John Andrew Entwistle - Founder & CEO of Wander

Welcome back to the Casey Adams Show. Today I am joined by John Andrew Entwistle, the founder and CEO of Wander. Thanks so much for coming on the show, John.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Of course. You know, I, I'm so blown away by what you've built and as I said before we jumped on this podman, congratulations on everything. You guys are revolutionizing the, the short term, short term rental market and how you like to say, vertically integrating the entire experience. But for people that may not know what Wander is, I'd you to give a high overview of what it is you're building just so that people understand.

Yeah, absolutely. So you can kind of think about. Wander is basically the Apple of vacation rentals. Now obviously that's like a big statement. So not trying to compare us to Apple as a 18 month old company, but really trying to sort of allow people to think about the integration part of it. So how Apple owns the Apple or the, the hardware and the software, Wander does the same, except with homes. So unlike other short term rental platforms like various OTAs like Airbnb or VRBO for example, where they're a marketplace and you kind of get put into any home when you go and download Wander, all of the homes on the platform are owned and operated by us. And that lets us do a lot of really cool things like turning on and off the lights with your phone or accessing the Tesla in the garage or controlling your eight sleep or whatever that looks like. And so all the homes are consistent quality and experience and really unified under this one vertical strategy.

I love that. It's literally music to my ears. I remember as I said before when I first saw and downloaded the app, just seeing you have the Tesla in the garage, you have all these new appliances or mattress like eight sleep, which I actually have and love, it's so cool. And I want to ask you, your startup's 18 months old, I know you guys just raised $100 million late last year. What has been some of the responses since inception? Because I know from what I see online, from the experience that I've had, not as a user yet, I'm planning to book something here in the near future. But what is the response been and how have you guys grown so quickly in terms of the brand and then the opportunity to really capitalize on the market when it comes to a fundraise. Like $100 million.

Yeah. So that $100 million round was actually a debt round from Credit Suisse. So that's really around going and purchasing the actual properties which obviously is an incredible amount of work, as you would imagine, kind of creating a facility that large with such a really established institutional bank. And then we've raised about $32 million to date of venture capital as well. So definitely very well capitalized, which is, which is great, especially going into this market. For us, the reaction has been really strong, especially on the customer side. We've held about a 93% customer satisfaction score over the last however many months since we launched, which is really unheard of in the hospitality space. Now, of course, we don't take that for granted because you kind of take your eye off the ball and it can slip pretty quickly. So we try and stay very focused on that. And then from the investor side and really the market opportunity, I think people see the short term rental space and the institutionalization of it in a very similar way to single family rental. And how from 2012 to today you saw that asset category really suck up a ton of capital and really institutionalize and turn into this great asset. And they think that that same thing is going to end up happening with short term rentals. And so I would say that that's really the thing that's most exciting to investors is this idea of taking this asset category, becoming a professional operator, institutionalizing it while creating a really customer first and customer focused company and brand around that idea. And so, you know, for us, obviously it's all about the customer and the experience and that sort of side. But I would say from the investor perspective, that's really the most interesting angle, is sort of attacking a short term rental space with this quality first and customer first approach.

I love that. And before we dive too deep into the, I have so many questions I want to ask you, but I want to get into the conversation of why Wander and why now? Because I know you were a previous founder, co founder of a company called Coder, which I'd love to get some context on. And then now you've been running Wander for the past 18 months. What has your entrepreneurial journey consisted of and how did it lead to starting wonder?

Yeah, so my journey is pretty atypical. I started my first company when I was 13, this little game server company which ended up doing pretty well, low six figures. People always ask me, were you a good student with that? And the answer is I did not spend much time focused on my homework, as you can imagine. And then yeah, really from there my journey got even more odd. I ended up enrolling in high school online. And so that gave me a ton of time to build These little companies and also travel somewhere in between. I ended up racing formula cars and otherwise. No way. Yeah, so I had a lot of fun doing that. And then out of high school, I started a company called Coder, obviously, which you mentioned, with my co founders, Kyle and Amar. Basically what that company does is move the development environment where a software engineer writes code to an organization's cloud infrastructure. So we really started it with this vision that it was inevitable that development was going to move to the cloud and not stay on an engineer's local machine, which was a very controversial view at the time. And so we started that company, moved down to Austin to start that, ended up raising about $45 million in total from a bunch of really incredible venture capitalists, which was quite the journey as well. I have a lot of stories being that 17, 18 year old kid in Google Ventures or Sequoia's office.

