- Justin Khan introduces Adora Chung, founder and CEO of Homejoy
- Adora talks about the mission of Homejoy to connect people with home service professionals and make homes happier
- Homejoy is available in the United States, Canada, UK, and Berlin
- Adora praises the entrepreneurial spirit in Europe, particularly in London and Berlin
- Adora discusses the challenges of finding a problem to solve and the journey of starting Homejoy
- Adora mentions the various ideas and ventures they pursued before settling on Homejoy
- Adora shares the story of how the idea for Homejoy came about when Aaron, her co-founder, needed to find a cleaner for his dirty apartment
- Adora highlights the issues they faced with traditional cleaning agencies and online classified sites
- The summary does not cover the entire video

- The founders of Homejoy identified a problem in the cleaning industry, specifically the lack of background checks for cleaners found on sites like Craigslist.
- They decided to start Homejoy to provide a convenient and safe platform for booking cleaning services.
- Initially, they struggled to find customers and had to resort to offering free water bottles to convince people to book cleanings.
- They also faced challenges in learning how to clean properly and realized the need for professional cleaners on their platform.
- One of the founders took a job at a cleaning company to learn more about the industry and improve their own cleaning skills.
- They eventually became a legitimate platform with professional cleaners joining their platform.
- However, after three years of working, they realized they needed to raise more capital to grow the business and achieve their goals.
- They faced difficulties in raising money due to their previous failed ideas and lack of success.
- They decided to take out a credit card and one founder even considered practicing poker as a backup plan.

- The speaker started practicing poker with the idea that if it didn't work out, they would go to Vegas and double down on it.
- They set up two meetings to raise money for their company.
- The first meeting was with an investor who used to be their boss, and they asked for $25K to keep the company going.
- The investor agreed to give them the money, providing a sense of relief.
- The second meeting was with another investor who also gave them $25K.
- With $50K in the bank, they felt like they could make something happen.
- The company has now grown to over 30 markets worldwide, has 150 employees, and has raised $40 million in venture capital.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of not giving up and maintaining a positive mindset in the face of challenges.
- They believe that hard work, rather than luck, is the key to success.
- The speaker works every day to make their company better.

- Adora Chung, founder and CEO of Homejoy, discusses the mission of the company to connect people with home service professionals and make homes happier.
- Homejoy is available in multiple countries including the United States, Canada, UK, and Berlin.
- Adora praises the entrepreneurial spirit in Europe, particularly in London and Berlin.
- The founders of Homejoy identified a problem in the cleaning industry, specifically the lack of background checks for cleaners found on sites like Craigslist.
- They started Homejoy to provide a convenient and safe platform for booking cleaning services.
- The company faced challenges in finding customers and learning how to clean properly, but eventually became a legitimate platform with professional cleaners.
- They struggled to raise capital and had to resort to alternative methods, such as taking out a credit card and considering poker as a backup plan.
- They were able to secure investments from two investors, providing a sense of relief and allowing the company to grow.
- Homejoy has expanded to over 30 markets worldwide, has 150 employees, and has raised $40 million in venture capital.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of perseverance and hard work in achieving success.

Talk at Startup School Europe 2014 at The Brewery in London

I'm 1 of the partners at YC and I'm extremely excited to introduce our next speaker, Adora Chung.

Adora is the founder and CEO of Homejoy and 1 of our top companies that we've funded.

I'm particularly excited for her story because I know how good Adora was.

Previous to YCI, I was competing with her and she was the founder that kept me up at night many, many sleepless nights.

Homejoy, if you don't know, is the leading platform that connects people with home service professionals and our mission is to make homes happier everywhere.

We're now available in the United States, Canada, UK and Berlin.

We have a pretty awesome team here in Europe and I can't see them right now but Give a shout out to Angela who runs the UK for us and Olay who runs Field Ops in North America and Europe for us.

If anybody, they are the experts in how to make things big in Europe.

So since you guys are from here, you probably want to hunt them down and get some advice.

