S2E18: Tim Speicher @ Buoy

Tim Speicher is the Co-founder & CEO @ Buoy, which is designing the simplest, yet most comprehensive revenue management tools for the global vacation rental market

Show Notes

Buoy is designing the simplest, yet most comprehensive revenue management tools for the global vacation rental market

What is Chicago Capital?

The Chicago Capital Podcast explores the startup and Venture Capital ecosystem in the Windy City. Each episode will feature a prominent founder, Venture Capitalist, or Angel investor who plays an integral part in the city's entrepreneurial story. Join host Matt Castellini as he chats with guests about their career journey, their perspective on a particular market, and their thoughts on the Chicago VC and startup scene.

Matt Castellini: [00:00:00] [00:00:00] Hey everybody this is your host matt and welcome to chicago capital Thank you so much for hopping on Chicago Capitol. It is a true pleasure to have you here. Thank you. Happy to be here so I will, uh, let you take it away. I think we'd all love to hear what you're working on over it. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:00:24] Tim Speicher: [00:00:24] We do dynamic pricing for vacation rental hosts. So, you know, if you think about opening up an Airbnb, you got to put prices on the calendar.
[00:00:32] And if you set the right prices, you can make a ton of money. And if you don't, you can lose a ton of money and it becomes really hard. The more listings that you have. So we make all of that really easy by doing everything that a revenue manager would do, but better and faster and automatic. So if I'm an
[00:00:49] Matt Castellini: [00:00:49] Airbnb owner and I am not.
[00:00:51] So I'm just, just kind of curious about the, I guess the, the user journey here on Airbnb Dan's today and some of these other short-term rental booking platforms I [00:01:00] go on and what resources do I have available to me today to try and capture the best sort of optimal price. What's kind of the current currency.
[00:01:08] Yeah.
[00:01:08] Tim Speicher: [00:01:08] So there is an internal tool on Airbnb. It's called smart pricing and it's notoriously under priced. You're definitely sure to get a booking, you're going to have a very competitive rate. I actually started out using smart pricing way back when they very first introduced it, but I quickly realized that you can make a lot more money by raising your rate.
[00:01:28] Um, and then also it has the problem where if you want to push. Like have your same listing up on VRBO and booking.com and stuff like you can't push that rate. And, you know, honestly, people aren't thinking, well, what is Airbnb want to suggest? They're first thinking, how do I protect this asset that I have either like a mortgage payment or like, you know, if they're doing lease arbitrage, then a lease.
[00:01:48] And so the first thing that people usually do is they say they use like what's called the eight X model where you take your payment and then you divide it in. Because that covers like each of the two weekends nights in [00:02:00] a month. And it means that you can always cover the initial payment, like from, from that price.
[00:02:04] And then anything else that you guys gravy and then like base rates, which every one of our competitors, every dynamic pricing algorithm uses the base rate. That's an outgrowth of that approach because you can imagine it getting just a little bit more complicated. So like, this is the base rate. We'll put it up this much on the weekends would like take it down this far in January.
[00:02:21] We'll like, put it up this high for the Chicago marathon, you know, that kind of thing. But it's like still derived from like the value of your investment. You know what I mean? It's like built around protecting your investment as opposed to maximizing the revenue that the maximizing, the potential revenue that the market can bear.
[00:02:41] And so, you know, you start off just, okay. I just want to cover my bases. And then you're like, okay, I want to make a little bit more money. And then you're like, okay. I want to know that I'm making the maximum money that I possibly can make in any like year over year gains are actually attributed to improvement as opposed to just like the entire market going up or, or [00:03:00] something like that.
[00:03:00] So believe it or not, we are the first, we are the first dynamic pricing algorithm to move beyond the base rate and be commercially viable. So we have an algorithm that does exactly what I was always asked to do as a revenue manager, which is create a cohort of competitors. Figure out where they're priced.
[00:03:19] Take a look at professional revenue managers at hotels, look at where they're priced and then adjust my rate. According. So we just like automated all of that into a, into an algorithm. It was more complicated than I just described it, but it essentially, it works like that. And you know, that's how people ask the question, you know, they're like, I want to know how my competitors are priced.
[00:03:39] I want to be competitive. And like, where are the professionals raising their rates? You know, people ask questions like this. And so we said, okay, let's take all of those questions. Let's bake them into an algorithm and like, let the interface just answer the questions for people. So yeah, it's built for people who want to maximize revenue.
