Oneio Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

hey folks my guest today is kurt averill he's the co-founder and ceo of ember where he's responsible for leading the development and execution of long-term strategies and identifying key opportunities for growth within the industry he's obsessed with helping people own the vacation home of their dreams where they can create lasting memories of family and friends he's a serial entrepreneur and has taken more than one company from inception to scale having raised over 70 million of venture capital uh financing at his prior startups kurt you're ready to take it to the top absolutely thanks for having me you bet man so before we get into emma real quick quick on your backstory so what was your last company company's called canopy um so canopy's in the as a sas software solution for accountants uh interesting and we're founder there did you join a little later on i'm not founder yep solo founder inception through scale and it continues to do really really well that's amazing what year did you launch that business 2014 and this was the accounting practice management software yeah yeah exactly yeah git git canopy fascinating okay so that was 2014 and then i guess what made you leave canopy and jump into ember so i left in 2019 took a bit of a sabbatical and then kind of went back to my roots my family uh is kind of a generational home builder and so my parents and then also my grandparents built second homes for people in lake arrowhead california which is a destination outside of los angeles interesting now how did you replace yourself i mean obviously i think you guys raised significant capital how much did you raise a canopy uh we raised um at the time that i left it was about 70 million yeah so that would have been what that would have been just post series c it was like a b a b-1 i think yeah you guys have quite the fun i'm looking except quite the funding history not traditional there's some debt mixed in there's some up down all over the place huh yeah yeah yeah okay so i guess that's a good lesson here first too before we jump into ember how did you replace yourself as founder right so leave it in good hands and make sure you're exiting gracefully there yeah i mean i think like as founders you have to realize that you know there's going to be a time when you're there with the company growing it and then there's going to be a time when it's time to move on and for me it was like a deeply personal decision uh to move on to the next thing um the way i viewed it is i think you know i thought that there you know a after five years of being a founder at a high growth startup you're ready for a sabbatical and so taking a sabbatical was probably one of the best things i've ever done and then you know b um i think you know as an entrepreneur what i love to do is build and create and so i knew that i could go out and build you know the next uh you know the next thing and that's what really gets me you know gets that's what motivates me it's what keeps me going in the morning and gets me up and and and rolling and are you able to share when you left there in 2019 you sort of went from zero in 2014 to how much ar when you left oh yeah no i'm not able to share unfortunately yeah no no when you leave you're always under strict nda's that's the way it works yeah i mean it's your company that was three four years ago i'd be surprised if those are still active today you can't share anything about the range you grew it to besides the amount of capital you raised yeah just the amount of i don't think it's raised i don't think it's terrible to judge any company how much capital they raise it's it's a horrible metric oh 100 agree 100 okay all right amber uh you go back to your roots uh why vacation homes why partial ownership if that's the model and explain the marketplace to me yeah so we kind of fit right in between you know an airbnb and a whole home vacation home right so if you think about your options you have uh you know you have a handful right when you go on vacation our thesis is you know we're looking for people who are going to the same vacation destination on a regular basis right these are typically vacation destinations that sit right outside of a large metropolitan area so it'd be st george utah which is a gateway to zions national park to salt lake city it'd be bend oregon to portland it might be the hamptons um to new york city or you know cape cod to boston where you're going on a regular basis right and um for that your options are basically to airbnb which is you know fairly expensive as we know and then um or you buy a home outright but the challenge with buying a home outright i mean it comes with the benefit of having the home and being able to use it whenever you want the downside is most second home owners don't use the home that often and so um you know they're only they think they're going to be there six months out of the year but they end up only being there six to eight weeks out of the year and then it's just that second home becomes a second job because homes are work and um you know whether it's just fixing a faucet or paying your property taxes that's just work it's just a lot of things that are going on in that home so what ember does is kind of bridges the gap it sits right between an airbnb and a full home ownership where we take a home and we buy it with an llc and then split it into eight different shares and a person can buy anywhere from one to four shares of that home um now think about these homes these are high-end vacation homes the goal is to like make it