Jay Reno welcome to the podcast thank you for having me so you are the founder and CEO of feather which was in the summer 17 batch and feather is a furniture subscription service so at the core of it is this idea that people don't want to own things anymore how did
you come to that conclusion and why does it motivate your business yeah high level I think I saw three things happening in my life the first was I had moved seven times in the nine years I've lived in New York City and that's just above average
actually that's okay not too far out of the ordinary and each time I've moved I've had a completely different life situation so I've lived with roommates I've lived with a significant other I then moved back in with one roommate then I lived with two roommates then by
myself then with a significant other and then by myself okay and at each phase of my life I've had completely different needs in my apartment so you know the space changes the layout of the space changes place to place the needs of the
furniture needs in that space change dramatically so for example one roommate might have had this sofa we needed but not a coffee table I you know he didn't have a bed for me so I'd bring them bed and mattress etc then when I moved to
the next place that stuff might not have fit physically or stylistically in the next space so it might have been like a modern apartment the first time then I moved into a pre-war building in Brooklyn and at each phase you have completely different needs and and so
one I realized that moving is a pain it's just you know we've all experienced yes so many different times and to the stuff that you have doesn't necessarily fit physically or stylistically in your next space for all the different reasons
couple that with basically there being a massive problem of furniture waste in the u.s. so what people are doing to solve this problem today is buying you know IKEA Wayfair what you might consider a disposable furniture that can be assembled once and set up
once in someone's home and doesn't really transport very well it's not meant to be disassembled or moved and so all of that stuff might not fit in your next space so you have to throw it out and then go buy new things then you move and you throw those things out and go
buy new things to fit your foot to fit your space your life so I got my master's degree in climate and environmental science that care deeply about some of these big world problems especially as they relate to the environment the built world and realized
that I think there's a there's a big opportunity to solve a couple massive problems the third piece that's kind of interesting is there's a cultural shift happening like you mentioned the way from ownership of stuff mhm and high level where you see that going is and
when you see that taking shape is in the American dream changing so sounds like such a big lofty thing yeah and maybe it is but our parents generation cared about getting a house and cars and having a white picket fence with things
in their life settling down and our generation cares about totally different things we actually aspire to have something very different which is freedom and flexibility mm-hmm and freedom and flexibility allows you to experience the world it allows you to
maybe be bicoastal or just lean into whatever feels right for you at a given time maybe that's a job maybe that's a hobby or where you live what you're doing and and yeah we just we value something totally different so that
shift happening yeah culture yeah but yeah there's other problems just what would you attribute that to just the dollar not going as far in people being like you know maybe I can't buy a house ever or maybe you know I'm gonna push it back
from like age 30 to age 45 or something is that like a main factor like what what drew that change out in the world yeah I don't I don't think that's a main factor I think that's that's a secondary factor and you're seeing that happen you're seeing costs of debt rising
you're seeing you have greater student debt yeah people are unable to you know buy and own lots of things maybe because they're not as careful with their money or they're not saving etc or you know in the front end you may not have been
given much money but your family or anything like that so that's certainly a an issue we consider that accessibility so feather does give people access to items that they may not otherwise would have purchased instead would have maybe purchased something disposable that's
cheaper right but the reality is most people are using feather and companies like us whether it's you know Rent the Runway or uber lyft or Spotify etc because they they don't necessarily want to own things and have things tying them
to a physical space yeah I found that I found that really interesting because I was listening to a podcast with you that you've done a couple years ago and you were talking about the fundraising process and you're basically you're talking to people at VC funds who
definitely have the means to like buy something from you no not crazy expensive but like West Elm yeah and they were still buying IKEA garbage yeah and so what did the prototype look like for feather did you just like sell to your friends like how did you ultimately
figure out that this was the product yeah you know we started as a rental business okay so the prototype was hey ownership is the problem today everyone buys their furniture and owns it and that creates a lot of waste because they
have to be fully responsible for their thing so they end up buying things and throwing them out and on the cheap end that's I guess kind of what you what you end up doing yeah someone like a you know using VCS as an example you know they've got you
know even you know analysts associates principals they've got pretty decent salaries and like you said like they'll still choose to yeah purchase the disposable thing and a lot of people do this and the reason is is because it's flexible and it's convenient yeah
that is what feather solves today and so the prototype that we created was okay let's get let's create a simple solve an MVP that allows us to say would people prefer to subscribe to or rent things rather than buying them upfront and
owning them and throwing them out so I built that yeah by myself just at my apartment and and just tested it yeah they're friends okay so walk me through what it actually is because people are so curious they ask us about this all the time like what can my MVP look like
