed 6,000 houses in Napa Sonoma, which is my backyard. And we watched what was happening around us and knew, um, a simple marketplace wouldn't solve the problem of getting someone home. Um, my co-founder lost his home in the fire and we just looked at each other and said, there's gotta be a better way. We need to build the next generation home builder that is capable of overcoming all of the consumer barriers to getting a house built and really use technology to power a solution that's never existed before
Speaker 2 00:06:03 There is so much in there. <laugh> I would love to unpack I'm also I, okay. Where do I start? I think number one, that's an incredible story. And I think what is really, um, it's amazing is to see that the experiences that you, you had, even at the very early stages, like moving to New York and not having any friends, but just having sort of the four walls that you're in and looking for that experience in, in the roles that you found like that must then shape this sort of wanting to build a home, have somewhere to call home feeling comfortable in your four walls, being able to do what you like to it being it. I think it's that. Yeah. The, the, the comfort and, and that early experience of being somewhere completely alien to you all by yourself must have had a huge influence on what you knew to be home and wanted to, to call home in the future. Um, yeah,
Speaker 0 00:07:04 Definitely. And I think, you know, as a kid we moved from, I was born in Kansas city and we moved to Minnesota and I watched my mom, you know, we did, we had very little money. And so this was not like, oh, let's do some fancy renovation. It was like, no, let's figure out how we can take existing furniture and make it feel like ours, you know, used things that we could get or let's figure out how to, you know, redo part of the kitchen by ourselves in a way that really serves how we wanna use it and what feels like home for our family. And so, yeah, from a very early age, I think the, the power of being able to craft your own space has been something that's really important to me. And I love teaching people how to use power tools and I love learning and trying to get better and better at building things myself.
Speaker 0 00:07:52 Um, but it got to a point where it was like, well, if you could just democratize this, if you could just make it easier for people to get house built so that they didn't have to choose from what today there's no inventory of single family house anywhere. So there's really nothing to choose from. But during normal times you have lots of used houses you could choose from, but none of them would feel like they were yours. Yeah. We have a massive inventory shortage right now. We need more houses. So how can you create consumer experience around building a whole home that enables homeowners to have the tools to say, yeah, there's an inventory shortage. I'm gonna build my own house. I'm gonna choose that lot. And I'm gonna build that house on it and I'm gonna make these personalizations so that it feels like the house I dreamed of my entire life. And so that it feels like it's mine. And that's really what homebound is all about.
Speaker 2 00:08:38 It's, it's incredible because, and it's such a, like the, the sort of home industry is very archaic in so many ways and even like real estate or, you know, state agents over in, in, in the UK very much. So I, I look at it and I think why is this still the way it is <laugh> and, and it sounds like you are really transforming something that is just incredibly archaic. That act actually, you know, home, home own homebuilding should be completely democratized. Um, so yeah, it's very exciting and yeah, I'm excited already. <laugh> and you might have to, uh, teach me how to use some power tools in the future. Nick <laugh>
Speaker 0 00:09:21 I'll come, I'll give you lessons. We can build anything that you want.
Speaker 2 00:09:26 Um, and I would love to hear, um, a bit more about home bound sort of vision. Um, you know, what really you are looking to, to solve obviously democratizing the, the sort of home build industry, but, um, any, any additional context around that as well?
Speaker 0 00:09:45 Yeah. So just getting back to this kind of founding moment, 6,000 houses burned down and an area where about 300 homes a year were typically built. And so you have this massive supply demand imbalance, which at the time, this was the largest and most destructive wildfire in the history of California. And we thought this is a once in a lifetime event and we need to go help our community recover. Now, unfortunately we were wrong. And every year, since then there has been a larger and more destructive wildfire. Um, and so natural disasters are something that we, as a country, we globally really need to figure out how do we respond better to them because they're not gonna happen once in a lifetime they're gonna happen frequently. And so there's something around that that's sort of resilience and ability to rebuild quickly. That's really important. But really the core to our story was we had friends and family and co-founders and team members who needed to get their house back.
Speaker 0 00:10:38 And if you talk to people and this isn't a really lovely area where people were generally quite well insured. And so you'd have homeowners with billion dollar insurance checks in their pocket who were paralyzed. They couldn't figure out how to navigate the maze of insurance and architecture and permitting. And then they finally find their way to a builder. And local builders would say, I can definitely build your house. I'll put you on my wait list and I'll call you in four years. And it was like, what, how, how can that be? How can that possibly be? How an industry responds to a crisis like this? And you look at the underlying factors and you realize, um, this is something I spent so much time at thumb labor is just hyper, hyper, hyper localized, because there historically haven't been great marketplaces that can connect networks over larger periods.