[00:03:55] Based on like current market conditions, as opposed to just using a rules-based [00:04:00] algorithm to put something down in the calendar.
[00:04:01] Matt Castellini: [00:04:01] And so my question, I guess, from that is, it sounds like your background was in revenue management. Was it for short-term rental properties? How long did you sort of build this as a tool that you used in your day-to-day job?
[00:04:15] It sounds like that was part of the product journey, but yeah, kind of get, I would love to get a sense of your background and how you ultimately found your way to this operation. Well,
[00:04:24] Tim Speicher: [00:04:24] you know, the, the beautiful thing about the vacation rental industry, to me, it's like, it's this very clear path to wealth.
[00:04:31] Like you can pretty easily open up an Airbnb listing. As I did, you know, back in 2013, it was a 330 square foot Chicago basement apartment with literally with a hole in the wall. I covered with a photo that my friend took and I rented that thing out for $40 a night. It was one of the first listings in Ravenswood for a little while.
[00:04:54] It was actually the, like the number one most viewed listing on Airbnb in [00:05:00] Chicago, because we had a lot of availability and we were new. And like, there were fewer than 300 listings at that point. But like building from that, and, you know, I did some pricing in my day job because I worked in events and, you know, uh, theater live events, that kind of thing.
[00:05:13] So like, I just kind of knew how to put things on a calendar. And, you know, I grew from that and I always had this wish, like I just wish I knew where my competitors were priced at. I wish that I, I knew that I could price myself relative to them at any given point in time. And that idea stuck with me as I grew my portfolio and then went to Oasis and then Hyatt invested in a waste and they liked my revenue management approach and they sent me.
[00:05:35] The schooling that they do with Cornell. And I came back to a waste ready to put this, uh, algorithm into practice. And then they went and sold the big Casa it's like classic classic startup story. So I went and worked as an independent revenue manager to validate the methodology and then eventually turn it into a SAS product.
[00:05:50] That's completely automated.
[00:05:53] Matt Castellini: [00:05:53] We'd love to hear about the status of the product today. And you know, is it live? Is it currently in the market and people are [00:06:00] paying for today? You know, where are you guys right now?
[00:06:02] Tim Speicher: [00:06:02] Yeah, we got our first paying customers in may after, you know, a few months of testing on the, you know, I guess version one of the product and we are growing.
[00:06:11] We're growing more quickly every week. I've, I've gotten a lot of response from clubhouse, but like just this week, we've had more than 200 listings come onto the platform from three different users. Uh, we're seeing the highest traction with users who have. Like in between 25 and 500 listings. So you think like too much for somebody to just handle on their own and like probably too much for like an amateur revenue manager without like a really sophisticated tool to manage.
[00:06:40] And so like, we were there to do all of the calculations that take up so much time and that humans tend to mess up and we try to say, okay, we're going to do all of that for you. We're going to display it really clearly. So that way you can spend your time creatively talking among your team and saying, Hey, we want to try to get aggressive at this time.
[00:06:58] We're looking, you know, [00:07:00] everybody's got rates high during Thanksgiving week, but we're seeing that the hotels have them really low. So we've got to ask ourselves, like, what kind of occupancy are we looking for over this period of time? Do people come into central Washington DC for Thanksgiving or do they leave?
[00:07:14] And like that's where teams are going to get a really big ROI and understand their market more fully. If you're spending all of your time, just like sorting through spreadsheets and like trying to like figure out what's going on. That's like not a very good use of human creativity and resources, you know?
[00:07:31] So we try to take that complex data and just like a weather. Yeah. Like format it really, really simply. So you can spend your time like planning what to do about the weather at the beach, as opposed to trying to figure out what the weather is going to be at the beach. It's the same for your market investment.
[00:07:46] Matt Castellini: [00:07:46] And I think that it might be helpful to back up and talk about the end customer here. You touched on a little bit the sweet spot, but, uh, you know, listeners may not know. Are these individuals who own a bunch of Airbnbs and are renting them out [00:08:00] or own properties and then renting them out. Are these revenue or Airbnb rental management companies?
[00:08:05] Can you just talk about who the end customer is? Yeah.
[00:08:08] Tim Speicher: [00:08:08] So the end customers for the most part, property management, correct. That that need to make their money because they have some sort of contract in place. They're not, they're not doing it casually on the weekend or something like that because that's, there's so much more a judgment call because you're really saying like, what's the price I'm willing to stomach to have some stranger in my house.