how do I really test out an idea is a forum for like one type of couch like what was it actually yeah for this to work you you kind of need to have a little bit of merchandising you need to have a little bit of a visual aesthetic and appeal to see what
furniture is with the prices etc yeah thought maybe a spreadsheet would work and that just not don't work okay but there are templates that exist to create web shops there are a few if not many companies that do this I used Shopify you know I was paying $89
a month I think it was for what was then like a premium plan yeah so it's not that much money on the face of it and ended up I have a bit of a background as a product manager so I found a a very inexpensive engineer who was living in India and she you know
she was being paid maybe 16 or $18 an hour all-in to just build the MVP I decided that I felt comfortable investing up to like two or three thousand dollars but it was of my own personal money yeah so I said great you know this could go nowhere I'm just gonna build that myself
in the confines of my home and and that's how much it took to create it how much money did you make off of that MVP it's really interesting I I had it running as a side project while I was working my full-time job and just sent out a blast to friends on Facebook to
see if anyone gave a and it turns out some people did and the first two orders were friends the third order was a friend of a friend okay the fourth order was a friend of a friend and I was like interesting yeah okay that you know
sample size of the four doesn't give me all of the confidence but certainly gives me some confidence that people who I have no idea about I don't know yeah are actually using this thing and how many products did you have ooh and we had enough maybe we had four or five
items per product category on the website okay so as an MVP as well the best way to test this hypothesis was to have the right selection of enough items so it's not just one dead one chair one yeah one mattress etc yeah but to have
just enough so that you can actually accurately test whether people care because that's ultimately what it needs to look like and what I did was I put items on the site from a retailer who could ship me things just in time effectively so when a customer would go
on our site they would place an order for an item or multiple items yeah for their home and I would then in turn say okay great they're committing to this furniture for 12 months or whatever it was okay I'm gonna go buy it myself and deliver it
myself and they're going to I'm gonna own all this furniture yeah front and I felt comfortable doing that rather than stockpiling everything up front and assuming that it was all gonna go well okay and so your model was based around
the furniture earning itself out after one year yeah okay in their early days was there any margin you built in in the first year no okay it was it was I mean you know I wasn't paying myself so there was no delivery expense or assembly expense but I went
and had one other person go with me who I'd usually find on TaskRabbit who would have the truck yes I also didn't have the truck so I really lived a couch upstairs and also deliver it for me yeah with me now I'll be your helper yeah
so I did that for the first number of orders okay um it was at that time that I realized it's important to kind of get feedback from the industry as well not just consumers as to whether the industry whose by definition been in the industry thinks this is a good idea or
not well yeah coz to be clear I wasn't aware of this but listening to podcast with you furniture rental is not new yeah yeah okay so what's the history of that market yeah so furniture rental companies are not new you have a few legacy companies
that exist yeah I've been around for 40 years like court for example they're in all 50 states you can get furniture rented and delivered to your home one the furniture is not for our demographic for people between going to college and buying a home in urban
environments it's meant more for corporate relocation it's super old and Steely looking it's like meeting like really high end or just like nod the aesthetic or all high-end they have a range of prices but yeah the aesthetic is not appealing the brand is just not
appealing to the demographic yeah at all the UX is very different it's very hard to pay them separate conversation okay anyway yeah so this this rental market does exist yeah but we came out and said they're not addressing the massive
opportunity which are people who are currently buying furniture thinking they want to buy furniture but in fact what they actually want is the flexibility to be able to subscribe to furniture mm-hmm and subscriptions it's somewhere between rental which is
implying short-term rental and implying you're gonna return it mm-hmm and purchasing the items which is full commitment you own it it's yours and it's your responsibility yeah we should talk about that nuance which is super interesting because when you when you
went through YC it was rent feather calm yeah and now it's live feather calm so it's like from the outside somewhat subtle but can you like go through that thought process and then how it actually affected your bottom line as a company yeah so we were rent
feather at the beginning because we assumed that rental was the correct solution yeah that ownership was the biggest problem which in fact is true that people don't necessarily want to commit upfront yeah but it's not that they should never own
something it's that you shouldn't commit upfront yeah you shouldn't commit to ownership today because you don't know what's gonna happen in your constantly changing life you know you just moved to New York yep you are in a relationship yep anything could happen I mean I am
NOT gonna would that that goes quite well for you yeah and you might think that this apartment is perfect for you guys for the next year two years five years mmm you may hate the neighborhood though and move to a different neighborhood because
you like this new neighborhood and so you're gonna have to move so point being committing to ownership of things upfront is what is what we're really addressing we're saying instead of committing just pay monthly have access to it your your monthly payments on your