Speaker 0 00:11:26 And so our first insight was, well, if it's gonna take four years before we can get a house rebuilt, why don't we just try calling some people in a different state and see if they wanna come? And so there's a number of states with license reciprocity, uh, with California. And so we would call, uh, other states would call people in Louisiana and say, would you ever come build this house? We had plans. We'd send them plans. This is a house we need to build. Would you ever come build it? Every builder we talked to said, I will be there next week, when can I get started? And so then we're like, well, maybe what if we don't have to call out of state? And we started calling people in Sacramento, Modesto, Bakersfield, just a few hour drive from where we were building houses. And we got the same response.
Speaker 0 00:12:04 When can I be there? I will start immediately. And so we knew that there was something about reaching over geographic boundaries that would enable us to bring in the labor that would let us get started building quickly and build more efficiently than anybody else. And so that's something that has been a really important core tenant of everything, about how we think about labor, which is, um, very much rooted in marketplace principles. We know that if we can create liquidity on one side of the marketplace and expose it to the other side, we know that we can make those matches and we can enable people to build. So that was one early insight that was really important. But another huge piece of this is if you've ever built a house or done a renovation, you know, that there's almost no technology used anywhere in the process.
Speaker 0 00:12:47 You know, multimillion dollar homes in the us are built with maybe an Excel spreadsheet to give you a high level sense of budget and a high level sense of cost or a timeline, that's it, that's all you're gonna get. And so if you think about what that means for a homeowner, it means I feel like I'm in the dark. I don't have information about what's happening and what it means for a builder is I'm constantly scrambling behind the scenes to try to clear paper invoices and try to build a customer the right amount. And I have no leverage in so many other industries. People are working with incredible leverage with software. That's been custom designed for them. It makes their jobs really easy. That simply doesn't exist in construction. And it particularly doesn't exist in home building. And so it's, it's like they're, you know, everybody who's working in this industry is sort of working with one hand tied behind their back and venture dollars are starting to flow into PropTech.
Speaker 0 00:13:41 Um, but with homebuilding specifically, they just, hasn't never been a player that's been capitalized to build the software that would change what was possible on both sides of the equation for a builder to be able to have everything that they need at over 600 steps in building a home at their fingertips with a really easy to use piece of software that they could use at home, they could use on their phone. They can keep their project going and know what's happening. And for the homeowner, the ability to see every day without going to the site what's happening and where are we versus expectations and why? And are there decisions I need to make? Are there payments I need to make to keep things moving? And so the second big insight for us was just, there's no technology anywhere here and without technology, nothing can never get better. And so let's create platform that can be all the technology you need from first touch with a homeowner through 10 years into living in the home. And let's make sure that we're capturing data at every step of the process so that we can make the build better. And we can create a customer experience that's totally unprecedented
Speaker 2 00:14:42 Mm. A customer and a supplier experience that makes both sides, the equation feel empowered and comfortable, and like they know what's going on and, and have that real time update. I think, I think you mentioned this earlier. It's absolutely insane. Isn't it? That we, the, the homebuilding industry is so far behind when owning a home is probably the biggest investment youll make in your entire life and huge projects. And you spend majority of your life at home now, more so than ever, right. With people working remotely. So, yeah, I think it's just absolutely a, a mission and a, and a company that I'm sure many, many people can get behind. So, um, yeah, I definitely something that I wanted to touch on does tie in with that, and that is sort of being so purpose driven. And I think that, you know, the moment in time that, that you really founded homebound off the back of those, um, wildfires, that must be something that really resonates with people, as you say, it's, it's really affected them, um, in their real lives and aligns what you are looking to achieve aligns with people's values and, and topics that they genuinely care about.
Speaker 2 00:15:55 Um, is this what you feel has contributed to home bound being named as one of America's best startup employers that was last year. So congrats on that. Um, but do you think that that's a real, a real draw for a lot of your employees and are there other aspects of, of the employee experience that you think really, really, um, sort of tied in with that?
Speaker 0 00:16:17 Yeah, so, um, I think that there is magic in what we are doing, and I think it's in both the mission. It's something that so many of our early employees were personally impacted by this. And so it was this wasn't a choice. It wasn't like, gosh, maybe we should start this company. It was like, no, if we don't start this company, people don't get home communities don't get rebuilt. And as soon as we realized, I mean, six months ended building the company. We launched our second market in Malibu because 2 billion of homes were destroyed there. And we had a group of teachers email us and say, if you guys don't come build here, we're never gonna get our homes back. And so there's something incredibly powerful about that mission. It really was from day one. It wasn't about, you know, let's build a cool tech company.