[00:08:28] I'm like, that's like, that's not really a rational system, but you know, if you're a property manager and you have 10 properties, then you know, you need to make sure that you're maximizing the revenue on those. The people who are in this range tend to be hobbyists who started off doing something else.
[00:08:46] You know, kind of like I was, I worked in nonprofits and I opened up one place and I, you know, grit to seven on a lease arbitrage model. Cause I convinced some number of landlords to work with me. These people are the same way and if they're good at it, then there'll be [00:09:00] able to grow, you know, to 20 and then 50.
[00:09:02] And like I have seen people go from a single listing to making a million dollars a month on a portfolio. You know, one to 200 units, if you're like really good at scaling and you know, you watch every penny and you have good contracts and you're ready to hustle then like it's, there's totally an avenue to welfare.
[00:09:21] Matt Castellini: [00:09:21] And you meant, you touched on it a little bit from an ROI perspective. Do you guys have any data on, you know, how much better this maximizes profits for people? Have you heard, have you started to aggregate that kind of thing?
[00:09:32] Tim Speicher: [00:09:32] Yeah. So in, in our tests, the, the worst improvement we had year over year was 7%.
[00:09:38] That was for a group of listings in Los Angeles that had four years of maturity were professionally revenue managed and had been on an industry, leading dynamic pricing algorithm for a long time. So like, those were, those were pretty well maximized and we squeezed another 7% out of them. Um, The biggest improvement that we had was in Louisville for that test, which was a 58% [00:10:00] improvement because the biggest flaw in the approach is if you enter in the wrong base rate, as this user had done back in 2018, it has really big effects on your count.
[00:10:12] Like throughout the whole year. And then the other thing that the dynamic pricing algorithms tend to struggle with is accurate demand prediction. So they missed the Kentucky Derby by quite a bit. They just didn't put the rate high enough. Um, and then missed one other like itinerant event. It was like a youth basketball tournament or something like that in between those two things.
[00:10:30] Plus the, uh, the base rate that ended up being 58% or, you know, like between 15 and $20,000 in revenue for that user. It's not that there's a ton more. Money too. Like you can't say, Hey, I'm going to make, you have like four X money. Right, right. It's like the, market's not going to bear that, but you can reasonably expect like a five to 20% improvement over your like, already very well-managed listings.
[00:10:56] Now the real, like the real magic to the platform is the [00:11:00] time savings, because there's just no way. The way that we get that revenue improvement is by never making a mistake. You know, it's like, you can't say, oh, I forgot about that. Ariana Grande day concert, or it got announced. And I, we didn't adjust it in time.
[00:11:12] And oh, this guy came in and booked her, like, whatever it is, you just never make a mistake. And then you save so much time. If I were to do everything that buoy does just like, like that, like, it would take me about 50 hours per listing per week. And naturally that would be overkill. Like there's, there's no, generally no reason to do that, but.
[00:11:34] If you want to make sure you never ever make a mistake, that's what it would take. So why not have that same standard for any like any portfolio size, as long as you have the, uh, algorithm that
[00:11:44] Matt Castellini: [00:11:44] can handle it. And I'm curious about Airbnb's role, you mentioned their smart pricing. Do you ever get the question of, oh, you know, why does an Airbnb, why haven't they just figured this out on behalf of users of the platform?
[00:11:58] Like there's, they're basically a [00:12:00] public company at this point, you know, how do they not have data scientists sort of evaluating these prices and, and trying to do this for users or guests solving this conundrum of these missed these, you know, huge miss revenue opportunities, Securus on your thoughts on where Airbnb.
[00:12:15] Tim Speicher: [00:12:15] Yeah, I think that they're solving a different problem. Like not everybody wants to maximize their revenue. A lot of people want to minimize their anxiety. Just, I just want to know that my place is booked, you know, and smart pricing is for people like you. Because it can't push to VRBO or booking.com or anything like that, because there's not like big bulk controls and stuff is really made for somebody who's like just dipping their toes into the water.
[00:12:41] They want some price variance, but they really don't know what to do. And, you know, Airbnb. Like the conventional wisdom is that Airbnb wants to keep prices low, to keep, like, to improve their value proposition for people who are choosing vacation rentals, as opposed to other accommodations that may or may not be true.