furniture go towards owning the items you never pay more than the retail price of that item mm-hmm but if you don't want to own it you can return it at any point so if the evolution of the company went from rental definitely don't own it's wrong
to own too hey why don't you want to just make the choice later and so we evolved the the way we communicate that to people from a rental company to a subscription right so you kind of just defer the choice yeah and so how did that become obvious
to you down the line were you doing like customer interviews like how'd you figure that out yeah I mean you have to talk to people you have to look them in the eye it's it's it's not enough typically to just do user interviews over the phone video is helpful you can
meet people in person or like I did do the deliveries yeah and see the people who are using your product see the living situation they're in and see the furniture that they're choosing you get a lot more so that just going there asking a couple questions
them not necessarily knowing that I was the founder of the company yeah was quite valuable okay interesting yeah cuz I always figured it was them I mean because I met you right before you did your interview right and I always
figured that furniture was an expression of self and it doesn't seem to be for a lot of I mean some elements are but like can you just walk me through how you realize that cuz I figured yeah that was like core to someone's apartment in
their life you know what you might you might think that and to some degree this style of the thing is but not necessarily the caller yeah so furniture the overland majority of people purchase furniture and the overall majority of people purchase colors that will go well
with the pops of color that they have in their art and their rugs and their pillows and their the things that they got on their trip to Africa right or wherever they traveled and got a really cool thing yeah or from the store down the street
and so the furniture is like it's an expression of you it needs to be comfortable first and foremost it needs to fit whatever the aesthetic is of your of your place and of your own personality yeah so some people like you know modern and some people like
mid-century modern and they're quite different in aesthetic and it says a little bit about a person but aside from that you don't actually really need to have so many different colors and shapes and textures where that comes through is in that the little
accessories and all like yeah it was just really surprising to me because I've you know I browser said like two years ago and then a browser this morning it's like oh this is very different yeah but also not like it's not like infinite choice it's actually
like told fairly curated totally and so it's not all that different from your like MVP just a much more legit back-end it's like there's a lot in the backend yeah yeah yeah so that's like there's something I want to talk about - so
you're in multiple markets and you're also dealing with physical products what is it would have been the key takeaways scaling something where you're delivering real things to people like there's two important points to mention first is you have to respect logistics
and respect operationally intensive businesses and you know I think there's been a lot of venture backed companies that have very that have very high demand that should exist today but they may be ran too quickly mm-hmm and didn't
necessarily respect the logistics or yeah or the complexity of building and operational intensive business and in order to do this effectively you just you just need to step back and respect it I think the other the other point is for a for a business that relies on
software on people on unique inventory management systems on a complex reverse logistics process you have to heavily rely on software it's fundamentally a data problem that we're solving on the backend in the software that we've created over the last few years allows
us to effectively deliver furniture to people's homes you know I think from the outside you can look at a company like in saying hey well I mean in the early days didn't you and your TaskRabbit just throw the furniture in the back of a
truck and delivered to people's houses and yes that's true but those are probably negative margins those are negative margins those are a proof of concept those were yeah we weren't optimizing our routes efficiently we didn't know how much revenue each
product had had generated we didn't know which product categories were doing well or not doing well yeah we didn't have the ability to have route optimization already actually yeah there's just so much that that you need to build on the
back and so how much of your your stack at this point like several years in is yours versus third parties almost all of it is ours really okay yeah it doesn't the the the software that our business needs doesn't exist off the shelf it's
like like Shopify did and as the front end template like this furniture company did to help me get the thing off and in does that go all the way down like for instance like warehouse yours truck scores all the way down employees full-time employees delivering furniture
almost all yes okay now how many markets are you in we're in three okay so new york SF and LA no okay why not just dominating New York first good question I think I was so I got into I see I was just me yet a company we flew out to San
Francisco we hired our first employee and who stayed in New York and then I said you know what I'm in San Francisco there's a big opportunity to service a lot of the people who are NYC and they'll be a very good use case for us to test and learn that is just there
right off the bat so why not effectively open that market with very low overhead so I did that you know it was a I think it was a good move ultimately we've learned a whole lot and it's a market that's that does very well for us so yeah so just try well because
like with an Operations heavy business I think you could make an argument for the other side quite easily right like we scale too fast we want to own the whole stack we up yeah and like went to San Francisco yeah and it was total mistake so in terms of learnings for you
guys how similar are these markets that's a great so we this was two years ago yeah I flew to San Francisco with my suitcase yeah go to I see and had nobody on the ground there and decided to open that market effectively with no one on
