Nat Koonce, an early AppFolio executive who helped take the company public, is now CEO of Rentvine after Mainsail Partners invested roughly $100 million. Years ago, Koonce said he'd challenge AppFolio with a $50 million war chest. Founder Dave Borden stays on the board.
Rentvine has a new CEO. Can you believe it? So Dave Borden, the founder of Rentvine and longtime CEO, has stepped down from his role and we have a new CEO. His name is Nat Koons. And I want to tell you about Nat because he has a fascinating background. But before we get into that, let me talk a little bit about Rentvine and Dave. So Rentvine is one of the most significant new entrants to the property management software market that we've seen in literally decades. Their growth has been a remarkable story. Dave Borden has a history in property management. He's got a fantastic co-founder by the name of Jonathan Yuan who is staying on as president as part of this transition. And Rentvine kind of made their name early on for 2 things. One, their great customer service and customer support. The second one being their open API, which to me is a really big deal. And you're gonna hear me talking about open APIs and the value of quality APIs very soon. So stay tuned for that. And something else you need to know about Rentvine is they took outside investor money. So it's expensive to grow a software business. And like just about every other software company, they brought on a growth equity partner in the form of Mainsail Partners. They made an injection of, might've been like $100 million or so into Rentvine. And that got them like a seat on the board and some other stuff, pretty typical stuff. Well, interestingly, Mainsail Partners had as an executive in residence, Nat Koonce. He had been in this executive in residence role for the last 6 months. And Nat Koonce was actually one of the very, very, very early early executives at Appfolio, pre-revenue. This guy was at Appfolio and he took them all the way through their IPO. And during this time, he was over their product and strategy. He basically built a lot of what we think of as Appfolio today. So he's a really big deal and he's kind of a living legend among some of the OG prop tech folks. He actually wasn't on my radar at all, believe it or not, until I heard this news. So I spoke with Dave Borden earlier this week about the transition. He's very optimistic about Nat and the future of Rentvine under his Dave let me know that he's staying on in a leadership capacity, and of course he's still on the board as well. So that's nice to see because I think a lot of people have a personal relationship with Dave and are going to want to know that he's still around, which he is. What can we expect moving forward? Well, Nat brings a dynamic history in the direct space of property management software. In fact, there's kind of a secret interview that I think Nat did. It's anonymous, but There was an interview with an AppFolio executive that surfaced a couple of years ago. And the interviewee talked a lot about what it would look like to try to compete with AppFolio. He was asked directly, hey, if I gave you $50 million, how would you go up against AppFolio? If you want to see some of that breakdown, check out my newsletter that came out on Friday. But basically the guy that talked about what he would do if he had to compete with AppFolio is now in a position to do exactly that. Congrats to Rentvine, Dave, and Nat. It's going to be very interesting to watch where things go from here. That's all I got for you.
