And were they like obviously now youre opening here the cap table to a different breed and I guess when that happen probably at a strategic level lets say from a board perspective or something you know, maybe you receive some type of recommendations whether it was with this corporation or with other corporations as to what perhaps to look for and what to avoid. How did you find these investors? Then behind the scenes, Zumper will close the transaction with the landlord and set the renter up with kind of rent payment. It is ultimately the culture. You look at your cofounders and you know that they understand that and that theyre not freaking out, that is where you build real institutional culture and then you try and grow that across the team. Saying that, if you do have multiple term sheets the second point is of course, like before you get to liquidity, revenue is irrelevant and if revenue gets in the way of bringing either the consumer on to your platform or the supply side person on to your platform, you should not be trying to charge. He had actually interviewed me for a job at a different consulting firm and we stayed in touch. Got it. Anthemos Georgiades Current Workplace Zumper Location 555 Montgomery St Ste 1300, San Francisco, California, 94111, United States Industry Information Collection & Delivery, Media & Internet Description Discover more about Zumper Anthemos Georgiades Work Experience and Education Work Experience Manager, Summer Investment Atomico 2009-2010 At scale you get to do that and have those teams. So we have several million users using our platform every month now which is great and next year we wanted tens of millions of users a month and were poised to doing that. Not really actually. No. But I guess you were saying then here the shift, kind of like shifted more from like growth of users perhaps retention to more kind of like deep revenue growth. So it doesnt always work out and I think thats fine. And so as you mature you look for a different kind of investor and that naturally tends to happen. Thank you so much. So we solved it to the first two years purely by getting landlords on board through various kind of product strategy and so our growth cuts for the first two years that we raised the [27:41] were purely about landlords and listing. I dont think theres a startup I could have launched that taught me more. So we bought them. Retention is something I think about every day. So the majority of that is still in the bank but yeah, we raised money in capital [12:00]. Pat Mapper caters to 25 and under and kind of big college populations. Anthemos Georgiades: Yeah. And frankly, the process is a pain in the ass. I think Id say forget everything you think you know and everything, your education [38:28]. So I guess what was the timeline of this C round compared to perhaps your seed round of 2012? Ill set the first couple of meetings often alone but its been wonderful as weve grown our executive team to be able to bring like our VP of sales, our head of grow, our CPO in to the meetings afterwards when they want to meet the team. So I learned a lot from a few companies that I loved, a few companies that I thought are doing crazy things I learned so much. How autonomous can people be at the junior levels? She was our original CPO and after the series A, she moved on to roller, another company and we promoted someone internally to CPO. Theres never like an exact number you need like when Uber raised money or you know Zillow raised money, theres never like a number they have to be at. I was really impressed when because its not hard, its almost impossible to land VC such as Kleiner Perkins on literally your first financing round, the seed round. Were going to charge you per lead or for the smaller landlords we charge them if theyre [11:15] for the transaction. Your job as the CEO and the founder is to convince your investors of the reason to do this. Yeah. I mean at the end of the day, building and scaling companies especially when youre at the early stages is all about survival and its all about learning to be with each other behind the trenches and really going to war and having each others backs. After that, it changed to more consumer. You start to build depth and management structures. FUNDED EP01: How to tell a story worth $140 million dollars (Zumper) 00:00 51:07 Episode Summary Anthemos Georgiades, founder of Zumper, perfected his pitch the way most founders do: through trial and error. Obviously they knew and I think for us it was like telling Axle and the rest of our investors that there are going to be months where we massively beat plans and there will be months where were behind plans. Culture is everything and so investing in people making sure I as the CEO spend a lot of time as much as possible with people who dont report to me is absolutely critical and that is ultimately like the fabric on how most companies are run. How many landlords did we have on the site? When people ask me what Im most nervous about its how to keep our amazing team together, a couple of tactics and then one thing that really worked. So Id say your first month you spend like getting first, second, third meeting. There was no book [01:41]. So I