[00:12:59] Like, [00:13:00] but I think that for the people who use smart pricing, Low prices help to alleviate anxiety is like drives like new users onto the platform for Airbnb gives them advantage over like hotels and stuff like that. So I, I see why it works for them, but it doesn't work for an ambitious entrepreneur who wants to maximize their revenue.
[00:13:19] Matt Castellini: [00:13:19] Sure, sure. And how are you thinking about the overall size of the market opportunity that you're going after? Um, you know, looking at this from a Tam perspective, how big do you think the pie is that you're going out. Yeah.
[00:13:31] Tim Speicher: [00:13:31] So the industry took a hit with COVID and dropped down to a $50 billion industry, but it's projected to get up to a hundred, you know, eclipse a hundred billion by 2025.
[00:13:41] And this product is as relevant to. Revenue managers as the weather report is to your destination managers, you know, it's like you have to understand your, your market environment. So think about like who in the travel industry needs to know the weather and then like who in the travel industry needs to know, like the booking [00:14:00] environment.
[00:14:00] Those are the people who could use the platform. Now. Like we, we think that the lowest hanging fruit are these ambitious entrepreneurs who have like growing portfolios and like not a ton of revenue management training, not a ton of experience in, in. Travel tech and stuff like that. So that's where it will begin.
[00:14:16] But, you know, my dream is really to be like a weather channel for the vacation rental industry, where anybody's, who, who, anybody who is curious about their booking environment can go to our website, entering their listing and like check their, check their environment very quickly and just like, understand, oh, this is what the next nine months are going to look like for me.
[00:14:34] I want them to spend, you know, two to five minutes in my platform, two to three times.
[00:14:40] Matt Castellini: [00:14:40] In the platform, is it going to be, I guess, the monetization behind this? So is it going to be SAS based pricing? How are you thinking about your revenue model in the future? Yeah, you
[00:14:50] Tim Speicher: [00:14:50] know, I really, I had in terms of doing a percentage based pricing, you know, doing a revenue share because they make sense.
[00:14:56] You're like, I'll make you more money and then you share the, you know, then we're both [00:15:00] incentivized, but wow. People hate those. There were a lot of, I think a lot of people signed up for that type. Model with their, their tech stack early on, and then quickly we're paying 15%, you know, plus other commissions, you know, it's like, it can just wipe out your revenue.
[00:15:13] It also makes it really difficult to predict what your monthly costs are going to be. And it introduces a pain point around a big success. Like they're like, yay. I negotiated this, this deal. You know, I negotiated the $20,000 for this long stay. Like, why am I going to give you that much of it? You know? So I'm like, okay, you're probably right.
[00:15:30] We need to be priced like that. Like a resource. So we are priced $14 per listing per month for the first 99 listings. And then after that, it's a $9 per listing per month. And then I also do want to have a, a free version of the platform. That's just like, you know, you can explore and get projections and like a market breakdown and stuff like that.
[00:15:49] Um, because I think that there's a really big gap right now in the industry. There's an opening for somebody to claim revenue management knowledge and, you know, education for the [00:16:00] industry. Nobody's really done it because everyone's been so concerned with like trying to adapt the hotel model to fit vacation rentals and amateurs.
[00:16:07] And I don't think it works that way. So we're trying to create a new revenue management vocabulary to support our original methodology. And I'll be really happy if we can use our free product on our platform to do that. So I think that it'll end up. Trickling up as people learn to analyze their market through our lens.
[00:16:28] And then like, it becomes much easier to use our platform, the paid platform that actually publishes the rates and does the automatic updates and all of that stuff
[00:16:36] Matt Castellini: [00:16:36] for people who are wondering about the current state of the market today, you know, we talked about what Airbnb can and cannot do for them.
[00:16:45] Touched upon a little bit. What other, you know, competitors are doing today? Obviously you guys have developed a proprietary algorithms, so that in and of itself is a competitive differentiation. And once it starts showing, you know, real ROI, it becomes almost a moat in that [00:17:00] sense, because you know, you'll have gained so much more market share.
[00:17:03] You'll have much more trust of the market, but in your mind, who do you, who do you see as the other main competitors in this space? And can you sort of eliminate for us how they. Operate as opposed to how you guys are going to operate.
[00:17:17] Tim Speicher: [00:17:17] Yeah. So there's really two different, two different types of competitors out there.