And just I was going to ask you, so how old were you when you started Coder with your co founders?

Yeah, so we officially started it right as I turned 18.

Wow.

And did you guys, did you guys.

Have a technical background? I'm just curious because you're talking about cloud infrastructure and all these things. You're 17, 18 years old. Did you and your co founders have a technical background or how did.

Amar and Kyle are probably the best engineers that I've really ever met and had the pleasure of working with. You know, just, just incredibly, incredibly intelligent, thoughtful about the future, really, really great leaders, and also like my best buddies at the time. And so yeah, it was a, it was a hell of a journey and obviously an incredible learning experience for all of us. Right. I mean, it wasn't just a, like creating a website, for example. It's like we're orchestrating compute for like thousands of engineers and, and all this stuff. It's not a, it wasn't an easy, easy project, sure. But the beauty of it, I think, was that it was sort of the naivety that allowed us to tackle it, if that makes sense. Because of course, if we were more experienced or further on in our careers, there's no way that we would have tackled such a large project, especially coming out of, out of high school. But it was that naivety that allowed us to build something really incredible. And obviously that company's continuing to go and grow. Amar. So I ran that company as CEO for the last 5ish years. I stepped down. Amar stepped into the role. And so he's doing an incredible job running that company and growing it. And you know, obviously it's Also really difficult in that space in developer tools because it's such a, it's such a valuable market. Right. And so you have companies like Microsoft and IBM and all these different players very keen to capture that same customer and build an ecosystem around it. And so as an early stage startup, creating a technology and a moat that you can obviously not only capture such valuable customers, Enterprise 500 customers, but then keep them in your ecosystem is very, very difficult. So they're doing a really incredible job over there.

That's so cool to hear. You know, just starting out with buddies. 17, 18 years old, raising 45 million. I want to talk about the transition. You said you stepped down, he stepped in as CEO. Are you still active in the company at all or what was the transition to Wander? And most importantly, you know, what led you to that transition? Coming from coder, cloud infrastructure, like focusing on that big problem, to then vertically integrated short term rentals. Where did that idea come about and what led you to making that hard decision to step down and then go start a new company?

Yeah, so you know, it's interesting when I reflect, you know, starting starting coder at you know, 17, 18. Right. Let's say you become like conscious at like 16. Let's say like your brain is a little bit more formed. It's, it's a ridiculous, it was a ridiculous percentage of my life, you know, from, from 18 to, to 23. I mean the vast, the vast majority of my brain was, was formed around that company and really building companies generally. And so you know, when, when the time came, obviously it was something that Kyla, Kyla Mar and I had sort of talked about for a few months in terms of, okay, what are the next stages of the company, what makes sense for us all, et cetera. You kind of have to just be very comfortable with the unknown. Right. In terms of what was next. And for me, I knew that I wanted to continue to build and to be a CEO and to continue to grow in my career. And so through that transition, which again to be clear, everyone was just so absolutely incredible. I mean every single board member of, of Coder could not have been more supportive. And obviously many of them ended up investing in Wander, which has done well. But yeah, really, really a really tough experience I think for any founder to be, to go through really regardless of how peaceful of a transition it is, it's always like a little bit heartbreaking. But you know, in terms of starting Wander thereafter, I knew that I wanted to start another company. So I stepped down. I was 23, so still obviously pretty young and not done yet. And when I was a kid, the company that I started, that game server company, ended up. Basically what ended up happening was they put in place some different terms of service in the actual underlying game and, and it basically like nuked the whole community in terms of monetization and otherwise. And kind of this idea of owning the platform, owning the technology, making sure that you were never reliant on anyone else's platform was really important to me as an entrepreneur, which I think a lot of entrepreneurs have been burned by. Right. You kind of build an app on, let's say Shopify. Shopify is a great company by the way, but I'm just using them as an example. You build an app on Shopify, let's say it gets banned or something like your whole business is gone, or they integrate those features internally, for example. And so you really always want to make sure that you're, you're building a real platform out of it. But yeah, in terms, in terms of Wander, you know, rented this cabin out in Colorado to get away and think about the world. You know, little like 23 year old midlife crisis. And you know, just the idea for Wander, you know, came to me as I arrived at this place. It didn't look like the photos, beds were uncomfortable, all that sort of stuff. And obviously not in terms of being unhappy about it, but this idea of what could you do if it could control this experience? What could you do if you verticalized it? And at the time I was reading the Steve Jobs biography, so that was all sort of front of mind to me as well, this idea of verticalization. And you know, the opportunity just seemed too great. You know, the, the, the short term rental market is so fragmented. You have all these different OTAs, property managers, property management softwares, all these different fragmented investment products. And so the idea space was just really incredible. And I also knew too that whatever I did next, I wanted to spend the rest of my life building. And the idea for Wander just wouldn't let me sleep at night and all the sort of the best ways. And so, uh, so yeah, started the company and was fortunate that quite a few people wanted to, to work with me again. So we were off to the races pretty quickly.