guess in your guys case, how do you deal with the egos and then more importantly how did you define the responsibilities early on so that you kind of have that healthy culture going on? We raised like a million dollars in seed money, that was running out so we tried various things that didnt work and I think the fabric of our culture that is still true today when we have a hundred people is built in the dark days and those days where your stuff is not working, your users arent growing, and how you look at your teammates and how you guys turn up on a Monday morning after a really crappy week the week before where maybe someone quit or maybe the metrics went south. There could be investors who are fantastic. At Zumper, based in San Francisco, he leads the company in its mission to make renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel. Alejandro: Just out of curiosity, Anthemos, like how many nos did you get for example on your seed round if you have to count it? Got it. anthemos georgiades net worth. At series B, you got to show product market set across the board with the revenue and then at series C, you got to show real traction and real revenue and a proper P&L. Theyre struggling to kind of grow their audience because they didnt have enough listings whereas Zumper at the getgo we had a lot of unique landlords on the platform that no one else had. Look how quickly our revenue are scaling. We have like four people at the company for the first year or maybe five for the first year and so theres so much to do and theres so little time and few resources that you actually theres no real intellectual whiteboarding session that you do to carve out rose. The one unifying theme in every fundraising Ive run is momentum. Absolutely. So how did you meet your cofounders? We didnt go that route because I have the network but if I didnt have the network and some people have the network and still do it, they are really good cheap in to getting scaled quickly. The second one is have a vision and a mission that people agree with and we all wanted to [37:13] this vision make renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel. Likewise. And [14:42] in Silicon Valley is married to [graphics 14:43] mostly in terms of great companies just break out and succeed [agnostic 14:48] as to where people went to college or if they came from a wealthy or poor family. Anthemos Georgiades: Its just part of the game and it doesnt [24:30]. So one is weve always promoted within so whenever we needed a role, we always prefer to promote someone instead of hiring from outside. Get 5 free searches. I think if you hire four cofounders like yourself, thats difficult and luckily we didnt have that problem. So for the business, Anthemos, how much capital have you guys raised today? Its not about the ski trips and any of that you know. Culture is everything and so investing in people making sure I as the CEO spend a lot of time as much as possible with people who dont report to me is absolutely critical and that is ultimately like the fabric on how most companies are run. I think its easy not to set those expectations and get caught in the relationship where neither side is being clear on what they expect. So Id say your first month you spend like getting first, second, third meeting. If you guys are Zumper website, you can kind of kind at zumper.com the Contact Us or on Twitter I am just @anthemos, A-N-T-H-E-M-O-S on Twitter and yeah, I respond to people. All of it is going to be important and it will come out at the right stage. Your job is to raise capital and your job is to kind of hire and retain the best talents. You know marketplaces and liquidity is king like you were pointing to finding what you need in the shortest period of time because otherwise theyre going to go elsewhere. So yes, we have a great cap table. Absolutely. How do you take a company with those tractions, 10 million in revenue. So when you go in to a fundraising in terms of preparation the most important thing is that your last six months are great and your most important metrics are all growing really nicely so kind of five, six months in a row that is a fantastic story to tell to an investor. Yeah. Prior to his work at Zumper, Georgiades worked at the Boston . You are going to get a bunch of nos so I wouldnt rule people out too early. . Prices can change quickly! Anthemos Georgiades: Yeah. It was always a man, there is a really tough problem that consumers experience and no one is solving it. How do you scale like 20 million in revenue to 200 million in revenue and we didnt need the more product set investors because we already have fantastic people at that. Never thought Id be an entrepreneur. Had worked in politics. Could you meet him? And so whereas that doesnt guarantee any success we obviously have to have really good numbers and a really good story to tell them. I say like in the first pitch to the day the money wires, theres always been around like a minimum of three months. Anthemos Georgiades CEO at Zumper United States 4K followers 500+ connections Join to view profile Zumper Harvard Business School Websites Websites Company Website http://www.zumper.com Company. Your job as the CEO and the founder