Season 2, Episode 10: The Rover-DogVacay Merger (with Rover CEO Aaron Easterly)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/128a7f9bb5de104d

You know, and I've experienced dogsy and stuff that they shouldn't
Y
Dogs jumping over fences, you didn't think it'd be possible for them to jump over

Mm-hmm.
Welcome to Season 2, Episode 9 of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert, I'm David Rosenthal, and we are your hosts.
Today we are talking about a very important company.
Without this company existing, there would be no acquired, and it's likely that David and I never would have met.
Today's episode is about rover.com and their merger with Dog Vake to consolidate the grand rivals of the Dog Sitting Wars.
And we're super fortunate to have with us today the founder and CEO
Over dot com.
Aaron Easterly.
Well thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
Yeah, we're we're super pumped.
So Aaron, this is the part where we introduce the guest, and I was gonna do it from memory, but I wanted to make sure that I nailed the details.
So I tried to find a bio for you online uh which is harder than most folks. You're not exactly a bio person. I spent exactly zero minutes managing my reputation. As will become clear.
Throughout the show. Well, the one I did manage to find is from Crunch Base, unless you as Rover's top dog. So uh Rover's big on puns and we'll we'll revisit that many times throughout the episode. But listeners, to give you a sense of uh of Aaron's background.
He was an entrepreneur in residence at Madrona Venture Group, uh sort of during the genesis and formation of Rover and and and as a a key part of that. And Aaron was the before that the general manager of network strategy and monetization within Microsoft's advertiser.
Publisher Solutions Group. Now, Aaron, there are many rumors circulating that you were the youngest GM ever in the history of Microsoft at age twenty nine. Can you confirm? Actually I can't. I I don't know if uh if that's true or not. I was a very young GM for Microsoft at the time, um, and there's no one that's younger than I'm aware of, but I don't know if that's true or not.
Yeah.
And Aaron, of course, came into Microsoft through the acquisition of a Quantive Avenue A atlas, and it was a a huge ad tech acquisition of of that era.
So
To start the show. Oh, that's the thing.
Through your whole life.
And
Has been a lover of dogs.
Pomeranians. One dog in particular. Yeah, I love all animals, um, but I'm I'm very partial to dogs.
I was owned for fourteen years by a four pound fluff ball named Caramel.
And we are sitting here in the rover office in Caramel's den.
Name for caramel with a portrait of of caramel.
Up above Eren on the wall here.
Very sweet.
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All right, David. All the hard stuff is out of the way. Now for the fun stuff. Yeah.
It's really fun to have Aaron with us because um
Not only is Aaron a great friend of all of ours, um and we've spent lots of time together, but
Literally this story is the story of um
You know why we're all here today.
As Ben said, I don't think we would have met without it.
Certainly there would be no wave, no PSL. No.
None of it. It all comes from
The Top Dog.
So thanks, Aaron. Yeah.
to set the stage on the Rover Origin story and we'll Aaron will will come in here throughout.
But there are really three three pieces that I want to dive into. And so
First setting the background, let's go back to summer
Two thousand eleven.
Here in Seattle. It's summertime in Seattle, which is
the best time in Seattle. We're we're just entering into it again here now.
There's a company based here.
High growth.
High flying company.
Goes by the name of the
Amazon, which we've covered on this show before. And the stock price is at astronomical
It's
All time high. All time high.
Two hundred dollars a share.
And people are wondering, can this go on? Can this hype continue? Things are going so well, the company which had
here to four had just one office, had a an old hospital building up on Beacon Hill. They've actually
purchased from Paul Allen and started constructing a brand new campus.
In South Lake Union. Wait, in twenty eleven Amazon was still in Pac Med?
Yeah.
Beginning of twenty eleven things change. Amazon is still on Beacon Hill.
Wow.
And listeners, there's a crazy story about that building. It's a little dovetail, but that was a hospital that Amazon converted into their their first large major office before uh effectively colonizing all of downtown Seattle now. Um and it is now back to a hospital. Totally crazy. But people are wondering, you know, what's going on.
They're starting to construct
These new buildings, they've just constructed their their new headquarters in South Lake Union, uh here in Seattle. We're gonna come back to that.
And as part of that's sort of the the tech and venture funding thaw after the financial crisis is is starting to
thaw optimism is returning to the tech world and to Seattle. And there's this other interesting thing happening in the world right now, which is this concept call the sharing economy.
is taking off.
For me personally, I had just moved to Seattle the fall before in September of twenty ten.
uh to take a job at Madrona. And I had for the first time stayed in an Airbnb in September.
of twenty ten.
Uh and I knew about it because my then girlfriend, now wife, Jenny, her best friend, had just started dating one of the early employees at Airbnb.
Now my partner Riley at Wave. Uh and so I heard about Airbnb is where I stayed when I moved here to Seattle.
So this is all percolating. They'd raised a seed round from Sequoia.
And at the same time, here in Seattle
There is an organization called Startup Weekend.
And Startup Weekend was really cool. Then you were part of it in the early days, right? Yeah, still is very cool. It's uh an organization that uh started as a as a nonprofit and is now part of Techstars that basically gets a bunch of people in a room, most of them having never been involved in startups before, certainly having never founded them before. And it's
people pitching ideas and trying to create companies in forty eight hours. So you they bring together designers, developers, business people, because we never had a better name for business people than business people, and you basically try and come up with a a pitchable concept that has evidence of traction or belief it will succeed by the Sunday night.
And Chief Among Us.
The useless business people.
is our partner at Madrona, Greg Gottesman. Now, of course, Greg was also on the board of Startup Weekend, uh was instrumental in in building out that organization, but also happened to be an idea person. An idea person for sure.
And so
All of us
The weekend of June tenth.
Here in Seattle. We
decamp to Amazon's new campus.
Here in South Lake Union.
For a startup weekend hosted by Amazon.
Greg and I are participating.
Aaron, I can't remember. Were you there? No, I actually got a call from Greg during the weekend, but I actually didn't show up during the weekend. My girlfriend at the time was there, but I wasn't. We we did a phone a friend to Aaron. The way startup weekends work is that
On Friday night, anybody who attends can pitch an idea. And so, of course, all the useless business people pitch ideas. And I remember Greg about to go up on stage to pitch his ideas, and he's debating between two ideas.
I don't remember what the second one was. I was trying to find it. There's another nine hundred and seventy million dollar company lurking in that second idea. Maybe even bigger. What could have been? What could have been.
But one of the ideas is
Airbnb for dogs.
And he asked me, which one do you think?