so that when you walk in there's a wow factor um your friends and family walk in it's it they're when we buy the homes uh you know they're high-end then we also furnish the homes and with high-end furnishings and and hand it over to the owner group totally turnkey at that point we uh manage the property so that we abstract all of the work that comes with the second home away from the ownership group so that they can just enjoy their vacation but while still retaining that ownership in the asset that can appreciate over time oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview yep let's look specifically at 2293 north saratosa road palm springs california you've got it listed right now up on the side it's potential buy 224 560. now is that what you would pay for one eighth ownership or is that the total price of that's not the total price of the house that's the one eighth ownership yeah that's right yeah it gives you six weeks out of the year at that home and um you know if you wanted to be there six months out of the year you buy you know half the home instead of instead of one eight right which we have some customers who do yeah so so 224 000 for 1 8 the home price is about 1.8 million total if you want to buy more than 44 nights per year you just buy two three four five eighths of the ownership stake have you pre-negotiated basically almost like a like a roofer with the current owner or an option with the current owner how do you how do you generate the supply on your marketplace yeah so for most of our homes on the marketplace we actually go in and buy the home we have a pretty good um sense of what our buyers want in their homes and um so we go buy the home in the first instance and then we then market the home to uh you know to the buyers um in this case with the home in in palm springs that's a potential bias we have two different categories of homes we have homes that are for sale um so you can look in newport beach you'll see some there uh those homes that are for sale or homes that we actually own and now we're selling actively selling shares in those properties the potential buys like the one in in palm springs that's a home that we could buy if we had enough interest in the home so we kind of put the potential buys up there to provide some diversity and then also gauge interest in uh the in in that particular home what prevents someone sophisticated like a blackstone to hire a data engineer scrape your site picasso and others where you have basically labeled these yellow labels potential home just go buy them ahead of you right ahead of your ability to close it if you have interest yeah they could i mean they definitely could the thing is this is a massive market it's a massive market we're talking about the largest asset class in the world real estate and um and so we think there's going to be a couple large players and and and we kind of welcome that it's a new asset class there's a lot of education layers but people who buy in they love it they love the experience um so um so right now it's basically the two big players in the space are picasso and ember and there are a couple others that are smaller um but those are the two big ones and how do you measure size is it literally gmb through platform number of closed deals yeah i mean i would look at it kind of an inventory so um you know clearly you know picasso's been very aggressive and is a couple years ahead of us on their growth trajectory so they've got inventory you know coast to coast and ember is mainly on the west coast so it's it's oregon california utah interesting and i mean what would you um i guess you can look at a number of unique properties you can add up the total amount of the value of the properties like the 1.8 million place in palm springs like i mean what do you what do you try to get to or how far can you stretch your supply side here i mean do you want to have 100 million of sort of listings on the platform or what's that number yeah i mean i think it will get very big yeah so we we've been doing this for 10 months my co-founders and i and then our our team at ember and the company's grown very quickly so right now we have you know just shy of right around 15 million dollars of inventory that's available on the website um that's that's homes that we actually have purchased and are for sale so i think that will grow into the hundreds of millions over the course of the next few years and you know the way we think about it if you look out five to ten years which is what you got to do in a startup right you got to think about what this will be this is going to be a massive marketplace where people are buying and selling shares in these homes and it's the way that we you know our thesis is that this is how people will buy vacation homes um the way the old way of buying whole homes which with all the work and cost that comes with that um will start to fade and certainly there will be a segment of the market that will still buy the home outright but for most people they want the they want to be able to show up and have a worry-free vacation and not really have to deal when you know when they leave at the end of their vacation they leave all the troubles of the home behind to ember so um so yeah we think that there's like a you know multi-hundred million dollar you know certainly you know potentially into the billions of dollars of inventory if you go out 10 years and that's kind of where we're headed mm-hmm so ember got going about 10 months ago i heard that correct yeah and so how you said you've you've purchased already 15 million dollars to feed the inventory we currently see on the site yeah so we have 15 million dollars live we've actually sold um quite quite a lot more than that oh oh interesting so over the past 10 months you've bought way more than 15. 