The Man Taking On Airbnb | John Andrew Entwistle

You're not quite sure when you roll up to a normal vacation rental if it's actually the right vacation rental, right? The lights are off, you're kind of like breaking in. And so we wanted to make that experience very different at Wander. And what you'll notice is the lights are on and you hear this low thump of music playing. It's almost like there's this party happening and you see the Wander sign out front and you very much know that this is where you're supposed to be. And then when you get in, you can unlock the door, obviously, right through your phone, turn on and off the lights. You see a little handwritten note there from the team, basket of drinks. And snacks, Ghirardelli chocolate at the bedside table, all these little touches that really say, hey, this is all for you to enjoy. You don't need to worry about like stale ketchup in the fridge or anything like that.

All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got John Andrew Entwistle here with me. I thought a great place for us to start this conversation would be the vacation rental market. That is not something that a lot of people think about in the tech industry other than when they're maybe going on vacation. You're building an entire business here to go and kind of capture this and improve that experience. Talk about how big is that market? Why is this so interesting to you? And what exactly do you think that you guys can do that can improve it?

Absolutely. So the vacation rental market has been around for quite a while, long before obviously Airbnb and VRBO, because renting other people's houses, particularly in Europe, was, was very popular from a vacation perspective. Now, obviously there was a whole bunch of problems when it came to the discovery of certain locations, and that's where companies like VRBO and Airbnb really started to flourish. In terms of thinking about the size of the market, Airbnb is now a $70-ish billion company with literally millions of listings all across the world. And so in order to support a market cap that's that large, you can obviously imagine how large the underlying actual inventory is. And so when we think about the space, I mean, Wander is today extremely, extremely small compared to like how big the overall market is, but it's, it's far larger than I think most people realize. Actually, when you look at it as an inventory perspective compared to, let's say, Marriott, for example, Airbnb is many times larger in terms of total number of rooms than even these massive hotel brands.

When you think about Airbnb and VRBO, what do you think they're doing well? And then where do you think the areas that they either need to improve or kind of the opening for you guys to come in and actually have some sort of disruption?

Yeah, so the thing that Airbnb has done well, I mean, there's, there's so many things that they've done well, incredible team, brand scale, obviously building a $70 billion company is no easy feat. And the way that that team navigated the pandemic and pre-IPO to get to that point, I found incredibly impressive. So I have nothing but incredible things to say about, about that team. But one of the consequences of that type of scale is that you don't really take into account the quality of each and every listing on your platform. And that's obviously what leads to sometimes a low customer satisfaction related to certain stays, right? You go and rent this vacation rental and you just— doesn't look like the photos, beds are uncomfortable, internet's bad. And so that's really where Wander is trying to play, is this idea that when someone goes on a vacation, they want the quality and consistency of a hotel, but all the space and privacy of their own vacation home. And so that's where we're trying to enter the market. But obviously, building that as a product is— really relies on quite a bit of infrastructure.

So when you talk about like the privacy of their own home, but all of the things that you would get at a hotel, I think one time you told me like, it's like if Four Seasons had vacation rentals, right? What does that mean, right? In terms of like, when I walk into one of these Wander homes, what am I expecting? What is kind of the brand promise? What are the things that make it different than if I just go rent, you know, Joe Blow's kind of location off of Airbnb?

Yeah. So the first thing, and I think this is something that we've all experienced, is that you're not quite sure when you roll up to a normal vacation rental if it's actually the right vacation rental, right? The lights are off. You're kind of like breaking in. And so we wanted to make that experience very different at Wander. And what you'll notice is the lights are on and you hear this low thump of music playing. It's almost like there's this party happening and you see the Wander sign out front and you very much know that this is where you're supposed to be. And then when you get in, you can unlock the door, obviously, right through your phone, turn on and off the lights. You see a little handwritten note there from the team, basket of drinks and snacks, Ghirardelli chocolate at the bedside table. All these little touches that really say, hey, this is all for you to enjoy. You don't need to worry about like stale ketchup in the fridge or anything like that. And then what we want to do as well is encourage you to go and experience outside of the property. And so you can go right through your phone, unlock the Tesla in the garage and go to one of the many curated experiences that we have for you around it. So it's really trying to take what people I think want, which is a really wonderful trip in a clean and consistent home where they know that everything's going to work and there's going to be great customer support and, you know, have a, have a wonderful vacation. But like I mentioned before, to deliver on that requires a ton of infrastructure, property management, building your own booking platform, building your own asset management, And so to a customer, it's just delivering on the brand promise. But the behind the scenes of all that is pretty, pretty wild.

