How PadSplit Reached $250M GMV and 34,000 Units as the Largest US Co-Living Marketplace (Interview with CEO Atticus LeBlanc)

Introduction and Atticus LeBlanc's Background

Nathan Latka

0:00Hey folks, my guest today is Atticus LeBlanc. He's a serial entrepreneur and Yale graduate who's worked in affordable housing since 2005. He founded PadSplit in 2017 as a public benefit corporation after winning an affordable housing ideas competition in Atlanta has experimented with shared housing models all the way back since 2009. Atticus, you're ready to take us to the top. All right. What got you so passionate about this space? Was it just sort of a hobby? You just couldn't let go of it. Just took you over in college or something.

Atticus LeBlanc

0:19Let's do it. Yeah, no, I mean, not exactly. I was certainly always interested in housing, but I first rented a room when I moved to Atlanta in 2002. And from there ended up being able to purchase my first house, which really changed the trajectory of my entire career and really the rest of my life. So we talk about solving housing as a vehicle for financial empowerment. And for me, that was certainly true. And then It happened a couple of times over, yeah, encountered in 2009, two folks that were living, renting rooms right next door in a house next to one that had vacant. And they were living on social security income and just didn't qualify for any housing option anywhere in Metro Atlanta. And it seemed clear that this was an option that was both more affordable for them and more profitable for the investor. And so just continue to ask why, why this didn't exist at a much wider scale.

Nathan Latka

1:22Interesting. mean, this is no joke. You've got some serious scale. People can look at the website, but when you look at the traffic, mean, 68,000 hits per month in a 66 domain rating. mean, there's some serious activity happening over here. So walk us through, mean, the hard part about models like this is the chicken and the egg problem. So if I've reviewed this site back on launch day in 2017, what would I have seen back then?

PadSplit's Marketplace Model and Early Days

Atticus LeBlanc

1:41man. We've been through many iterations since then, Nathan. I mean, we've always been a marketplace, though. I think that's the first thing that's really important here is we've never owned the inventory. And the idea was always this two-sided marketplace where the people who were struggling to pay their rent could qualify for units and get in almost immediately. And that inventory was always going to be offered by third parties. Generally, mom and pop investors, but increasingly we're seeing more more owner occupants. I think the major thing that you would notice between 2017 and today is just the inventory overall. We were in 40 states and we can list anywhere in the country. ⁓ But at the time we finished 2018 with 82 units and we have 34,000 roughly today. We're the largest marketplace for co-living in the US. So that's probably the biggest single difference.

Nathan Latka

2:36Holy mackerel. That's insane. I mean, okay. So I want to come back to that 34,000 units and sorry, is that defined by number of beds or like, what if there's one unit with two beds?

How Units Are Defined and Counted

Atticus LeBlanc

2:46Yeah, great question. it's basically think of it like a per household. So in a shared housing environment, it's an individual bedroom. So we provide, it's typically access to private rooms and shared homes for this 50 % of Americans that can't afford their rent. But it could just as easily be a studio apartment that is furnished with all utilities included because every unit has to be fully furnished, it has to include all utilities. But it could be an accessory dwelling unit in the backyard. And Whether it's a bedroom, an apartment, or this accessory dwelling unit, we count each one as an individual unit because it means that you have one household, typically a single person, but increasingly we're seeing more families and they can rent that unit. So it's just a rentable unit of any kind.

Nathan Latka

3:30I go on Airbnb, I see pricing per night. If I go on Zillow and I want to lease, I see pricing per month. You price per week. I imagine that's very intentional. Is this be, I imagine you run into maybe you don't. I'm just, I'm guessing here. Some people could say that way. This just feels like Airbnb, but like for, for if your budget's lower, but that's, I don't think that's actually what you're doing here. Right. How would you respond to that?