[00:17:22] Right now. Number one, there's like the pure data suppliers. So that's, uh, air DNA and transparent. They provide market intelligence. Um, you know, we like both of them. We get our data from transparent because it's cheaper to get it from them than it is to scrape it ourselves. Like it makes sense, but they don't actually push rates for you.
[00:17:42] They do make some rate recommendations, but I think that there are some real flaws to their, their algorithms because they, they just don't introduce enough rate variance. Um, and so it, it ends up recommending recommending rates that, that don't maximize. Right. Then everybody else, every other dynamic pricing algorithms, that's, [00:18:00] you know, formerly beyond pricing, I would just beyond price labs, wheel house, even now like rented.com de PGO like all of these new, I think there's a new one from Spain called turbo suite that have heard about recently.
[00:18:13] They like, they all use like this base rate model. It's just easy to use a base rate it. So it's a really easy thing to build. It's been around for a long time and the pain point is really high. So, you know, people people know that there needs to be something better. People are frustrated by using these algorithms and then people keep making the same version of the company and like the same, same methodology and expecting to have different result.
[00:18:39] So that's why the industry is so crowded right now. It's like, there's clearly a problem to be solved there and everybody's trying to solve it with base base rates, which is why it's not getting solved.
[00:18:47] Matt Castellini: [00:18:47] Yeah, it's funny. I, and again, I think people who haven't really been introduced to this market, and I've only used Airbnb as a, as a customer, or I guess as a tenant or what's the right word I'm looking for.
[00:18:57] You're an Airbnb guests, people who are Airbnb [00:19:00] guests, not hosts. They don't realize, I think how much of a problem. Technology and specifically pricing and reporting is for Airbnb hosts.
[00:19:11] Tim Speicher: [00:19:11] Yup. Yeah, it was funny when I got into the industry, I left nonprofits and I had always thought about the startup world is like, Shiny like apple looking sort of tech place.
[00:19:26] I don't know. I was like, ah, non-profits, it's all of these antiquated, like Excel sheets and like, nobody knows how to do this stuff. And it was like, there's not been innovation in all of this time. And then I got into this industry and it was like, oh my God. Everybody in vacation rentals has been focused on innovating in the legal space, like making it legal, innovating, and real estate contracts, like all of that stuff.
[00:19:48] And the tech stacks have stagnated. And like, it makes sense. Like you want to invest in like the actual product and, you know, a whole bunch of companies went out and raised a ton of money a few years ago. And it [00:20:00] was like mostly built on expansion. Like, Hey, go sign a hundred apartments onto this lease.
[00:20:04] And like, have it at a 10% market premium because we want to make it really attractive to this big operator. And like, it, it, it makes sense as to why there was so much money flowing around, but like, we go nuts when we have to interface with these technologies, because like, We're like, how can you be the industry leader when you haven't updated your API in seven years?
[00:20:24] You know, like how, how are the docs like this far out of place? And then when it comes to the, like, when it comes to the users, like everything's in Google sheets, like everything's like really hard to hike. It's very hard for people to just know like how much money did I make last night? How full were my units last night?
[00:20:42] And how full are they doing? So for that, we took, like, I just built all of that into an email report. So every day you get a report that says like, these are the new reservations you got, this is how much they were worth. These are the upcoming, like upcoming nine ten-year calendar. If you want to look at any of this stuff, just like click it and you'll head into your property management system.
[00:20:57] And that the question will be answered. [00:21:00] And like, just, just reading the reports, which takes less than 10 minutes a day, it gives you a near comprehensive view of your portfolio. Like we have 1600 listings, uh, loaded into the platform. Right now I have a near comprehensive view of what all of those listings are doing and those like 20 whatever different markets, because I just look at that report every day.
[00:21:21] And like, I don't spend any more than 30 minutes on it. It's just. Formatting is incredible. And we have not had great formatting in any like tech products in this industry for a long time. Last note on this is like the, if you look at the most recent host family report, they're like sort of, you know, the industry standard for reporting on travel tech pricing and reporting those have those combined to be the, the number one problem and revenue management is itself pricing and reporting that pain point has tripled.
[00:21:50] Since they first started tracking it back in 2018. So it is the number one and it's gotten worse. The, all of the other pain points like consolidation and like marketing over the [00:22:00] past few years, those have now dropped as there's been innovation in the space. And so now we're seeing all of these competitors, all of this innovation around pricing and reporting and, you know, somebody going to emerge as a leader.
