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Hey, Vineet here, one of the HomeBreeze cofounders. Really appreciate you sharing this. We've seen a lot of #1, #2, and #4. We haven't seen too much with landlords yet and would love to learn more...What kind of unit do you rent (single family, large managed apartment, from a big company or single owner, etc.) And what repair issue did you have?

I'd be down to trade emails to chat live too, if you're open to it - myhomebreeze at gmail

Interesting... HomeBreeze has quickly become an important B2B relationship for the home pros we work with. Although a lot of what you're describing is for construction, which we don't serve, your comment makes me think that we could be giving homeowners access to great contractors who they wouldn't be able to otherwise access.

Vineet, one of the cofounders here. Would love to chat! Don’t see your contact info anywhere - could you email myhomebreeze at gmail?

Appreciate the support! Love the “landlord” concept too - we have a few ideas here…

Good to know. So much room for innovation in this market. Appreciate the support!

Great! Will reach out

We have a few ideas on how to manage this but totally agree that maintaining quality is critical (and hard!)

We’ve seen similar things for general contractors and construction, which is a market we don’t yet serve. Today we target jobs that are completed within one day. We find our jobs get prioritized because we drive material volume to contractors.

We need to unpack what makes someone “unreliable” because we’ve found every single contractor runs late, ghosts some leads, misses some scopes, etc. The root cause is that it’s a complex job to manage and they may not excel at those small business tasks, despite having excellent craftsmanship.

We simplify their job. Normally they would have to field leads, visit homes to scope jobs, find suppliers who can deliver the right parts, figure out a price, convince customers to choose them, and then balance that with their other projects. Instead, we send them fully scoped jobs, parts pre-ordered and ready for pick up, customers already scheduled, and more. We do a lot behind the scenes to take that burden off their shoulders, and let them focus on doing great work.

What type of contracting does your brother do? We see what you’re describing with general contractors but rarely with plumbers who are our initial focus

Spot on. It’s all about trust, which in this context means getting the offering honest scoping & pricing, completing work as promised, and doing quality work. Contractors who deliver that trusted experience already are usually booked up and hard to get hold of when you need them.

We’re betting that more contractors can achieve those same standards in our structure, and we can deliver better availability and consistent trust to homeowners.

Initially we're focusing on a set of services that we can define well, some of these were previously considered "unpredictable".

The contractor takes on the liability, just like any other job. As part of our quality standards, all work needs to be up to code. We ingest the local code standards and include those in our quality controls. The controls are pretty rigorous, down to the specific materials used in jobs, including tracking the purchase, pickup, and usage of those materials.

The contractors who love us are small, independent shops who are great at their craft, but not great at sales & marketing. Unlike lead-gen services, we send them jobs with defined scope and payment. We need to be really good at scoping because if we botch it, then we take liability for that rather than putting it on the contractor. We've had contractors hire more people to their team and buy additional service trucks, purely based on the volume we send them.

Scaling will be a lot of complex work but we've built systems like that in the past at UberEats, where Chris was one of the first GMs, and at Opendoor (largest homebuyer in the US).

We had a lot of those concerns too. We're here to build a sustainable business (really the only kind of business). We have zero interest in hyperscaling something that isn't viable. We started with categories with minimal tail risk (for example, we're not doing whole home construction), and have had good success. We also limit our exposure through agreements on scope.

Homes with majors issues like that have been extremely rare in our experience. When they come up, we've been able to catch them early (at least so far). In the future situation where we miss it, we have some back stops with our scope of work agreements. We would be okay eating losses in a lot of situations, to your point about taking a portfolio approach, and then updating our approach to avoid repeating those mistakes. This was something that worked well at Opendoor (buying/selling houses), where I previously worked.

We haven't met service professionals who have the capability to do that directly, but doing so delivers a much, much better homeowner experience.

We want to level the playing field!! Similar to your experience, we've seen too many examples of homeowners receiving different prices or treatment based on gender, socioeconomic status, or other factors that have nothing to do with the underlying service. HomeBreeze eliminates this for our customers.

The reuters link posted here is click-bait junk. This section from the Microsoft blog provides better context.

>We detected unusual activity with a small number of internal accounts and upon review, we discovered one account had been used to view source code in a number of source code repositories. The account did not have permissions to modify any code or engineering systems and our investigation further confirmed no changes were made. These accounts were investigated and remediated.

>At Microsoft, we have an inner source approach – the use of open source software development best practices and an open source-like culture – to making source code viewable within Microsoft. This means we do not rely on the secrecy of source code for the security of products, and our threat models assume that attackers have knowledge of source code. So viewing source code isn’t tied to elevation of risk.

https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2020/12/31/microsoft-interna...

While I can't speak for Delhi, Mumbai is closer to the "NY of India" and attracts young people in the same way

From the article. Investment dollars in and realized + unrealized gains.

They’ve made ~$15B on ~$65B invested. $15B!!! Ignore the sensationalist headline.

This piece wasn't written by investors. It was written by two opinion columnists at Bloomberg, the same publisher that refused to retract its widely refuted story about the Chinese government hacking Amazon & Apple.

That aside, sometimes people post stupid things on the internet.

I'm surprised by the negative comments on Zoom's profitability. The return on sales/marketing investment is exceptional. Net income is a poor indicator of high growth SaaS company health.

See this deck for a detailed view on SaaS metrics that shows the cashflow benefit of investing in quality growth. https://www.slideshare.net/DavidSkok/the-saas-business-model...

i give them credit for doing it. if they find something there, they can improve on it. v1 rarely nails everything (nor does v100!)

Amazon was also overvalued in 1999. It took almost a decade to get back to its dotcom valuation. Amazon of 1999 and 2009 were two very different companies.

+1

Understanding exec 2nd level thinking is perhaps the largest opportunity of your internship

Always think about WHY behind their actions. Think about their incentives. Think about what they're trying to accomplish. Same for the other people in the meetings.

School starts early because of parent work schedules.

Thanks for sharing. Important context regarding Uber’s pivot into all forms of transit (bike, scooter, public transit). They must see the same writing on the wall.

$4.6M annual revenue was when they raised the Series A in 2014. The baremetrics dashboard is current.

Amazon is buying urban, high end locations. First Whole Foods, now Landmark. Clearly shows which customers they see as high value.

I was skeptical about buying through Alexa until I finally tried it. I found out that I value convenience more than detailed selection, at least for reorders and staple products (kitchen and bathroom soaps, etc).