Under $30 a Night and Why the Model Is Relational, Not Transactional

Atticus LeBlanc

3:51Yeah, a couple key differences. Like the first and most obvious is if you were going to look at like the average cost per night for our units, you're going to be less than $30. So it's a lot cheaper than Airbnb. The more complex and nuanced answer is that our marketplace is relational rather than transactional. And what I mean by that is when you book an Airbnb or even an Uber, you have

Nathan Latka

4:02Wow.

Atticus LeBlanc

4:19a specific moment in time that you are rating when you rate that transaction and that individual experience. You have a move in experience and then you have a living experience on day seven and a different experience probably on day 32 or 185 or 372. like your journey as a consumer changes across that life cycle. And so the technology and the infrastructure and all of the systems need to be built around that relationship rather than just the individual transaction. And as any marketplace, like we ultimately sell trust. And we need to maintain trust at all of those different anchor points in the relationship. So it's pretty complex.

Nathan Latka

5:07What's the average length of stay?

Weekly Pricing and Average Length of Stay

Atticus LeBlanc

5:10about nine and a half months on average, it's a bimodal distribution. you've got like some people who like 11 % of users give or take will move out within the first month or month and a half. Then you have 25 % of all cohort users who will stay for more than 12 months. And Like the first co-living property that I opened in 2009 that I was referencing earlier was the third person who moved in there. She's still there today, 17 years later, living in the exact same room, still paying week to week. And like the reason we ultimately build weekly is just because it's much more user friendly. It's much easier to budget around. It's often how a lot of workers get paid. You can also set every two weeks in case you get paid every two weeks. But yeah, it's just like how we live versus... monthly or daily which is more complex and harder to remember.

Nathan Latka

6:05And so it is hard to remember. Yeah, it just it feels. ⁓ Easier, more appetizing to think about 170 per week versus any other sort of metrics. That's interesting. any marketplace, obviously sort of the match rate and supply demand, right. And what's empty and what's not as always like a critical thing you're trying to reach equilibrium on. So let's just take may here of 2026. When this interview is happening, we already know that the supply side, you're supplying 34,000 units available per month. How many right, right now today are filled.

Current Occupancy and Refill Speed

Atticus LeBlanc

6:35So today we're at like 25,000 that are filled. ⁓ This is another key stat for us, like as you think about this model compared to apartments, for instance, where you think of, just what's your occupancy percentage? Well, for us, we look much more at how quickly are we filling rooms and how bookable are those rooms, because our hosts will set pricing. If you set pricing for a very small bedroom at

Nathan Latka

6:38Okay.

Atticus LeBlanc

7:00$1,000 a week in Jacksonville, Florida. Guess what? Like it's not going to get filled and there's no amount of marketing I can do to fill that room. And so you look at, well, how bookable is this actual room in terms of the quality, the pricing, photos, et cetera, and just how available is the owner. But then separately, how quickly can you refill those rooms? And if I added a unit yesterday, it's not realistic for me to expect that it's going to be filled today. But across the platform, we know that the average time to refill an individual unit is about eight days, which from an apartment perspective is blazingly fast. And if you're in many markets where there's higher demand, it could just be a couple of hours, because there are no showings and people could be moving in 48 hours later after that booking. And so it's just much faster than like a traditional residential experience, but it also means that the metrics are different.

Nathan Latka

7:57Mm hmm. This is interesting. Okay, so I think I understand the model now you've walked through the marketplace. How do you make money?

How PadSplit Makes Money

Atticus LeBlanc

8:03So we make money because if we source the resident into that unit, we take the first 10 days of that stay to help recover a good portion of that marketing expense. And then we get paid 8 % of ongoing transactions. So we only get paid when our hosts actually get paid, which is a key differentiator with our marketplace compared to what we refer to as demand aggregators, like a Zillow or realtor.com or apartments.com where you're paying for leads. We are absolutely aligned with the incentives of the owner so that we only get paid when they get paid and then we collect that revenue on a go-forward basis.