the ground there fast forward to today two years later we've only launched one more market to your point it's there's one plenty of room to scale within the markets that were in - it's a logistical II complex business and we wanted to make sure that we had that honed in in
the markets that we were in mm-hmm and we also felt it was really important for us to launch in new market so that we could effectively have a new market playbook that we had been testing and iterating over time and then launching
and so now that we're in three markets launch we launched LA back in May um it we have we have a very healthy playbook for growth okay so now you've raised a bunch of money you've scaled so companying a pretty substantial size for other founders who are doing an
Operations heavy business how would you order the employees that you hire depends on who you are and what you're good at look I think is really the first place to start okay so for me I know I'm good at selling I'm good at operations I'm good at building I'm good at
understanding the customer and I'm good at product early on we brought on someone to our team who was a very good balance to me didn't know it at the time but but then this person sprouted into becoming the CEO of the company quite quickly after
bringing them on in a very different role and knowing that this person was just incredible the things that I was less incredible that it was a very important place for me to put this person I I was also a solo founder yeah so I wasn't able to you know create the
perfect founding team with you know the best like you know all the all the things I don't have yeah it was just me in the early days now I brought on some amazing and talented people in the early days are now CTO who joined me out in
San Francisco for the summer and I needed somebody to help build and iterate on the product that I had very terribly put together with my my engineer overseas but arguably that's not the most important part of your business especially in the early days
right I would agree okay yeah but all the back-end infrastructure to power the company was incredibly important as you get start getting to even a moderate level of scale and complexity in this business which gets more complex every single
month yeah you need very critical pieces of software in place to make all that happen yeah totally so what else has been I don't know how else but it like unexpected as you've scaled this company like you said you really like product
yet now you're managing all these people yeah how's that going yeah yeah I think I think there's a there's a balance of having to continue to learn on the job all the things that you were not necessarily good at or things you didn't even know at all to get better at those
things while also leaning into the place that you are most comfortable and do the best work it's it's easier said than done yeah you're getting old from both ends so my role now has it is still somewhat like difficult to understand a lot of
what I do is I'm sort of like the snow plow out in front of a line of cars getting all the snow off the road and saying okay cool this is a good path let's let's go down this path okay while also having to look back and be like alright let me work with all of our team
leads Department leads to help answer questions and provide vision based on what I've seen out in front two totally different skill sets yeah but you you either have to lean into both of them and get really good at both of them and continue doing both of them or at some
point pass the baton on to somebody who can do one or the other more effectively because you just have an infinite okay and a finite number of hours in the day but how is that it I guess one of the most curious about is like how does that
make you feel as a founder you know who's someone who's like you've worked on startups before before feather like you've been on small teams like hacking stuff together obviously you hacked the beginnings of feather together yeah like you know what does feel like to have you
know this thing that you wanted to exist like you will it into the world and then it completely changes in terms of what you actually do to today what's that experience been like for you yeah I mean I've loved every minute of it I've loved
the first two years of just grinding and growing the company and I think the first couple years of a start-up is all about heart mission dedication and grit and intensity mhm and once you start to hit product market fit you have to and
yours the company is starting to scale you really need to start focusing on process on improvements in the way you lead and provements in the way you do everything and you know there are more things happening on your team that need addressing you don't know what's going
on at the company so you need to be a bit more structured in how your meeting with team leads and providing them value and also giving opinions and so yeah it's we're writing out a very interesting shift in that in that in that trajectory of the company where
we're sort of building process for scale while also like shedding all of the heart the the like just grit and get it done until it's done right ality yeah kind of that like shitty buggy code that you write in the beginning you get it
done no it has to be functional and worked well yeah interesting ok so in terms of scaling the company management wise has any advice or any learnings you've picked up along the way I've been completely counterintuitive that you
would be willing to share yeah I mean at least in there earlier it is you know it's really important to focus or to be very focused on a particular thing and drive towards whatever that goal is mm-hmm but at the same time in the early days you need to be seeding as many
opportunities as possible so that you can hope that one of those 10-20-30 seeds you put out into the world or a few of those 10-20-30 seeds you put out into the world will sprout and become an opportunity so for example when it was
just me prior to getting to Y Combinator I I wanted to like as mentioned earlier can meet with some people in the industry to get their take on this as an opportunity and I ended up cold emailing the CEO of West Elm it's one of the people he got back to me right away it
was like oh this is fantastic I love this do you want to come in and meet I was like whoa yeah great yeah and after two meetings with him he said this is incredible we'd love to partner with you I don't know you know how many millions in