Speaker 0 00:17:04 It was about we, we have to help our neighbors and our friends and our family. And as soon as you've been through this experience with one community, you know what it feels like, you know, the arc of utter despair at the beginning and hopelessness, and you know that then you get a glimer of hope and you know that you're gonna get a home and then you start seeing people get home. And then you see a community that is largely recovered with more sustainable and more resilient homes. And with homeowners that are so deeply invested in the community. And you know, that there's this incredible bright spot on the other side of it, but it's hard to get there. And then it becomes all about how do we get people there? How do we get everyone there? And whether we're building your home or whether we're present in your community and we can help, uh, how do we make that possible for more people?
Speaker 0 00:17:51 And so that's been a huge part of the driving mission of the company. And I think of the culture, uh, what's been really interesting is sort of, we, we went into the pandemic with a housing shortage of five and a half million units that we do in the us. And it has gotten significantly worse during the pandemic. And at the same time, as you said, that home has gotten more and more important to people, and that's a different kind disaster. And you go to markets like Austin, Texas, where they have historically low levels of inventory at the same time that they have historically high levels of migration into the city and you houses, and you have a line of families out the door waiting for the chance to see a house and hoping that they might be able to get in before the house is sold.
Speaker 0 00:18:32 It's a different kinda despair, but it's despair and it's families who just wanna get home. They just want the setting for their life. And so that's something that's incredibly important to our entire team. And I think does really power people to feel like we're doing something that matters and we're gonna work really hard and we're gonna make mistakes. And there are gonna be many moments where it feels like this is just too hard to make happen. And then you take a breath. Remember it's not a choice we have to do this. People are counting on us and it's really important and it helps us continue towards the mission. So I think that's a big part of it, but there are a couple of other things that are really special about the culture and the team that we've built at home bound. Um, one of the things that I'm most proud of and also think is one of our biggest assets as we build the business is the team that we've built.
Speaker 0 00:19:22 We have an absolutely world class technology team, and they're sitting next to absolutely world class home building team and the power of taking two industries who have never before coexisted and have hand selecting some of the most talented and brilliant people out of both of those industries, but also some of the most empathetic and some of the most humble people who can look across the aisle and say, I know how to build machine learning algorithm. And that's really incredible. But what I don't know is how you figure out foundation type from GIS data that will tell me the shape of a lot that I wanna buy. And there's somebody sitting over here who is an absolute expert in structural engineering or civil engineering who can help me figure out that answer. And they're used to figuring out that answer once for a single site. And if you put a machine learning person next to the civil engineers, figured it out for a single site, you can figure out how to do that at scale for construction sites across the country.
Speaker 0 00:20:28 And you can literally see sparks flying when you put people like that together, where the expertise, the extreme expertise of two different people who never would've come across each other in any other place in the real world, come together and create something really special. So we talk about that a ton internally as one team, what we are doing cannot be accomplished by one skillset or one kinda person. It is definitionally requiring multiple skill sets and multiple disciplines and extreme expertise on multiple sides to come together and really hear each other out and build something that has never existed before. And that makes it again, a challenging, um, it's, it's harder to work with people who are different from you. It's a challenging setup, but it's also really important. And we can do things that nobody else has been able to do before. And that's incredibly special.
Speaker 2 00:21:19 That's pretty magic. And I think, um, by the sounds of it, your home home bound is very much focused on community, not just community externally and in the people who, who, you know, you are building your product for, but community internally as well. And having, as you said, that sense of one team everybody's in it together, you know, one person by themselves isn't as strong as, you know, two people working together in the same direction. So that sense of community really, really comes through in what you're saying.
Speaker 0 00:21:52 Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:21:52 Awesome. Um, and in February this year, was it, this year you raised 75 million series, which is huge and, and such a incredible milestone, um, for yourself and the team. So congratulations,
Speaker 0 00:22:07 More lucky. We have incredible investors
Speaker 2 00:22:10 Amazing. And, and who were the investors in the round?
Speaker 0 00:22:13 Um, so our investors in this round were many of our investors in prior rounds. The round was led by coastal ventures and had participation from all of our existing investors. So thrive 4runner, um, Google ventures and fifth wall. And then we had a handful of new, um, investors join us as well. Um, deer park, who was a real estate focused hedge fund that jumped in and a number of other pages who will be really helpful for the future.