So starting Homejoy here in Europe has been a great experience.

While I still believe Silicon Valley is the number 1 destination for entrepreneurs, I really believe the entrepreneurial spirit here is alive and well.

And in particular in London, Berlin, I really think it's on the cusp of something great.

Silicon Valley just has time on its side.

And so if you choose to stay here in Europe, I definitely advise you to go to Silicon Valley.

But if you choose to stay here in Europe, you all are pioneers in something up and coming, and so that's very exciting.

So in any case, I came here today not to talk about that, but to, you know, I'm sure you came here to hear stories and advice on how to do startups and maybe get away with something inspiring or motivational to help you along your entrepreneurial journey.

The theme that most people want me to talk about and which I'll oblige today is on the topic of how not to die in the context of a startup, of course, not life.

And the reason why I'm asked to talk about it is because my co-founder, his name is Aaron, and he's my younger brother as well, he and I spent a really, really long time searching for what is home joy today.

And we essentially spent over 3 years in utter mess and darkness until we figured out, we even thought of home joy.

And so that's what I want to talk about today, tell you that story at least as much as I possibly can in the time I have.

And hopefully, you know, I think there's something instructional in there, if not semi-entertaining.

So, Aaron and I started, we started working in 2009 and our goals were twofold.

We wanted to, 1, make people happier somehow, and 2, we wanted to build a huge, humongous business because we wanted to, it's a good proxy for making huge impact in the world.

And, you know, the problem was that most entrepreneurs are, and which is very good advice, are given the advice of, you should work on a problem that you actually have.

The issue for us is that we are fairly simple people.

We literally, both of us combined, we probably own just, you know, our clothes.

And I just wear Homejoy t-shirts all the time.

They're free, so I really just own my pants and shoes.

And we both each own a mattress, and that's literally it.

And so we just generally are very happy people, very optimistic people, and we just didn't have many problems.

And so for us to build a business, we then went about, we had to go essentially search for a problem.

Now when you're searching for a problem to solve, it's literally a needle in the haystack type problem.

You're trying to find that needle, you're trying to find that great idea.

Some people literally have high-powered vacuums, and they just zap up all the hay in a perfect manner, and then laying there is the perfect idea.

But for the rest of us, we're literally taking each piece of hay, 1 by 1, looking at it with a magnifying glass, and seeing is that piece of hay or is that a needle?

And you just go piece by hay, piece of hay, piece by hay, 1 by 1.

And you have to be very patient, because a haystack has lots of pieces of hay.

And so that's what we did for a long time, is we were just searching for idea.

So in 2009, we started a company called PathJoy.

And Pathjoy was a platform that connected people with therapists and life coaches.

Because again, our primary motivation for our business was to make people happier.

And we thought, who are the people who make people happy?

Well, it's gotta be these therapists and life coaches.

It also turns out that we appear to be cynics because when we tried to use the platform ourselves, we absolutely hated it, And we couldn't stand the sessions.

And so clearly we weren't working on a platform that we'd even actually use ourselves.

And so we went through idea like this after idea.

And we went literally through a dozen ideas for over 3 years.

And meanwhile in these 3 years you know life also happens.

So There's things like you need to pay your electrical bills on time and sometimes we didn't and we'd be forced to go find a generator and when you have a generator, you know, on a hot sweaty day you have to make the choice of do I plug in the portable AC or do I plug in my computer so I can continue coding.

And so there's other things like we have typical Asian-American parents.

And it's like they were about to disown me because I had taken the star genius child of our family and somehow convinced him to work on this flailing venture.

And instead of, you know, he could have been working at a really nice prestigious high paying job.

And so while all this is happening in life, you are also expected to just focus on building a business.

And we just had a really, really tough time finding an idea that would work.

And you know, in 2012, around the summer of 2012, we just kind of lost our way and I found myself literally working on a network of blogs and rewriting gossip news for these blogs because we were just essentially arbitraging keyword traffic, SEO and SEM type traffic, and making money off of that.