Nathan Latka

8:45So let me try and do some random math here. If you have 25,000 filled as of today and you told me the average nightly rate across your platform is 30 bucks a night times an 8 % take rate on that, which is again, feels really high value because you're doing all the work. You're filling these things quickly. You're, you're unlocking a physical asset to be a new revenue stream. ⁓ that would be, I mean, what, that's like $60,000 a day, right? Something like that.

$250M GMV and 70% Year-Over-Year Growth

Atticus LeBlanc

9:11Your math would be better than mine if you can do all of that in your head Nathan. yeah, right now we're grossing over $250 million a year in transaction revenue.

Nathan Latka

9:26Yep, yep, yep, yep. Really interesting. Okay. And just to make sure my audience understands when you say grossing, that's not how much you're processing through your platform. That's just your, that's your 8 % take rate.

Atticus LeBlanc

9:35No, no, no, that's the processing. That's the processing. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

9:38Okay, okay. So if they want to back into your revenue, they could just take eight percent around eight, sometimes it's 10 because you first take the first 10 days, but it's generally 8%.

Atticus LeBlanc

9:44Yeah. Well, you'd also have to know the blend between the 10 days or the 8%, which is why it gets more complicated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I appreciate it.

Nathan Latka

9:50Yes. We're splitting hairs here. I just want to give you credit for what you built. It's a, is a meaningful business with real revenues growing quickly. We see all the beautiful awards behind you. ⁓ this is, this is a fun story.

Atticus LeBlanc

9:59Yes. Yeah, and then if somebody sources their own resident, we actually don't take that 10 days. So like Nathan, if you want to move in your buddy into a room that you own, like we don't actually take that fee.

Nathan Latka

10:14I see. how was that? How was that? Let's just call it GMV, right? Dollars flowing through your system annually. It's 250 million today. Where was it one year ago? I mean, that's the way to value the growth of the business, right?

Atticus LeBlanc

10:23Yeah, so we're growing 70 % year over year and have for about the past three years.

Nathan Latka

10:27wow. Wow, wow, wow. Okay, very interesting. Where did you was there ever a moment between 2018 and your rapid growth now where you said, Holy crap, this model is just not gonna work. I'm shutting this thing down.

Atticus LeBlanc

10:40short answer is no. I mean, I, there have been very, ⁓ like very many hard moments and as any entrepreneur listening can relate, I mean, it's just a question of knowing where you are on the roller coaster. And there have been some brutal, brutal downs, but also some, great ups. And I think for me, I just, I knew that it only ended when I said I quit. and I knew that I was never gonna say quit. ⁓ was never really a point at which when I thought, okay, this isn't gonna work.

Nathan Latka

11:13That's awesome. Yep. Yep. And I love that. Um, one of the patterns that I'm studying deeply right now, sort of in this age of AI is this concept of sort of ABC, which is atoms plus bits plus capital. You're a really interesting example of this because I see on your LinkedIn, you're not just doing the bits side, the digital PadSplit. You're playing in atoms as well. I'm guessing with Striant Investments, real estate investment construction company. So you're, you're owning the full stack from what I understand. Tell me how you think about. sort of just the new world are going into and the vertical alignment between your digital and physical worlds.

Atoms vs. Bits: Striant and the Marketplace Choice

Atticus LeBlanc

11:54Yeah, well, I mean, so just to clarify to Striant's totally different business, like that was what I started many years ago and ultimately evolved into this idea behind PadSplit. But even though Striant is a host, we only have like 90 doors ⁓ for PadSplit. Yeah, so it's, ⁓ now we have other assets, but.

Nathan Latka

12:11Okay, so that's actually smaller than I would have thought.

Atticus LeBlanc

12:18But for PadSplits, like, yeah, we're only at like 90 individual units on PadSplits. So it's really ⁓ tiny by the grand scheme of things. But you're right in that, in your atoms versus bits comparison and that like, we, the product, if you will, is not just the marketplace. The product and the experience that any consumer has is very much informed by

Nathan Latka

12:24Okay.