So you mentioned having a Tesla in the garage to then go to curated experiences. I don't think many people would expect to get that with their Airbnb rental. Talk a little bit about providing a car, picking experiences. Like, how do you do some of the things outside of the actual home experience itself?

Yeah. So in order for us to provide that Tesla in the garage, it's not as simple as, hey, here's a car, as you would imagine. We basically had to build out effectively Turo, if you're familiar with that product, actually within the Wander app and experience. So you have to go right through the Wander app and upload your insurance and verify your ID. We actually were able to get direct API access through Tesla. So shout out to the folks at Tesla for like giving us API access so you could actually like unlock the car right through the Wander app and that, that whole dynamic. And so what you end up with is a lot of very complicated systems for a very simple user experience, but to the customer, it sort of feels magical, right? And that's really, I think, a big piece of building a modern technology company and product is abstracting away all these complexities so that for the user it just feels super, super simple.

And where are people going once they get in the car? Are they going usually to like go hang out with friends or are most people using these curated experiences that you guys have?

Yeah, so we don't, we don't obviously track in terms of like where, where people go. But we do— we obviously see a lot of it on social and otherwise. And what you see is basically this, you know, Tesla with like the Wander logo on the back in, let's say, Redwood National Park or outside of a great local restaurant. And that dynamic is something that we really love and encourage. But it could be something as simple as like taking your girlfriend in the car and just going on a drive down the Oregon coast.

So I know you keep calling this vacation rentals, but there's been this explosion of remote work. I know tons of people who are like wandering around the world. How many of the people people who are users and consistently use the platform are actually on vacation versus maybe they are just remote working and kind of hopping around various locations?

Yeah, I think that pretty much since the pandemic, and for a lot of people before the pandemic, the idea of work-life balance and sort of drawing a line in the sand started to disappear, and it sort of started to turn more into work-life harmony, right? I think there are very few people who can say when the last time they went on a vacation was where they never checked their email or never had to do any work at all. And so what end up with is this harmonious relationship between who you are as a person and your work. And we find that that's the case for most of our guests as well. And so supporting that with high quality internet and great desk setups and that dynamic is super critical for obviously satisfying that need. And so what you end up with a lot of times is someone who needs to hop on some team call or a board meeting or whatever it may be, but then is able to take a deep breath right after they turn off the Zoom and stare at the ocean or go golfing or, or otherwise.

Now, how are you finding the people to come and do this? Is this all kind of just beautiful pictures on the internet? Is it word of mouth? Is it like some sort of viral campaign? What are you doing to actually get people onto a platform? Because not only are you competing with, you know, the Four Seasons and various other hotels, you're competing with the Airbnbs and the VRBOs. Like, this is something where they're getting bombarded over and over and over again by these platforms saying, use us. How are you guys breaking through that noise?

I think that really what it boils down to is when we launched the company, we saw really strong idea market fit. Everyone wanted to go to an incredible location, an incredible house, and understand that it was going to be clean and connected and safe. And so when we were able to actually deliver on that idea, it instantly resonated with users and it was something that they were willing to try out. I think a lot of people who've stayed at a vacation rental previously have always thought, wouldn't it be great if I had the quality and consistency of a hotel in a space like this. And so that idea market fit and how it resonated with users led to a lot of not just early adoption or excitement around the idea, but people actually willing to, to pay for it, which is a really critical dynamic. And then from there, what you really have is social proof. So what a lot of people look for is, hey, the people who have gone and stayed at these properties, did they actually enjoy it? What are they thinking? And the nice thing about Wander is, is that so far we've been able to really hold up our standards. We have a 93.3% customer satisfaction rate, which is super high. It's— birthdays in America is like 89%. And so the vast majority of people sort of sing our praises when they go and stay at a property. And that's resulted in a really large portion of our overall revenue. And now what we're starting to see as the platform matures is that repeat bookings has become an even bigger part. So I think for March, 30% of our bookings were from repeat customers, which is a pretty wild dynamic.

