Adora Cheung

Hello, um, my name is Justin Khan. I'm one of the partners at YC, and I'm extremely excited to introduce our next speaker, Adora Chung. Uh, Adora is the founder and CEO of Homejoy and one of our top companies that we've funded.

Um, I'm particularly excited for her story because, uh, I know how good Adora was previous to YC. I was competing with her, and she was the founder that kept me up at night. Many, many sleepless nights. So, Adora, please come on up!

I think she's in the back. I'm right here. Oh, right here. All right, hello. Thank you, uh, Justin.

Um, and I'm really excited to be here today. Um, Homejoy, if you don't know, is, uh, the leading platform that connects people with home service professionals.

And, uh, our mission is to make homes happier everywhere. Uh, we're now available in the United States, Canada, the 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.

Um, if anybody, they are the experts in how to make things big in Europe, so, um, since you guys are from here, you probably want to hunt them down and get some advice.

Um, so, you know, starting Homejoy here in Europe has been a great experience. Um, while I still believe Silicon Valley is the number one destination for entrepreneurs, I really believe the entrepreneurial spirit here is alive and well, and in particular in London and Berlin. I really think it's on the cusp of something great.

Um, Silicon Valley just has time on its side and so, uh, if you choose to stay here in Europe, um, I definitely advise you to go to Silicon Valley, but if you choose to stay here in Europe, um, 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.

Um, 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—um, in the context of a startup, of course, not life.

Um, and the reason why I'm to talk about it is because my co-founder, who, uh, 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 Homejoy today.

And, uh, we essentially spent over three years in utter mess and darkness, um, until we figured out about, uh, we even thought of Homejoy. And so, uh, 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—um, if not semi-entertaining.

So, Aaron and I started working in 2009, and our goals were twofold. We wanted to, one, make people happier somehow, and two, we wanted to build a huge, humongous business because we wanted it to be a good proxy for making a huge impact in the world.

And, you know, the problem was that most entrepreneurs are—and which is very good advice—they're 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 don't have that many hobbies.

We actually don't own that many things. We literally, both of us combined, probably own just, you know, our clothes. I just wear Homejoy t-shirts all the time; they're free, so I really just own my pants and shoes. 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, trying to find that great idea. And you know, some people are very good at it.

Like, some people literally have high-powered vacuums and they just, like, 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, you know, each piece of hay one by one, looking at it with a magnifying glass, and seeing is that piece of hay, or is that a needle? Is that a great idea or not?

And, uh, and, and you just go piece by hay, piece of hay, piece by hay, one by one. And you have to be very patient, um, because a haystack has lots of pieces of hay.

Um, and so, that's what we did for a long time, is we just searched for ideas. So, in 2009, we, uh, started a company called Pathjoy—not Homejoy, Pathjoy.

And Pathjoy was a platform that connected people with therapists and life coaches because, again, our primary motivation for our business was, you know, to make people happier. And we thought, who are the people who make people happy? Well, it's got to be these therapists and life coaches.

It turns out that's not really the case. Um, it also turns out that we, we appear to be cynics because when we tried to use the platform ourselves, we, we, we absolutely hated it.

Um, and we couldn't stand the sessions, and so we clearly 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, um, for over three years.

And, uh, and meanwhile, in these three 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?

Um, and so, and there's other things like, you know, we have typical Asian-American parents, um, and it's like they were about to disown me because I had taken the star genius child of our family and somehow convinced them 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, we just kind of lost our way, and I found myself literally working on a network of blogs, um, and rewriting gossip news for these blogs because we were just essentially arbitraging keyword traffic, SEO and SEM type traffic, um, and making money off of that and thinking about, you know, back to why we started this business, um, of making people happier.

You know, I, 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.

Um, but you see, see that's, that's, that's quite a stretch, right? Um, and, uh, and we were just essentially faking it at that point.

Um, so meanwhile, you know, summer of 2012, we were still, we didn't have an idea—um, at least an idea we thought that could get really big and meet the goals of, you know, what we wanted to do with our business.