Atticus LeBlanc

12:47not just the home itself and the platform and our customer service, but their other roommates. And so the complexity of this particular business gets pretty intense pretty quickly as you start to compile, okay, well, this unit with these five or six other roommates and trying to identify which one of those things may be negatively or positively impacting the overall experience for that customer gets to be... pretty wild, pretty quickly. And I think one of the biggest learnings for us early on was we initially tried to control as much of that experience as possible just through brute force and setting more rigorous standards around every element of the business. But ultimately, what we realized was just You can't be an expert in every market and every housing type and every relationship and every decision. And so you have to trust the people who are closest to the problems with the agency to actually go solve those problems. And what we can do as a marketplace is provide better information, better customer service overall. And frankly, most importantly is better incentive alignment. between all of the parties so that we can get to the best outcomes that are possible. But ultimately just relying on them to make choices for themselves, whether that is on the resident side or on the host side.

Nathan Latka

14:14Mm. Part yet that that what you just shared is very valuable. My, my follow up questions that would be anyone that sits on GMV can basically build an individual pro forma for the underlying physical asset. For example, we lend at founder path. We are debt firm, right? We lend money to software companies. We lend money, a lot of software companies that sell to waste management companies, all those waste management companies need dump trucks like waste trucks and they're funding the dump trucks, right? You sit on the end. So in other words, you know how much this one here in Austin, Texas, You could rebuild their pro forma because you sit on the revenue. My follow up question would be, you know, could you go roll up all the physical assets? But it looks like there's so much fragmentation here. It actually would not make sense. This isn't like one building with 30 beds. You could roll up selectively. These are like literally individual really spread out.

Atticus LeBlanc

15:05Yeah, so they are. mean, but there are ⁓ some of these funds, Mogul is one, where it's a crowdfunding platform where they are buying existing performing PadSplits from lots of these different owners and then reselling shares in those assets. Yeah. Yes, exactly. Exactly right. We do, we do.

Nathan Latka

15:19This. Oh, interesting. Do you have a partner? Do you have partnership with them?

Atticus LeBlanc

15:27And so they own a bunch of PadSplits that are performing very well because they did the math and saw, well, gosh, on an overall yield basis, this is fantastic. And you just can't find a comparable type of investment in real estate because you're filling these units, you're getting a really high yield. And the difficulty historically has been

Nathan Latka

15:44Yeah.

Atticus LeBlanc

15:51aggregating enough of these things where you can have that yield across a large enough denominator. Exactly. so, mogul is, one of the groups that is, that is doing that. But for, for me personally, and this kind of circles back to your first question around the mission. I had a choice early on about.

Nathan Latka

15:56economies of scale. Yeah.

Atticus LeBlanc

16:13Did we wanna be, we kinda had three options. Did you wanna be a marketplace like Airbnb? Did you wanna be ⁓ a master lessee like WeWork at the time? Or did you wanna be the underlying owner like Invitation Homes? And for me, it was abundantly clear which choice to take because... Even though Invitation Homes was a massive company and very stable, they had 60,000 houses or so at the time, Airbnb had 6 million units. And so if my goal is to solve the problem and ultimately solve the housing crisis, then it's super clear. I'm going to go choose this Airbnb model because I don't need to own more real estate, right? Like, Striant owns plenty of real estate. I wasn't worried about like owning more. I didn't feel compelled to own more myself.

Nathan Latka

16:55Mm-hmm.

Atticus LeBlanc

17:02But I wanted to go solve this problem. And so that's really what pushed us into this marketplace model, even though it's still a really tough business.

Nathan Latka

17:09Interesting. Yeah, I know, definitely tough. Tell me more about how you funded the business. you bootstrapped, how you raised capital?