[00:22:10] And then that pain point is going to going to. So, is it going to be the like venture backs Titans who are probably out raising funds, raising money right now? Or is it going to be some startup with a different idea? So we're, we're trying to be the one with the different things. Love that. And
[00:22:25] Matt Castellini: [00:22:25] I, and again, it is amazing how much of a pain point it is and how, how, you know, how potent it is and how deeply felt it's.
[00:22:32] It's incredible. I would love to hear a bit about the, the future for you guys. And, and it's specifically around, you know, fundraising and I'd love to touch on Techstars, which are going through right now and what that experience has been like. But first and foremost, you know, what does fundraising look like for you guys for the next six to 12?
[00:22:49] Tim Speicher: [00:22:49] Yeah. So we are raising right now in Techstars. We're like just beginning of Ray's looking for a lead investor. So, you know, we're at that stage of the process, but we do want a $1.5 million [00:23:00] seed round. So that'll be a fun end to the Techstars experience, like finishing up demo day with hopefully a big check from a lead investor.
[00:23:08] Matt Castellini: [00:23:08] I mean, that would be, and then a night on the town in Chicago for spot recommendations, that's a Gibson steak with a, with an old fashioned, after that it's going to be made was days of your career.
And then from AF you know, what's the Techstars experience been like, you know, for people who are considering maybe the accelerator route with their startups in the Chicago land area, what's that experience.
[00:23:35] Tim Speicher: [00:23:35] I cannot recommend it enough. It is. It's the best experience our company has ever had. Like bar none. We had a few investors who have more of a background in traditional business, looking at those investment terms and looking at like what people get out of the program and saying like, don't do this. But like it just in talking with there, Justin talking with other people on clubhouse, like I was like, oh, this place is the right place for us.
[00:24:00] [00:24:00] It has accelerated us because I spend so much less time wondering if I'm doing the right thing. You know, I I'm mostly a first time founder I've had, I've had I've started other things that like went, went. So, you know, uh, that closed down so quickly that I could like barely call it a venture. So I S I'm essentially a first time founder and I don't want to, I haven't built like a really good financial model before.
[00:24:27] Right. And so I worry and fret and like try to read and research and watch videos and whatever. And like, it's not a very efficient process. But you get into Techstars and they say, okay, build us a model. You got to do it in two days. And then we're going to look at it and I don't have time to second guess myself, I just have to build it.
[00:24:46] And then I know that if I really, really mess it up, as I did the first time that I made it like, well, Troy Henikoff is going to take a look at it and fix it in two days, which he did. So it's like, there's just a huge safety net there. So I don't have to like [00:25:00] worry as I like tip toe on this tight rope. I can like just approach it confidently and know that I'm going to fall off and it'll be all right.
[00:25:06] So like, God, it's amazing. I recommend it to everybody
[00:25:10] Matt Castellini: [00:25:10] that is such a. A great point as to the benefits of accelerators. I think the founder experience never done it personally, but from everything I've heard, it just sounds like such a Herculean effort and any kind of support you could get any sort of.
[00:25:26] Gaps that you could, you augment or skills you could augment has to be so beneficial at the pre-seed stage. And I think for you, you just have an interesting background to me because if I, if I read LinkedIn correctly, you were a theater major at IEU. Uh, so first off go Hoosiers, but second off, just about your kind of journey, you know, how, how you went from maybe.
[00:25:48] The theater background into entrepreneurship. If you ever thought this was be, this is going to be something that you were going to make a career of and kind of how that all kind of morphed for you over time.
[00:25:58] Tim Speicher: [00:25:58] Yeah. So I grew up on a [00:26:00] Buffalo farm. Uh, so I, you know, I was first a farmer. I started like working on the farm when I was nine.
[00:26:05] Um, which is why I went as far away from a farm as I could possibly get. Like when I went to college, I was like, oh, it'd be in the theater. And so I, I trained, I trained to be an artist. Um, I actually didn't like acting, I like to directing and like doing, you know, doing the big stage imagery and conceptual stuff.
[00:26:22] And, um, and so I tried to do that a little bit in Chicago when I got there, but I. I don't know, man, like I, I liked the problem solving part of theater, but I realized that like, I'm, I wasn't telling necessarily the stories that people wanted to make and it was taking, or people wanted to see, and it was taking a long, long time.