Now, this is not your first company. You've been starting companies for a long time now. You started when you were very young. Talk a little bit as to where does that entrepreneurial DNA come from and what are some of the things you learned in those early things that set you up to make this successful?

Yeah, so I started my first company when I was 13, 14. And it's interesting because when you sort of look back, right, or especially at the end of a long day, right, at the end of a 14-hour day, you sort of have to wonder, what am I doing with my life and why am I doing it? And so that question is something I've reflected on quite a bit. And thinking back, I was raised by a single dad. My pop's a lawyer. He runs his own law firm. And I remember when I was super young, basically going to bed and waking up at 3, 4, 5 in the morning and walking downstairs and seeing him at his computer working. And all of a sudden it clicked for me, the sacrifice that he was making, picking up me and my sister from school, hanging out with us, and then working all through the night, dropping us off at school in the morning, and then going to work and doing it all over again. And so I think when I've reflected on this question, it really boiled down to wanting to work like Dad, which I think for a lot of young men, um, that tends to be a pretty strong, strong reason. For me at this point now, my main motivation is really making people proud, making the team proud, making our shareholders proud. Personal pride is really my, my motivation. And what's nice with that is that it's resulted in a pretty endless stream of energy and always wanting to be better. So very glad that that's the motivation as opposed to monetary or otherwise.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Now, you also were a Thiel Fellow and talk a little about that experience and kind of was that something that you were like, I really, really want to get this? Was it something something that was kind of, hey, it'd be cool, let's see what it is. Like, how did that work?

Yeah, so for the listeners, for context, the Thiel Fellowship is a program that was put together by Peter Thiel, and it was basically a grant-based program and network-based program for young entrepreneurs who didn't go to college. And obviously Peter Thiel was one of the early backers of Facebook, and so I think he saw a lot of this with Mark Zuckerberg and otherwise. And so for young people who are running a company, it's extremely lonely because your peer group of other, you know, 17-year-old, 18-year-olds are not exactly thinking about about the same things that you are. And of course, who you're actually surrounded with are people who are twice your age and extremely experienced, not just in life, but in their own fields. And so what you end up with is massive, incredible growth from an entrepreneurial perspective at a very young age, but your social growth related to people your own age is relatively limited. And so it ends up being pretty lonely. And so I think that he identified this sort of need Of course, it's for a very small group of people, right? And so basically every year there's a class of around 20 entrepreneurs who become Thiel Fellows. They receive a grant of $100,000, which for many of the entrepreneurs is incredibly key in terms of paying their rent. Normally it's split across their co-founders, that dynamic, and it gives them sort of a good jumpstart along with a really great community. And so for me, my path into the Thiel Fellowship was a little bit different. Peter Thiel and Founderstone participated in Coder partners, my second company or first venture-backed company's seed round, and one of the partners basically texted me and said, "Hey, this is something that you should be a part of." I ended up going through the interviews and participating in the program. But typically, to your point, there are literally tens and tens of thousands of applications and it's a super long process. But for me, it was a little bit different.

[Speaker:TREY_LOCKERBIE] And when you think about that experience, you mentioned the network and the people that you could talk to. Is there one or two that you pulled out that you point back to and you're like, man, I really learned this there, or I picked up this experience that has helped me?

Yeah, I can say that without the fellowship, I would have far fewer friends. In fact, I would say that I really wouldn't have any friends who were sort of my age and building companies. And so that, that effect has, has candidly changed, changed my life. To think that, you know, at this point now I'm 25 to think that I would have no friends would be a little bit sad in that context. And so that camaraderie and that fellowship, to use the wording, is really, really life-changing for a lot of young entrepreneurs. And when you think about the companies that have come out of the fellowship, like Figma, for example, or Ethereum, those founders, and I can say likely that that benefit was felt by them as well. And so it really does show how how impactful the program has been, not just for these, these young entrepreneurs, but also in terms of the products that we use every day.

Now, you mentioned Coder, and for those that don't know, I think you were like 16, 17 years old when you started this thing. Venture capitalists were not nice all the time. Talk a little bit about what maybe the best way to describe is just like VC shitting on you because you're a 17-year-old kid. Like, what was the business and what exactly was the VC treatment of a young founder?