Funding History: Bootstrap to Series B

Atticus LeBlanc

17:17So we bootstrapped initially and then I raised from VCs in 2019, mostly West Coast, but some here in Atlanta as well. then, yeah, we've gone through our series B. Our series B was 2021 though. So it's been a while. We're now able to get debt capital. Not that we're closed off to equity funding going forward, but we've always been a little bit of an ugly duckling and... It's not like you can pattern match your way into a decision to invest in this business. let's be honest, like PropTech in general hasn't been having its best run here in the last couple of years. So we're in a lot of people's anti-portfolios, I think, at this stage of the game. ⁓ And we've just had to be really lean in the way that we've operated and try to stay as close to breakeven as we can.

Nathan Latka

18:01Yeah I want to learn more about that. mean, that's obviously a great way to build a great business. And there's a lot of I mean, I know a lot of top founders that love debt. If you know how to use it, it's a great way to avoid dilution. But you know, those 2021 days, I mean, there are people raising crazy amounts of money, ridiculous valuations, did you sort of fall into that trap at all with your series being 2021? Okay.

77 Meetings, One Yes: The Series B Story

Atticus LeBlanc

18:27No, no, no, we never, we never did. But yeah, I mean, I had 77 meetings for that Series B and one yes. So we didn't, I didn't have a ton of options, but we only needed one, Nathan. So that's another part of story. yeah, but I mean, it certainly colored my thinking on funding for the business since then was like, we got to get to break even as quickly as possible so that we can control our own destiny.

Nathan Latka

18:34⁓ my gosh That's right. And my research team gave me an aggregate amount, but if I like split out that series, a and B was at like a 20 million series B and a 10 million series A or sorta like that.

Atticus LeBlanc

19:03Yep. Yeah, yeah. So we've raised about $40 million in equity total for the company at this point.

Nathan Latka

19:09Okay, got it. okay, guys, okay, got it. But that was all 2021 and before.

Atticus LeBlanc

19:14We did ⁓ We did like a convertible after the series be shortly thereafter, but but yeah for all intents and purposes

Nathan Latka

19:19Okay. What should founders or what can they learn from you about how to negotiate a good debt deal if they're thinking about using debt instead of equity?

Atticus LeBlanc

19:32Well, I mean, listen, the most obvious thing is have options, right? I mean, if you have more than one player at the table, then you're in a good position. Other than that, it's just a question of how willing are you to say no? And are you in a position to be able to say no? And so one of the reasons after going through that series B experience was, look, I want to be able to say, whether it's a debt or an equity investor, to say, I would like your money. I can use your money. I think you're a valuable partner, but... Under no circumstances do I need it. And simply being in a position as a company to say, don't need this money, I think is by far the most powerful piece of advice I could give.

Negotiating Debt Deals and Choosing Lenders

Nathan Latka

20:14Okay, now you have five term sheets from debt providers. One of them is a 12 month IO, one of them has 2 % warrants, one of them has three financial covenants, the other has no financial covenants. One of them requires a personal guarantee, one doesn't. What have you learned about what you think a founder should optimize for if they are sitting on three or four debt term sheets?

Atticus LeBlanc

20:31Yeah, it's a great question. And we have been fortunate that we've been in this position. ⁓ And it may sound counterintuitive, but at the end of the day, like the last time we were deciding between multiple term sheets, it's you're going to be in a relationship with this person. Who do you want? Who do you want on the other side of that table? And like real gut check, who do you think you can trust? Who's shooting you straight? People will ultimately show you who they are. if you give them an opportunity and who may be slid something in to some term sheet or the actual loan docs at some point in time versus who's the person who's just been totally straight up with you from day one. And like when you know when when ultimately every term sheet kind of gets ironed out they're pretty close in most cases and you may be optimizing for warrant coverage or for Uh, for interest rate and like that, those things depend on, the business and your, your preference in a lot of ways. But we've ultimately decided on who has a, uh, a demeanor and a reputation that we feel like, yes, we can trust this person. And one of the things I generally appreciate about debt relative to equity is like that relationship is usually pretty clear cut. I can pay you off. Right. If I can, I can always pay you off and like that is, that is the end.