We should do. And I said, Well
I think there's actually something to this Airbnb thing. I mean my buddy down there is working there. Like they're doing pretty well. I stayed at one. It's really cool. Okay.
We'll do every and be for dogs. Wow, David, you should be a venture investor.
And
Airbnb for dogs. It was. Greg pitches the idea, recruits a team, led by all star
developer and in his own words, quote unquote Studley College student. The one and only Phil Kimme.
I believe the the direction from from Greg during the weekend, uh to Phil heading the development team was
go to airbnb.com, clone everything on the site.
Uh and replace it with dogs.
It should be noted that after the start up weekend, we ended up
throwing out everything that was built because it was completely shoddy, but
Phil ended up rebuilding it, as we shall see. The company called A Place for Rover
ends up winning startup weekend.
It was a little stacked because the judging panel on the judging panel was
Matt McIwan, one of our other partners at Madrona. But
That aside, Rover ends up winning the startup weekend.
Monday comes around. We're in the Monday meeting at Madrona.
And Aaron, of course, is an entrepreneur in residence with us uh at the time at Madrona. We're discussing the weekend and how things went, and everybody's pretty excited about this idea. So excited that we call up Phil, the
The Studley College student who had
built things over the weekend and say, Hey, can you come on down?
And uh we want to talk about this a little more and maybe turning this into a real company. God bless everybody at Madrona who had the confidence in uh
all of us uh to do this crazy idea because this was before we were a venture firm venture firms didn't start companies and with all of us there
We started going on that Monday, June thirteenth.
So Aaron, as we mentioned, was an entrepreneur in residence with us at Madrona. And you were working on some new marketplace ideas, right? Because you had been obviously a marketplace expert being at Aquaniv and then at Microsoft.
What were you working on? It was like a local commerce idea, right?
Well, there's a couple of different marketplace ideas I had around advertising and um small businesses as well, um, but mostly on uh
Customer acquisition schemes and marketing things for those uh types of companies.
Of which I should add I was totally not excited about. Um you know, like I love the digital uh advertising world. I found it fascinating. The economist and me had a lot of fun.
with building some of the early online marketplaces.
But you know, after being in it for over a decade
I was having a really tough time getting passion about throwing myself into
Another uh digital marketing startup.
Am I remembering right, was there something about people in your family had worked in local businesses and
Uh had trouble with customer acquisition that you were gonna support them with problem. My parents had actually decided to open a pizza and wine bar at the time.
In California, right? In California. But you know the challenges of people who open businesses like that actually being able to devote cycles to doing marking effectively.
It's a big problem. They're typically working in the business, not on the business.
They don't spend a lot of time thinking around how to make that efficient.
So that that Monday meeting happens and you guys are kind of discussing, hey, this this thing happened over the weekend at startup weekend. We couldn't get Aaron to come in despite the fact that he's this world class marketplace expert and economist. He wouldn't drag himself over to to South Lake Union, but here we are Monday and we're all looking at each other going, uh we think we should do this.
What does the process look like from there? So Greg uh dragged me to meeting with uh some of the engineers that were on the team over the weekend that he wanted uh some help evaluating whether or not he should invite them on to kick off a prototype.
program.
And so day one I was uh happy to advise and uh consult on the project. What Greg didn't know at the time though was actually um a dognet.
And then I had
experience this problem myself.
uh for the better part of twelve years being a single busy business executive with a dog I absolutely adored, uh, but would not take with me on business trips.
So it's a problem that I had like all the time in my personal life and
Over a little four pound fluff ball.
Because of course at the time, if you before Rover uh and Dog Vake, which we will get into in a minute.
If you were going on a trip and you were a loving dog owner,
You
Instead of keeping your dog in this lovely home where he or she lived, it would go to a kennel and be in a cage and locked up. And it was really
Not a great experience.
Well that was actually the debate between Greg and I on basically day one. So Greg
As having been someone who had used a cat hole.
Um he had an experience with cannons where I was
you know, overpriced, his dog had gotten mauled, he felt like he had been nickel and dimed
And the debate was well
That's
All good, Greg, but like
I adore my dog. Um I know lots of dog owners.
I'm not sure I know anyone other than you that has ever used a kennel.
And so the the big debate was uh was more the population of dog owners like Greg Gottesman
Well, of course I'm gonna go to a high end kennel.
Or more like Aaron Easterly, I'm gonna go down the roller decks of friends, family, neighbors to find someone I can pond my dog off on. There are two, in my mind, two super, super key insights that Aaron brought to the business.
when he finally relented and we convinced him to become the CEO uh about a month later. And one was that dogs are family now. And this is was a behavioral change that had happened over the last
Five to ten years at that point, where dogs went from being pets to being
You know.
almost at the level of children. Aaron, of course, could speak from experience on that. But part two, and operationally, I think this was such an important insight into Rover and what has made it successful.
is that people were already doing this. Uh exactly like you said, Aaron.
many people were not using kennels, they were leveraging fem friends and family uh close to them. And so
Uh, this was not a new concept of behavior change that we had to do with consumers. We just had to bring it online into a better experience and a closed loop marketplace.
This begs the question.
you're starting an an early stage venture, one slide in your pitch deck is market size.
How do you figure out the market size of something that's currently not being monetized?
Um
Poorly. Uh is Dion's answer. Uh so
We initially looked at third party estimates of market size and
And the answer there, depending upon what you looked at, you could kinda get to three and a half in some sources, maybe
Six to eight billion in other sources. So it's it's not small, you know, and put that in perspective. You know, that's
You know, about the size of the entire non search digital advertising industry in the US, circa
Two thousand eight.
I think we had six billion in the pitch deck. So and and does that include kennels or is that outside of Kennels and private professionals for the most part.
But that was what the industry stats are based on, those segments. And so the the dilemma was how do you figure out how big
the friends, family, neighbor segment is.
given that these are oftentimes
You know, what we call shadow market transactions. Um
There are people with needs.
They have someone meet those needs.
More often than not, there actually is a value exchange.
A bottle of wine.
Uh take your friend to dinner.
Quid pro quo, I'll get you next time you need something. So there is a value exchange, but doesn't get reported in any industry stats and it may or may not be monetary in nature. A tough challenge. And um
Uh one that we didn't even attempt to solve in the initial series A pitch.
Um we put in the commercial market and just said, and there's some gravy on top in this shadow market segment. Um which looking back was just really dumb because as a as we found out a couple months later that
Gravy on top is actually ten times the size of the commercial market.