[00:26:42] And then I found that, uh, it was really rewarding, just like exploring the marketing. And, you know, I could just focus on one job. So I did that a little bit. Like victory gardens was a really, really exciting place actually. You know, Steve Miller from origin ventures was the board president at victory gardens when I was [00:27:00] there.
[00:27:00] And so I like, I just, naively was like, you know, wasting this amazing resource that I had, like, as I was presenting my marketing plans damn. And like challenging him, like having no idea, like what kind of person he was in the startup industry. Uh, I left that to do a project with the city of Chicago, the Chicago architecture.
[00:27:18] Um, but that was right around the same time that my Airbnb business was starting to take off. So like, you know, that had been growing on the side and you know, that grew and then like came crashing down as the regulations changed in the city of Chicago. And I made a, I made a commitment. I was like, all right, I'm going to let, I can leave my job and do Airbnb.
[00:27:36] Full-time. As long as if it all comes crashing down, like I can support myself by being an Uber driver. So when it was, when it did come crashing down, I supported myself by being an Uber driver for a little while, then, uh, got hired by Oasis and then, you know, use that opportunity to go to Hyatt and you know, all of that stuff.
[00:27:56] Um, so yeah, not a super, not a [00:28:00] super normal trajectory. But I don't know. I think that that's why I approach problems a little bit more diversely. And also that's probably why, I didn't know that you shouldn't be able to build the algorithm that we have. Like, I, I wrote it, I actually wrote it. Um, assuming that data was available, that wasn't available when I first wrote it and, and became available shortly after.
[00:28:21] So I got really, really lucky. Cause I had like designed this algorithm and then boom, the, the data becomes available and I was like, oh, well I guess I'm probably the first one. To have this type of algorithm built. Thanks. Transparent for having this data like become available. Um, yeah, I think that like the, the really diverse background has made me a, made me a problem solver as opposed to like, uh, an ex.
[00:28:45] In the traditional sense.
[00:28:46] Matt Castellini: [00:28:46] Yeah, no, I think that makes total sense and I love that. I love the background. I love kind of hearing people's paths and journeys to entrepreneurship, to venture capital it's. It's always interesting. And I guess my last question would [00:29:00] be, you know, you've spent time around the Chicago ecosystem.
[00:29:03] You're in Techstars, Chicago right now. Just any overall thoughts or prognosis for the Chicago startup community. Uh,
[00:29:10] Tim Speicher: [00:29:10] Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I'm I'm in Techstars, Chicago because we first went to clubhouse early this year, like trying to make connections with angels and VCs. And I heard like Christopher Deutsche, I think.
[00:29:22] And. And Troy had a cough and a couple of other people just like talking about the Chicago startup ecosystem as very supportive and collaborative and welcoming. And I was like, wait, that's, that's how we used to talk about the nonprofit ecosystem. Um, and I didn't necessarily hear people talking about Silicon valley in the same way.
[00:29:43] So we, we were like, okay, if our company is going to have the best chance of success, we want to go somewhere where. We like, we personally feel really comfortable where we can like cultivate these, these relationships with people we trust and stuff like that. And [00:30:00] it, you know, we were living in Los Angeles when we applied and there's a Techstars LA happening at the same time, but we wanted, we specifically applied to Chicago.
[00:30:07] So we could be part of that ecosystem as we were fundraising and finding mentorship and all of that kind of. That's awesome.
[00:30:13] Matt Castellini: [00:30:13] No, that's, that's great to hear. And you know, I think the ecosystem is lucky to have you guys, and I, I'm very appreciative for you taking the time to hop on. I know how busy you must be with going to the accelerator, but I couldn't be happier that we were able to line up this interview.
[00:30:28] You know, Tim, thank you so much for hopping on Chicago capital. We can't wait to see what's next and to, uh, to see how that C round shapes up.
[00:30:35] Tim Speicher: [00:30:35] Thank you so much. Um, it was a pleasure to be here and I'm happy to come back anytime.
[00:30:39] Matt Castellini: [00:30:39] Awesome. Well, all right, there you go. I mean, you're invited back. There you go.
[00:30:42] All right. That's so you say that and I'll invite you on the spot. I will great you on
[00:30:46] Tim Speicher: [00:30:46] air. Great. Awesome. I love it. Tim. Take
[00:30:50] Matt Castellini: [00:30:50] care. You
[00:30:50] Tim Speicher: [00:30:50] too. [00:31:00]