We're back! ⚡️⚡️
@ZeusLiving
raised $55M in Series C financing, led by SIG ().
We're bringing our vision of making it easy to live wherever and whenever, without the constraints of the traditional rental market, to the wider world.
It's remarkable how many startups not only survived the pandemic, but evolved into something even better as a result of it. Zeus is one of the more spectacular examples.
2020 was a challenging year.
The pandemic crushed my startup,
@ZeusLiving
.
We were in a mad fight for survival.
I learned a lot about resilience, teamwork & belief, whilst making some mistakes along the way.
I'll share some of that experience here.
/Thread
And, as the greatest final blessing, my cofounder’s wife is in remission!
I have immense gratitude for my cofounders Srini & Joe, & to the whole Zeus team for giving it everything this year.
And of course, to my wife
@meghankamat1
for her unwavering support.
Onwards. 💪
If anyone is stuck for housing in:
🌉 Bay Area
🌅 Los Angeles
🌆 Seattle
🗽 New York
🏦 DC
🏫 Boston
Hit me up, we are offering discounted stays
@ZeusLiving
Places are deep cleaned, & you can easily isolate if needed.
👩🏽🎓 discounts available here:
Zeus NYC just hit $1M lifetime revenue in less than a few months after launching.
Zeus DC just hit $1M/month run rate about a year after launching.
🏡 🏡 🚀
Q4 was our most profitable Q4 in company history.
We expanded from 6 markets to 30+.
We had 6 straight months of 85%+ occupancy.
We cut burn by 75%, and will still grow revenue this year.
Goodbye 2020, we won't miss you.
New York now has more cases than Wuhan did before they started their massive lockdown.
UK is double where Wuhan was, with a government going for a herd immunity approach.
China still got to 80k cases after lockdown with a high fatality rate in Wuhan.
It’s going to get bad.
1/ Today's an exciting day!
🗽⚡️
@zeuslivinginc
launched in New York!⚡️🗽
Currently:
💰 2,000+ companies have used Zeus
🏘️ 1,650 active homes
🏙️ 5 major metros
Read more in BI:
I remembered
@bchesky
's advice when navigating tough decisions.
You can make a "business decision": see what’s best for the business.
Or, you can make a "principle decision": how do you want to be remembered irrespective of outcome?
This is my vision for
@ZeusLiving
.
Longer duration travel gives you something short term travel cannot.
I backpacked around the world when I was 19 and noticed it took at least 2-3 weeks to appreciate the vibe and ethos of a place.
Everything else is tourism.
wouldn't be surprised if the next gen, especially in their 20's, spends a decade of their lives living between a set of Airbnb's around the world, working remotely, immersing themselves in communities and cultures.
a nomadic life where you feel at home everywhere.
Decided to continue sharing updates to our turnaround
@ZeusLiving
.
✈️ Business Travel returns: corporate sales grew 55% in Q1
💻 74% of Zeus Residents work from home
💪 Rehired 23 employees
And, Q1 was our most profitable Q1 in company history.
More details below.
Over 2M readers read this thread I sent out on New Years Eve, and so I decided to update it. 🙂
First, I want to acknowledge the outpour of support.
It was an incredible feeling to have so many people reach out and showed how great this platform can be.
TLDR, we overcame:
- losing tens of millions of revenue
- two layoffs (60% of the company)
- cofounder's wife diagnosed w/ cancer
- core business (business travel) going to zero
- switching to remote whilst undertaking a save-the-company pivot
- fundraising nuclear winter
Tomorrow I am telling
@ZeusLiving
's pandemic survival story to a group of founders in the current
@ycombinator
cohort and I'm strangely excited to give the "off the record" version.
The good news is that we survived & emerged stronger.
Despite everything, the pandemic allowed us to bring forward our vision (“live without the traditional constraints of housing”) more quickly, as remote work accelerated.
But it was the toughest thing I’ve done.
This morning, we announced internally that we had to make layoffs
@ZeusLiving
.
It's especially tough because our people are the ones who've helped build the company and get us to where we are today.
👩⚕️👨⚕️🏥😷→🏡
Healthcare workers are working extremely long shifts, with long commutes, & added stress of risking exposure to their families.
So we decided to offer our homes to them at 50% off market rates. Pls share.
Homes in NYC, LA, SEA 🌉🌅🌆🗽🏦👩🎓
Garry’s support over the last twelve months was amazing.
He was with me, every step of the way, as we turned the ship around at Zeus.
Founders, if Garry offers you a term sheet, take it!
He’s awesome (and I believe, still underrated).
Somehow we got to 1,000 🏡 homes🏠 on
@zeuslivinginc
and maintained 90% occupancy without having “Search by Address” functionality.