Speaker 2 00:22:45 Amazing. Yeah. Congratulations cause yeah, such a big milestone and, um, something I'm sure is exciting for everybody. What, with this round, um, are you really like laser focused on, on sort of putting that investment towards?
Speaker 0 00:23:00 Yeah, so there are two. So we raised our series C um, we also raised hundreds of millions of dollars worth of debt from Goldman Sachs. And so those two pockets of capital are really important and paired together. So, um, the series C raise was very focused on technology, investment and powers, all of the investment in creating a platform and a set of software applications that unlock completely transformational customer experiences, trade partner experiences, and the ability for our internal team to manage our projects at what we think of as an atomic level, it is 600 steps in building a home and it's managing all of the details of all of the tasks and the subtasks within each of those steps and both pushing out data of the best way to do it, but also pulling data back of where can we be continuously improving. And so, um, all of that investment is very much focused on technology and the connection between technology and humans and operational expertise that's happening in the real world.
Speaker 0 00:24:06 And so we're very focused there. Um, at the same time we raised this large fund from Goldman Sachs that would enable us to go out and buy lots so that we could create new for sale inventory for homeowners in all of our markets across the country. And that's really important as well, because as much technology as you build for home building, you could make it easier for people who are already gonna build a house, but if you don't unlock net new places to build, um, then you're not really solving the overall inventory crisis that we have as a country. And so we said, we really need to make it possible for anyone in our markets to say, I want this lot and this home on it and go through this, the process with our checkout flow and our home portal, um, to be able to turn that into reality. And so the Goldman fund enables us to do that as well.
Speaker 2 00:24:58 Brilliant. Yeah. Thank you for, for sort of explaining what the, the difference between the two is as well. I think it sounds like an exciting journey ahead and, um, yeah, powering forward on both of those sort of missions as well. And, um, you, you mentioned earlier about those early stages of home bound, it is very much, um, yourself and the, and the founding team and, and people who joined you, who joined because a lot of them were affected, um, by the wildfires and, and that sort of brought you together at that mission. How, how has that changed now? I mean, you've, you, as you mentioned, you've got sort of your tech layer and then your, your build, your build layer there two very distinct pipelines, so to speak or, or types of talent that you are looking for. How have you evolved your approach to that sort of from that early stage through to now and how you are sort of bringing in the right talent for where you're at right now?
Speaker 0 00:25:56 Yeah, so I think the, the core underlying mission of making it possible for anyone anywhere to build a home music technology has not changed from day one. And so everyone we're hiring and everyone we have hired, um, is focused on that mission and enabling that to become reality. And so the evolution for us has really been driven by a couple things. One is we've gotten a lot bigger, which means we have the ability to hire people who have extreme expertise in more specific areas, um, who can really help propel us forward. So whether it's people who know everything about acquiring lots and land, or people who know everything about building machine learning models, or people who know everything about building the incredible architecture, that's flexible and can be applied across markets. And so, um, one big thing is we've gotten just incredible expertise and more and more talent on the team.
Speaker 0 00:26:50 Um, the second thing which was really pandemic driven for us, you know, in the early days, we were very focused on being together in offices like any other startup. And so we had offices in San Francisco and then we had an office in Denver where most of our tech team existed. And then the markets that we were building in popped up offices. Um, but at the very beginning of the pandemic, um, somebody on my team who had been trying to recruit for two years to move to San Francisco, uh, to work with us called me and said, Hey, can I join you now? And just not move to San Francisco? And I was like, yeah, actually let's try that. And that was the beginning of what has really opened the floodgates for us of we're a primarily remote first company. And what that means is we would love to have people who have incredible expertise and are driven by our mission to join us from all over the country. And so we've been able to bring in talent that frankly wouldn't have been possible to hire before that is contributing to that expertise and that ability to drive more and more quickly towards our mission and unlock home ownership for people across the country in ways that are far greater than what I imagined would be possible. And so that's also, uh, been a huge accelerant of both our growth, but also of the talent density that we've,
Speaker 2 00:28:07 That's incredible. Cause I think, um, for, for a lot of companies, the pandemic really did unlock that sort of accessibility to talent. Um, and it was sort of, we, I think we actually, we had an office we've been remote first since we were launched in like two 13, but we've always had a head office in London where everybody can go, if they want to go. And very quickly, we were like, why do we have that? Like, why is it, why does it have to be a permanent four walls? And even we shifted being remote first, we shifted and got rid of that and just gave everybody accessibility to an office no matter where they were through like co-working spaces. But I think for so many companies, it really did. Yeah. Unlock that, that chance to say, let's give this a shot and see if it works and, you know, great for you guys that it worked really well. So that's awesome. And hiring, is it based can distributed anywhere in the us?