revenue you guys are doing or how many people you have in your team I was yeah yeah no word but you were great weird it's going real well we probably had you know ten orders at the time yeah but because I planted all of those seeds it got me into the position where I was
able to get feedback from the industry that said yes this is a good opportunity feedback from customers that said yes is a good opportunity yeah the day I left the West Elm meeting I said okay now is the point where I believe that this come
I had conviction I believe this company could exist should exist and I really want to pursue this so I went online and I looked at applications to various startup accelerators and the first one I went to was Y Combinator and as it turns out the deadline was that day not
kidding and I took that as a sign to sit down at a cafe I was actually at a pizza shop and as tremendously sick and fire out an application but it wouldn't it wasn't it wasn't it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't spread a bunch of
seeds in different places that could randomly turn into opportunities or luck that I could then grab on to and continue going so just to be specific there because I think that's potentially dangerous advice like it is counterintuitive advice but I just want
you to clarify it like how much energy did you put into planting each of those seeds because I know a lot of people like half-ass dirty things and do nothing because they have fast all that stuff so you have to be focused on what you're
seeding so you have to be clear and understand what the intention is there they should be very high risk but high reward okay and assume that like a seed investor for example you know you know only one or two of the two we'll ever even come to fruition and if
they do then magic right and so if you see all of those different things with some of your time not all of your time yep to be clear it's it can it can produce something very magical in the form of opportunities or or luck yeah well I think what's cool about feather
is like it's basically the product you imagined in the beginning is basically this is it yeah yeah with tweaks along the way yeah getting to know people understanding what resonates with them you know how to how to message people and what they truly care about mm-hmm
but largely it is very similar to the way we conceived of it you know and in terms of interacting with industry in the beginning I think that's also counterintuitive I know a lot of people who would advise you can probably not do that because they're gonna say no to you
did you get a lot of nose or did you like have to learn to tweak your pitch to get them to say yes like how did how did that process go down just a bunch of non responses which is very typical and then most of the people I talked to
really thought it was a great idea hmm which you know you normally hear that like people don't really get the best ideas so but it seems to be working and people are very happy with it and were you concerned that people were gonna try
and copy you immediately like Oh west domes gonna grab it and like do that not at all okay no I mean understanding the level of complexity of our business yeah and how different it is from everything that exists in the market your software needs the delivery and last-mile
logistics needs that you'd need to operate this business at scale you know I never never felt worried that a big company would copy us and to this day no large company has even remotely copied us only only small upstarts people who
saw us and decided to do yeah same deal yeah okay so it is now August we're about to have demo day next week yeah it's super exciting you're going I am going I will be there I'm flying out in a couple days so for the founders in the batch I know it's a
tough transition to go from this like really cool group dynamic tons of pressure like with your peers a clear goal in sight they're gonna raise money most of them what is your advice to the founders who you know raise money it all like you
know a month from now demo day is over and then they're just kind of on their own like how do you prepare yourself for that totally you know I think especially within the first year after YC you should keep that exact same mentality going which is set weekly goals maybe
monthly goals we set weekly goals and made sure we stuck to those weekly goals at all costs that showed growth of business that showed that this was a clear opportunity and if we weren't hitting our goal we we as in our CTO and
I would stop what we were doing and go figure out how we're gonna head our seven percent a week over a week growth goal mm-hmm and every single week but one summer we hit it it'd be like at the expense of building the software to power the business but it proved that
there was latent demand and that we were able to go find it so post YC immediately posted YC definitely reset it's it's it's a little like coming down from a high I think where you're at demo day and there's so many people there and they're all there to see you and all of
your batch mates and there's just so much buzz and then imagine you raised the seed round that you were looking for and you're off to the races maybe you're in San Francisco or like us we flew back to New York and then there was a calm after the storm
you know we sat there you're like all right okay well the energy is what it is in our office it's just us you there's no longer this nurturing support system around us or in the real world coincidentally I actually gave my graduation speech on this on on entering
the real world and how different it is from being in the like support system and it's like actually the same thing as college except like a like a condensed college like condensed Startup College yeah get some money yeah it's the opposite of college
it's like Lanza way better than College yeah and and that first month was I didn't feel the blues a little bit even though you might have you know we raised three three and a half million dollars of funding from great investors and had
tons of support it's just a little felt a little slow or quiet yeah take that time to just reflect and reset and set your strategy for your next six months year that's my best advice it's awesome all right man thanks so much yeah you bet thanks for having me you