Yeah. So I started Coder at 17, 18 with my co-founders, Kyle and Amar, really incredible people. And as you would imagine, a VC getting a cold email from one of these teenagers with no LinkedIn, no experience or otherwise, isn't necessarily always met with the best reaction, let alone when you have these teenagers who've never pitched a VC and have no idea what they're doing beyond just creating a really incredible product. Standing in front of you putting together a demo or otherwise. And so I have tons of stories of VCs being blunt, to sort of say the least. I remember once me and my co-founder Amar were in San Francisco and we were going through a phase where effectively we felt like we didn't want to show our age. And so we're the only 17, 18-year-olds in Silicon Valley who were wearing button-ups and slacks, which obviously doesn't really fit in. Sort of like IBM salesman is what we look like. And so we go up this massive tower in the elevator and we're standing in this office that's overlooking the bay and we sit down and we start to do this demo. And basically what happens is Amar had always used a Linux laptop and Linux doesn't perform very well on laptops and it constantly drained the battery, constantly had different issues. And so we started to demo the product. The laptop ended up running out of battery and the VC basically at that point just started to like chew us apart, right? Started to like tear apart the business plan, started to tear apart the product, you know, all these different pieces. And I remember Amar asked him, what would you do to fix it? Right? Because he was, he was really drilling into us. And he looked at us and he was clearly prepared for it. And he said, like, that's why you're here. Like, you're supposed to answer this question. And so he ended up sending us down the stairs with basically this, like, vegan milk drink that he had invested in, which is such, like, a classic, like, Silicon Valley event. And we just thought that he hated it. And then, of course, 20 minutes later, we get an email that, you know, he would love to participate in XYZ. We ended up not obviously having him involved in the company. But yeah, it's really tough for an early stage entrepreneur and you get very used to hearing no. And my greatest advice is to like just kind of laugh it off and keep moving forward. And, you know, if you're persistent in building the right idea, then you should, you should build a successful company.

So yeah, that, that makes sense. When you think about at age 25 now running a business compared to age 17, what are the things that you did differently in setting up Wander that you didn't do before? Like, you know, you had kind of a couple shots on goal, so you learned from the things to do and maybe the things not to do, are there any major differences in the way you structured the business, how you hired the team, you know, fundraising? Like, what are some of the things that you, you kind of implemented this time and you're like, yeah, I actually learned that because I was basically practicing in my, uh, previous attempts?

Yeah, so you learn quite a bit. I would say the, the big things that you learn is really the quality of your team and the quality of your executives is hyper important to get correct in the early stages. And so for Wander, you know, we, we went from starting the company to Series A in about 12 months. So we basically speed ran the whole pre-seed, seed, Series A process. And that boils down to understanding and having extreme clarity in terms of what are the risks for the business and what team do I need to hire to de-risk those risks and figure out related solutions to those problems. And so I'd say that was the biggest thing for Wander. I had questions around brand, I had questions around technology, I had questions around the capital markets. And so I very quickly hired an executive team that could solve those issues. Now, in the early stages, an executive team doesn't necessarily mean people who just sort of like point and say, hey, do this and goes and builds out a 20-person team. You need people who can actually get their hands dirty but are experts in their field. And then of course, you don't want to miss a beat when you go and raise your $20 million Series A or whatever it may be. And so they also have to be able to go and manage that team as well. So that was probably the biggest thing is understanding what are the risks in this business and how can I hire the right executives who are able to effectively solve those problems and prove a thesis that if we do, we'll allow the business to get to that next stage.

How about managing a team as a young person? If you're hiring a bunch of people who are in their 30s and you're 17 or 25, there's some weird dynamics. People have heard me talk on the podcast before. I went to the military, I got deployed overseas. I was 20, 21 years old, and I was there with a bunch of older guys. And one, you're learning a lot and kind of like, oh shit, mortgages and families and and kids, like all this stuff. At the same time, there's times where you're in charge and like you gotta kind of convince someone who is looking at you like, what the hell do you know, to actually, you know, be a participant of the team and execute in this great way. What are some of the things you've learned there to be effective?

