digital-wissen

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Seattle startup Latchel applies Amazon delivery strategies to building maintenance

The challenge of fixing a leaky sink and delivering groceries might sound like two very different problems, but Will Gordon would tell you that’s wrong.

For close to three years, Gordon worked at Amazon, focused on product delivery and leading an international expert team that was tackling last mile planning and execution. In any logistics or fulfillment process, he said, “it’s all about getting the right information to the right people at the right time.” That’s true whether it’s an Amazon delivery or property management emergency.

Now Gordon is applying this wisdom to Latchel, a Seattle-based startup that he co-founded in April 2016. The business helps property managers nationwide solve emergencies including broken toilets, flooding, failed heating systems and other building woes. Their tenants have round-the-clock access to a hotline for reporting and troubleshooting problems, which sometimes results in sending out a contractor to make repairs.

The apartment and building managers are kept in the loop through messages and photos, but don’t have to play a direct role — which might be most appreciated for troubles that strike in the middle of the night.

“The property managers are only woken up for the really severe cases,” Gordon said.

The 11-member Latchel team includes Gordon, who is chief operating officer, and fellow co-founders Ethan Lieber, CEO, and Jullian Chavez, engineering lead. Before Latchel, Lieber was director of product at One Planet Ops, creator of websites including Contractors.com and HomeGain. Chavez has built mobile and web apps, most recently at Picmonic.

The group is finishing a session with Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley accelerator. Their “Demo Day” pitch is next week.

“It’s a lot of fun. It’s really intense,” Gordon said. The coaching has focused on growth and making sure you’re working on the right problems, he said. Latchel has doubled its overall business since starting the program three months ago. The team blazed through more than six months of a business roadmap in that time.

Latchel has skyrocketed from serving 2,000 units a year ago to 33,500 units today. The business follows a model akin to Lyft or Uber drivers for its troubleshooting hotline: qualified experts can pick up shifts whenever they’d like to help customers. Latchel has 25 troubleshooters and 3,000 contractors in its system.

Latchel offers a free, basic plan that handles maintenance requests and coordination. For more complete services, the startup has two subscription plans that are $25 a month, plus $1 or $10 per unit, depending on the range of services needed. Gordon said there is competition in the space, particularly for 24/7 emergency service, but the other options are focused on call-centers and lack their digital solutions.

Gordon’s Amazon influence is integrated across the business, including Bezos-esque leadership principles that include “continuously improve and customer obsession.” He’s also a fan of Amazon’s fundamental approach to building platforms that can be readily scaled and applied to slightly different problems. With that in mind, Latchel’s vision is to one day expand beyond property owners to anyone needing home maintenance.

We caught up with Gordon for this Startup Spotlight, a regular GeekWire feature. Continue reading for his answers to our questionnaire.

Explain what you do so our parents can understand it: Latchel is a 24/7 maintenance department for property managers and landlords. We take tenant calls, screen them for potential emergencies, troubleshoot the issue and send contractors if necessary.

Inspiration hit us when: My grandfather retired from managing our family properties (at age 92!). While I was working at Amazon, I also tried to help with the family business. I quickly saw that the day-to-day problems were mostly maintenance related. I also noticed the maintenance fulfillment processes were surprisingly similar to the Amazon delivery processes I was building for Amazon Fresh, PrimeNow and Amazon Logistics. I looked for an existing solution to solve this problem but couldn’t find anything on the market, hence Latchel was born.

VC, Angel or Bootstrap: Angel — I had a strong network of mentors from Amazon who helped get the company off the ground.

Our ‘secret sauce’ is: Our process — but it isn’t a secret! We publish it right on our website. The secret is we can reliably execute on our process better than anyone else.

The smartest move we’ve made so far: Turning on 24/7 emergency maintenance service. This went against conventional wisdom in the space, which said this service is already saturated, but is the reason we’ve been able to grow from 2,000 units to over 30,000 in less than a year.