Speaker 0 00:29:12 Yeah. So today all of our teams accept engineering are exclusively us based. Um, we do hire for engineering roles today in us, Canada and Kenya. We are also exploring other international markets and so very open to engineers from other markets. Um, and at some point we absolutely have ambitions to be a global company. So for listeners who are in other markets, um, know that we're coming for you as soon as we
Speaker 2 00:29:41 Amazing, where do are you allowed to give us a hint as to sort of what markets you're looking at globally?
Speaker 0 00:29:49 Um, so I will say for the foreseeable future, we are very focused on the us market construction and the us is one half trillion market. It is massively fragmented and we have a tremendous amount of work in front of us for, uh, focusing on this market and really perfecting the way that we are building homes for homeowners in us markets. So we'll be expanding to more markets in the us. Um, you can stay tuned for more details on that later in the year. Um, but we'll be very focused on us. And then over time, I think many of the problems that the industry faces here of just complete lack of technology, hyper localization of labor, just a complete information asymmetry between homeowners and the industry, all of those things are endemic to the industry globally. And so, um, my hope and expectation as many of the things that we're building will be broadly applicable across other markets over time.
Speaker 2 00:30:44 Yeah, I can, uh, I can vouch for the need being there over here in the UK <laugh> um, and throughout the process of, of founding co-founding, um, home bound and building your team, um, what have some of your biggest learnings been personally?
Speaker 0 00:31:02 Yeah. Um, so I'd say one of the biggest things I tell anybody who says, I really wanna start a company is don't ever start a company that you do not feel in your bones must exist in your lifetime because I have done a lot of hard things in my life, including birthing three children. And I will tell you building a company is by far the hardest thing that I have ever done. And there are so many moments in the early days where, you know, you get rejected by an investor or somebody you hired turns out to not be successful or somebody quits, or, uh, you know, a homeowner goes with another builder and you have these moments of thinking this might never work and it's exhausting and it feels impossible so much of the time. And if you don't have something to come back to that says, I know it feels impossible, but I'm gonna go to sleep and I'll wake up in the morning feeling differently, or I'm gonna, uh, I into meditation as a way to impossible moments.
Speaker 0 00:32:07 I'm take 10 minute meditation break and come back and reassess what feels possible. You need something that pulls you back and says, this has to exist. And I know it's really hard, but I believe it must exist. And I believe we're gonna be able to make it exist. That's so important. So only start something that absolutely has to exist otherwise work for an existing company cause it's much easier. Um, the other thing that my co-founder Jack told me a lot in the early days, um, that was really helpful. And I think really powerful is, you know, if you consistently live on the edge of your comfort zone, your comfort zone will continue to expand. And that is so true. And I think in the early days of building your first startup, it feels so uncomfortable and there aren't good milestones of, you know, as a series, a company, am I doing really well?
Speaker 0 00:33:01 Or am I doing terribly? There's no yard stick. There's no benchmarking of, well, what should my revenue be? And how many employees should we have and what should my cash burn be? And you know, how should things be going? And so it feels, I think for many really type a people who are used to being successful feels really uncomfortable and really hard. But if you can just sit with that and you can just say, I'm doing the best that I can today and I'll do the best that I can tomorrow. And we're gonna put one foot in front, the other we're gonna get good people. We're gonna try our best. And you start to see the arc of, well, yeah, it's, it's up and down and all over the place, but the, the arc is positive. The arc is that we are building something really special.
Speaker 0 00:33:43 Um, and it's pretty powerful to be, we're now almost four years in, and it's really powerful to be able to see that in moments of real turbulence or instability or where it felt like nothing was gonna work. Those are actually the moments where something unlocks where you think, well, how could we possibly be successful in this market? And you know, for us, like we went into Austin as our first non disaster market and we had no idea how we were gonna make it successful and you quickly figure out, well, if we don't get land, we're dead in the water. So we went out and got land and we figured out how to build an entirely new business unit, an entirely new technology to make that possible. And you do it really fast when you have to. And so, um, being able to sit in those moments of extreme discomfort and know you're growing and you're learning and you're getting better and it hurts and it's hard and you gotta just be able to remember that there you're gonna get out of that. And then you're gonna be on a new frontier of what feels comfortable for you. And you'll be able to go through even harder, even worse things in the future and come out on the other side.