Nathan Latka

21:53Yeah.

Atticus LeBlanc

21:58⁓ But you want to make sure that they have that same view and that it's maybe not a back-ended way to get control of the company because like that would be the worst case scenario for everybody on our cap table. And I think maybe loss avoidance as much as anything would be something front and center for me.

Nathan Latka

22:23Yep, yep guys if you want to learn more just about the world of you know debt with private software companies and marketplaces the biggest Lenders into this space or the public, there's about 16 publicly traded BDCs that do most of these deals. They've got about 30 billion today, outstanding specifically to software exposure. So whether it's Ares or Blackstone or Blue Owl, and, you can't obviously add a, cause I won't put you on the spot and ask you to tell me your interest rate, but you can sort of go in here and see other large software companies. Like if we go in, for example, and go look at box, right. Everyone knows Dropbox and they did a deal with Blackstone at an 8.6 rate, 78 million of capital, you know, maturity date, four years, but again, Dropbox has hundreds of millions of are. So, um, the public markets right now, you know, all these publicly traded firms are publicly saying, Hey, these are the weighted average interest rates we're charging. They're generally coming down over time from a high of like 11.4 % and Q3, 2023 down to about 9.2 % Q4, 2025. This data is all being pulled directly from their publicly traded 10 Q's and 10 K's, but Atticus I'm bringing all that up because again, people I think underestimate, there are a lot of companies that use debt to scale and keep their equity and it makes a great outcome for the founder as long as it doesn't blow you up.

Atticus LeBlanc

23:33Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think We are blessed with an outstanding CFO and that's another key part of this puzzle that we haven't talked about at all is someone who always has their eye on the dial to make sure you're not gonna blow up and that can run projections across all these different scenarios and all these different term sheets and really run sensitivity analysis to see, like this one is better even if you do like this other person more. So just be very aware of what that trade-off is.

Closing a New Credit Facility and the Debt Stack

Nathan Latka

23:53Mm-hmm. You just recently closed a deal. mean, it was public knowledge orcs put it up on their website. Yeah. So why, why orcs? Why were they the right choice for this new funding?

Atticus LeBlanc

24:06We did. Yeah. So, so in our case, we had been looking for a lot of credit previously, and we had closed a lot of credit with a bank and got great terms. And we were, we were just in a position where Orox had approached us. We had talked them previously and they said, Hey, we know that you just, you close the deal with this bank. We know them, we like them. If they were able to underwrite it, we think that we'll be able to. And, yeah, much like lots of these funding events, it was a relationship that, had started in being built two years prior. And so when they stepped up, we weren't out there looking for this type of funding. But when it showed up in our laps, we said, well, yeah, I think we can make this work and let's go.

Nathan Latka

24:54So do these guys take out any prior debt you had on the balance sheet or are they like stacked now? Like some people, people do unitranche an APC, a BP, et cetera.

Atticus LeBlanc

25:02So they would have, ⁓ but in this case, we didn't need them to. So we've got a line of credit and this facility.

Team of 240 and the Customer Service Split

Nathan Latka

25:09That's awesome. That's great. Well, hey, look, as we move forward here to two last questions, what's your team? We got to give your team some love too. What's your team size today? How many folks full time?

Atticus LeBlanc

25:17240 folks.

Nathan Latka

25:19Holy mackerel. How many of them, I guess, what's the split? it mainly engineers or I mean, what's the split?

Atticus LeBlanc

25:23⁓ So that includes our customer service team, which is our largest, which is about 100 people. So we've got ⁓ first customer service, then sales, then marketing. Engineering is still pretty large, but we've got a lot of mouths to feed.

