I used HomeJoy once, a student showed up and said "Wow your house looks pretty clean already, I'm not sure what I would even do". My apartment was tidy, but it wasn't clean (at least by my standards)
This actually highlights a big problem we had - aligning expectations of what "clean" meant between a customer and cleaner. Everyone has a different definition!
If someone is in a situation where they really don't have anything else to do on Christmas, ok. But hard to imagine they don't have some friends or family missing them...
She railroaded our YC interview for having a similar model (albeit in a different vertical) simply because she failed, so naturally we would also fail. Aaron Harris, another failed entrepreneur turned YC partner, has routinely done the same I've heard.
We're now 2 years later pushing $2M ARR profitably and about to raise our Series A. YC not taking 7% of our company was the best thing that ever happened to us.
YCombinator is nothing like what it used to be. The majority of the partners are useless as venture partners.
There's a phenomenon I've noticed in job interviews where the interviewer will in a sense torture the interviewee if it's a domain that the interviewer has expertise in, asking needlessly complex questions as if to grandstand and show off. It becomes theatrical and I can only attribute that to some level of sadism- or narcissism-like traits. I am not impugning Adora's motives here just commenting on my own experience.
I had an interviewer do that once, and it was clearly just to show that he knew more obscure technical info that I did, even though it was at a much lower level than was required for the job. The other interviewer even sighed and rolled their eyes at him, so I'm guessing it isn't the first time he'd done it.
Can anecdotally confirm this when I've been on the interviewer side, alongside coworkers who I am/was also close friends with. I'd agree with you on the traits.
I always felt really gross afterwards because I felt like the interviewee was wronged, but it just wasn't worth the potential conflict with my coworkers/friends if I did anything about it, either during or after. Walking on eggshells and all that.
Seems like we made a mistake, and congratulations on your success!
If you're open to it, I'd love if you could email me the name of your company (jared@ycombinator.com). We are extremely interested in learning from mistakes like this.
It's true if you have a capital-intensive business, I will ask some of the toughest questions. I do this to figure out where you are in your journey of learning, not to find reasons to not accept you. In fact, we all take super-extra precaution to not over-learn from our own failures.
And to be clear, I've invested in plenty of startups with similar models. But I understand your perception of how things went.
I don't like the phrase too much but short answer is intellectual honesty. For example, understanding what went wrong that was probably because of your decisions versus the market, customers, external forces, etc.
There are far too many examples of founders succeeding with an idea after many people before them failed with same idea. I think any good investor is cognizant of this.
In my interview with her for my B2B startup, she said (paraphrasing) "I never had this problem when running Homejoy, so why would others? I don't get it." Years later, our problem space continues growing like crazy.
That’s just what happens when worthwhile initiatives get too big and bloated. I’m sure there was a sweet spot YC was in years ago but I guess it’s no longer that.
I understand there's probably a desire to stay at least pseudo-anonymous, given that your account was created 42 minutes ago as of this posting, but I'd like to hear more of this story. Feel free to post here or contact me directly via the info in my profile.
While seemingly harsh criticism, I think you may be right. YC of the old (PG, Jessica, etc) was much more selective and smaller inner circle. However, even when PG was at the helm he said they passed on many insanely lucrative opportunities.
Picking startups is hard, like picking stocks. You aren’t gonna pick every winner, but frankly 2M in ARR after two years is not exactly a home-run for YC. So, perhaps them passing was the right call for YC.
Congrats though, sounds like you’ve built something useful and you can be proud of that. Plus, taking VC money ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. If you can bootstrap to get to a level that pay’s yourself $200-300k a year, that’s a win.
> frankly 2M in ARR after two years is not exactly a home-run for YC
It's been awhile since I looked at this deeply, but I thought the path of a good startup is to raise a seed with an 18 month runway, grow to 1m ARR, and then raise a series A. Assuming that's true, growing to 2m ARR in 2 years is in the ballpark.
$2M ARR is such a small part of the story though. You really have to look at things like cost of acquisition, churn, gross profit, along with understanding the market itself. Certain markets can be easy to create quick ARR either through enormous CAC spends and/or large amounts of churn, all of which means poor long term growth potential.
> The weird tale begins with an email that John Salzarulo received Tuesday afternoon. A Los Angeles based user, Salzarulo received an email from Cheung that "$20 cleaning is back!" thanks to its local partner.
> "I wanted to reach out personally today to invite you to join a private house cleaning trial with our Los Angeles partner, Fly Maids," Cheung wrote, not disclosing his connection to the company.
> When Salzarulo clicked the email link, the Fly Maids' site logged him into his Homejoy account, which still had his credit card number and notes about where to find the trash can.
I don't know if it's illegal, but I definitely think it's unethical.
Thank you for finding that! This opens up a fascinating discussion about ethics.