Um so it wasn't so much gravy, it was the entire cake. Well and this is so fun because
Once Aaron joined, you know, we were convinced there was a big opportunity here. If the one of the world's marketplace experts saw the opportunity, we we should probably continue to fund this at Madrona. Uh so we were willing to we're willing to fund this, but we thought there's one person in the world who we should go talk to.
as well. And maybe we would let them into the round.
And that would be someone we've also talked about on this show.
Greg McAdoo at Sequoia because he had just done uh the Airbnb investment. And so
We send Aaron packing down to the valley to go pitch Greg.
Greg says, you know, Yeah, that's all well and good and you know, Airbnb's doing great, but like it's such a bigger market. Like look at this market size. Like this isn't big enough. And of course it's hilarious because now Greg is, of course, a uh a good friend and an advisor to us and wave uh and he very much regrets passing on the opportunity. But
To your point.
The market size that was relevant was not the existing market size.
I'm glad you guys thought, by the way, that the fact I was taking the job is an indicator of the market size. Uh I can tell you my personal thought process was quite a bit different than that. But I'm glad that that's what you guys believed. Wow, these guys are willing to fund this. There must be something here.
For me, uh, life in general is about uh having uh uh fun, challenging experiences that actually have a unique impact where you're
contributing something that's different than what other people could contribute. You're not just a cog
So for me the thought process was
This is an opportunity that I think exists. Have no clue how big it is, but it exists at some level.
There is a chunk of this I think I can help out a lot with the deep analytics, the marketplace expertise.
I love dogs and
There's a bunch of this consumer side that I don't have a lot of experience with. I've done most of my marketplace stuff in B2B marketplaces.
Um, like search and ad exchanges and things like that. And so I was like, God, there's just half of this business I'm gonna fall on my face daily. And so for me, like, hey, I'm sure I can add value in some areas and have no clue.
What I'm doing in other areas.
Plus I think it's a big enough opportunity to be
interesting to throw myself into was basically the extent of the thought process. It's a good thing you didn't tell us that at the time. It totally is. Well, you know, every startup has to go on a little bit of faith.
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Okay, so before we dig into the dog vacay side of things and before we start talking about progression from here and the companies growing, we've got some fun stories that we want to dig into. So one is
the the company was originally a place for rover and it was a placeform
Yeah.
H how long did that last? Actually, uh about seven years now. Our legal name is still a place for rover.
So any time we file a document, file taxes, file a Delaware, we're still a place for Rover.
doing business as rover or rover dot com, but we're still a place for rover. And I think at the time it was uh Greg's uh play on a place for mom, which was a mechanism to find care for
elderly parents typically.
Uh also a Seattle company. And also had a domain name that was available. So Place for Rover was an available domain name. Purchased during the start up weekend. Purchased during the start up weekend. And so I think it was as simple as that. Domain name available.
had a little bit of uh prior art in terms of uh being used
For certain types of care marketplaces
But Rover at the time was not available.
And so we had mentioned this a little bit on our last episode in talking about the the T Mobile Sprint merger.
Aaron would love to to hear the story from you. How did you end up with rover.com? Uh yeah, this is just one of those cases where connections matter. So some research was done to figure out
who actually own the rover.com uh domain name.
And it it turned out it was clear wire.
Clear wire.
had acquired it because I was rolling out uh
A mobile Internet POC for wireless
Uh Internet.
Mobile Wi Fi hotspots.
And they'd actually canceled the product.
And cancel the product and also may run into trademark issues.
Uh, with regards to a French company that had a similar offering named like Rovare or something like that. Uh so some combination of clear wire not being able to invest in a new brand s slash some
Long term concerns around trademark is my understanding.
We're doing nothing with it.
Uh as it so happened, one of the other uh managing directors at Madrona at the time sat on the ClearWire board.
Your former boss. Former boss from Aquantum. When we found that out, uh he shepherded a conversation
Around hey, uh so you're not using this domain name, uh you wanna give it to us? And uh the answer was
No, but since we're uh not using it
How about we're willing to lease it to you guys for a little while?
So we initially uh leased it for like next to nothing and then bought it pretty cheap.

what five letter domain names with some level of actually brand equity already
Go for. We got super cheap. Near palindrome, you know
You know, just you know, in the US at least is this thing that means dah. And we're talking about a service
That actually makes it easy to move your dog around when you're traveling. So
Hoving your dog rove around. So
It it was perfect and cheap and serendipitous.
One other real quick fun story is that
For the rest of the summer as we were building the M V P
Based in the Madrona offices, the old Madrona offices at the time.
The first
Dog's Day.
happened in the the actual live dogs day happened in the Vagina office.
And of course the dog decided to
Use the bathroom.
On the floor in the Madrona office. And our awesome, truly, truly awesome uh and lovely CFO
uh and general counsel at Madrona. Troy Chickas.
Basically, I don't think I've ever seen him more enraged than at that moment. And he was he was so skeptical of Rover for years after that. But hopefully uh everything's you know, everything's uh dusted over. Oh, it was about a week after that too, where uh Troy came to me and said, You know, um
It's about time you guys find your own place. So we got we got the boot soon thereafter. Um
Yeah, which was time, you know, we you know did have our own funding and we could get our own plays.
But I'm pretty sure the timer that was uh driven by uh the dog with the explosive bowels. Or Yeah, or at least, you know, like operate a marketplace instead of you yourself setting the dogs.
Which at the time, you know, a lot of us actually engaged in dog care as well on both sides of the marketplace to try and get a sense for what worked and what didn't work.
Yeah, I was an active sitter for the first several years. I think I still have over a hundred reviews on the site.
Um, so probably but close to a thousand
Nights of care just as myself as a sitter.
You know, experienced a lot of awkward situations
In the early days a lot of us were doing that to get a sense of what worked and what didn't work for the thing that was inherently somewhat awkward in the early days.
I mean
One might call it.
Eating one's own dog vacant. Okay, moving on. Before real quick before transitioning to dog vacay, it's worth mentioning to listeners, uh we've touched on sort of how David and I know each other, but Rover is really to thank
for many, many things that have happened in David in my life since meeting.
the genesis of Madrona Labs, a a group that that we had started inside of Madrona years later to be a startup studio inside of a venture firm.
was really the the reason why we justified, hey, we think there's a chance we could do this is because of Aaron and Rover, because Greg was able to point to that and say, look, we we did it in this super ad hoc way. What if we systematize the process? And so I left Microsoft and went to Madrona and and uh met David and of course that's
the exact same thesis that we have now at sort of this this broader scale and and outside of a a single firm with PSL.