Yeah, as a young person, what you have to realize is that you're all compute and no context. You can sort of think about it like a new computer where the CPU and everything works very well, but your hard drive is completely empty. And so you have to be extremely attentive thoughtful to the people who are around you and listen and really try to deeply understand what their concerns are or what they're going through. Your point around mortgages and kids and that dynamic is something that a young person simply doesn't understand, but it's a really big and important piece of the lives of the people who report to you, right? They're worried about making their mortgage payments. They have kids that are sick, all these different ideas. And so as a young leader, you have to learn and understand those pressures and who they are as a person. And it sort of forces you to think far beyond your years, even though it's not personally something that you're going through, you end up having to feel this really deep compassion and empathy for people's life circumstances. And what that ends up creating is, I think, a decent amount, or it sort of forces you to have a decent amount of social intelligence related to managing people who are far above your age. And also what it does is it forces you to try and learn as much from them as humanly possible. So the way that I always looked at it was, okay, I have all this compute but an empty hard drive, and this person has an incredibly full hard drive full of life experiences and otherwise. I'm going to try and copy-paste as much of that data as possible and see what I can learn from this individual. But it's certainly hard and it's certainly a process, and a lot of the things are going to seem foreign. And the best advice that I can give to all the young people and young managers out there is to really be thoughtful, to really listen, to understand that you're dealing with other people's lives and to leverage their experience. And at the end of the day, yes, you have to be the one to make the decision and you should trust your instinct in that regard, but you need to make sure to also treat people with respect and compassion and do realize that even though you're in charge, you ultimately have far less experience than they do. And so you should show them incredible respect.

Yeah, that makes a, uh, that makes a ton of sense. Uh, I believe that you were a formula driver early in your, uh, teenage years. Um, were you any good, one? And two, is there something that, like, is there some correlation between the same type of person who would get in the car and try to go fast as the same person who, you know, early in their life wants to start a bunch of companies? Like, what, what are some of the lessons that we can take from that?

Yeah, so I, I did used to race formula cars, so I started out in Formula Mazda, and this is the effect too of what happens when you have a kid who's doing high school online. And has some level of disposable income because they're going to travel around the world and be like, "Hey, I'm going to race cars. Why not?" So I raced Formula cars out in Texas, Formula Mazda. I ended up doing pretty well. I finished second in nationals and then I ended up graduating into F4. And yeah, I mean, it's highly competitive and very data-focused. For me, I think I always knew that I wasn't going to become a professional race car driver. And of course, all of the kids around me this was going to be their career. This was their life path and journey. So I really got to enjoy it, enjoy the speed and the danger and all that sort of fun stuff. It did end up catching up to me. I ended up breaking my back twice, sort of on two different occasions, which always makes things a little bit harder. So now I like to joke that I'm like the body of a 90-year-old man, like a little bit creaky in that respect, but I certainly have a lot of pretty epic memories. So yeah, I would say so. It's very competitive and a team sport as well. And the adrenaline and the speed and high risk, I think there's a lot of parallels with entrepreneurship.

I want to do a little bit of a round robin of a bunch of topics that people seem to be very interested in right now. You're a young person who's in the technology sector for a while. You know, tons of different people. You have a lot of these conversations. You've got very smart people that work for you. And so I thought maybe the first place to start would be with the current banking crisis. We've seen tons and tons tons of, uh, banks who have come under pressure. Some of them have failed, some of them have liquidated themselves, uh, and I think there's still a lot of uncertainty about what will happen moving forward. We've also seen this massive response from the government, whether it's, you know, discount windows, lending programs, uh, you know, nationalization just in some degrees, and receivership, all this different stuff. Uh, you guys at the end of the day do have real estate, right? It is a part of your business. How are you all affected by that? What are you seeing from some of the lenders that you work with? What, what kind of can we take away from your experience far with this banking crisis?