And we were also running out of money. Um, three years we had managed to raise a little bit of, um, investment capital in 2010, but, uh, it was pretty much gone.

So what were we doing? Coincidentally, at the same time, Aaron, um, Aaron's place—we were working out of Aaron's place, and he's a typical bachelor. His place was extremely dirty.

Um, the bathrooms were gross; I refused to use it. I would literally walk three blocks to use a bathroom at a cafe instead.

Um, 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. Um, and at some point, he decided, okay, I'm actually going to, uh, 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 want, I'm, I'm, 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 he can stop complaining.

So he went out to go find a cleaner, and you know, he ran into two issues. One is he, uh, he looked up cleaning agencies and stuff like that, and there—you know, you can find a really great professional cleaner who's background checked, has been tested in person, interviewed.

Um, you, when they show up, you actually know that they know how to clean. Uh, the problem is that you have to pay these agencies, uh, a huge premium for them, and something he clearly, we couldn't afford then.

The second route is, in the US, we have—and I mean there's online classified sites everywhere, but in the US it's called—you know, the most popular one is called Craigslist.

So you can go to Craigslist and find cleaners there, but those people are not background checked. Um, you don't know who is actually going to show up to your place, so they could be essentially an ax murderer, you know, serial killer, and, 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 and try to solve it." And at that point, again, we were just working on an idea that was, you know, kind of flopping.

And so I said, okay, let's, let's, let's just look at this. And the more and more we researched into it, the more we realized that it was extremely inconvenient to book a cleaning, um, and that the industry hadn't changed in over 60 years.

And so we decided to, uh, to to start working on what is Homejoy today. Now, now we had the idea, um, 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, zero people. Second day, zero people. Third day, after a week, zero people. And we just couldn't find a customer, so it looked kind of depressing for a little bit.

But again, this was during the summertime, and it was very hot. And so I thought one 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.

Um, 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.

Um, and so we traded water for cleanings. It, it was pretty good. I figured, you know, once the clean—once the booking—the cleaning was supposed to happen, they would actually, you know, cancel, uh, on me or on us.

Uh, but it turns out most of them didn't, and 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-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, um, in apartments, and what we learned very quickly was—which we should have known anyway—we were very bad cleaners.

Um, and cleaning is very, very hard. 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 one of the first places we cleaned was a 9,000 ft² home in Los Altos Hills, which is a rich area in, in the south of San Francisco in, in California.

We showed 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 literally walk into one room, we get our microfiber rags and we would just, you know, 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. Um, it turns out you actually need special equipment to pick up this dust.

Um, you don't use paper towels and microfiber rags to clean up this dust, and I kid you not, it took us five days to clean this house. Like, literally five days. That is the worst experience for the customer because you—in the day you said, "Sorry, I have to come back because, you know, what you saw in the morning is it still looks like that, so, uh, I'm coming back tomorrow."

Um, so right then 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, um, and that was very important—we're getting lots of calls and stuff like that—it was on me to actually go, um, 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, um, 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 two weeks to find this job, and because mostly I was rejected at almost everywhere, but this one 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, it was in San Francisco, which is about a 30 to 90-minute drive depending on the rush hour traffic at the time. And so I would literally show up to work at 7—I would go through rush hour traffic, show up to work around 7, 8:00 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.

Um, and then take a shower because you need to take a shower after cleaning that much, and, um, spent my time coding or doing 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 3:00, 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 Third Street, and I would just go brush my teeth, um, 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 three hours every day by doing that. Um, in hindsight, not the most efficient use of my time or, you know, 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.

Um, so, you know, the job, the cleaning job, was actually quite interesting and, um, 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.

And there's a number of things, and I, I don't have time to talk about all of the things, but you know, it's things like getting, uh, getting a customer—booking a customer took a long time, was very inconvenient.

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

Um, and then it was down to, you know, scheduling cleaners—they were doing it in a very manual manner.

Um, 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, um, 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.

Um, we were growing a little bit, and, um, we were very confident that we were onto something. And by taking that job, uh, we had built even more confidence.

