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Pondering Homejoy’s Failure

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Re: Pondering Homejoy’s Failure

#31

Post by stevebmark »

> Homejoy was led by two software engineers. Both wildly talented humans, but both wildly out of place given the nature of the problem we were solving.

A tangent: This is something that scares me about many Bay area startups. What do software developers really care about home maintenance? This is a serious question. Some startups you can tell the founders are in love with the idea. The founders ARE the idea, and they're devoted to it. They believe it entirely independent of making money.

Home care seems like a nuisance and a real world problem. But why devote your life to it? Again, this is a serious question, not a stab at Homejoy. It doesn't seem like a problem that anyone could seriously put their life's work into. It's not like you're a home repair person crafting the finest cabinets you can for clients. From an outsider's perspective, this seems like the founders could only superficially be in it for the money. For the

> majestic startupville spell

, but not for for the true, deep love of the idea.

I've seen the Stanford engineer dropout start the clothing company. The bored engineer spin up yet another time tracking app that they don't use themselves. The car-less developer vagrant try to "disrupt" auto sales. I've been there before, brainstorming "startup" ideas. I'm glad none of them panned out, because I can't imagine being attached to any of them. Fringe ideas to make money and solve problems I didn't have.

I don't know what makes a company successful, but to me a red flag is a mismatch of founder lifestyle and true, obvious investment in the idea. Can a successful startup be founded by someone who's only in it for the money? Probably, and many Bay area startups are probably in that category. The money's here, after all.

Is it an unattainable ideal that the founders of a company truly believe in the product, entirely independent of financial success? Does that correlate with company success? I'd like to think so, even if just a fantasy. As an outsider, Homejoy doesn't appear to fall into that category, because I have a hard time believing two software engineers cared about the idea at their core, outside the obvious desire for something you build to succeed.

Re: Pondering Homejoy’s Failure

#32

Post by 7Figures2Commas »

danieltillett wrote: post #30
7Figures2Commas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, investors should be putting twenty-something would-be founders who think it's a good idea to "lock customers into discount rates that even with infinite retention won’t become profitable" on $50,000 retainers to come up with ideas that they can then fund. That's an efficient way to deploy a nine-figure fund if I've ever heard of one. I'm sure LPs will love it.

Well considering the 50K is basically a rounding error to most VCs the money is not an issue. Given the difficulty of assembling a world class team to let one disintegrate just because their current idea is poor is not a good use of a limited resource. Actually why VCs think good ideas and good teams should come as a package has never been explained to me. The is no reason to think that the best teams will have the b…

> Well considering the 50K is basically a rounding error to most VCs the money is not an issue. Given the difficulty of assembling a world class team to let one disintegrate just because their current idea is poor is not a good use of a limited resource.

You do not seem to understand how fund management works in the real world. A venture firm simply cannot deploy a nine-figure fund by writing $50,000 checks to keep on ice every entrepreneur it thinks has potential.

Furthermore, I don't see how you can conclude that founders who thought it was a good idea to "lock customers into discount rates that even with infinite retention won’t become profitable" represents a world-class team. The post-failure behavior of one of the Homejoy co-founders[1] is even more damning.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10468700

Re: Pondering Homejoy’s Failure

#33

Post by increment_i »

leothekim wrote: post #7

This epitomizes the arrogance and drowning self-absorbedness of Bay Area startups. And it does it in a Medium post. And wow, there are some real gems in this post. For example: "Customer interactions happen inside of their homes (anything that went wrong was grossly amplified)" What did you expect? THIS IS WHAT YOU WERE SELLING. "Client expectations vary wildly" Yup, different people like different things. News at 11…

IMO, your vitriolic armchair attack here is a hundred times more arrogant than anything I read in the Medium post. The author isn't on trial here, he's simply relating his thoughts on the issue. I for one, found it a worthwhile read.

Re: Pondering Homejoy’s Failure

#34

Post by liamcardenas »

stevebmark wrote: post #31

> Homejoy was led by two software engineers. Both wildly talented humans, but both wildly out of place given the nature of the problem we were solving. A tangent: This is something that scares me about many Bay area startups. What do software developers really care about home maintenance? This is a serious question. Some startups you can tell the founders are in love with the idea. The founders ARE the idea, and they…

I don't know much about Homejoy or its founders, however, I wouldn't assume that they weren't dedicated to their idea. I believe that being excited about something is largely a choice. I, personally, could easily be excited about a cleaning related start up. And trust me, I hate cleaning... but there is a huge difference between the act of cleaning and making a cleaning service.

Maybe you are right, but I think it is awfully speculative to say that they didn't "[care] about the idea at their core."