Wow, that, that is so cool to hear. Just that transition process. And I want to take a step back. So you have this idea for Wander. You, you obviously see an opportunity. What was like, what were the, what were the next steps for you?

Right?

You have this idea like how did the, the name Wander come about? What Was your game plan as a previous founder? Right. Like you have the experience, you know how to get things going. Like what were the first six months of Wander? Because I know you guys have only been around for 18 months and you've made so much progress. So what were some of the early things you did that allowed you to move quickly and really cement and you know, acquire these properties, build a team and just get you guys to a place where, you know, the previous 12 months would really allow for exponential growth?

Yeah, it's a great question because we definitely speed ran the pre seed stage of the company even though it had been. Because obviously Coder is now a growth stage startup. Even though it had been quite a few years since I started the company, those memories were very fresh in my mind very quickly once I had decided that I was going to work on this idea. Well, I guess I'll go a step backwards because I think if, if this is going to turn into a roadmap for pre seed entrepreneurs, you might as well include all the steps. The first thing you want to do when you're evaluating your idea is try and kill it on paper. It is far easier to spend 2, 3, 4 weeks working on your idea, this business plan, and trying to figure out all the ways it's going to die and doing your market research versus starting it and finding out that page 17 is how it died. Except you're finding that out three years later in your life and like everything's terrible. So that's, that's my greatest piece of advice to pre seed founders is to work on that idea on paper, try and kill it, try and find out why it dies and how you can avoid it and really be brutally honest with yourself because what you're trying to avoid is not wasting 10 years of your life building the wrong thing. So that's my first piece of advice. And really how Wander started was this massive Google Doc of me basically trying to tear it apart and figure out all the reasons it would die and then, and then playing the other side of it and saying how we would, you know, work to avoid it or get around it. Otherwise once, once I had reached page 20 or so, everything started to become so clear and durable enough that it was kind of hard to ignore. And at that point too, I mean like it'd be 2, 3, 4 in the morning and like I couldn't turn it off. And so it was, it was off to, off to the races at that point. Obviously having started, having started Coder and otherwise brand is so incredibly important and something to get right off the bat, especially when you think about a company like Wander, where the brand is so crucial to wrap around this really operationally and logistically and financially complex beast. Right. Because to the consumer, all they want is a experience, but behind the scenes there's quite the company. And so Wander was really the only name that I liked. Like I refused anything else and was incredibly persistent in terms of getting the domain, getting the Instagram, getting the TikTok, getting the Twitter. It was such a celebration moment for us where we had literally every like at Wander handle, even the app store as well, the trademark, all that sort of fun stuff, because it meant that Wander could become a trillion dollar company and it wasn't going to be bottlenecked on the brand. Right. Which I think a lot of startups face as they grow in terms of the team and the fundraising. Obviously timing had a lot to do with it. Right. So starting the company in 21, it was a really wonderful time in terms of precede raising and otherwise. But for us, we were fortunate because, you know, Red Point, who obviously led the seed in series A encoder, was, was very keen to work with me again. Alex Bart over there, by the way, is the most incredible venture capitalist in the world. Any founder who gets to work with him is very, very lucky. And so we ended up raising our pre seed from them along with a bunch of different angels. And then really, as we got hit with interest as we built Wander, it basically just turned into a bunch of rolling safes which culminated in like an $8 million seed thing by the time it was all done. Because at the, at the end of the day, and this is another piece of advice for pre seed founders, is your chance of failure is remarkably high, like 99.99%. And to think otherwise is like super ignorant.