Happy to say we do now. Still v 0.1 but wanted to share it:
Would love feedback!
cc
@anapischl
I'm not a religious or superstitious person, but the circumstances led me to keep a Ganesha and Daruma doll on my desk.
I leaned heavily on my Five Minute Journal & each morning blindly reaffirmed to myself that we would get through this.
(NB: must give Daruma his other eye)
How is Airbnb doing, compared to 2019?
It might be a winner of the pandemic. "Airbnb spending is running a whopping 75% higher than this time last year."
It’s corny, but I believed that if we decided this was the end, it would be.
If we decided to come together and find a way, even if we didn’t know how to immediately, we would.
Highly recommend "The Courage to Be Disliked".
I find myself coming back to the ideas often.
It came up as a recommendation in my book club a few times, but I was put off by the dialogue format.
H/T
@harjtaggar
for encouraging me to actually read it.
To set the scene, we've grown revenue 3-4x each year since we started in 2016.
Our product is high quality, flexible furnished housing for business travelers.
In 2019, we raised a $55M Series B ().
Always nervous when tweeting about US politics because:
a) Silicon Valley hates it &
b) I’m from England
The 🇺🇸 has given me a lot, and I hope someday to become a citizen.
That said, here goes.
Early in the pandemic, when we had only a few weeks of runway, I told the team what happened next would be our choice.
I'm not sure where this belief came from, but we made the collective decision to fight, pivot & live.
January 23, 2020 sticks in the memory.
It was the date the Wuhan lockdown began, when the virus cases numbered in the hundreds.
It felt like a big deal & I wanted folks to pay attention.
@balajis
' twitter updates were clutch.
We pulled it off and doubled the available homes for Zeus residents.
The revenue we send to partner operators has grown each month.
To wrap up this tweetstorm that should have been a blog, I'm proud of what we achieved despite the headwinds.
As our goodbye Zoom ended, my cofounder called & told me his wife had stage 4 Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia. The doctors hospitalized her immediately.
It put things into perspective. The company struggles no longer felt important.
Flex Living 🚀🚀🚀
We’ve spent five years perfecting this service for 🏡
@ZeusLiving
🏡
Awesome thread by the CEO of
@airbnb
, the largest investor in our Series B 👇🏽
It was awesome talking to
@HarryStebbings
on the
@twentyminutevc
podcast!
We riff on the differences in running a "tech-enabled" business like
@zeuslivinginc
🏡, how we validated the idea, fundraising and culture as a superpower for scaling.
Espresso martinis with
@HarryStebbings
in London after work (hence the hand signs).
@m2jr
we spoke about your valuable mentorship over the years.
Looking forward to hosting Harry
@zeuslivinginc
the next time he visits SF.
Wrote "Morning Pages" today for the first time. (h/t
@amittm
)
Curious, who else does this? Has it been helpful?
After re-reading what I wrote just now I'm in mild shock about certain parts. Are streams of consciousness always surprising?
Then came the pivot & glimmers of a growth strategy.
No one was travelling to our markets like San Francisco or New York.
But searches on
@ZeusLiving
for secondary markets like Miami were growing.
"Remote Work" was a new use case, and we had to figure out how to adapt.
We decided to add 3rd-party inventory to our platform in new markets like Miami, Denver & Austin.
This meant an entire software rewrite. The existing platform had property management assumptions baked across the architecture.
But there was millions of $ unmet demand if we did.
It is a home away from home. I stayed in their LA Venice house and it had everything what you use every day at home in the kitchen, laundry, and all the pluses of hotel luxuries.
I can't get over this studio we just onboarded in Venice, LA. It's part of a historic 8 unit compound that belonged to a friend of Abbott Kinney, and features the original construction timber.
I had to confront layoffs for the team we had carefully built up
@ZeusLiving
.
Executive leaders that I had painstakingly recruited no longer fit the future we were facing.
It was awful & I deeply regret how the layoffs were communicated.
2020 was the year we'd become an international company.
We had staffed up for growth and 9 figure revenue numbers.
But when 2020 started, I felt uneasy. Uber & Lyft's IPOs weren't up and to the right, & WeWork imploded. Something felt off.
I’d never done layoffs before, let alone on zoom.
The bad news kept coming. Each day felt like a week. Key team members left. The rocketship they signed up for was crashing back to earth.
My usual support of friends & family, weren't available.
The exec team met daily & worked relentlessly to turn the ship around.
We captured all the demand we could. Our software improved in the way that only maniacal necessity can drive.
An existing investor, impressed by our execution, stepped up to capitalize the company.
Around the same time, the press took great interest in our problems and wrote unflattering articles.
My ego suffered as our valuation dropped in half and our struggles leaked to the wider world.