Re: Pondering Homejoy’s Failure

#35

Post by brogrammer90 »

leothekim wrote: post #7

This epitomizes the arrogance and drowning self-absorbedness of Bay Area startups. And it does it in a Medium post. And wow, there are some real gems in this post. For example: "Customer interactions happen inside of their homes (anything that went wrong was grossly amplified)" What did you expect? THIS IS WHAT YOU WERE SELLING. "Client expectations vary wildly" Yup, different people like different things. News at 11…

The only real failure here is that the author gave two years of his life (including holidays) working for the Cheungs. Hopefully he was in his early 20s, otherwise he has no excuse.

Re: Pondering Homejoy’s Failure

#36

Post by danieltillett »

7Figures2Commas wrote: post #32
danieltillett wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well considering the 50K is basically a rounding error to most VCs the money is not an issue. Given the difficulty of assembling a world class team to let one disintegrate just because their current idea is poor is not a good use of a limited resource. Actually why VCs think good ideas and good teams should come as a package has never been explained to me. The is no reason to think that the best teams will have the b…

> Well considering the 50K is basically a rounding error to most VCs the money is not an issue. Given the difficulty of assembling a world class team to let one disintegrate just because their current idea is poor is not a good use of a limited resource. You do not seem to understand how fund management works in the real world. A venture firm simply cannot deploy a nine-figure fund by writing $50,000 checks to keep o…

VCs don’t have to lock up every entrepreneur, just those they think are world class with a bad idea. If the team truly is world class then they should be as rare as unicorns. To let a world-class team explode over just because they had a bad idea is silly if 50K would keep them going until they came up with a good idea.

I don’t think the team at Homejoy was world class, but I also didn’t back them. We have to assume that the VCs that did back them thought they were a world class team or else they would not have given them the money they did.

I am more lenient towards delusional founders (especially young ones) than delusional VCs. The team at Homejoy would have done very little damage if they had not been backed.

Re: Pondering Homejoy’s Failure

#37

Post by danieltillett »

nostrademons wrote: post #29
danieltillett wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to be a VC. Someone gives you 100s of millions dollars which you don’t have to give back for 10 years and which you can spend on whatever crazy ideas you like. Just follow the herd and no one will blame you if you lose the lot and if the herd is right you make out like a bandit. It is a game of heads you lose, tails I win.

I'm pretty sure I'd hate it. (I had the opportunity a few years back but turned it down because it wasn't the right time to leave Google. Also, my wife is an institutional investor, but in philanthropy and not tech.) Some of the downsides: Your life is consumed by pitch meetings, and you have to say no to the vast majority of them. You have to constantly be out hustling for deal flow. If you miss the wrong startup, y…

This sounds like hard work - I think I might just have to keep running my own business :)

Out of curiosity why can’t anyone know that you built something? Do you mean for your own company, or you can’t help your portfolio companies build things?

Re: Pondering Homejoy’s Failure

#38

Post by luluki »

A couple things stood out to me about Homejoy: -When seeing the founder Adora speak at YC female founders day, she talked about doing cleaning herself to learn how things worked, and something along the lines of it being embarrassing if she'd been "seen" by someone she knew. That underlined to me there wasn't really a respect for cleaners. It seemed strange to start a business where you think it's embarrassing to be one of your own staff. -When I did order Homejoy, the cleaner was sooo bad/slow that I felt that they'd secretly sent me one of their engineers who'd never cleaned an apartment before. He just seemed lost. He spent an hour and 45 minutes just cleaning my bathroom which was really strange. When he left, I realized that he'd moved the plunger out of the bathroom and left it on the bedroom floor and I had to move it back! It was just weird, an experienced cleaner wouldn't move a plunger into a clean area and just leave it there! I wrote a long email to them about the experience and they offered to send someone back to finish up the clean - of course I'd finished cleaning myself by then and said I wasn't interested. I didn't feel they really took my feedback to heart - it was detailed an took a while to write, but they didn't respond to any part of it directly.

Re: Pondering Homejoy’s Failure

#40

Post by notjoedimaggio »

leothekim wrote: post #7

This epitomizes the arrogance and drowning self-absorbedness of Bay Area startups. And it does it in a Medium post. And wow, there are some real gems in this post. For example: "Customer interactions happen inside of their homes (anything that went wrong was grossly amplified)" What did you expect? THIS IS WHAT YOU WERE SELLING. "Client expectations vary wildly" Yup, different people like different things. News at 11…

Wow, this comment has a lot of anger towards someone just doing a post-mortem of the lessons they learned.

It illustrates something that I don't understand. Why do you care so much that you significantly affect the tone on this HN discussion? You bring up some excellent points, but your tone completely changes how your comment is perceived, and detracts from your contributions.

I am now going to take my own advice -- when you perceive someone else's words as so obnoxious that you cannot help but respond -- and ditch my HN account and re-add it to my blocklist.

Thank you for providing me with the impetus to regain hours of my day.

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