is to convince your investors of the reason to do this. Anthemos Georgiades is the co-founder and CEO of Zumper, the largest startup in the rental industry, used by more than 26 million renters last year alone. This show is about storytelling and all the elements that go into telling the perfect fundraising story. Anthemos Georgiades: Yeah, I mean BCG I think you get access to the 23 year olds CEOs who had been working for 40 years and kind of crazy in consulting you take the shortcut in your careers to being in the board room. Vishal Makhijani President & COO. Its a Greek name, British accent. In the first two or three years you will kill your marketplace if you create any barriers to entry from either side. Alejandro: Got it. Of course and I agree with you there, Anthemos. Hes raising money now. I knew the CEO for a while. So lets talk about Zumper here. Theyre both incredibly smart as are my executive team who are also like critical to fundraise where Ill go in and sell the vision often alone. Unluckily weve made some phenomenal early hires so the company that have all scaled to leadership roles, thats fantastic for retention because those people know that we could have hired from outside but we bet on them and it worked and so Zumper is a place to build theyre career not somewhere else. Yeah. I mean I think at seed round its like an [26:02]. Georgiades founded Zumper after his own . So in terms of timeline, you were mentioning that the C round, you guys closed this 46 million a couple of months ago. Alejandro: And talking about hustling the network, was there any because I mean those networks that you have I think the network of Harvard is really fantastic and then you know the BCG as well but is there like any process that you followed to really like leverage the network? So paradoxically, I dont think the core DNA of a companys culture is built at ski tracks or offsite. In the early days, youre going to need to take all the capital you can get. And it was just [22:11] during the process that its a startup, were at growth stage but not to expect to be able to predict our courses like that public company again. So it was never I want to be an entrepreneur journey. I'm so proud of my wife Lucy Georgiades and her cofounder Lindsey Nehls on launching their business Elevate Academy today. The most important thing is to surround yourself with an amazing support group because it is so much harder to build a company than I thought it was and the emotional resilience you need to get through the dark days and come back to the bright days even now is what [38:54] just get harder like yeah, we have more revenue now but with that there are people [38:58] and like huge revenue targets we have to attain and so the most important thing is surround yourself with a network of family, friends, mentors, peers, your team, your investors, whoever is an emotional crutch for you where you can take from them but also maybe get back to them as well when theyre having a tough time, thats the single most important thing is look after your mental health because it is lonely and it is stressful and if youre able to kind of be resilient you have a great outcome but it is really hard on some days to push through, so build that around just [39:35] and you can be happy while running your company. It just really helps to divide and conquer like that while I was meeting new investors again. How does the day to day at Zumper work? So you know I think Axle Springer very used to appraising companies that match their scale. [06:54] the early days and it worked where there was just all hands to the pump. Zumper CEO & Co-Founder Anthemos Georgiades makes renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel, shares insights on monetizing marketplaces, diversifying r. I met Russel who [04:01] engineering products through just the personal connections in London. How did you find these investors? For every successful fundraise, every single company have a lot of nos. Alejandro: So I guess like I have one thing to follow up on this. Well, Anthemos, it has been a pleasure to have you on the show. So when you go in to a fundraising in terms of preparation the most important thing is that your last six months are great and your most important metrics are all growing really nicely so kind of five, six months in a row that is a fantastic story to tell to an investor. It was just purely hustling my network for six months to find people who are really great cultural fit but also have very different skill sets to the one I have. Alejandro: So Im completely there with you. Zumper CEO and co-founder May 2012 Board and Advisor Roles Number of Current Board & Advisor Roles 1 Anthemos Georgiades is the Board Member at Zumper. So it was never I want to be an entrepreneur journey. It was kind of [31:51] as early as we did to buy another stock up that was kind of four years in. I learned more from you than you learned from me, and then your job as CEO is to do kind of two or three things, that is to continue to advance like the vision and the mission of the company and keep everything strategically aligned. So I guess without further ado, Anthemos Georgiades from Zumper, welcome aboard. Anthemos