And David, obviously instrumental for your marketplace thesis too. Absolutely. I mean it wave it's it's a combination of
Both of uh the aspects of Rover of
Starting companies and investing in companies at the very beginning before there's
A product as we just talked about. Can work. And then also in the
Disruptive power of marketplace businesses. So
Uh thanks, Aaron. You're welcome. Uh glad I didn't screw it up and uh perpetually ruin your guys' careers. Happy with that? Yes. So speaking of of dad jokes, essentially, um
At the same time, uh not quite the same time, but slightly after as this is all going on and we made no secret about what we were doing up here in Seattle, and in fact, uh much of the tech press
Pillared us. Called this a a sign of second sign of the tech apocalypse. Pets.com take two.
But you know, as Jeff Bezos says if
Well, it's the willing to the Washington Post is willing to put body parts through the ringer, but
If you're not doing something that people make fun of, uh you're probably not doing something interesting.
Yeah, I think we're n made a list of the
top five worst ideas that our VC funded in that year. It's uh fun for us to get. And uh yeah, the the funny thing about the same time that people are like, I can't believe this is a thing, this is embarrassing. Why would anyone ever invest money?
At the same time that was going on that like the next three or so startup weekends
The idea that was pitch in one was the same damn idea.
Copycat started popping up. So people pitched like literally the same
Airbnb for dogs again. Literally pitched the exact same idea. And the people who run the Startup Week in event were like, Hey guys, this
One last week or one last two weeks. And the judges are like, I don't care, it's cool, I like it. And'cause in every town there's a different set of judges that are local and weren't in the last one. So it's new to them.
And so we went from kind of, Oh my God, this is almost laughably bad idea to at the same time
having like 10 companies announced that they were going to do it. So it's kinda like the worst of all worlds where you have now like 10 potential competitors.
For an idea that everyone thinks is awful.
So among the
competitors that pop up. The most credible by far is a company based in Los Angeles called
Dog Vake.
And Dog Vacate was started in the fall of twenty twelve.
as part of the incubator down there, the well known incubator science, started by Mike Jones, formerly of MySpace and Peter Pham. And it was started by Aaron Hershorn uh and his wife Corine, and they were dog owners, and Aaron had been a
Confusing. Was confusing for many, many years. We have Aaron E up here in Seattle and Aaron H down in uh Los Angeles. But Aaron H. had been a consultant for many years and and actually worked at a venture fund. He was among the minority of people who
realized that this was not a bad idea, but actually a great idea.
So they started the company and then in the spring of twenty twelve they raise a seed round.
uh led by First Round Capital uh and Jeff Jordan from Andreas and Horowitz.
From then that point on really
The race was on.
And it was later that year that
Bill Gurley at Benchmark would lead their series A, and he correctly identified
the massive marketplace opportunity here and Bill had already was famous for many marketplace investments, including the series A of Uber. And he wrote a canonical blog post called Not All Marketplaces Are Created Equal.
he put forth his framework for evaluating marketplaces and then wrote a sidecar essentially investment memo that he published for Dog Vake about all the marketplace dynamics and why
This made for such a great investment. And he was completely correct. Yeah, and Bill's set of posts on this are are biblical for listeners that are are thinking about a marketplace business. And in fact, David and I were talking about a concept yesterday where we're like, we should probably put it through Bill's framework.
Like this is this is sort of the way to think about marketplace businesses. And I in doing research for this episode just found out it was it was modeled after the dog vacay investment. Yeah.
And so that happened and then right around the same time we raised the technically series B since Madrona had done the A, but
effectively the same amount of money from Bradfeld at Foundry Group here at Rover.
I'm curious.
We on the Madrona Inventory side had lots of thoughts as all of this was happening, but how did you feel, Aaron, when uh
when these competitive financings are happening. You know? I think all this stuff matters a lot more to VCs than it does to me. Um
You know, uh at the time I th uh there's a lot of marketplace orthodoxy around every marketplace is winner takes all.
Um, and every marketplace is
you know, first to scale wins and
We have to be super aggressive because no one can ever come back from being a little bit behind.
And so if you believe this and if you spend a lot of time being a VC and you care a lot about other VC's track records and who are the big names,
You care about this stuff.
If you don't
You don't. And I probably found the category of
Not caring. Now eventually I did care when it affected whether or not other people were willing to give us money um and had to figure out how to speak to it.
But it's definitely one of those uh things where uh
Greg and others at Madrona.
You know, were a lot more intrigued and concerned around who might be investing in dog vake than I was.
makes people so good is being able to shut out
a lot of the noise and a lot of the things other than put your head down and focus on the business because
You're probably gonna make missteps and kill yourself long before your competitors will kill you.
Obviously not the case here. Both companies pushed on and were successful for a long time. So I'm just gonna refrain from all the tail chasing analogies.
The end of twenty twelve until the merger happens in the beginning of twenty seventeen.
Rover and Dog Vay are in lockstep.
uh in terms of growth, in terms of fundraising, at least to the outside and VC perspective worlds. But underneath the covers, uh we were doing a lot of really interesting things at Rover. Um and I'm curious to your perspective. What were the
Things that we decided to invest in that that helped us in the long run.
Ultimately, uh, you know, we thought that this business was gonna come down to marketplace mechanics, um, and how you make use of data. One of the things that
a lot of people believe about marketplaces is that they can have great economies of scale.
But sometimes people forget to ask the question of where those economies of scale are coming from
And whether they happen naturally or they actually have to be earned.
And so there are certain cases like an Uber um that the economies of scale can happen naturally. So for example, you just get more drivers on the road relative to the demand, and all of a sudden your t wait time
after you hit the button is less. And it it happens for the most part somewhat naturally. And you can improve and optimize it, but just happens. Or Airbnb
more people in more cities come on the platform and now you can travel to more cities and it becomes more a part of your life and you book more and then that brings more supply.
Our view though is that most of the economies of scale in this business weren't gonna just weren't gonna come from just pure scale.
It was gonna come from the use of data on the back end.
That there's a big difference in the performance of sitters, there's a big difference in the desirability of certain sitters.
There's a lot of subtle micro differentiation.
And so the design the marketplace mechanics, design the backend data.
um would matter a lot more than any short term advantage and scale.
And one of the other things that actually gave us conviction around that
was that
This business uh was about the shadow market. It was about the people that were using friends, family, neighbors.
Businesses that are free to use
Um think social media can kind of spring up almost overnight.
Businesses that have a large existing market
um where a better version or cheaper version comes along can kind of spring up overnight.