Absolutely. So for, for the listener, a really good way to think about it is, is that with the Fed having raised interest rates so dramatically, effectively it's created a credit crunch within a lot of these local and regional banks who were the primary lenders for a lot of commercial real estate. And so what's ended up happening is, is that with the collapse of certain banks like SVB and now First Republic, you're starting, you're starting to see a lot of other local regional banks sort of tighten up on their lending. So that result means that there's not going to be a lot of new commercial real estate projects necessarily. So think like new construction buildings. And then also, of course, what you end up having is a lot of commercial real estate is going to come up for refinancing as well over the next 12 to 24 months. And so that is going to lead to some really interesting circumstances when you pair that with extremely low vacancy, particularly in markets like San Francisco and Chicago. So I'm not actually sure what the government is going to do or what these banks and investors are going to do when this happens. I think a lot of investors are going to end up being wiped out and take pretty significant losses, but it may reach the point where the Fed and the government generally may need to step in and do some easing in that regard. But this dynamic, which is really fascinating, is that effectively this credit crunch that's happening with these regional banks is having the same effect as the Fed increasing their rates. And so that's something that they've talked about more broadly is this idea that rate hikes may actually slow down or be paused simply because banks today aren't lending, which obviously slows down the economy, which satisfies the goals of the Fed as it is today. Related to Wander, we're obviously not in traditional commercial real estate, so we're obviously in short-term rentals and the vacation rental and travel space. And so we've benefited from the continuous tailwinds of the short-term rental and travel space very fortunately. But for a lot of other different types of commercial real estate like office or even some industrial, for example, they're certainly starting to suffer and having trouble meeting their yields. And it's a real issue for the country. And hopefully, I think there's some type of action taken before the results of that are felt as opposed to to what's happening currently, which is we're sort of waiting for banks to fail. We're waiting for, you know, buildings to go into foreclosure, et cetera, before we do anything. And it would be nice to be a little bit proactive about that, or at least that's, that's what I'd love to see the country do, but we'll sort of see what happens.

So another topic that people are very interested in is artificial intelligence. Although you all have the real estate, you also are a technology company and there's a lot of things that you're doing that maybe we can call auto magic, right? Where people walk up and they can unlock a door that's not their door with their phone, or maybe get into a Tesla, like all these different things. Um, so that's some degree of automation or kind of this auto magic. What else are you all, uh, doing internally? And then what are you excited about coming outta that sector?

Yeah, so the, a really great way to think about the shift that artificial intelligence is gonna have is that it's gonna create incredible operational efficiency on companies that typically had to have a very headcount-heavy operational structure. right? So customer service is going to end up being automated away. Anything that anyone does really just behind a computer will end up being automated away by these various AI agents. And so what you have is the efficiency unlock in typically very operationally complex businesses that would have historically low margins due to the number of W-2 employees. And so for Wander, one thing that we're working on, you know, pretty, pretty intensely is the augmentation of our concierge service. This so that when someone reaches out to us and they say, hey, we'd love to go and book this restaurant, can rather than a human do that, can we use an AI agent and related automations to be able to go and effectively do that without a person intervening? And so that's just on the customer support side. But then you look at the property management side and the automation of certain contractors and cleaning crews and otherwise, and what you end up with is basically a system that theoretically it scaled to hundreds or thousands of properties with a very, very low headcount. And it sort of sounds outrageous today, but it's certainly where the world is moving. I think today IBM announced that effectively they're not hiring any more W-2 employees where the jobs could be done by AI. And that is fully the world that we're moving towards, is that companies with fewer people are going to be able to do the jobs and tasks tasks of companies with thousands of people. And that's going to lead to incredible operational efficiency. And basically business models that didn't work before the technology will now start to work. And so if you're in one of those operationally intense businesses, definitely leveraging AI and making sure that as a founder and entrepreneur, you understand how it works and the systems and have a vision for it is, is hypercritical because if not, you'll be sort of left in the dust.

Yeah, I think that's a great way to look at it. Um, are you seeing anything change internally with the use of this stuff in terms of, uh, tools that people are using or various types of products that you can build now that maybe you couldn't build previously?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's something like 70% and this, this should be fact-checked, but 70% of engineers are now leveraging AI tooling. And it's, it's a pretty remarkable shift in terms of AI code completion and A company I'm a big fan of, Sourcegraph, just released basically a context-aware code search where you can effectively ask it queries and it'll give you answers related to that code base. And so that augmentation is happening very quickly and that results in a lot of training as well. And that training is going to result in these, these, um, this sort of like AI code companion, um, becoming a bigger and bigger piece of an engineer's life until ultimately large swaths of software are going to be effectively automated, which will be a really incredible effect. Like, imagine if rather than building a website and it taking, let's call it a week, anyone anywhere in the world could ask, let's call it like ChatGPT or whatever to say, hey, make me this website. And it took a day and cost nothing. And so basically, like the idea that software could be free-flowing for everyone is going Yeah, it's going to, it's going to change, change the world and it's coming for everyone as well. Like, you know, copywriting and graphic design and accounting. I mean, the really no, very few people are safe from a, from a job perspective. Even me as a CEO, you think about this like AI that has all the context in the world to make decisions. You know, really all I am at that point is just a a smiling face. And so it's going to be really interesting to see what happens over the next few years and how the right leaders integrate it into their business in a thoughtful and human way.