Yeah.

And so the way to think about capital in the early days is effectively de risking your outcome. And so you have to ask yourself, okay, is it worth the extra 10% dilution to significantly de risk the riskiest stage of my business? And obviously ask yourself what's important now? At the end of the day, every founder wants to own more, especially if the company is successful. But you do have to ask yourself, was this a guarantee? And how did I increase my odds by taking that additional capital? And so that was something that I was very cognizant of and really focused, especially as a solo founder as well, that I had that extra equity to play with. And I could be a little bit more aggressive in terms of fundraising and in terms of Employee pool and all that sort of fun stuff.

Yeah, I want to. I'd like to stop you there too because I think it's a unique difference or differentiator for this new company of yours where you had co founders, now you're a solo founder. That conversation I think is super important and I'd love to hear what you've learned through that. As I had a company that I. That recently got acquired back in September, I had a co founder and just thinking about starting something new as a solo founder just seems different, as a different approach. You're one man band, of course, you're building your team, but I'd love to hear from you and your experience of really just the differences and how you've approached it, has it been significantly different or what's your experience been as a solo founder?

Yeah. So I can say that the first thing is that Wander has like the most remarkable team obviously. And so none of what we've accomplished sort of sits solely on. Solely on my shoulders.

Absolutely.

So I want to kind of get that said. You know, being a solo founder is. It's. It's difficult. Right. I think that at the end of the day you have to be the type of person who is the energy source, who kind of has this infinite energy inside of them and is always, you know, kind of glass half full and excited and ready to tackle it. And even on like the worst days, you can kind of tough it out because being a CEO is lonely, period. Even when you do have a co founder, especially too when you're going through an argument or something like that, you're even more alone. But being a solo founder, you're kind of just alone, period. In the good times and the bad times. And so I think that at the end of the day it's difficult. You have to have a very generalist knowledge of everything from the technology and your software stack to finance and all the different components of your business to be able to effectively run everything as sort of a one man band. And you also have to be cognizant too that your decision making is all the more important. I think Jeff Bezos, who is probably one of the most famous solo founders out there, constantly talked about how he spent so much time thinking. And back in the day when I was running Coder, I always thought that it was a little bit of an interesting perspective. How are you spending the majority of your time thinking? How are you not building and doing things? But then of course when I started Wander, you realize that as a solo founder you don't have someone to bounce things off of. And so you really have to be completely correct in your thinking and your decision making. And the only way to do so is to really give yourself the time to be sure to play all sides of the equation to make sure that you're correct. And then of course, anyone you can bounce it off of, you do. So I would say that that's probably the biggest thing is that you spend far more time thinking and making non reversible decisions along with really being the source of energy for you, for the team, for everyone. And you have to really lean into that.

That's incredible advice and I'm sure any solo founders out there really took something to heart there because I think it's super impactful what you just said. John. I want to dive into Wander because I know I've raved about it since the moment we got on this call. And not only am I a huge fan of the product, but I'd love to hear about the go to market strategy. Right. You're acquiring these properties in specific locations around the country. What was your initial game plan there and how do you think about expansion in a market that, you know, as you said, you have to think about these irreversible decisions where you're buying properties. You hopefully you got to pick a great location and then make sure people are willing to go there. How do you think about that and what was the initial game plan from the beginning?

Yeah, so all of our, all of our decisions in terms of acquisitions and otherwise is all data driven. So we have these massive archives of effectively short term rental data dating back a few years down to a specific address. So we can see occupancy, seasonality, rental rates, what amenities work, and basically use that against our underwriting standards to figure out where are the areas across the United States to focus on and then what properties within that make sense. Then of course you have this whole other dynamic of the brand and the guest experience and properties that really inspire and these, these sort of architectural gems where there are thousands of these houses that no one ever gets to see. And so bringing those to the consumer and saying, hey, you can stay here, you can enjoy this, and opening it up from one family for 20 years to literally hundreds or thousands of individuals to create memories at. So that's really sort of how we thought about, okay, how do we not miss when we go and buy these locations? How do we make sure that it's a yielding asset that at the end of the day will become an investable product in terms of the strategy of expansion, everyone wanted us to have density in terms of locations. And that was something that to me was just incorrect. There are certain advantages to having all of your homes near each other, right. Operationally, logistically, all these different pieces. However, there are a bunch of advantages that you miss out on. Right. So number one is how do you become culturally relevant with as few locations as possible to as many people? And the only way that you can do that, of course, is by having a house that's near these different population centers and really spread out across the country. And I think, I think we were nationwide by the time we had four locations. Right. And so it's like having that push is super critical. And I think what ends, what you end up learning and looking at is that wander with relatively few locations. I think, I think the math is something like 60 locations can have a home within 90% of the US population within three hour drive.