50 million is just what you bought currently that hasn't sold yet it's sort of in the middle right now yep that's actually for sale on the on the website right now i see i see how much have you moved over the past 12 months um it's in the tens of millions yeah wow in the tens of millions of inventory across the website so there are a lot of homes that we have purchased and sold that are no longer listed on the website obviously once we sell them we take them off the website yep yep do you think you can break 100 million bucks of sort of gmv you know this year oh yeah yeah absolutely yeah based on the current growth 100 do macroeconomics matter interest rates going up people can't get loans as easily you know does this matter matter yeah they do matter you know i think you know we're obviously high in vacation homes it's usually a discretionary spending um we watch it pretty closely you know that said the growth trajectory to date hasn't been impacted we're we're continuing to grow and what i would characterize is kind of the top you know one percent of startups um and and the company operates you know we're pretty tight-lipped about like absolute numbers but i can tell you we operate pretty close to a break even like we've not burned hardly any cash most of the cash that we put on the balance sheet is to buy inventory um and so um and so yeah i think like you could see a three four five x growth over the next 12 months you know based on on what we know of the market over the last 12. where did you get the cash to buy up all the inventory i mean to get to get going so it's a combination of the equity dollars that we raise from the venture side and then we also layer in a debt uh some debt on top of that that gives us kind of the purchasing power you know the one thing i'd mentioned that you that you brought up was the interest rate so typically when you think of like a one-eighth ownership in a home you're not thinking like oh you know that's something that can be financed right that in fact historically that would that's not a product that would have been financiable but um that's actually not the case with these shares like these shares um can be financed and we have a partnership with a bank that finances these shares at a low interest rate in fact in the newport beach homes um the interest rate's four percent so it's actually less expensive than a than a traditional mortgage in in kind of the current environment which is uh which is amazing very interesting now you mentioned equity so it sounds like you've closed a seed round when was that how much was it for yeah so we closed a seed and an a which we kind of announced together at a 17.4 million dollar financing the a was um was led by peter thiel so we were super excited about that to have him um lead that financing and we closed that in february okay and sorry if you split that out how much was the series a the series a was 15 and the the the seed was 2.4 interesting okay so a lot of your early inventory was really fueled by it sounds like a great debt deal you got done which is nice because there's real collateral here to get a debt deal done i mean when you talk about fintech and sas today you're seeing people raise these warehouse facilities and bankruptcy remote spvs and there's no collateral except like software contracts or invoice factoring right did you sort of use the same structure but your collateral is not a contract or an invoice it's the actual house correct yep interesting and how much i mean you always have track record right so you have a history here i mean how big of a debt facility were able to raise on day one to go fuel the supply um so we you know we have raised um you know roughly well on the on the debt side it's there's several different sources of debt that we use to to make this happen and um you know it's probably in the 20 to 30 million dollars right now on the debt side and the combination of everything collectively okay okay interesting and and do you want to keep holding that debt even when you move that house off your site because because buyers buy all eight shares because that's a revenue stream for you potentially right you can pass those costs on yeah once so it's really just designed to be acquisition debt so we'll acquire the property in the first instance and then the property will move hands to the new owners if that owner decides to finance a portion of their purchase of the share then there will be some debt that remains on the property but in a lot of our homes um it's been cash buyers so i see you know that that debt is financed out entirely and and then the owners own the home outright um kind of indefinitely and you can sort of recycle there very interesting okay let's so averages are dangerous but it helps really understand the marketplace quickly what's what's the average sale price of the home on the platform so it depends on the geography in st george utah which again is if you've ever seen the red rock you know of southern utah that's where that's where st george is so it's a beautiful a beautiful area it's actually a very big vacation destination um you know your homes are typically between two um and uh three and a half million dollars in newport beach that that ranges from four and a half to eight million dollars um you know so we have two homes they're actually on the low and you know it was four million but that's you're