The biggest mistake we’ve made so far: Hiring a sales team before we had product/market fit. We had a lot of early demand for our product and we thought we needed more salespeople to keep up with the demand. Our product wasn’t mature enough however and we ended up losing a lot of early customers. We learned our lesson and have maintained an incredibly lean and nimble team since then.

Which entrepreneur or executive would you want working in your corner? Jeff Bezos. He has built the world’s most customer-obsessed operations and technology company. The culture he has built has enabled his team to act autonomously with the customer’s best interest in mind.

Our favorite team-building activity is: We’re a fully remote team and we haven’t met most people in person yet! We send silly GIFs to each other on Slack. As we grow we’re rolling out more fun ways to keep the team connected.

The biggest thing we look for when hiring is: Culture fit. We look for team members who embody our leadership principles. A couple of examples that are vitally important to us: continuously improve, customer obsession, ego is the enemy.

What’s the one piece of advice you’d give to other entrepreneurs just starting out: Pick a problem you can absolutely obsess over. You’re going to be living and breathing this problem for years so make sure you’re solving a problem you’re passionate about in an industry that you love.

Source: Digital Wissen

[digital-wissen]

Seattle startup Igneous raises $25M to help companies manage their unstructured data

Seattle startup Igneous has reeled in a $25 million investment round to fuel growth of its software that helps companies manage their unstructured data.

WestRiver Group led the Series C round, which pushes total funding to date to $70 million. Existing investors including Madrona Venture Group, NEA, Vulcan Capital, and Redpoint Ventures also participated.

Founded in 2013 by veterans of Isilon Systems and NetApp, Igneous’ platform provides visibility and storage for unstructured data, or information that isn’t easily categorized, both in the cloud or on-premise.

The company’s clients span across various industries and include The Allen Institute of Brain Science, OpSec, PAIGE, Tippet Studios, Altius Institute, and Bardell. Igneous has customers in the “mid-double digits,” said CEO and co-founder Kiran Bhageshpur.

“They use Igneous to see, organize, mobilize and protect their unstructured data — and for our customers this is petabytes of mission critical, often machine generated data typically living across disparate systems onsite, offsite and in public cloud,” Bhageshpur said in an email. “Igneous helps data-centric enterprises tap into their valuable unstructured data, optimize their storage and IT resources and reduce their data risk posture.”

Bhageshpur said Igneous differentiates from competitors with its focus on enabling efficiency at scale and the ability to support any file or object protocol.

“Our customers are able to quickly (in days) get up and running, see all of their data, improve their backup SLAs and modernize their data protection services, surgically archive and migrate data to control tier 1 storage costs, organize their datasets for use in HPC/ML/EDA/RPA workflows … all without the need for a full-time system administrator,” he explained.

The startup employs 70 people and expects to grow headcount by more than 50 percent in 2019. Bhageshpur said new sales growth has increased by 10X over the past year.

Igneous originally sold a hardware data appliance for companies to help manage on-premises storage systems but has since expanded to develop services geared toward cloud computing.

The global big data market size is expected to reach $70 billion by 2022, according to Statista.

Bhageshpur is the former vice president of engineering in the Isilon Storage Division at EMC, having spent five years in senior engineering roles at the company. Another Isilon engineering vet, co-founder Jeff Hughes, is CTO at Igneous. The company’s third co-founder, Byron Rakitzis, was the first employee at NetApp.

Madrona was also an early investor in Isilon, which sold to EMC for $2.25 billion in 2010.

Anthony Bontrager, WestRiver Group managing director, will join the company’s board as a result of the funding.

“Igneous is uniquely positioned to enable enterprises to unlock the value of their datasets and simultaneously reduce their risk profile,” he said in a statement. “This is a complex problem that Igneous has tackled with impressive technology services.”

Other recent Seattle-area investments by Kirkland, Wash-based WestRiver Group include Tectonic Audio Labs, Pro.com, Wicket Labs, and Viewpath.

Source: Digital Wissen