Speaker 2 00:34:51 Amazing. I think that's an epic piece of advice. <laugh> an epic learning because I think it also talks to the importance of having that bigger picture and always being driven towards that mission and seeing that, you know, there will be small things that come up that make you think, why am I doing this? And, and actually if you panic in those moments, you can end up making rash decisions or not the right decisions. Um, so it's like the importance of pulling yourself out and looking at that bigger picture. And as you say, really, when you're up close, it looks, you know, jaggedy, but when you go back, it doesn't look so jaggedy it's, <laugh>, you know, it's all the perspective piece. So I think that's fantastic bit of advice. And, um, for you, were there any sort of initial mistakes that you, you made, um, or sort of roadblocks that, that you really learned from, um, at those early stages and, and how did you overcome those?
Speaker 0 00:35:49 I would say in retrospect and building a company, um, and I've talked to many founders who feel this way, almost everything that we ever did at the beginning was a mistake. Like if you talk to anybody in the homebuilding industry and you say, what is the worst way to start a home company? You start building custom houses in California, which has the hardest permitting of anywhere in the world. It is so, so to start a company that way, and yet that's how we started. And it meant that it took longer to get going. And it meant that we experienced a ton of pain and we did not give our early homeowners the experience that we wanted to give them. But it also meant that we deeply, deeply felt the pain of permitting in markets where it's really difficult. And we deeply felt the pain of making too many customizations to a house.
Speaker 0 00:36:46 That meant that house was actually not as efficiently designed as a homeowner should want it to be, and as we were capable of making it. And so I think some of those lessons SRE into the fabric of a company, um, principles that you end up carrying forward and you end up saying, well, we first and foremost wanna create a customer experience. That's unprecedented in this industry. And to do that, there are gonna be some really hard guardrails around how our process is gonna be set up. And I could imagine if we had started with a dramatically simpler offering and we didn't let anyone customize their homes. Um, and if we had started in a state like Texas, where it's a lot easier to get things permitted, we wouldn't have that intense understanding of how hard and how complicated it can be for homeowners and for our trade partners and for our team.
Speaker 0 00:37:38 And so we've learned a lot and we've evolved dramatically since then. We are fundamentally different company than we were when we started, but we understand those principles and the underpinnings of why we are doing what we're doing in a way that we, if we didn't do it wrong in the first place. And so, um, I think you've gotta remember all the time that building a company isn't about getting to the right answer first. It's about getting to the right answer as fast as you can. And it's about knowing that the right answer is just part of the bigger right answer of what you're building and that you're trying to get all these little nuggets of right answers together and assemble them in the way that works right now. And one of the things that is most important about the DNA of most tech company is, is that they view themselves more as living beings where there's a right answer today, but what's really powerful about technology is it can help you understand the underlying data of how that right answer is changing over time.
Speaker 0 00:38:34 And so being able to learn and adapt faster than anybody else in the industry, that's the most important thing that we're building and technology enables that. And so if you know that, then you can sort of disabuse yourself of the idea that there's one canonical, right answer today. And instead you can say, let's gather all of the information, let's look at it in the, the right ways and let's continuously improve. So that every day we're better than we were yesterday. And then let's remember that that trajectory of compounding improvement every single day will eventually get us to a place that we can't even imagine right now. And so keep that in our minds and keep reinforcing that continuously.
Speaker 2 00:39:13 And that's a huge element of, um, trusting the process, right? And knowing if you work, if little steps forward, yeah. Trust the process. And for every right answer, you're gonna have 10, 15, 20 wrong answers, but it's the right answer. That is the, is the gem and you need to carry forward. So now I
Speaker 0 00:39:34 That's. Yeah. Emil, Emil Michael from Uber is on our board and has been a advisor and partner and friend to me and homebound from the beginning is an exceptional human being and a wonderful partner. And one thing he reminds me of always is 70% of everything should always be broken. And it's so hard if you come from a successful background working in industries that are not growing, you know, five X in a year to think that everything is broken and like this can't be, and if you just can remind yourself, 70% of everything should be broken, then you can look at the 30% that's working and make sure it's the right 30, because you need to get the right 30, but then you can also just let go of the 70% that's broken and make sure that you're learning from it and you're improving the right things. The thing that has to happen this quarter so that the company can unlock the next chapter, but that you're letting go of things that don't matter. And so that perspective and having people who've seen the journey of building a company that's, you know, worth tens of billions of dollars, more than any other company in its space over time. Um, it's really helpful to have those people to remind you, this is, this is how it's supposed to be. You're you're right on the right track.