We refunded residents, & offered credits for business customers when possible.
Occupancy dropped from 85% in March to 65% in April.
The lucrative summer months that drive our business disappeared.
"With no rent controls & fewer restrictions on height & density, Tokyo appears to be a city where the market is under control—where supply is keeping home prices from rising as drastically as they have in many other major world cities."
Surprising that.
Brian Armstrong posted a video of us working on his Demo Day presentation. This is the sausage being made. Usually it's messier; Brian's presentation was already in good shape.
today's comedy wfh moment.
I hear my mum calling from the living room, her laptop had frozen mid yoga session.🧘🏽♀️
she was fed up at how long she'd had to hold the pose before realizing the malfunction.
All this is to say that February was the beginning of the rollercoaster.
A coworker approached me in the office asking me why I looked so stressed (do founders ever not?).
I responded that the lockdowns in China could come to the US.
In parallel, I had been gearing up for fundraising in Q2. I had spent months building a pipeline & preparing the data room.
That pipeline disappeared. Investors "keen to get into the space" stopped responding.
The market crashed.
Two weeks later I was flying to Japan.
I left booking flights to the last minute and consulted with my doctor about the safety of travelling.
I have an autoimmune condition, so had to take extra care.
My last public update was 2.5 years ago: .
For those who know me,
@zeuslivinginc
came after a four struggle / process to find product market fit (and perhaps embarrassingly, to make something people want).
The good news is we didn't pivot again.
We applied for PPP, and then gave it back and had to do a second set of layoffs.
This time, we did it better, but it was still heartbreaking & difficult. We had an emotional, respectful extended goodbye, culminating in a goodbye Zoom one afternoon.
Congratulations
@JamesCurrier
@GigiLevy
@peteflint
!
This is much deserved. You guys rewired my brain and helped me launch
@zeuslivinginc
with such rigor and speed. Not only that, but you backed me at my most vulnerable moment. Thank you <3.
We just announced NFX Fund II at $275 Million. We're doubling down on seed stage - the most important stage. Today we're sharing our plans, & why the more interesting story isn't about a fund at all.
It's about "Why" we're doing NFX.
A special shout out to the crew
@Initialized
.
@garrytan
made it to the Forbes List this year, but I still don't think the world fully recognizes how brilliant he is.
@alexisohanian
works so hard, I'm in awe for what he does for his companies.
Then, March happened. I didn't expect things to cascade so soon.
At first, our business didn't see much impact.
(We designed our product for 30+ day stays, so our residents aren't living with
@ZeusLiving
to attend conferences, for example).
The respite was short lived though.
Trump's travel ban shutdown international travel. Companies like Facebook began stopping travel. Cancellations snowballed.
We had to make a decision about refunding millions of dollars, which put our balance sheet in a perilous place.
I didn't expect to become teary in front of the company, but I worried about the wellbeing of the folks we were letting go in the midst of a pandemic.
I could see 4 years of collective work & effort unravelling in front of my eyes.
Nothing could prepare me for what came next.
Listening to
@pmarca
discuss the craziness around GameStop today.
If you haven’t followed this story, it’s insane. Redditors almost bringing down a $13B Wall St hedge fund.
There’s no real cost to the police for their brutality.
History suggests that to drive change, we have to drastically flip the cost benefit ratio.
That means continuing protests, removing immunity for criminal cops & hurting them financially.
#BlackLivesMatter
Oh man this hit deep. Growing up in South East London with a name like Kulveer was tough.
My theory was that East Asian parents wanted their kids to have easier lives and understood immigrant integration better.
I’ve always wondered this: Why do South Asian immigrants name their kids traditional names (like Hasan or Aziz) while East Asian immigrants seem to give their kids western names (like Andrew or ... Justin)?
I had so much fun last night hosting
@alexisohanian
at the
@zeuslivinginc
office.
He helped me 12 years ago with the launch of
@auctomatic
(omg the handle still exists), & offered to come by & share some of what he's learned.
@devinbanerjee
's write-up:
It's been 15 years but just woke up worrying about finals again at
@UniofOxford
.
Was creating my revision timeline, stressing about how to bolster my notes.
Woke up very confused.
You read this and it puts the current administration's handling of the pandemic into even starker terms.
This virus can have long lasting effects, even after recovery. It can cause inflammation in your brain.
Wear masks!
👇🏽Why you should consider
@zeuslivinginc
for housing the next time you move!
Thank you so much for choosing us,
@KunalsLab
🙏🏽, and to the Zeus team for putting customers first. ☺️
Mind has been blown.
@zeuslivinginc
is simply amazing 🤯
Not only do they rent me a business-ready apartment, but they're like my personal moving team 📦 📪