Wow.

And so to have a company that's sort of tackling this $100 billion short term rental market and going after these massive, massive companies that can have so few locations and be culturally relevant to 300 million people is super fascinating. I think what's even more fascinating is when you look at that in a global perspective, how you could have a company with, let's say, 500 or 1,000 locations be culturally relevant to literally the entire world. And then of course, how can you distribute, how can you go down market, how can you expand your product, set all these interesting pieces? So that was sort of our big growth hack was saying, how can we seem much larger than we are with such little capital? And the answer was really cultural relevancy as quickly as we could across these major population pieces.

That is so cool to hear because, I mean, it's totally accurate. Right. When you open up the app, you can see where you can stay. You're tackling a lot of markets here in the US already. And I know if I wanted to go to a certain part of the US I could book a winer there, which is really cool. And of course not in every single city, but it's super cool to hear how you guys have thought about that and how that's, you know, how that is also true to the consumer looking at places to stay. So speaking of locations, how many locations do you guys have currently?

Yeah, so we have relatively few. We have, I think 13 locations right now. We should be at about 50 to 60 by the end of the year. So really growing quickly.

Yeah, that is very exciting.

Yeah. And it's really all about again, this idea of how can we be culturally relevant, how can we of course scale thoughtfully as well? I think that's really the big thing that kills so many of these different companies, especially vertical companies, is you have to kind of recognize that by definition your strategy has a much stronger moat, but it's going to take longer to scale, or really more specifically that it's going to be. You need to be more thoughtful about your scale. So the benefit is of course you own your cash flow, so you cash flow much stronger than a typical business. But you obviously want to make sure that every single investment decision is correct, that you're scaling thoughtfully, that you're not scaling negative unit economics, all these different pieces. And so even though Wander has grown really quickly, I think that the next three, four years people are going to be pleasantly surprised at the scale and the progress that comes out across the app and locations and all that sort of fun stuff.

And you guys just rolled out something where users like myself can invest in these properties, correct?

Yep.

I would love to go down that rabbit hole because that is so powerful. And why is that important for the business and why is it important to you as a founder?