Another area that people are very excited about is Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. What are you seeing there, or what do you think is exciting?

Yeah, so obviously what's happening in the banking industry is not necessarily great for creating assurance or confidence in the US dollar. Especially too, when you think about some of the moves that China and Russia are making, even China and Saudi Arabia in terms of doing dealings in the yuan. And so what you end up with is basically looking at why or what did Bitcoin and crypto come out of? And of course, it came out of the 2008 crisis when people weren't exactly confident in the banking infrastructure. And so I think that what you're going to see is that Previously, the sort of flood into crypto was driven by low interest rates and speculation, but now you're starting to see confidence in it from an actual utility perspective. And so it's going to be really interesting to see that shift again, especially if we see continued bank failures, how more and more countries and more and more individuals are going to start to leverage it. You're also seeing pretty rampant inflation in places like Argentina and otherwise. And so those types of people and the people in those countries really have no choice but to move to some other currency, whether it's the US dollar. And of course, if you don't have faith in the US dollar, then what currency are you moving into? And crypto certainly has a potentially big place in that future. But I think that as that happens, you're seeing more and more regulation around it, right? Because obviously threatening the US dollar is going to result in quite a few folks in power sort of looking at these different cryptocurrencies. Like you see what's happening right now with Coinbase in the Wells notice and otherwise. And so it's going to be really interesting to see what happens from that perspective is that even if you have this decentralized currency, if all the governments say that it's not allowed, then it's going to end up being this sort of black market item. So I candidly don't know what the future is going to hold for it, but what I can say is that we're certainly seeing the reason it exists all around us.

Yeah, I think that's right. You all are interesting because you have software and then you have quote unquote hardware, which is really kind of real estate and physical spaces. There's been a very big rise in whether you want to call it American dynamism, whether you want to call it space exploration, manufacturing. Like there's all these kind of things in and around the combination of software and hardware that are now coming together and becoming quite popular. What are you seeing there? Maybe places that you take inspiration from, but also places that you're paying attention into, uh, that are outside of what you all are doing?

I think as you see this shift where software is becoming sort of easier and easier to create, that more and more businesses and servicing new ideas are going to have some type of hardware component to them. And that that result is going to be, especially if it's in an idea space that consumers feel strongly about, are going to build some pretty important companies. Tesla being a great example, obviously an incredible software company, but has built an incredible cult brand around the physical hardware as well. Apple being another example, this idea of having this physical object with soft, with great software as well. And that creates really high moat and durable companies because no matter what anyone else does, they're not going to have Apple's hardware. And in Wanderer's case, no matter what anyone else does, they're not going to have our homes. And so that dynamic I think is going to continue for new companies tackling big ideas. Now they are going to be a little bit slower to scale. Again, Tesla's a 20-something-year-old company. Apple's a 40-something-year-old company. But the result should be a much more durable, durable business. And so I think that more VCs, as again, you see the, like, abundance of software, are actually going to start turning to some of these higher moat type businesses.

Yeah, when you see that moat developing, to me, I always come back to this idea of you have the hardware, you have the software, but also there's this— I'm going to call call it like cultural thing going on as well where, you know, take the Anderills of the world, take the SpaceXes, like these very big companies that are matching hardware and software, but it almost feels like they're able to recruit because they literally just say, this is important, right? And I know that there's been a rise of all kinds of different tools and this and, you know, single-person companies, like some of the things we even talked about today. How important is it to be able to recruit people, recruit investors, and ultimately recruit customers by somebody just putting the flag in the ground saying, hey, this is important.