But businesses that are mostly about changing fundamental consumer behavior and not the existing commercial market and
Aren't free to use?
Those are grinds. You know, they play out over time. Behavior fundamentally changes
There's a limit to kind of how fast you can go in those businesses'cause you actually have to adopt
Uh consumers have to change their behavior.
In something like travel, people on average travel twenty seven nights
Um a year away from home.
So at any point in time like
very few people actually have a travel related need. So there was an inherent speed limit on this business. So you couldn't uh just pump a lot of PR, pump a lot of marketing, and somehow um create an insurmountable lead. Our view was that it is always going to come down more to the back end piece.
I remember you you talking about and and giving me and and Riley uh the advice as we were starting wave that
These speed bumps
at first blush can seem to be negative factors in markets. But if you believe in the ultimate market size enough, they become a competitive mode. This is a certainly an outsider's perspective, but what I think was held to be true in the industry was Rover's really, really good at engineering, at data science, at operations, at like
really aggressive segmentation of their customer base and understanding exactly what drives behavior and narrowing funnel like being really crisp on your your your funnel and and you know removing leakiness wherever possible and in the most aggressive ways. Like if there was a dollar that Rover could spend on a brand advertisement versus
a way to further decrease a drop off in a funnel step. It was absolutely going into that that funnel step every single time.
How do you sort of look at
the way that you guys did that and how it showed up in short term versus long term. You know, so listeners have a little bit of uh of visibility on this.
I don't think Rover was, you know, leapt out to to a lead in the early days. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think in that twenty twelve to twenty fourteen, there's a a lot of metrics you could look at where it looked like Dog Vake was was really out in the lead.
No doubt about it. Uh Dog VK uh got a much faster start, did a much better job with uh
Initial PR and marketing and graphic design.
had a group of uh well known uh valley investors
And
got out to a fast start, you know, at one time
LA and New York, which are large markets.
Dog Vake was six times our size in both of those markets.
When we were doing a deal with uh Dog V K, um, we were materially larger in both of those markets than they were.
So kind of came back from a uh six to one deficit to be a clear leader in those markets. But uh
We got our butt kicked uh in the early days.
It's just interesting to hear hear stories like that and try and draw draw inspiration for future times when you're getting your butt kicked. Well, you know, it's an interesting uh conversation'cause going back to the tuning out noise thing, you know, love Greg. Greg is super helpful about the company, but
You know, probably multiple times a week. You know, I'd get calls around uh how frustrating he found it that he was reading Dog Vake's PR all the time and they were in the press all the time and had all this buzz all the time. And and those things work, like clearly the in in LA and New York is great examples. Get a bunch of sitters, you know, get a bunch of customers.
Yeah, and it you know, definitely um help get the business off the ground. And I would say um
It was also helpful to create an awareness for the category, which had a follow on benefit to Rover. Looking back, you know, ultimately I wish we had done a little bit more in PR in the early days. You know, it took us a while to
make up the ground on SEO, for example, and domain authority. So we could have been a little bit more balanced, I think, on the
Net net, it was the right overall prioritization.
But we could have been more balanced in our approach for the first couple of years. And to put some more specifics on this, you know, for listeners who aren't necessarily experts in marketplaces, um
I mean this for me, this was like a uh
education on the fly, uh, and how to manage these things. It ultimately kind of came down to
All the dynamics and investment on data science and the backend and funnels and analytics that we we did at Rover meant that
our conversion rates as as new customers, new needs were were hitting the marketplace.
ended up being much higher over time than our competitors. And and then not just the conversion rates, but also
most importantly are repeat booking rates. Because as we were acquiring folks, the the lifetime value of those people, because they would convert at higher rates, but then repeat much more often, just ended up that even though we we were had a slower ramp, the exponential kink in the curve was that much steeper.
And the important thing to note here is you think about the equation of cost to acquire a customer versus the the customer lifetime value and trying to make that delta as that as wide as possible or that multiple as wide as possible is
they're not a customer until they actually book in a marketplace business. And so the more funnel optimization you can do where you increase the rate of sign up to booking, the more you can spend or and and the the broader you can spend on getting new people in the door.
complete the transaction. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, if you think about if you're twice as good
at turning someone who hits your site into someone that completes a transaction, then
you know, if you're competing over the same add words, keywords
you can outspend because you know that you're gonna be able to more profitably move those customers through your process.
Indeed. I think the other thing that cannot be understated, I'm sure Aaron would agree, is
is a major moment in Rover's history, which was the hiring of Brent Turner in
January. January twenty fourteen.
as Rever COO. Yeah, so Aaron, who is Brent and how did that all go down? Uh Brent has been my companion for most of the last twenty years in Seattle.
Uh Brent and I met in the early days or the prepublic days of uh Avenue A, which later became a quantif.
We've worked together for something like seventeen in the last twenty years.
There have been times where I've reported to him, times when we've been peers, times when he's reported to me. But division of labor is was kinda always the same. Um so
I it took about three years of effort for me to get Brent to become involved in Rover.
I try to get him as an angel investor in the early days and over it's like a war of attrition of people convincing each other to do things. For a company founded on love of family members.
Hey, just tell me what you're doing next. Whatever you do, I'll invest in. And then I got over there with Rover and they're like
Except that. Except I'm not gonna invest in that business. Um including uh people at the V C world. Yeah, like very well known venture firms that you flew down to the valley to have meetings with were like, Oh, actually
Not sorry, not that thing. I would invest in anything but this.
What are you doing with your career? Like this seems like the worst idea ever, and you're throwing away your career. Do you know you're doing that?
And so Brent wasn't uh uh being someone who I'm also friends with and cares a lot about. He wasn't he was more diplomatic than that.
Uh, but basically he was just like
Dude, I'm not giving you angel dollars for this. I'm not sure there's a business here. I'm not sure And so like I I kept on for a couple of years and was kinda like, Okay, well here's how we're doing and each time it's like wow that's
Bigger opportunity here than I thought. And uh
Um so eventually uh convinced him to uh join Rover and in a lot of ways uh Brent's a co CEO.
But uh the best uh manager I've ever met, the best developer of talent I've ever met, um
The best operator I've ever met.
kind of rounding out the diversity of skill sets in uh the Rover executive team.
