Thats your job. Great question. Two sided marketplaces are so difficult. Youre right that is wrong advice. We didnt go that route because I have the network but if I didnt have the network and some people have the network and still do it, they are really good cheap in to getting scaled quickly. Got it. So I saw for example Axle Springer which is you know more kind of like the corporate. Oh yeah, on the seed round back in 2012, we had probably five investors come in to the seed round so we kind of had five yeses who put in small checks. I was also doing, Ive been doing marketplaces for I think like 10 years now and I remember in the last company, I would go and meet with investors and they kept asking me for the chicken and the egg. So you kind of just have to [25:29] but just to be clear yeah, we had far more nos than yeses at the seed round. Yeah. So we solved it to the first two years purely by getting landlords on board through various kind of product strategy and so our growth cuts for the first two years that we raised the [27:41] were purely about landlords and listing. We love our investors. Its not about the ski trips and any of that you know. I mean to a point network gets you an intro but a lot of intros are 10 minute meetings where the VC immediately decides its not for them which is totally fair. I didnt think that either of them originally. And so I finally just gave in and thought no one is going to build this. Anthemos Georgiades: Yeah. At scale you get to do that and have those teams. I say like in the first pitch to the day the money wires, theres always been around like a minimum of three months. anthemos georgiades net worth. Im so glad I did it. Got it. But theres no right answer in business. Yeah, I mean BCG I think you get access to the 23 year olds CEOs who had been working for 40 years and kind of crazy in consulting you take the shortcut in your careers to being in the board room. So all good companies have multiple offers on the table. But theres no right answer in business. In the early days, youre going to need to take all the capital you can get. Alejandro: Got it. So if the story has changed in a way that merits the focus of the company but what is consistent every single time weve raised is that for six months in a row, we had really, really quick growth. And investors love that story because its easy to believe that you can continue to do that. We have like four people at the company for the first year or maybe five for the first year and so theres so much to do and theres so little time and few resources that you actually theres no real intellectual whiteboarding session that you do to carve out rose. 1. FUNDED EP01: How to tell a story worth $140 million dollars (Zumper) 00:00 51:07 Episode Summary Anthemos Georgiades, founder of Zumper, perfected his pitch the way most founders do: through trial and error. So I think as your company matures, you look for investors that have something that you dont have and so for us, were not yet doing $100 million in revenue. And the biggest change in the series C I just raised versus in the early days is having a CFO. Got it. They are the two ways that Zumper currently monetizes them and there are two folks that [11:35]. Anthemos Georgiades. So yes, we have a great cap table. They are the two ways that Zumper currently monetizes them and there are two folks that [11:35]. So watching board members from the early investments are [19:38] who now runs Good Water but was originally Kleiner and then Eric [19:42] from Kleiner and theyre both experts at product market set. Anthemos Georgiades: Yeah. And it is the culture that keeps people here, not the compensation or anything else. So I think as your company matures, you look for investors that have something that you dont have and so for us, were not yet doing $100 million in revenue. I say like in the first pitch to the day the money wires, theres always been around like a minimum of three months. So M&A are strategic [33:48]. Thats your job. Anthemos was an undergrad at Oxford when he noticed how problematic renting an apartment . You kind of just all in [06:39] I think where the carving of the rose start to happen for me around 10, 12 people where you no longer just have [06:49]. How does the day to day at Zumper work? A lot of it was completely bottom up. So cofounders are difficult especially if youre not technical as really hard to find a good technical cofounder but the great thing is once you do and it takes a long time, they are able to attract the next generation of talent in to the company and thats how you kind of build your engineering team out. Got it and before we actually dive in to the journey here, so consulting and. Pat Mapper caters to 25 and under and kind of big college populations. You look at your cofounders and you know that they understand that and that theyre not freaking out, that is where you build real institutional culture and then you try and grow that across the team. And we were talking about the $46 million round which was the C round, C as in cat and basically what you were talking about I mean what Ive seen is that you guys have shifted a little bit the strategy. Unluckily weve made some phenomenal early hires so the company that have all scaled to leadership roles, thats fantastic for retention because those people know that we could have hired from outside but we bet on them and it worked and so Zumper is a place to build theyre career not somewhere else. So our CFO is fantastic and what he was able to bring to