Yeah. When the way that I like to think about it is that let's like flashback to like ancient Sparta, right? When warriors would go to war, they weren't doing it because of their compensation packages. They were doing it because they were going to war with a leader and an ideology and a mission that they believed in. And when you think about building a great culture and a great company, people aren't going to give it their heart and soul unless that dynamic is also true. Now, of course, I'm not equating working at a tech company to being a Spartan warrior, but the idea that people need to be passionate and believe in something and believe in their leadership is still extremely relevant. And so that's why a lot of great companies are able to recruit really incredible talent, even though the compensation packages may be less or otherwise. Is because they truly believe in the mission statement and it's something that they want to dedicate their life to and have a real purpose. And so as long as humans aren't robots and simply make decisions in an extremely logical framework and actually have ideologies and beliefs, then that dynamic is going to continue. And it's something that's super important. And candidly, I think it's a very, very good thing for humanity.

Yeah. Uh, when you start looking for talent, what are some of the things that you're looking for and where are you finding, uh, kind of people today? And I would love for you to tell me your secrets as to where you're finding these people, but kind of what does that process look like? Uh, obviously you guys have, uh, all these locations, right? And so kind of, I'm assuming most of the team is remote and it opens up opportunities, but also makes things more challenging. Talk through that a little bit.

Yeah. So as, As someone who grew up as an internet kid, I sort of have this deep intuition when it comes to undiscovered young talent. I can see from someone's GitHub, it's like this 17-year-old, 18-year-old kid with thousands of commits and working on these great open source projects. And of course they would flunk an interview with Google and also a recruiter on LinkedIn isn't going to necessarily find them. They probably don't have a LinkedIn at all. And so finding those types of people and bringing them into a culture where you don't need to have 20 years of experience and understand the politics of a workplace, like we value output and camaraderie and like building, then they tend to be extremely high output and it ends up putting their career on a vastly different and more productive track. And so that's really what I focus on across all the different aspects of the business. Now that's very different than when you look at your leadership team. When you look at your leadership team, you're paying for someone who's been there and done that and has some type of expertise in the field, but they need to be able to manage those types of very high output individual contributors that are on a great upward trajectory in their career. And so that's, that's really what I focus on. And then over top of that, just their raw abilities is I really focus on compatibility. So does this person have shared ethics? Are they a good person? Would they stop and help someone change a flat tire? And so that's something that we really focus on as well. And what that results in is a really high output culture with very few, what's the best way to put it, very few negative people, so to speak.

As you continue to build this business, what are the biggest risks? What are the things that keep you awake at night and you're like, "Hey, we got to mitigate this or get rid of this"?

Yeah, so the biggest risk for Wander at this point, is scale. So when we, when we first launched, we had a bunch of questions, right? Could we build this booking platform? Would the customer experience be better? You know, would we be able to build the asset management, all these different pieces? Are the unit economics positive? Tons of tons of questions. For the most part, those questions have now been answered and customers truly love the product. And so we sort of satisfied that like Y Combinator philosophy of build something that people love. But now the question is, how do we scale that across the US, across the globe? And that's a really complicated dynamic and something that if startups are so lucky, you're going to face at some point, right? Once you build something that people love, then if successful, you're going to have to scale it. And so that's really the phase that Wander's going through right now. And I hope that I can look back on this podcast in 5, 10 years and be like, wow, like, you know, we figured that out. Like, holy crap. But yeah, it's certainly a tough, a very tough dynamic that I think a lot of companies go through. And I just, I feel very lucky to be faced with that challenge. But that is really what keeps me up at night at this point is, you know, really capturing the full potential of this company and figuring out how do we scale to, you know, thousands of locations.

I think that is a great place to end this conversation because understanding the risks, but also saying, hey, when I get there and I look back, here's what I want to believe, I think is a great way to not only minimize risk, but also it's a great way to really understand what are you building, right? It's kind of like if you start at the end and then work backwards, it helps you really understand what that North Star is. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about Wander?

Absolutely. So the company's website is wander.com and it's @wander on all the different social media platforms. And then for me personally, my name's John Andrew Entwistle. So on Twitter and all that fun stuff, and thank you all so much for listening and thank you for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate it.

I learn every time we talk, so I appreciate you taking the time to do this. And although you have been at this for a long time, you still got a long kind of portion of your career ahead of you. So I'm excited to see what else you do once you build this business into an absolute giant. And I appreciate you taking the time to come on here. We'll definitely do it again in the future.

Amazing. Thank you so much.