And thinking about, you know, back to why we started this business of making people happier, you know, I think I convinced myself at some point that, you know, when people read entertainment news, they get this little amount of joy out of it.

And if I was able to, you know, get millions and millions of people to read it, then I could get this little bit of joy times a million, and so I'd be at least creating this much happiness in the world.

But you see, That's quite a stretch, right?

And we were just essentially faking it at that point.

So meanwhile, summer 2012, we didn't have an idea.

At least an idea we thought that could get really big and meet the goals of what we wanted to do with our business.

3 years we had managed to raise a little bit of investment capital in 2010, but it was pretty much gone.

Coincidentally, at the same time, Aaron's place, we were working out of Aaron's place.

I would literally walk 3 blocks to use a bathroom at a cafe instead.

And when I did work out of there, I would literally carve out a little corner for myself to work from because it was semi-clean.

And at some point he decided, okay, I'm actually going to figure out how to clean this place.

And he decided, well, maybe I should just go find a cleaner.

Because, you know, I could I don't have that much money, but I think this project that we're working on is very promising, so I should just spend my time coding and just pay a little bit of money to have someone clean my place.

And therefore, we can be more productive and you can stop complaining.

1 is he looked up cleaning agencies and stuff like that.

And there, you can find a really great professional cleaner who's background checked, has been tested in person, interviewed.

When they show up, you actually know that they know how to clean.

The problem is that you have to pay these agencies a huge premium for them, and something he clearly, we couldn't afford.

Then the second route is in the US, we have, I mean, there's online classified sites everywhere, but in the US it's called, the most popular 1 is called Craigslist.

So you can go to Craigslist and find cleaners there, but those people are not background checked.

You don't know who is actually going to show up to your place.

So they could be essentially an ex-murderer, a serial killer, and so that was not a good choice.

And so he comes to me and says, hey, Adora, I think that there's a problem here, and I actually think we should try to look into it and try to solve it.

And at that point, again, we were just working on an idea that was kind of flopping.

And so I said, OK, let's just look at this.

And the more and more we researched into it, the more and more we realized that it was extremely inconvenient to book a cleaning and that the industry hadn't changed in over 60 years.

And so we decided to start working on what is Homejoy today.

Now, we had the idea, but there was still a long path for us to even make it somewhat successful.

And the first problem we had was how do I find the customers?

So, we spun up a website over the course of a weekend and we opened it up and we thought everyone's going to start booking and the first day 0 people, second day 0 people, after a week 0 people and we just couldn't find a customer.

So it looked kind of depressing for a little bit.

But again, this is during the summertime, it was very hot.

And so I thought 1 day there was a fair outside our office and I basically got a bunch of cool water bottles, dragged it all the way out to outside and just convinced people to start talking to me and I gave them free water bottles.

At some point I was able to, we were able to essentially guilt trip them into booking cleanings And so we traded water for cleanings.

I figured, you know, once the booking, the cleaning was supposed to happen, they would actually, you know, cancel on me or on us.

But it turns out most of them didn't, which was a sign to me that this was something people actually wanted.

So when you start a platform, you know, or a marketplace, you have a chicken and egg problem.

You know, you need your customers, then you need the cleaners in this case, and if you don't have the cleaners, then you can't, you know, there's no way you can serve the customers.

So we got the customers and we solved the other side of the equation.

Instead of trying to find cleaners, we just became cleaners ourselves.

And so we showed up to the first few cleanings departments and what we learned very quickly was, which we should have known anyway, we were very bad cleaners.

So, if you work hard you'll eventually get the place clean but it could take many, many hours.

And a good example of this is 1 of the first places we cleaned was a 9,000 square foot home in Los Altos Hills, which is a rich area in the south of San Francisco in California.

We show up to this house and it's a post-construction clean.

And so if you know anything about, you know, the cleaning industry, a post-construction clean, the house is actually not gross or dirty in any sense.

It's just very, very dusty because it's just been remodeled or they just built it.

And so you just need to clean up a lot of dust.

