Matt Bendett built Peerspace's Trust & Safety team to handle fraud prevention and regulatory compliance. He created proprietary risk-scoring tools and used multiple SaaS solutions to add friction without blocking low-risk users. The company avoided short-term rental regulations by positioning itself as a commercial space-sharing platform.
Mason, do you want to come on? Yeah, thanks. My question is about trust and safety and regulations. I'm curious if you faced any headwinds in either of those channels and how you took those on.
Yeah, so I ran our trust and safety, I built it and kind of grew it, the function. We, for trust and safety, we focus on 2 things, the sort of fraud prevention And risk prevention side. And then I guess 3 things. The 3rd thing would be like regulation and, you know, working with city government and different, actually different types of municipalities to avoid regulation. We didn't, I'd say that was like the least frequent. There's a couple incidences of that that we kind of worked through. And it really came down to explaining, and this is particular to Peerspace, that we're not a short-term rental business. We're not providing transient occupancy like a hotel would or like an Airbnb where you're sleeping in the space and someone's vacating. This was like space sharing. Most of our businesses is in commercial space as well. So it's like a business having another business use their space. So anyway, that was less of a challenge for us. But what I made sure to do as our mini GC is I had a Rolodex of different types of legal resources, whether they're sort of geographic land use attorneys or there was liability litigation help, and then I'd have contract legal over here. So we I would always have some resource or some expert that I could reach out to and I would negotiate terms with them to keep it, you know, efficient. And I had to kind of manage it to make sure that we weren't spending too much on legal. So I don't know if that was the aspect you were asking about or if it was more on like the fraud prevention and risk prevention side. But, you know, on that side of things, that's what, that was the side that we really started scaling up. We built you know, our own proprietary risk scoring tool, tools and kind of models for that to make sure that what's being booked, we know what the mark, what the bookings were that were possibly going to be risky. We learned obviously as different things came in and tweaked our models accordingly. And then, you know, on the fraud prevention side, it's really just about making sure that you have good tooling there. And we would use, we use many different SaaS enterprise softwares to sort of help us out with that and to make sure that we were introducing healthy friction where necessary without having a lot of people churning through the process because that would otherwise would book in more low-risk individuals. And I'd be happy to talk more about this in further depth later.