And we were
We were having drinks last night with with Bill Kimmy, who of course is still
lead developer for Rover and the Studley College student that
separate. Oh yeah, we should we should we should tell a little of Phil's story. So after staying the summer, then Aaron and Greg lobbied him to not go back to school. Including calling his parents. Including calling his parents and and convincing them, which
Didn't go over well then and continue to not go over well for force. Phil, of course, did drop out and and as a co founder of Rover, built the engineering side of the business with with a great engineering team into what it is today. And only recently have have you know Phil's parents started to come around on uh okay, there's something to it.
Doctor. So you know, if both your parents are doctors and you decide, hey, I'm dropping out to go do dog sitting, you know, you can imagine why that meet might be met with a little bit of skepticism. But Phil's point, of course, having been along the ride uh for for all this journey as well.
was that just like we were talking about
You know, if you had to choose a dollar to invest in the early days in your backend and data science and analytics for a marketplace versus
uh marketing and growth.
You would you should for sure choose the back end every time. However, ultimately you need to do both.
And that it was Brent's coming on board in twenty fourteen that really built the muscle in the company to be able to do both and be world class in both.
Cannot understate the impact there.
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Well David, do you want to bring us to kind of the year leading up to the merger? Yes. So
As all this was happening
Uh I believe
Rover and Dog Vake raised four rounds of fundraising in lockstep, three or four rounds.
For the most part, RA was kinda their seed. R B was kinda their A
You know, R C was kinda their B
And we were in touch with them during that time.
Yep. So all along there's a little bit of a dance going on and and of course, you know
On their side, on the V C side, which is
More what I had exposure to. Bill Gurley had lived through a very similar dynamic with Grubhub and Seamless in the food delivery space, being two competitors in a market.
both private companies
both scaling nicely. You could see a path to being large public companies.
in a difficult manner, but ultimately affecting a merger uh between the two of them, becoming Grubhub seamless one company before going public, and that really being a great
value a creation event for all shareholders. Bill really started lobbying
the investor base, first within Dog Vake, but then on the rover side, uh, to consider following a similar playbook.
uh in this space.
And it ended up taking
Gosh, it was I mean, it was over a year.
uh well over a year of uh lobbying and negotiations uh before we really
Many years actually. Many years. Yeah.
Uh we actually the conversation around putting the companies together actually started in year one.
Aaron Hirschwom and I actually had a pretty healthy relationship and I actually brought this up with him
Around the time of the A.
Um series A round.
And said hey
Seems like the company's um

Um you guys seem to be a lot more competent on the marketing, the PR side.
think we have a lot of advantages on the uh backend and the analytics and the marketplace side
I think how this is gonna play out is you guys are gonna get off to a fast start.
the our advantages will matter more over time and then will like uh pass you over time.
But you know, do you wanna
consider putting the companies together now.
Um, given that we don't have a lot of overlapping executives, we haven't raised too much money, it'll just get harder over time.
Um, so that's a conversation I actually had with Aaron H, um, in year one.
Wow, I didn't realize it was that early.
Yes. Um I don't think Greg was super excited about the idea, but it it was uh year one that I had that conversation.
Uh yeah.
generally turned out to be true.
I said, Hey, you guys are gonna raise some money, we're gonna raise some money, you're gonna raise some money, we're gonna raise some money. And that that played out. And it also played out that it was more difficult as time went on to have the discussion. More investors at the table, more decision makers.
More overlapping
um functions, more overlapping exacts, it just becomes hard.
It really it really did and uh
This was a lesson to me, you know, as
Over the sort of
year and a half, almost two years, that it was really active leading up to the actual merger of of how hard it is to affect these things.
Particularly with
with private companies and uh
I remember uh my wife Jenny and I used to joke that Bill uh Bill Gurley had like a knack of just
calling at the most inoportune times. And there was one one time in particular where we were we were on vacation. We were in um
Uh Bill doesn't know this, but we were in uh in Cambridge in England, and we were going to Evensong at King's College Chapel, which is this
Amazing, you know, very
Solemn event we were in line, they just opened the doors to the chapel. Hundreds of people are filing in. You know, you have to turn your phone off when you when you enter the chapel and my phone buzzes, I look down and it's like
Of course it's called. Uh so I said, Hold on one minute. But it was it was hard work getting it done. Um and uh which I'm sure you will on the operating side agree with as well. Aaron, take us through what did the process look like
To
Everyone look around the table and say, Yeah, we're gonna do this and then after that the integration.
There are several overtures made over the years and um
including people cornering our investors at conferences and saying you guys should do this. We'd get that over time. And
Yeah, there's a couple of times where Erin and I talked around, you know, how we might engage in a process and
Yeah, and it was tough to get agreement. You know, at a high level
Um, there's a bunch of things that make
getting to agreement difficult on these. And the the first and
Is that uh entrepreneurs uh by their nature, especially in tech, have to be a little delusional.
In order to take on the risk of starting a business
that most of the time is gonna make a l uh lose a lot of money before it ever makes money.
The odds are stacked against you, lots of risk, uh, lots of complexity.
Uh, but for you to decide, you know what, like this is a good decision with my life and my career, you you just
Have to be a little delusional.
Um it's in news to me, you didn't believe in the market size in the beginning.
A little delusional or uh doing the job for different reasons.
Because of that dynamic, that kind of
confident faith commitment like we can figure this out we'll get it done
It also can make negotiating terms challenging, um because uh entrepreneurs uh typically have a
uh pretty high faith in themselves and their bill to get done. Uh and and when companies are both private, you know, there's no stock market that's a third party uh validation you can point to for relative value and share price.
Totally. Yeah. Stock market be like, Okay, here are stock. Here's what the markets think. You can debate around the edges a little bit, but m most of the time it's, you know, relative to that. With private companies
You don't have it.
Uh, most of the time they're not making money.
at the time, so you can't look at profit.
Multiples.
So you gotta look at some combination of revenue, unit economics, relative growth rates.
Um.
More important on the investor side, but but also equally relevant on the entrepreneur side. There are two preference stacks for each of these separate companies, uh, in terms of the money that each has raised. And
It's challenging to figure out how to combine those. Yeah, and for folks listening uh who aren't familiar sort of with preference stacks, basically the when an investor comes in and and does the most recent round, they have the preference in case the it's basically downside protection if the the company ends up selling for sort of less the or in a in a downside.
um they're sort of the first to get their money back and that continues in a waterfall on down to the earliest investors and then to the common stock.
Of course the issue David raises is, now you got two sets of those. What do you do?
Yeah, like do they both investors get to keep'em and do you burden the company with the combined preference? So like
If there's been three hundred million dollars in total invested, and that definitely wasn't the case in this case, but
Do you say okay
there's gonna be three hundred million dollars of preference and so uh none of the employees
Are gonna get anything until
You get well above that point.