And so we would literally walk into 1 room, we'd get our microfiber rags, and we would just clean the dust up.

And then we would go to another room, clean the dust up.

And then we'd circle back to the first room we went to, and all of a sudden, there's another layer of dust.

And so we were just going around the house in circles over and over and over again.

It turns out you actually need special equipment to pick up this dust.

You don't use paper towels and microfiber rags to clean up this dust.

And I kid you not, it took us 5 days to clean this house.

That is the worst experience for the customer because you end the day and you said, sorry, I have to come back because what you saw in the morning, it still looks like that.

So right then and there, we knew, okay, we have to look legit and anyway, if we're going to bring on actual professional cleaners on the platform, we have to figure out how to clean ourselves first.

And so we decided, okay, let's go learn how to clean.

So because Aaron was working on the customer service side of stuff, and that was very important.

We're getting lots of calls and stuff like that.

It was on me to actually go learn how to clean.

We first got some books, which, you know, they're actually professional cleaner books out there.

But like any physical task, you're better off and it's much faster to, you know, you learn by doing or learn by training.

So we decided to or I decided to just get a job at a cleaning company.

So it actually took me 2 weeks to find this job and because mostly I was rejected at almost everywhere, but this 1 cleaning company in San Francisco actually desperately needed somebody so they accepted my application.

And it was a bit of a taxing time at that point because it was in San Francisco, which is about 30 to 90 minute drive depending on the rush hour traffic at that time.

And so I would literally show up to work at 7 o'clock.

I would go through rush hour traffic, show up to work around 7 or 8 o'clock, depending on when my first gig was.

Then I would go out and do the work, clean, clean, clean, and then I would come back, drop off everything, and then drive back down to Mountain View, which is where we lived, and then took a shower because you need to take a shower after cleaning that much.

And spent my time coding or doing, working on operational type stuff, taking a nap and then driving back up.

And after a week that actually, I noticed I was spending too much time on the road in rush hour traffic.

So I actually decided to, I would come back, code, code, code, and around 3 o'clock I would just drive back up to the city and sleep in my car for a few hours.

I was right by the McDonald's there on 3rd Street, and I would just go brush my teeth when I woke up, and then just go straight to the gig.

And I was able to save about anywhere between an hour and a half and 3 hours every day by doing that.

In hindsight, not the most efficient use of my time, or not even the best route or the best thing to do.

But I was so focused on learning how to clean and coding the site and getting the operations up that that was the first thing I thought of to do.

So you know, the job, the cleaning job was actually quite interesting and very informational.

So I learned how to clean, which was great.

But the best thing I got out of it was that I learned a lot about how a typical cleaning company works.

I don't have time to talk about all of the things.

But it's things like getting a customer, booking a customer took a long time, it was very inconvenient.

For whatever reason, until Homejoy, there was really no way to easily book something online, which seems like a 21st century thing that should happen.

And then it was down to scheduling cleaners.

They were doing it in a very manual manner.

And as an engineer, when you see these sorts of things, you immediately see that these things don't scale and that's why cleaning companies generally stay very small.

But you can apply a layer of technology, apply a layer of algorithms or whatnot, and make things go much faster, and make things much more efficient, and essentially reduce the overhead cost to virtually nothing.

So, after a few weeks, I quit the job because I wasn't learning anything.

We were growing a little bit and we were very confident that we're on to something and by taking that job we had built even more confidence.

And so for the next month and for the next 2 months, we were working, working, working.

We actually became a legit platform in the sense that actual professional cleaners would join us and take jobs from the platform.

So after 2 months, we were growing a little bit, and we ran into a problem, and that is after 3 years of working, we had no ‑‑ we virtually had no money in the bank, And while we could have sustained the business without raising more capital, we knew that if we didn't raise more capital, we couldn't grow as fast, and if we couldn't grow as fast, this would just remain a lifestyle business.

And for us, again, at the top of when I started talking, you know, our goals had always been to build a big business.