AI's Impact on PadSplit's Business

Nathan Latka

25:40Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And then how are you, mean, is AI gonna dramatically impact your business at all?

Atticus LeBlanc

25:45So, I mean, I don't think it will impact us in a negative way. It's hard for me to envision how, like, we're talking about moving people into physical spaces. I you're talking about atoms, right? Until AI starts paying the rent. The answer is no. But at the same time, like,

Nathan Latka

25:58Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a long way.

Atticus LeBlanc

26:08It's absolutely impacting our overall business and how we approach business. I mean, customer service case in point, as you can imagine, and the variety of tickets that we have that are coming in from residents who are sharing homes together. And the... The capability of any individual personal agent to leverage AI to answer that question appropriately is massive. ⁓ Search algorithms, the amount of data that you have and can leverage to just get smarter about how you conduct a business. There are lots and lots of ways that we are absolutely just improving our productivity, but I'm not particularly worried about AI threats to the business. ⁓ and, and I don't say that lightly, but at the end of the day for us, like as a marketplace, the flywheel effects are really important. ⁓ the geographic effects are really important and, ⁓ and our ability to, to generate demand for these units is not something that I think AI, least in its current form is, is able to replicate, even though they can ultimately say that, that they're gonna. put more eyeballs or you're going to get ⁓ better AEO or SEO. The reality is like brand matters and I'll say again, we sell trust. So at the end of the day, that's really tough to replicate entirely, especially when you're talking about moving real people into real spaces.

Nathan Latka

27:49Yeah. And just to, just to call that out, to put up, to put some real numbers behind the strategies you're articulating now. mean, you dominate sort of this keyword rooms for rent and critical cities. brings you thousands of clicks per month. I mean, this is one of the things that you're saying you can sort of double down on in the age of AI is launch more programmatic SEO campaigns like this.

Atticus LeBlanc

28:09Well, yeah, well, not just that, but I mean, one, it's getting the eyeballs, but two, it's converting the eyeballs and converting the eyeballs into real transactions. And so the booking flow is a way that we're able to really optimize performance, but it's not something that's easily replaceable.

Nathan Latka

28:27All right, last question. If someone comes to you and offers you 150 million all cash to sell the company today, do you take it?

Would Atticus Sell for $150M? Hell No.

Atticus LeBlanc

28:33Hell no. That's easy. Hell no. ⁓ Listen, I've been an entrepreneur for a long time. I was only able to start this business because I basically had my finances covered through my work with Striant, which is still around and still flourishing. And this was really about solving the problem.

Nathan Latka

28:34That was a quick answer.

Atticus LeBlanc

29:00And how do we help solve the affordable housing crisis one room at a time while leveraging housing as a vehicle for financial empowerment? And that's what we're here to do.

Nathan Latka

29:08There you have it. Atticus, if people love this interview and want to follow your story, where can they find you online?

Atticus LeBlanc

29:13Yeah, so you're going to find me on LinkedIn more than anyplace else. Otherwise, just go to padsplit.com.

Nathan Latka

29:19guys, PadSplit.com. launched in 2018 with 83 units and said, Oh my God, is this thing gonna work or not? 2019 did a a series, 2021 series B 77 meetings one. Yes, that's all you need by 2026. He's now he's got 34,000 units on his platform as of today, recording date, May 19th, 2026, 25,000 rooms full. And his critical growth metric is What's the GMV flowing through his platform, right? People pay on a weekly basis to use these locations. He's got 250 million of GMV throwing through his platform and he takes on average called 8 % of that. And he says that GMV number has growing about 70 % year over year for the past, you know, very, you know, call it two, three years. think Atticus is what you said, right? Three years, three years. So really great mission, really great growth story here. A really great cause in general as a public benefit corporation Atticus. Thank you for taking us to the top.

Atticus LeBlanc

29:56Three years, yeah. That's right. Absolutely. Thank you, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

30:08Alright guys.