Speaker 2 00:40:47 Brilliant. It sounds like a fantastic advisor to have as well. So <laugh> um, and something else, something I noticed about home bound, um, is you're very much focused on building a diverse, um, and inclusive workforce as well. Um, and balance obviously balancing that with the need to scale, um, which is brilliant to see for you. What does this look like in reality? Um, have you got sort of key initiatives that you are focused on or is it something that you've really embedded within the organization?
Speaker 0 00:41:16 Yeah. So one of the things that's super important about what we're building is that diversity of thought and creating an inclusive environment where people of different backgrounds feel comfortable speaking up. It's not like a nice to have in the org that we would, you know, like to have because it makes you feel good. It is absolutely essential to everything that we're building, because we're trying to get engineers to build software for construction leaders. Who've never used software in their entire careers. And so in order to create an environment where first of all, you can recruit those two people who are both elite specialists in what they do, who everybody else would like to hire for their typical industries. You can bring them to home bound. That's one thing. And so being able to recruit from really diverse backgrounds, into an organization where these people are gonna come together is critical to our success, but then also being able to get them to work together.
Speaker 0 00:42:11 Cause if I have an engineering team that's siloed over here, building software, and I have a construction team building houses, that's siloed over here. Well, that actually doesn't mean I'm building anything special. And so the inner connection, and, you know, yesterday we had a, um, really incredible construction leader who would describe himself as not a computer guy, giving a presentation and a demo of our software to a room full of 25 people telling them how he manages projects and the software. I almost cried. It was so incredible. And it's cause he has a technologist who he says, Tim and I meet four times a week to talk about what problems I'm running into and how he can fix them. And that inner meshing of work, um, is something that's so important. And you have to create both a diverse, but also a really inclusive workforce in order to make that possible.
Speaker 0 00:43:01 And so, uh, it's really important in our sourcing. It's really important in our interview process. And then it's really important once people are here that we're creating diverse teams and that we're creating an inclusive environment for them work together. And I would say it's also easy coming from a technology background or, you know, many big corporations to think of diversity as gender diversity or racial diversity. And those are really important to us, but diversity is actually a lot bigger than that. It's about socioeconomic background. It's about geographic background. It's about skill it's about personality types. Um, and there are so many, and, and it's also about age. We have a wide range of ages of people within home bound. And it's a huge asset for us that we can take somebody who's, you know, 55 years old and has been a construction expert their entire life and pair them with a 23 year old. Who's awesome at using software and enable both of them to work together. That's part of the magic of building. And so we think about diversity and inclusion as an incredibly multifaceted, um, dimension of the culture and the company that we're building. And it is embedded in everything about how we look for people and how we bring them in and how we onboard them and how we expect people to work together. And it is a critical part of everything that we're building.
Speaker 2 00:44:26 And I can imagine. And it sounds like, yeah, it sounds like you, your, your thought process around diversity and it not just being based on that sort of, you know, demographic data, it is actually a lot about diversity of thought and, and background age as well. And home bound itself, you are, um, you are building a product that is really for everybody, you know, from, from your 20 year old, who's desperate to get on the, on the sort of home own ladder to, to older people who've potentially lost their home. Like it is important for you to be representative of that community or the, the, the society in which you are operating. So yeah, it, it sounds, you're definitely you're there <laugh>, um, fab, well, I'm, I'm conscious of time. So I think I've got a couple of lighthearted questions. Um, I'd love to, just to bring our chat to a close today, Nick. Um, is there anything that you are super passionate about, um, that you just find tons of joy in and this can of course be professional or personal orbit?