So, to start from a purely capitalistic viewpoint, it seems like you are free to use your property that you own however you wish, subject to the law. That raises questions like: in this situation, is it legal for the CC numbers to be stored in that way? From the customer’s POV, they authorized HomeJoy to store their CC info, not Fly Maids. But that leads to the question of: those CC numbers are stored somewhere (or the authorization token) and those assets were a part of the sale.
I don’t know. It’s a massive advantage to have your customers in a position of “just click this button to give us money” rather than pestering for CC details.
It’s a little odd, to be sure, but... it seems like unless it’s illegal, it might not be unethical to take advantage of that opportunity. It depends how you feel about capitalism, I suppose. If there was nothing illegal here, which seems perhaps likely, then it seems valid.
From another point of view, it sounds like he was just trying very hard to succeed, and in some sense Fly Maids was the continuation of his previous endeavor. So I sort of understand why it might have felt natural to reach out to the customers you were already doing business with.
But again, all of this has two important assumptions: (a) he legally owned all assets, and (b) used those assets to the letter of the law. If those are mistaken then someone with more experience should definitely call it out.
"When we contacted customers, we didn’t tell them we were Homejoy relaunching because we wanted to gauge reception to our new model without the influence of Homejoy’s brand," Cheung allegedly wrote. "As a result, we scared many customers, who expected the worst had happened to their data. We should have told customers upfront who we were, what we were testing, and used original content."
I dunno. This seems pretty reasonable, honestly. It kind of alarms me that you see this as clearly unethical, because I could see myself making this same mistake, in a different life. If you feel like explaining more of the reasoning regarding the ethics, I’d personally find it interesting to listen.
Not everything is an asset. You do not legally own the credit card numbers. At most you own the right to use them to fulfill a contract. Just like if I share my screen with an IT support company that does not give them the right to suddenly transfer my screen to an advertising company, except if I have been explicitly told that would happen (and no, terms and conditions are not enough for that, because it is way out of the expected behavior of the contract, just like having terms that make the user pay a billion dollar on each visit would not make it work either).
If card data isn’t property the way that customer data is, and isn’t transferable during an acquisition, then it’s hard to see how Fly Maid wasn’t in violation of the law here.
It seems like this should be readily answerable: in the event of an aquisition, does the acquirer have the legal right to use the card authorization token from the customers of the acquired startup? Note that Fly Maid did not charge them without their consent; they merely made the option available without them having to enter any CC info.
The reason I’m pressing this is because we’re talking about a YC alum + illegal behavior, which to my knowledge might even be a first.
Hopefully a lawyer might chime in with clarification. If Fly Maid was not authorized to utilize any of HomeJoy customers’ CC info during the course of business, regardless of acquisition, then this seems pretty clear cut.
I used to work alongside Adora at YC and she works super hard for the startups she is working with and is very helpful — totally justified for her to be there.
In the hedge fund world there is a mindset that if you're going to fail, you must fail BIG (without breaking the law). Then you get a sort of undeserved glamor associated with the failure that can actually lead to new opportunities. For example, the case of Brian Hunter, if he failed small he would've been long forgotten.
I think it's a pretty universal phenomenon. You want to be either outstandingly good (best outcome) or extremely offensive (second best outcome). Just don't be another drone that is indistinguishable from the million of other drones, that only leads to being forgotten.
The person who was accused of "stealing customer data" was the other co-founder - not Adora (CEO & now YC partner).
If you actually look into the details of the matter, what happened was that the co-founder acquired the failed company as it was put through a bankruptcy process.
People who weren't privy to the process thought it was stealing when it really wasn't different from any other acquisition.
How can you say all that and not mention the fact that they are sibling? You make it sound like 2 separate person that have no relationship to each other. It looks like you have something to hide by just ignoring that big fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homejoy
Don't you think it's possible that the person you're responding to has a different understanding of what a sibling relationship means? I think it's a little rude to inject your feelings about what a sibling relationship must be and resort to innuendo.
A 3rd party called Sherwood was brought on to wind down the company. This is common thing for a company to do when there are lots of assets to sell and loose ends to tie up. Everything from office furniture to domains to etc. They made all the decisions to sell what to who.
If anyone wants a startup idea, it's to make the inverse of Stripe Atlas. Closing down a company properly is a very long and complicated process.
This account doesn’t explain why your brother proceeded to misappropriated the startups database, and then terminated the rebranded startup once the wrongdoing was uncovered.
I'm skeptical a neutral 3rd-party would advocate selling credit card data to a person planning an illegal scheme. Especially when that person is your own brother.
i dont know Adora and i'm sure she has useful things to teach people. however i really wonder if this clouds every interaction with people going through YC. it's kind of the huge elephant in the room.
It's clearly not a very complete list. I wish they had presented a more complete list, filterable by funding round, amount raised, year founded, year shut down, and maybe one or 2 other things.
$66m raised, bad operations, bas unit economics, lawsuits and an abrupt shutdown.
All of that after being the calley darling for so long.