the series C was real credibility where I meet the investors, get them excited about our vision and our story and then they spend hours with the CFO on the second or third meeting digesting our historical financial as were talking about where were headed. Like what have you seen that really works? So Ill read it if anyone tweets anything interesting or if I can be helpful in anyway. Alejandro: Got it and before we actually dive in to the journey here, so consulting and business school, this is a few things that I typically hear so from some of our other guests. Im the CEO and Ive always felt that it was my responsibility to do the fundraising. Got it. Yeah. I mean I called it like a cheat [33:33] my team. Yeah. But I guess you were saying then here the shift, kind of like shifted more from like growth of users perhaps retention to more kind of like deep revenue growth. So I think three months is an efficient round. This pellet stove is a good heating solution for a smaller rather than a . How do you scale like 20 million in revenue to 200 million in revenue and we didnt need the more product set investors because we already have fantastic people at that. Got it. So for Zumper our vision as I mentioned was to make renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel and so instead of going in with just an idea, I built like a really crappy version of the end game that I wanted to build. And then now your job at five, six years in with a team of a hundred with higher and amazing executive team who are all better at doing their jobs than you would ever be and so your job is almost as a CEO is to like hire yourself out of a job where you hire people, where you look at them and you think, Wow, I cant believe you report to me. So I as British person moving to Silicon Valley in 2012 I have never run a startup before. Originally from London, he has an MBA from Harvard Business School, MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and BA from the University of Oxford. So in terms of timeline, you were mentioning that the C round, you guys closed this 46 million a couple of months ago. So strategically that was a good marriage where they had a great consumer brand and we have really fantastic supply side inventory. And I mean its quite a few cofounders. Anthemos Georgiades: Yeah. Got it. How does the day to day at Zumper work? It was kind of [31:51] as early as we did to buy another stock up that was kind of four years in. So how did you meet your cofounders? Based in San Francisco, Anth leads the company in its mission to make renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel. Because I speak with a ton of founders that are perhaps opening up the possibility of bringing on corporations and I think that you need to really do it right. So paradoxically, I dont think the core DNA of a companys culture is built at ski tracks or offsite. He discovered that the marketplace doesnt work for renters, and the idea for Zumper was born with the goal of evening the playing field and increasing transparency in the marketplace. Absolutely. You are going to get a bunch of nos so I wouldnt rule people out too early. Please subscribe to unlock this content. Every company is completely different and theres no gold standard. Zumper Board Member Related Hubs Were very clear with Axle Springer that we have a lot of consumer scale so a lot of people use our platform on a monthly basis but were still building the [21:55]. So we tell the small landlords, Hey, dont just advertise in Zumper. Like many of our most successful entrepreneurs, Anthemos Georgiades was drawn into startup life to solving a burning problem. We envisioned a world in which a renter can find apartments, book in [tour 10:18], turn up the [10:21] and if they want to take the apartment pre-qualify, leave a deposit and book the apartment. A lot of business schools was how to make decisions with imperfect information. For us, I think they fully understand the entrepreneurial journey and were really excited to have them on board. Thank you so much. Got it. And so as you mature you look for a different kind of investor and that naturally tends to happen. At Zumper, based in San Francisco, he leads the company in its mission to make renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel. Anthemos Georgiades: Yes, weve raised $90 million in capital including a series C that we just closed three months ago. I love it. At the end of the day though, whether its senior people, junior people, interns who we want to bring back is all under pinned by culture. You start to build depth and management structures. So in the first two years, Zumper is now [07:52] $90 million in capital. Alejandro: So I guess like I have one thing to follow up on this. Its really built in the dark days of when stuff is really difficult and I think Zumpers culture now is we have a lot of users still remembers and its a testament to those dark days and we never take anything for granted. Alejandro: So I guess in just to like follow up on that, what in your mind and obviously in what youve seen creates really that magical relationship between cofounders? Yeah. At series A, you got to show product market set in a sub vertical. I grew up in London. Got it. So Ill read it if anyone tweets anything interesting or if I can be helpful in anyway. Well, today's guest noticed that experience and wanted to improve it. Got it. Alejandro: Just out of curiosity, Anthemos, like how many nos did you get for example on your seed round if you have to count it?