Speaker 0 00:45:32 So home is the most important thing for me and whether it's building homes or remodeling homes or preparing them or decorating them. I just think there's so much power in place and where we are and where we spend our time, where we have dinner with our families and where we celebrate holidays. And so, um, I'm super passionate about home and I have been since I was a very small kid. Um, and so everything that we are building is important to me and matters to me personally, and is part of my family and my life. Um, the other big thing I am really passionate about is my kids. So I spend, um, a lot of time working and I spend a lot of time with my kids and those are sort of the two components of my life. Um, I have three little kids. I started home bound when I was pregnant with my third child, um, which I would say is generally not a great time to start a company. Um, but it was the right time. And she came everywhere with me and my kids are a big part of both my life, but I also try to make sure that everybody at home bound knows that family and people who don't have family, friends, and other aspects of their life, you know, it all, it all comes together as part of life working at home bound. And so we try to make sure that we're bringing in our whole selves to everything that we're doing
Speaker 2 00:46:53 Brilliant. And, and I think as well with everybody working remotely, what, what we, um, try to do is get people to share their home life more. Yep. And whether that's internally through slack or, um, our team actually, they've just started doing it, sharing a lot more on places like LinkedIn, about, you know, being able to grab a bite with my little one to eat at lunch. And it's just, it's so heartwarming to see it. We AB yeah, absolutely love it because home and work is, is so much more blended these days. Isn't it? Yeah. But it's important to,
Speaker 0 00:47:25 It's a way to feel close to your team members in ways that used to be more hidden where it's like, I didn't know that you had this dog or that you have this wild collection or that, you know, your little kids are super well behaved and sit next in color while you're that. And the them
Speaker 2 00:47:48 And share tips. <laugh> share tips on for me, how to keep alive. <laugh>, that's what I get from my team. <laugh>. Um, and you might have touched on this a little bit earlier, but as a busy founder and CEO, mother to three, um, how, how do you find and, and achieve balance in your day?
Speaker 0 00:48:12 Um, I think about balance less in terms of, you know, the right proportion of things every single day and more in terms of, I think about my own recipe for happiness, both in sort of the day to day of what do I need the mix of a day to look like in terms of zoom meetings versus in person, in terms of being stuck in an office versus going for a walk. Um, and so I try to be really thoughtful about the stack of my day and making sure that I have the right mix of things to feel really great. And then the other thing that I think is really important is thinking holistically about your recipe for happiness. So, um, my husband is also an entrepreneur and we spend a lot of time thinking and planning together what, what we want our years to look like.
Speaker 0 00:48:59 And, you know, both what's 20, 22 about, but what's sort of the broader arc of our kids' childhood and the kinda family that we wanna be building and the kinda companies we wanna be building and how we want our kids to be involved in that and understanding it. And so, um, I think it's really important to just be thoughtful about it and spend time articulating to yourself and your partner to your family, what it is that you are trying to build and really holding yourself accountable to, you know, if I say this is the year where I'm gonna focus on the following things, am I really focused on those things? Am I spending the right amount of time on those things? And so one thing I push really hard at home bound is for everybody to have a work life plan. And I want everyone to be able to articulate sort of where they are in their stage of career and life and their, you know, weeks, months, even years where someone might say, Hey, this is a year where I just wanna like crash work and I I'm gunning for a promotion, or I wanna learn a new skill and I'm very focused on work, and this is what it's gonna look like.
Speaker 0 00:50:04 And here are the personal things that I need to accomplish as well. But work is my priority. And there are other times where people will say, Hey, this year I'm pregnant and I'm gonna have a baby, or I am getting married this year, or I'm moving to a new community. And I really wanna establish myself and where it's really important for someone to be able to communicate this year. Actually my personal life is my priority and here's what that means. And so I encourage people really transparent about where they are and what it means for them, and then put big rocks in place. So you can see on my calendar, my calendar's open to everybody at home bound. You can see my big rocks are when I'm not traveling every morning. And every evening I have breakfast with my kids and I have dinner with my kids and I have a whole day in between and I'm available in the evenings if needed, but there are certain things that if I don't get to do dinner and bedtime with my kids, I don't feel as happy.
Speaker 0 00:50:56 And so I try to make sure I can do as much of that as possible. And I really encourage people to be put on their calendar, what you wanna do, and then be transparent about it so that your team can hold you accountable to, Hey, you said it was really important for you to work out three times a week and I keep watching you book over your workout time. So can we help make sure that that doesn't happen or should we move it to a different time of day? Um, and so I think it's something that particularly in the pandemic where work and life blend more, and it's easy for work to take over everything that we're all helping hold each other accountable to the big rocks in your life that are part of the recipe that make you your best happiest, most productive self.
Speaker 2 00:51:35 I love that. I'm definitely going, um, translate that into my own team because yeah, I think that's a fantastic, fantastic bit of advice, Nicky. I, I am conscious of time. Um, so I'm gonna wrap us up. Um, yeah, I'll wrap us up on that. I think it was a good, good note to end on, but it's been such a pleasure speaking with you and learning more about, about you and, and about home bound. Um, particularly, so it has been really, really brilliant. I think all of your, all of your sort of learnings and the insights that you've shared are super, super valuable and home bounds mission is something that it, yeah. I think it's incredibly important for people to get behind and, um, yeah, I think they definitely will be because it's something that's hugely needed. So yes, for joining us.