Um it can create some pretty perverse incentives.
Um, do you eliminate the preferences? If you eliminate them, how do you get someone to agree to eliminate
the rights to that and how do you figure out how much of
that reduction is, you know, eaten by side A versus side B.
And related to the preference tax, but slightly different is
Sometimes there are also different
control or voting rights attached to each round of financing someone has done. So in some cases
Just the investors in the last round have uh right
to veto certain decisions. So it becomes a very complicated decision process with a lot of stakeholders, all in the context of uh entrepreneurs feeling optimistic about the go-to-loan approach.
All in a context of uh a lot of uncertainty and that's just getting the deal terms, which for me is half the battle.
People have very complicated ways to think about MA acquisitions, mergers. You know, for me there's two simple questions.
Do you have conviction on the deal terms?
Like is it good deal terms, like do you think there's gonna be more value than what you're paying, whether you're paying in equity, cash, whatever.
The second is is do you have conviction around the post close plan?
Can you actually execute it?
And the second one is often forgotten about. Um, it's tough to get to terms.
But in the tech world, if you look at the history of M and A, um
most people, including third parties, would say that the vast majority
of acquisitions are failures. The basis for this show. The vast majority are failures.
The reason why they're failures is not because they were off slightly on the negotiated terms. The reason why they're failures is because the execution post close destroyed a bunch of value.
If you don't have conviction in the execution plan
Regardless of how good of a negotiator you are
It's not gonna work.
Mm-hmm. It's not gonna work. And so Aaron, what was the execution plan then coming out of uh out of the merger?
You know, in this case we decided to do what's called what we call a hard cut over.
So basically we're gonna migrate all Dog Vake customers on the demand side, all their sitters.
On the supply side.
over to the rover platform and basically execute a shutdown of the Dog Vake technology
And you know, probably uh the office. Um we were gonna offer
some jobs to people to move to Seattle. In some cases we may allow people to work remote.
Um but we decided to do uh a hard cut over. And and again that made
so much sense because of all the dynamics we talked about before, the just the the marketplace uh of Rover converted at a at a much higher efficiency and then repeated at a much higher efficiency.
So again, it's in everybody's best interest to add in all of this new liquidity into the marketplace. There's new supply, there's new demand, it's suddenly easier to find a sitter near you. It's you're finding higher quality sitters or better match sitters, all the benefits of of having a lot more people on the platform. David, I'm gonna say the word again, and I think now it's it's it's actually a
thing that I say on the show, which is unfortunate. It's like legitimate actual synergy.
It's actually yeah, it's it's true. Um and you know, how much of that's uh realizable um versus in theory. You know, but I'd say it you know, it it's easy to say, oh, this clearly made sense.
There are
compelling alternatives that smart people can rationalize.
You know, um in marketplaces, uh sometimes there's the
Hey, let's have two independent brands.
Um, you know, if you're dependent upon SE.
A trillion Zillow, if you're if you're dependent on SEO or S E M, why remove one of your slots from Google? If you think that there are different consumer segments.
So the different brands may actually attract different people.
And in specializing in different things.
So for us, you know, the the option to be considered is
Yeah, two brands uh and two backends. So two front ends, two back ends.
Two front ends.
Um but one backend or one front end, one back end.
And the challenge with this is like there's pretty compelling
rationales for each of the three.
Um and if you look at
how a lot of the marketplace businesses have managed this
Not everyone goes aggressively to the uh one front end, one back end back end.
Um very few actually have. But we were at a stage where we thought that slowing down for two years
While uh a bunch of internal lobbying went on around this
A bunch of uh systems integration with different tech stacks, different
uh coding languages, different skill sets, different architecture. We just thought it'd be a disaster to lose two years in that type of integration, you know, that if we were
Further along, you know, if we're already a public company, you know, or soon to be like GrebHub uh and seamless.
Maybe we could have made a different choice.
Um but we just thought it would uh slow us down quite a bit for uncertain benefit of keeping the brand.
But it's also the most offensive thing to propose.
to another company.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We wanna do this deal, we're excited about it, and by the way, we're gonna quickly throw out everything you've done.
Um
Just really really hard.
And yet if you don't get that agreement in advance, your chance of successfully executing a deal post close is like
No.
Oh, or at least it'll drag out for a really long time.
We thought all this through in advance and uh we got agreement from Dog Vake that uh uh we weren't gonna close on the deal.
Unless both sides could mutually agree upon
The
Post close.
Plan, execution plan, integration plan.
And so
Kudos to the Dog VK senior leadership team.
their executives came up, uh, met with us.
We kinda laid out each of the three scenarios.
said, you know, here's what we think the advantages and disadvantages of each one
You tell us which one you think makes sense. We even offer our own opinion and we didn't bias the conversation.
And uh unanimously their executive team said hard cut over, go to the rover platform.
Which you know probably take a lot of courage. Yeah. Rational as that may be, there's huge emotional you know, attachment to it. Not only what you've built, but the dream of what could be.
Totally. And then it creates a bunch of uncertainty. Well, God, if uh if the platform's gonna be Rover then
What happens to the Santa Monica office?
What happens to my personal job? Um I have a lot of expertise on how our system works and our system's not gonna be relevant.
you know, uh was very proud of the Dog Vake team, um for being uh consummate professionals.
You know, the right call.
But we were unique. If you look at Odasky Lance, if you look at Grubhub Seamless, Zillow Trillia as well. Zillow Trulia
None of those companies had attempted to be as aggressive
with the plan.
As us. We wanted to be done in
Six months and not two years, not three years, not a year.
So uh kudos uh to the team for being able to take that on with uh such passion. This might be a among
Many lessons, um
you know, for listeners in this episode and uh for all of us personally living it, I mean it this is ranks right up there. As hard as it was in terms of as we're talking about all the stakeholders on the investor operational side taking taking years to get to a point.
To want to do a merger.
The
speed and effectiveness of the integration
And the vast outperformance of it, uh, and the combined company.
I mean, I remember we were all both sides putting together spreadsheets, you know, throughout the negotiation process of what we thought
the combined value could be and growth thereafter.
the company has far exceeded that on all levels. And I think it's a testament to to all of this in the team and
the Doug Vake team for suggesting this and
And the rubber team for and everybody combined executing on it. Um, it has definitely been the best thing for the company. And and and for the companies, for shareholders in both companies.
Yeah, I I think it turned out to be the right plan, execute well.
We got done uh in about half the time and exceeded uh every three months, right?