And so we knew right then and there that if this was going to be big, we had to raise a little bit of money to continue growing.

So now imagine, after 3 years of failed idea after failed idea, and this current idea, which is essentially at that point just another cleaning company with a nice booking flow online, you can imagine trying to raise money for that kind of business and with your history of just not having anything, done anything successful quite yet.

Well, definitely couldn't go to the parents.

They thought we were pretty crazy already.

We couldn't go to investors because they didn't really know us that well.

And we already convinced them that the first 12 ideas were stupid.

So, you know, what makes the 13th any less stupid?

And so, we were pretty stuck for a little bit.

Aaron actually started practicing poker because he thought, well, worst case scenario, I'm gonna go to Vegas and just double down on this.

But my confidence in that wasn't very high.

And so we set a date, and on that date, I set up 2 meetings.

And I said, out of these 2 meetings, If we don't raise money, we're just gonna stop, and we're just going to figure something out and just spin the company down.

So on this day, it was sometime in, I think, late August, the first meeting was with an investor, my former boss, his name is Max Levjen, And he is 1 of the co-founders of PayPal and the founder of Slide.

And I set that meeting up because I used to work with him, or I used to work for him.

And I figured if anybody knew how hard I could work on a problem and could see some resemblance of a growing business and put money into it, it would be probably him.

Or worst case, I would just maybe guilt trip him into giving me money.

And then the second meeting I set up was office hours with PG, literally that same day, office hours with PG.

And the reason why I did that was I figured, okay, if I don't get money from this first meeting, then I'm going to have to do the whole depressing walk back down to Mountain View and tell somebody that our company's dead and we need to figure out how to spin this thing down.

So we drive up to San Francisco and have a meeting with Max.

And for the first 15 minutes, we're just kind of explaining what was going on.

And through this whole 15 minutes of just explaining things, I was extremely nervous, although I tried not to express it.

And sort of had this sinking feeling of, you know, we'd spent so much time building, you know, trying to come up with this thing.

Like, the first part of what we did was, you know, was, you know, was just horrible stuff, just stuff that didn't work out.

We finally had gained momentum, and then I could see in the next 5 minutes it was going to determine whether all that momentum was off or not, and it was just gonna come all crashing down on us.

And so, after 15 minutes, I basically said, hey, Max, we need some money to keep going, would you like to invest?

And I say, well, We need a CS rep because the customer service lines are blowing up and we need some capital to expand our operations.

And so I think I need 25K to kind of see this out for the next few months.

Just like, here, I'll give it to you, just to see how this will work out.

And as soon as he said that, there was a sigh of relief.

And I got there as fast as possible before he could even change his mind.

And we're just grinning the whole ride back down to Mountain View.

And we actually ended the day with 50K in the bank because he also thought the same thing and also gave us 25K.

And 50K at that point felt like a bajillion dollars.

Like we went from negative dollars to 50K.

And we knew that with that 50K we could make something happen because we just saw it.

And so if I had to succinctly describe, you know, that whole experience from beginning to end until we got that 50K that would then help us spurn the growth of Homejoy.

It would be like, in 2009, we jumped out of a plane together and we're falling very, very, very slowly down.

You can kind of see the ground, but it's just like slow motion.

And then when we got the idea of Homejoy, it's like clicking fast forward, basically.

You're trying to find the parachute and you don't have the parachute.

You're running, running out of money and you just run out of money and somehow, 100 feet before you hit the ground, you miraculously get pogo sticks or whatever and you bounce right back up and skyrocket.

And for us, you know, today we are in over 30 markets worldwide.

And we've raised around $40 million in venture capital.

And I would say I'm pretty much living the dream that I imagined so many years ago today.

And I am very happy at this point with where we are.

A lot of people ask me, how did you keep on going?

Like, how did you persevere and not quit?

And I would say that Aaron and I are, like I said, we're pretty simple people.

And I think it's important to note that with startups, a lot of crap happens.

And when that crap happens, you can't, you know, make a stressful situation more stressful.

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Adora Cheung