Georgiades is the co-founder and CEO of Zumper. Anthemos Georgiades: Oh wow, good question. If you dont have those connections, I think this is where like a lot of these accelerators and incubators, Y Combinator or Techstars or Launch are really good where you can apply. How autonomous can people be at the junior levels? Stay informed using all the free online rental data out there (like Zumper's national rent report). Your third month is getting kind of diligence done and getting the wires in to the door. Were incredibly grateful for everything she did and she remains kind of shareholder in the company. And so as you mature you look for a different kind of investor and that naturally tends to happen. But I guess you were saying then here the shift, kind of like shifted more from like growth of users perhaps retention to more kind of like deep revenue growth. Saying that, I have connections through both business school and previous people that have gone through BCG venture capital and most of your listeners and entrepreneurs will know so much of this is about like getting warm introductions to VCs so I did have a couple of cheats to get in through the network or through the BCG network. When you look your cofounders, your team in the eye and you know theyre ready to go and theyre resilient and they come back in to build and try the next thing and youve kind of worked out together this is part of the game. We want investors who look at $100 million in revenue as table stakes but they wont agree to a billion. Every company is completely different and theres no gold standard. Tanguy Le Louarn Chief Product Officer. You always have more nos that more yeses in fundraising but it was ultimately about just hustling my network as much as possible. So I as British person moving to Silicon Valley in 2012 I have never run a startup before. So Zumper is the vision for the company is to make renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel. Got it and before we actually dive in to the journey here, so consulting and. I mean if you could give some kind of like tips you know both fronts it would be really fantastic. They wanted to close apartments like they book a hotel and so took the status of like 35 different apartments we leased using the technology in San Francisco to VCs and said, Hey, were really going to rebuild all of this but heres some data that shows this really can work at scale, and thats how we raised the first million dollars from some of the names that you mentioned. And it is the culture that keeps people here, not the compensation or anything else. Yeah. So we tell the small landlords, Hey, dont just advertise in Zumper. They were [sexy 23:47] company and really fantastic fundraisers but the rounds just take a long time, due diligence take a long time. So for Zumper our vision as I mentioned was to make renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel and so instead of going in with just an idea, I built like a really crappy version of the end game that I wanted to build. It is not closely married to [14:55] and thats where its still on [14:58] I think Silicon Valley has a long way to go where when I got my first introductions to VCs to Kleiner, to Andreseen, to Graylock, to NEA, it often came through my graduate school network where someone was like, Hey, this guy is leaving HBS. My friend have had to camp out overnight outside the property management office to get access to the new apartment and this is [01:09] you know things coming online, you can order a cab via phone, you can book a hotel online. How much respect is there? If you dont have those connections, I think this is where like a lot of these accelerators and incubators, Y Combinator or Techstars or Launch are really good where you can apply. Taylor Glass-Moore Co-Founder. They are brilliant about. Yeah. So we bought them. Anthemos Georgiades: Yeah. Read More: Sujal Patel On Selling His First Business For $2.6 Billion And Now Raising $108 Million From Jeff Bezos And Others To Improve Medical Diagnostics. So I guess for those listeners that are looking at acquiring other companies to perhaps grow a little bit faster, what kind of advice would you give to them? How flat is the company? Really good strategy to differentiate the demographics and were super happy with how it went down. Now my cofounders were phenomenal in bringing them to meetings. How do you scale like 20 million in revenue to 200 million in revenue and we didnt need the more product set investors because we already have fantastic people at that. Youre right that is wrong advice. In the early days you as the CEO you are the fundraiser, you are the effective CFO, youre the head of sales and you kind of have to do the whole thing. Youre supposed to try six things that dont work. Dave Costantino Staff Engineer - Backend. Your second month you spend getting term sheets and documents signed. It was just purely hustling my network for six months to find people who are really great cultural fit but also have very different skill sets to the one I have. Anthemos Georgiades. I think Id say forget everything you think you know and everything, your education [38:28]. 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