Yeah. So when starting Wander, going all the way back to me in that cabin, kind of furiously thinking about the future, you very quickly realize that finance is the other side of real estate. Right. All of these different properties at the end of the day boil down to effectively an independent business with its income and its expenses and then generates a certain yield. And the benefit with obviously single family homes is that they have underlying value. So you have this now cash flowing asset, this business that really holds its underlying value as this asset, which will hopefully appreciate over time. And so what you end up looking at is basically this consumer brand where people are coming, they're staying in this asset. Wander is generating the cash flow. And you end up wanting to solve the problem of how do I maintain the ownership and control over this asset so I can make the model work while solving for really this idea of capital. How do we go out and acquire more and more properties? And what most companies end up looking at is basically what's called an OPCO propco model. Right. So you have the operating company, which in this case would be Wander, and then you have your, your propco, which is basically your dedicated real estate capital, so that would be funded by some private equity firm or otherwise. And then you go out and buy a bunch of properties. What I felt like was that there was this opportunity to kind of merge the two concepts and allow for customers to become owners in the same vehicle as these institutional investors. Which was something that was really important to us because I think there are a lot of alternative investment products that frankly are just complete trash, like your financial advisor would never recommend them. And so it was important to create something that was institutional grade in every way because institutions literally would be investing alongside users. And so we got to work on that idea. Frankly, we spent probably the first, I spent the first, gosh, I probably ideated on it for the, for the last 12 months of wander, like from the very beginning, trying to figure out how you could do it, how it would look, how would it work, exploring all different avenues, right? Everyone's pitching tokenization and otherwise. And it's like, okay, like I'm thinking through all these different models around the ownership and at the end of the day we landed on basically this step approach with structuring the product as a REIT. REITs are this really interesting tax advantage vehicle. People wonder who keeps an eye on them and they're actually really controlled by the IRS in a certain way because you can think about the tax code is basically an incentive plan. And this is something that I think is really interesting. Where the government basically gives you tax advantages where it wants you to be focused and deploying your capital. So capital gains has a lower tax rate than income tax. And the reason for that is, is because they want you to invest in the future. REITs are tax advantaged because they want you to be investing in infrastructure. And so we structured everything as, as this REIT which is a really efficient product. You have all types of advantages, like 90% of the income has to flow to shareholders, all this sort of really cool stuff which makes it hyper efficient tax advantaged. There are certain ownership rules as well which basically say that the REIT has to own the real estate. Like you can't fill it with a bunch of fluff, right? Like it has to own actual real estate. So there are all these sort of safety nets around structuring it that way, which was important to me. And then for us, the future of Atlas is basically right now it's a private, non traded REIT so accredited investors can go and invest the $10,000 minimum and it's an 8% targeted dividend and then obviously any appreciation. So it's a really great passive income product and, and realistically going to be just as performant as if you were going to go buy a short term rental yourself. So if you feel like saving yourself the headache there, it's a great financial product but the future of it is really exciting where we're going to publicly register the security as a non traded reit. So it'll be a public security, but non traded, so non listed rather. And that'll allow for non accredited investors. And that's where things really get excited. You'll see Atlas come into the app, you'll see integration with third party wealth tools and otherwise. And really creating this flywheel where more guests equals more investors, more investors equals more properties, more properties equals more guests. And you have this incredible flywheel where you're creating this community of not just people experiencing the product, but also owners and real ambassadors and in a product as well, which again is being invested alongside all these massive institutional investors as well. So having the little guy right next to the $100 million check from that massive real estate PE fund. So Atlas is. Yeah, Atlas is super exciting. It's sort of at the earliest stages, it's like a pre seed startup inside of an early stage startup right now. But the future is super exciting and I think the investors who get in early there are. Yeah, it's just, it's something that's typically only accessible to large firms and I think a lot of investors sort of realize that, which is exciting.

Totally. John, just hearing you talk about this gets me excited because of not only how you describe it and how passionate you are about the product and the idea of vertically integrated everything in the business. It's very unique and I'm just truly so excited for you and your team. But I want to take a step back and get into the lens of as the founder.

Right.

You're a solo founder. You have so many incredible exciting things going on. You guys are growing like crazy. Where do you spend your time on a daily basis? You talked about this idea of thinking inspired by Steve Jobs, but where do you spend your time and how have you built this culture with inside wander since the inception of the company? And how do you really recommend founders to build culture early in their companies?

Yeah, culture is, is probably the most important thing within an early stage company. And I think that the problem is, is that no one has a shared definition of what culture actually means. Culture is not like, oh, I like to hike and you like to hike and therefore we should go build a company together. Like that is the greatest red flag ever in terms of a hiring, a hiring process. You should very much stay away from that. What you're really looking for from a cultural perspective when starting your company is this idea of compatibility. And the way that I like to explain it to early stage founders is how many of you could you manage, right? And that doesn't mean, you know, skin color or you know, your, what you like to do, hikes or otherwise. Like if, if the person had the same shared ethics as you did, right, who believed in being good and trustworthy and you know, like helping others and all these different things, right? If you had these shared ethics and were compatible, how many people, how many versions of you could you. Could you manage? And it's interesting because the number goes from well, I could probably manage two or three strangers, right? Or maybe five people I interviewed to I could probably manage 50 of me, right? Because you know what motivates them, you know how to talk to them, you know how to communicate. And so that idea of compatibility is super critical in the early stages. It's critical to find people who have those shared ethics, who have that shared vision, who want a certain future and to bring them all together and to work on something incredible. And what you find is, and this is something that Wonder does pretty aggressively is that compatibility is the very first thing that we interview for at the end of the day. We've met a lot of really talented people who frankly were just like total dicks. And there's no way that they're going to get inside of this company. And then what you're looking for is to find people who have those shared ethics and, and values and otherwise with you who come from diverse backgrounds, who have different stories, different origins. And when you can bring that together and have a group of hardworking people who all believe in the same ethics and are all working towards a common vision from different backgrounds, that's a culture. That's something that's really exciting. It's like a common operating system, a common language across this company. So that's sort of what I focused on really early in Wander. And it's been incredibly spectacular. I mean, we're 40ish something people with all different types of backgrounds and disciplines and origins. And somehow everyone communicates and works together relatively flawlessly in an entirely asynchronous environment that's just ruthlessly productive.