And so for the next month and, uh, for the next two months we were working, working, working. We actually, um, became a legit platform in the sense that prof, actual professional cleaners would, uh, would join us and take jobs from the platform so we didn't have to clean as much.

Um, so, after two months, we were growing a little bit, and, um, we ran into a problem.

And that is after three 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 three 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, um, not having anything done, anything successful quite yet.

So where are we going to find this money? Well, definitely couldn't go to the parents—they thought we were pretty crazy, um, already.

Um, we couldn't go to investors because they didn't really know us that well. Um, they didn't know how we worked, um, and, 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.

Um, so we made a decision; we took out a credit card. Aaron actually started practicing poker because he thought, well, worst case scenario, I'm going to go to Vegas and just double down on this.

Um, but my confidence in that wasn't very high. And so we set a date, and on that date I set up two meetings, and I said if—I out of these two meetings, if we don't raise money, we're just going to 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, um, the first meeting was with an investor, my former boss; his name is Max Levchin, and he is one of the co-founders of PayPal and, uh, 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, you know, resemblance of a growing business, um, and put money into it, it would be probably him.

Or worst case, I would just maybe guilt trip him into giving me money. Um, 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, uh, 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, you know, what was going on, and through this whole 15 minutes of just explaining things, I was, you know, extremely nervous, although I tried not to express it, and sort of had the sinking feeling of, you know, we 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 that, 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 for or not, and it was just going to come all crashing down on us.

And so, after 15 minutes, I basically said, "Hey, Max, um, we need some money to keep going. Would you like to invest?" And he says, "Well, how much do you need?"

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

And so I think I need 25K to, you know, to kind of see this out for the next few months, and he looks up, he looks at me and says, "Oh, that’s it? Sure, you can have it. Just like, here, I’ll give it to you just to see how this will work out."

And as soon as I said that, there was a sigh of relief, and I got there as fast as possible before he could even change his mind.

And, uh, and so we were, we were extremely happy. We high-fived on the way out, and we were just grinning the whole ride back down to Mountain View. So our second meeting we had with PG, um, and we had that meeting, that was a good meeting, and we actually ended the day with 50K in the bank.

Um, 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, like, negative dollars to 50K.

And we knew that with that 50K we could make something happen, um, because, uh, 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 spur 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, um, it's like clicking fast forward. Basically, you're trying to find the parachute, and you don't have the parachute.

Um, 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. Uh, we have 150 employees, um, and we've raised around $40 million in venture capital, um, and we're growing faster than ever.

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

Um, and, um, I am very happy at this point with where we are, so I'll end with this.

Um, you know, 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, uh, we don't stress out about things.

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. You have to just say, "Oh, that really sucks. Okay, I'm not going to do that again."

And three, now how am I going to deal with this? And if you maintain that mentality, you'll—we can survive over and over and over again.

Um, so, you know, I tell this story not to glorify failure—it's quite the opposite. I tell the story because I want people to know that startups are very, very, very hard.

Um, the good news is that, you know, you only fail if you stop trying. And so if you don't give up, you won't have failed.

Now, most— a lot of successful entrepreneurs say that, you know, they are successful because they got lucky for some reason, and I believe that's a bunch of horseshit.

And the reason why is, you know, sure, there are some lucky events in your life, and mostly that revolves around, you know, who your parents— you know, when you were born; the environment you grew up in.

These are things that are out of control for me. The one lucky event was being born into a family where my co-founder happened to my brother. The best co-founder I could possibly have happened to me: my brother. That's a completely random and lucky event.

Otherwise, we have completely worked our asses off for where we are today, and we continue to work our asses off today.

I am so consumed by Homejoy that I work literally every single day still to make Homejoy better for our customers and for our service professionals.

And I'm not saying that, you know, it's to, well, that you need to work every single day— that would drive most people nuts—but I would say that, um, you need to work really, really hard. You need to work smart, but you also need to work really, really hard.

So, in any case, that is the story. I'm out of time now, um, and I hope it was helpful in some manner, and best wishes to your entrepreneurial journey.

Um, thank you very much.