talking about a home that's in a stunning neighborhood and you know 90 steps to the to the sand yeah they're beautiful i mean i'm looking through a bunch of them now they're beautiful so it sounds like sometimes across look geography matters but somewhere between sort of a three to four maybe five million sort of averages around the sale price help me understand how you guys make money you sell a place for 4 million bucks how do you make money yeah so we're super transparent about it right like our goal is to make sure that the consumer when they come in and look at it they understand exactly how the pricing works so we purchased the home outright um we're we provide you know the refse which is the real estate purchase contract to the to the customer so they can see that this is what we paid and this is all listed on the website um then we um add furnishings on there so let's just take an example let's say it's a two million dollar or let's say it's a four million dollar home down in newport beach we'll we'll break this out as four million dollars for the real estate another 250 to 300 000 for the furnishings um that includes uh you know closing costs uh you know you know really well appointed home uh window treatments appliances etc we also throw in like you know beach cruisers and things like that uh so that when people show up at the houses it's like they have all the toys that they would expect to have at the beach um and then um where we make the money is on that you know we're right now at 4.3 million dollars the 4 million purchase price of the home 300 thousand dollars of furnishings we take a 12 uplift so we'll take that 4.3 multiply it by 12 and that's where ember makes its money and so we break that out as kind of line items so that everybody can see exactly where that um where that revenue comes now that's a one-time revenue source on the recurring side and this kind of fits into both kind of the sas and and kind of proptech side of things there's a platform fee so that platform fees 100 a month per share that covers the management of the llc and then a tech layer so there's an app the app is what handles all the scheduling you can kind of think about it like an airbnb you know scheduling app where you've got a calendar you can go into any time so there's not set weeks this is not a time share this is not like hey you get you know that the 44th week of the year it's it's a first come first say first come first serve you can come down for one night or 14 nights and um and then on and then property management right man actually managing the property in kind of a traditional property management sense that's kind of the recurring revenue side of the business and how many shares do you think you'll sell this year uh well we've had over a hundred families buy in to ember uh to date over the past 10 months and um yeah we expect to you know double double or triple that number toward you know the end of the year or so and are most times those families are buying one share so it's a one-to-one ratio you know most families right now are buying one share we've just added the financing layer and i think with the financing layer you're gonna see uh you know more people buying two shares a quarter of the home having more time at the house yeah yeah okay good so i mean we get 100 families each owning about one share times a hundred bucks a pop there monthly i mean you're already at ten thousand bucks in mrr not including your 12 uplift correct yeah okay wow fascinating and you said earlier you have 15 million available today but you've already sold multiples of that so if we assume conservative 30 million we could take 30 million times 12 uplift right good yeah 3.6 million already they're on uplift 10 months initially pretty good pretty good for 10 months why is that i mean that's actual right i mean why would it not be 12 have you always had twelve percent yeah it's always been twelve percent yeah okay so there we can brag about you a little bit okay that's pretty good for ten months then that's not too bad um is the model working do you think you anticipate any pricing changes you know it's twelve percent too high too low um i think the model is working so you know the value that amber provides and the reason people are willing to pay you know 12 uplift on their share is because we're unbundling an asset right you're taking an asset that was previously unavailable to a group of buyers and you're making it more affordable and turn-key for them and because of that they're willing to pay a little bit of a premium it's kind of like um you know the analogy that one of my co-founders uses is like you know you can buy a six pack of coke back in the back of the you know the of the grocery store that's that's not cold and on the shelf for a couple bucks but you you inevitably pick up that cold one that's like you know already set out in the refrigerator in the aisle in the checkout aisle and so you're essentially just taking that asset and i'm bundling it and there's a lot of value in that um so i would say yeah 100 we've got pretty strong product market fit um we've actually had more of an issue keeping up with demand on the buy side and being able to get the inventory um which is always a good problem to have in a startup yep no that's tough now in terms of funding obviously delusion you want to manage that you've been through this rodeo before so you know all about dilution with your last company but most folks say you know closing series a's they're selling you know call it 10 to 15 percent of the business were you sort of pretty standard there yeah