Three months exceeded the goals on the successful sitter migration, the successful owner migration.
Um it was uh well executed and um you know we
had given stay bonuses to people in Santa Monica'cause there was uncertainty around whether or not
There's still gonna be a job after we got done to migration.
We accelerated we gave new grants and accelerated portion of them.
Um that was kind of uh based on when the migration was done.
Hopefully people feel really good and felt like they were uh treated uh
well and appropriately rewarded for what a Herculean job they did in a small amount of time.
Um but turned out to be the right plan uh with uh
Better than um expected execution.
And
You know, that kinda brings us to today.
Rover just recently announced uh the combined company a major new fundraising. Things are going really well. And and I think particularly
Well, we're we're expanding internationally, which is wonderful, but particularly not having the distraction
not having the distraction of all that at a moment when we were just starting to layer in all the additional services besides dog boarding, dog walking, daycare, uh all the other in home services, which have become huge growth drivers for the for the business, uh was critical.
Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest reasons we didn't want to slow down. Um, we view this area as like we're in the second or third inning.
We're a small fraction of the size we hope to be long term.
most of our business uh was overnight care. We had rolled out dog walking and drop in visits and in home daycare
At the exact same time we were doing this migration, we launched our on demand dog walking effort. So Why not?
Yeah, why not? Um and so it's it was uh one of our biggest concerns is that
It's not like we were a manufacturing plant and we're like, okay, we're operating at capacity
Now can we squeeze out a little bit more efficiency
Um, our view is we're nowhere near capacity in terms of what we want to accomplish.
You know, let's not slow down.
the speed um and minimizing the distraction of the execution plan was super important. So we could
Launch on demand dog walking.
We could roll out new offerings. Uh we could uh start to look at aggressive international expansion.
Which we were kicking off.
Um right now in Europe.
Let's do our other sections here real quick and make sure we check a few boxes'cause a couple points that I think we haven't quite made yet.
Listeners, our next section is acquisition category, where we decide whether it was a people, technology, product, business line, asset, consolidation, or other type of acquisition.
Clear consolidation. I don't think there's any we're looking around the room, we're all nodding our heads. There's not that that much has been discussed.
There's what would have happened otherwise.
Where
You know,
one thing that I think we touched on a little bit here is
the the cost to acquire a customer and
the sort of war going on between former VK and former Rover and the dynamic of this type of business. And I'll explain sort of my understanding of it. And Aaron, you can correct me in areas where I don't have enough sort of sophistication or understanding of it, but
This business is a very intent driven business. So people go to Google and they search on the internet for a solution to a problem that they have, which is I need a dog sitter. So you gotta buy all the keywords to cover all of those things. Now Google's keyword tool is of course a an auction. So with two parties bidding it up, your cost to acquire.
should be meaningfully higher if there's two people bidding for it than if there was just one major player. And so then you have both of these companies that are always aggressively bidding on these keywords, driving up the price. And as soon as there's just one party, it should theoretically be much easier and cheaper to acquire that that person who has intent to do the thing that your service provides.
Was that a major driver of the acquisition and have you kind of seen that materialize?
Sure. So I I think the question is is whether or not the savings on the marketing side was a major area of value of the acquisition. The answer is yes. You know, a lot of people suggest, you know, valuing these types of deals, you know, on strategic value, your
Your multiple as a public company would be higher, you know, with the consolidation and
That's not how we did it. You know, I don't I I struggle with hand wavy things and I struggle with this assumption that like
Um there's gonna be some long term multiple gain when we live in a highly dynamic
area where there are lots of big funds and competitors can get funded.
Yeah.
Competitive landscape change. Um, so we modeled it as basically a cash flow.
Like what is the amount of um
Incremental revenue minus incremental cost.
And the case where there's cost savings and it's obviously you add the cost savings.
Over some number of years.
And that's how we had it. And it turned out that uh only about fifteen percent of the value of the deal
was Dog V K's existing
Revenue stream.
The other portions of value came through other forms and uh savings on the marketing side.
Um was a big one.
You know, some of the other ones there were uh uh better
data coverage. So to the degree our marketplace works well cause
We do smart things with data.
In order to do smart things you have to kind of with data, yeah.
Two things out of data. You have to have data and you have to know what the smart things are. And um uh for the service providers that were on both platforms, it gave us a more holistic picture
of how they perform and do people like them and do they use them again and how responsive are they?
And then
for people that are on just one platform, for example, just on Dog Vake
we were able to use kind of uh those algorithms that we had invested a little bit more in to help evaluate those people. And so we got a decent amount of value from call it the economies of scale on the data side, in addition to the marketing savings.
Interesting.
Never would have occurred to me. That's cool.
Tech themes and then and then wrap up here. Sounds good.
You wanna go first, man?
That was my major one was really the era of the fruits of competition lining Google's pockets.
I have a couple, but I think I think the biggest one is something we've talked about a lot on the show and Reliving the Story has brought back to mind and recalled uh for me the lived experience here.
the the adage, the two by two matrix of the way
You make money investing or starting companies is not just by

But
having a correct non consensus bet.
And I think back to
the early days of Rover and the signs of the apocalypse and pet dot com and
I will, Aaron, I will give you money to do anything. Oh, you're doing that, I'm not gonna give you money to do that. Now, sometimes when you do that, you are wrong. And everybody else is right. And then, you know, not only do you not make money, it's not just about making money, but you fail. But the way that you win in that you win really, really big.
is you do things that are
Correct.
And not obvious. And Rover to me is just a shining example of that.
In Peter Tiel zero to one, what's your secret? Aaron's secret was dogs. Dogs are people too. Uh but it's all it was also the thing that like, you know, if you spent ten minutes and got over the knee jerk reaction, even though yes, we weren't clear on market size and we've joked throughout the episode, like we knew there was something here. We knew there was something here. Everything else I think we've covered. Yep.
Grading, I'm gonna be quick.
This is an A. Nice job. Thank you for having me on the show today, by the way. Just to be clear, our view is that we're haven't achieved anything yet. You know, we're still a money losing startup that may be more on the late stage side and
There's a lot of work to do. It's nice to be right about some things early in the company's history, but w we need to be right about a bunch of things go forward too. Um but I really appreciate the chance to come on and
Um share a little bit of our story.
Um
So if you're in the Seattle area or not in the Seattle area and you want to be part of a
Great company.
That's already great. That still has a long journey ahead of it. Come talk to everyone here at Rover. Yep.
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We'll see you next time.
Thanks, guys.
Mm-hmm.