Wow. Very cool. I was about to ask you about work from home. Is everyone remote? But everyone's remote you said, right?

Yeah, everyone's remote. But we actually take it a sort of step further. And to be very clear, whether you build your company in office, Coder obviously was an in person company or you build it remotely, Wander is remote. Encoder is now remote as well. You, you really want to make sure you take Advantage of either, either one of them. Right. In terms of the benefits. So working in person has a lot of different benefits in terms of. There are certain people who need energy from others to be productive. Right. Or need sort of that back and forth or you know, it even depends on what kind of company it is. Right. If it's a very sales heavy company, that in person culture can be really beneficial, or if you're a remote company, you want to take advantage of global talent, you want to take advantage of being asynchronous, all these different things where things tend to break is if you have a remote culture, that's super meeting heavy. Right. Like that doesn't work. You can have meetings in person all day long. But like meetings remotely are just like, I feel like a pretty big waste of time, I guess. Meetings generally, I feel are a pretty big waste of time. And so Wander is very unique because we have so few meetings. Everything's asynchronous. There's no definition of working hours. There's no even definition of weekends and holidays because the company's so global. Right. It's like, you know, a weekend for someone in, in the US could be the start of the day for someone in Indonesia, for example. And so it's really just this constantly 247 productive company. And then the, the thing that holds it all together is that compatibility, which again, you know, you think about how do all these different people from all over the world working together to build this company, like get along and create this friendship and this bond. It really boils down to, you know, kind of interviewing for that on the, on the front end.

Absolutely. When you talk about having this global team and actually I want to go down this lane because earlier in this conversation you talked about timing and whether that's timing for, you know, hours on your team or timing of raising money for a startup. You said something that really stuck out to me that I'd love to just get your perspective on. As a founder that's raised a lot of capital in this market Today, moving into 2023, what would you recommend founders do? Do differently, do the same if they were going out to raise capital for an idea, Maybe it's Wander today. Right. Like, how do you, how did you, how do you see things changing and where do you see the market going in terms of the future for Wander or just the future of VC startup land overall? Because you've had this experience and you've, you've been in it since you were 17, 18 years old.

Yeah. So it's interesting I think that so many founders got used to the like 2020 to 2022, beginning of 2022 capital markets, which was just like a pipe dream, right? I mean when we raised our seed for coder and maybe this is also goes to the fact that it was Austin based company as well and at the time no one was investing in Austin based companies. Like if you weren't in the backyard of the vc, no one wanted to talk to you. And so, you know, back then I remember spending probably four months going and pitching and getting told no from everyone until Coda really started to have like serious user traction and progress and just funding it literally with like friends, family, money, just everything, everything we could to kind of get it, get it going. Versus today you have seed stage founders where it's just a $15 million cap is like the default, which is still ridiculous, by the way. Like the fact that it was $20 million in 2020 and now it's $15 million is still silly. I mean you look at like the early stories of Airbnb, it was like a $3 million cap. Like just like today, it's still ridiculous, which is great for founders, obviously. You know, really what I would say is that seed and series A stage startups, basically you got transported Back to like 2017, 2018 in terms of valuations and necessary progress and how difficult it is to raise around. So it's still much easier than it was 10 years ago. So kind of no excuses in that realm. I would say where it gets more difficult is series B, C, D companies where if you don't have a true path to profitability. And by true path, I don't just mean within the next six years, I mean quickly, like 12 months for example, and then show some level of capital efficiency you are not going to be able to raise. Now where it gets even more difficult is that you need to do so right. You need to be efficient while also continuing to grow. So you need to grow two to three times year over year, while not spending more money, while making sure that you have that path to profitability, while also making sure that it's a company with a balance sheet that could go public and isn't going to get torn apart. The short answer is you need to be more thoughtful about what is this company going to look like in three or four years than you ever had to have been. If you asked a series A stage company that just raised around, hey, like what is this company going to look like at ipo? Everyone's like, what the fuck are you talking about. But now it's like, that's how you have to think about it. You have to think about what is this company going to look like when we do go and exit. Because at the end of the day in startups, you either exit or you fail. Like, there's, there's only two potential outcomes in your company, whether you exit to public markets or exit in terms of an acquisition or otherwise. So that's sort of the big thing that I would say is that for, for Seed and Series A, you got transported back to 2017. I would say, like, I feel bad for you, but like, like I've raised in that market. Like, it's hard. You have to make real progress. You're going to take more dilution. Like, yeah, you know, God bless, like, it's still, you'll be fine for, for Series, you know, B and later stage, you have to build a really, really great company and the price is going to be different. You're not going to be raising at 100 times revenue anymore. But at the end of the day, you'll take more dilution, you'll build a valuable company and the market kind of ebbs and flows and if you go public in five, six, seven years, it could be a really great time. So that's sort of what I would say. There is just efficiency, profitability and kind of thinking about what does this company look like when it exits, and then also just understanding that the price is going to be different and that's how it goes.