i'd say it's pretty standard okay got it so you're talking like 100 million evaluations some something around there okay interesting um what's team size today how many folks so we're just shy of 30 people right now 30 and how heavy on engineering how many engineers on the engineering side that makes up uh you know roughly five so it's it's it's interesting yeah five of the 30. okay five and i mean look anyone listening is gonna go wait this guy's rich why does he want to sell ten percent twenty percent of his business over two rounds the seed in series eight to investors why not sort of be greedy bet on himself and keep as much 200 as possible how would you answer that um you know there's a couple things one is you know it's a fairly capital intensive business obviously we got to go out and acquire the property in the in the first instance and then sell the property um it's a so there's reasons to have a lot of cash on the balance sheet so that you can take that cash and and leverage it um i also think that there's going to be a couple big players in this space and we're kind of starting to see those players form and um you know the way we view this kind of five ten years out is this is a you know a nationwide marketplace and also a worldwide marketplace where people are buying and selling um and are buying and selling shares and i think speed to market is really critical for marketplaces if you get out there and kind of establish the name that's what gets you in kind of in a in a you know first or second position and uh so we're we're going to be pretty aggressive and aggressive you know it's helpful to have the insight and backing of venture capitalists yeah i mean look this is my preferred way of living right i'm here in my house in austin right now but i travel most of the time my preference is to have five or six cities i'm in each year and i go a week here a week there i'm able to do this so the challenge with something like ember is if i want to become an ember loyalist and go on today well there's only really five cities i can spend my time in you know you know i love barcelona you don't have barcelona you know i love whatever i'm making this up sayulita in mexico you don't have that yet so like there really are network effects here right whoever gets the most inventory the quickest wins isn't that true yeah 100 yeah interesting and you feel like you can catch up i mean what's your mouse trap how do you catch up to like a picasso um so i think there's a couple things i mean i think like you know hey this is i mean this is this is a massive like like i mentioned it's a massive asset class and there's no way that you know one player can kind of capture an entire market it's not this is not an airbnb like you think about an airbnb where you go to an airbnb and you you go there on a you go there doesn't matter where you're traveling in the world right if you're gonna go out to um you know barcelona or to to london or you know to newport beach you're probably gonna go to an airbnb and go to single source this is not really that right this is a very localized regional you know home buying is a very regional localized uh you know i think buying process and it's also a much larger asset class so um so one is i think that there are there's space for several players to coexist two is um you know we're we're in a slightly different pricing price range than picasso poc goss was in the ultra luxury side of the business right like you know taking what was available to you know one tenth of a percent of of americans and making it available to the one percent what are their average sale prices do you think it's closer like nine ten million oh yeah yeah yeah for sure yeah if you if you browse kind of through their newport beach homes it's just a much higher price point um you know two to three x what ember is where um you know amber is coming down market a little bit and say maybe what's available to the three percent is now becoming available to the 20 to 25 and so that democratization is uh you know part of our strategy and and um and you know even if even if there's encroachment on those pricing you know there's again there's just so much space in the market that it doesn't it's not too concerning um so you know in our minds it's just expansion right to your point we have people who want to have a desert home a beach home a mountain home and so as we expand it's like you know get to the east coast quickly now that we've kind of got a handle on the west coast and and continue to build out the west coast then east coast and then europe and and um and i think you know i think it's the makings of a very big business um for you know for both of us so i'm in bend oregon i'm i love this place i'm sleeps 14 six beds seven baths i'm gonna buy four nine four hundred nineteen thousand for one eighth of this share the flip side of this is though i sort of have eight co-founders three years from now markets are way up everything's up i'm like wow this little share is worth a lot of money i want to exit and go move to cape town can what if what what if there is no buyer on ember ford i can't just list my house with a realtor because there's eight there's seven other co-founders i have to get to agree with me you know what i mean oh yeah so this is the magic of ember so the when you're ready to sell your home or your share in your home you can sell it at any time and um you you know because you guaranteed that you'll buy it uh you can sell it on like with on the mls with the real estate agent at any time at whatever price you want so let's say let's say the...