I appreciate the perspective there for sure. Last question before we wrap up here, John and I really appreciate your time. What keeps you up at night when you think about the future of Wander, I know you have all of these exciting initiatives and we've talked about a little bit about what the future of this year entails, but what keeps you up at night and what are you excited about in the future? Because I know you mentioned at the beginning of this podcast that I want to bring up, which is, you know, this company is something I want to spend the rest of my life doing. And that's, in my opinion, a very powerful thing to say and I'd love to hear your perspective on that.

The thing that keeps me up at night is. Is really failure in a very different way than I think most startups. So, like Wander right now is working like the unit economics are positive, the team is really strong, the brand is great. Like, all of the core metrics are going in the right direction. And so what we end up, what we end up looking at right Is okay, how does this company fail? Like, how does it just disappear from here? And really it's growth, right? So when we go back to sort of what I was talking about for a potential series B stage startup, it's how does it grow 3, 4, 5x year over year while maintaining that same headcount, while continuing to be aggressive and go after the future. And for Wanderer, our to do list is so long. Right. Which is partially my fault because it's. We're so ambitious and you know, when I think about, when I think about that aspect, like I'll give you an example with Atlas, right? Atlas has 1200 investors who are currently in various stages of flow. Flow. All types of things broke when we launched that product. There's all types of things that we need to get right now. The underlying financial product is rock solid, which is great, but it's like bugs in the UI and all these different typical things. And so it's like implementing the fact that that's the current status of Atlas means that a whole team needs to be built around it, right? Like marketing and investor relations and dedicated product resources and all these different things. And how do you arrange that inside of the company and make sure that it's in a position to grow? And then how do you scale acquisitions? How do you scale the number of homes that we're buying from 1amonth to 5amonth to 20amonth. Right. And how do you do so intelligently and then scaling customer success? And so, you know, for wandering, really the thing that keeps me up at night is, is, is the growth and not, not screwing up the education or the execution rather. Because I think that, like, I think that, I think that if Wander fails, people will look back and say it wasn't the idea, it wasn't the brand, it wasn't the customers, didn't love it. Like it was just purely like John Andrews up. And that's what I want to avoid. I want to avoid people saying that, which is a very privileged place to be. I feel incredibly lucky to have that, that weight. But it certainly does keep you up at night, which is, I mean for me is what I love to do. It's like, you know, I don't need weekends, I don't need any extra sleep. I'd much rather be be working on this.

So very well said, John. Well, I just want to say thank you so much for your time today. This was such an insightful conversation and I really do appreciate you for sharing. Where's the best place for everyone listening or watching to follow you, to stay connected with Wander, to learn more about the product, to book a Wander and everything that they should do to just follow along the journey.

Yeah. So you can go to wander.com to go and check out what we're building and then from there you can navigate to Atlas or otherwise to go and take a look at the product. And then in terms of Twitters and socials, everything is wandering. So on Twitter, Instagram, etc. And then if you do want to follow me, it's a and Twistle on Twitter. And yeah, I really enjoyed getting to talk to you. It was such a, such a pleasure. And yeah, very, very exciting stuff.

I appreciate it, John. And for everyone listening, I'll make sure to link all of that down below. And again, John, thank you so much for coming on today.

Absolutely. My pleasure. Thank you. Casey.