Your Home Is on the Brink of Disaster—Dobby's AI Can Save You!

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I'm Jake Aaron Villarreal, born and raised in Silicon Valley, and here to take you behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder, the journey they're on, the problems they face, and the products they build in an effort to transform industries. I'm excited to have with us today the founders of Dobby, Satadru Sengupta and Alexandra Fontova. Welcome to the show.

Satadru Sengupta: Thanks, Jake.

Alexandra Fontova: Thank you, Jake.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Hundreds of AI startups are launching every month, battling to build their founding teams. As a leader, your job is to get results. When it comes to hiring, that's where it gets tough. So, you go out and you try a recruitment firm, but they don't understand your story. They're off target. And when they send you candidates, it's a waste of time. We believe you should never have your time wasted. That's why we launch Match Relevant because your story is more than just an open role. It's your founder's journey, the problem you're solving, the product you're building, and why it matters. When we work with companies, we make sure we understand your whole story. So, we go out and do a search. We're on target. It's worth their time. They're interested. And more importantly, it's worth yours. And when it comes to hiring engineers, we work to make sure we get it right. By deploying a team of seasoned CTOs that have built some of Silicon Valley's best companies that can collaborate with you in the technical interviewing process, they can be a sounding board or they can run it for you. When it comes to building teams, there's no time to waste. Let's make it count. If you have a role that needs to be filled, book a time with a hiring guide at matchrelevant.com and learn how we do it.

I want to dive a little bit into your backgrounds before we get into your journey here. So, let's start off with you, Alex. Why don't you um give us kind of your origin story and where you started and kind of how you ended up becoming great partners with Satadru?

Alexandra Fontova: Yeah, sure. So, uh I'll start off professionally and then I'll share a little bit about my origin story like you said. So before Dobby, I was with WeWork. I went to uh join WeWork in 2015 in New York City and it was a very exciting time to join WeWork. I was an early operator there. So I managed 14 locations in the city, uh portfolio revenue of over 145 million, 80 plus employees. And there's where I really learned the complex operations in the built world and what it takes to actually drive high NPS and community within those complex operations. And so that really primed me for exactly what we're doing at Dobby.

Uh, another part of my, my story which I think is important to share is what "home" really means to me and why it's so personal. So, uh, in the '60s my, my family um had to flee communist Cuba and so they started over completely, left their home, everything, um, and restarted in New Orleans, Louisiana. Uh, so that's where my me and my family grew up. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina, my family lost their home again and had to really rebuild. So that's where I really started to understand just how personal home is and how it is ever evolving. It can mean something different to everyone and why I was so excited to really build and and dream the future of home with Satadru.

So Satadru and I met in 2020 and uh I was just instantly aligned with his vision for what home could be and how to get there. Really AI and ML were changing so much at that time and understanding that complex operations and experience is a huge part of it but needed to be uh really coupled and and with the vision of what it's going to take to build a 21st gener-, 21st century company. And that's when I met uh and he can share more about his story.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Satadru, let's go ahead and hear your background story, a little bit about your origin story as well.

Satadru Sengupta: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much and once again, like you know, thank you for having us here. Uh so I'm Satadru, co-founder, CEO of Dobby. And I'm originally from India, grew up there. And uh I grew up among lots of books and outdoors and uh and uh a lot of love from neighbors and extended family. Uh I lost my dad very early and my mom was a teacher. Uh so I lost my dad when I was 16. And uh we are two brothers and and like you know like many Indians she invested in educational pursuit and that worked out really well. Uh got into Indian Statistical Institute and studied mathematics and statistics and took it from there.

So I uh like you know growing up I was thinking about becoming an explorer, like you know really when I was little. And uh really love the idea that you can take a ship and go all around the world and discover new places. And that's kind of the idea of entrepreneurship uh that kind of there, but I never really thought about starting a company at that time. And or never sold a Coke can for $1, Coke can for $1.30 and there is no story like that. My grandmother, grandfather from mom's side, he had a like you know hotel business uh back in East Pakistan. They then moved from East Pakistan to India. So both of us had that very interesting uh story of like you know our families moving from one place to other.

And fast forward uh came to United States exactly 20 years ago. So in 15th August this year it would be 20th year of being here, studied here like you know came here to study further actuarial science. And uh then I joined the statistics PhD program which I did not finish. And uh in the first part of my career I worked with larger companies like you know Deloitte Consulting, then Liberty Mutual Insurance in Boston where I learned a great deal from amazing people about consumer insurance. That the home insurance, auto insurance. And then uh 2008 financial crisis happened. In 2012 uh I joined AIG in New York City. And AIG was completely revamping themselves. It was 73% owned by the government at that time. And they build this data science and economics and behavioral economics team and a lot of great people joined from many different organizations. And our goal was to really drive uh data-driven decision making across AIG. And it was an amazing opportunity because that's for the first time I applied machine learning and AI in complex operational problems across claims and underwriting and so on.

Um so that was back in 2015. So 2012 to 15 I was with uh AIG and that's when I for the first time thought about starting a company. And uh uh so I never worked in a small company. I was always with Fortune 100 companies. So I was very scared, like you know "will I be able to start a company?" and all that. So I was very lucky I joined uh DataRobot. Like you know I knew the CEO and founder Jeremy. Jeremy asked me to join DataRobot and joined there when it was 25 or so people and it was pre-revenue, series A company. And that changed everything like you know when I left uh... joined in 2015, when I left in 2019 to start Dobby, DataRobot was a thousand plus people and we have business everywhere. I was a General Manager, Insurance Practice. Uh DataRobot was a horizontal AI platform. So that means we can take DataRobot, go to any industry, any function, any product, and apply machine learning and AI, build models based on data and and deploy, deploy them really quickly. Like you know automatically. It was a robotic process automation on data science model development and deployment process.

The observation there was that uh you know like there is this "AI orphan industries" like where you do not have a single data scientist. That is when I really saw that uh "Okay, home services industry is a very good one too" and we'll talk more about that, but that's the story. The common thread between my, throughout my career is robotic process automation. And between Alex and I we have two DNAs in this company. One is delightful experience for our homeowners and service providers, and another one is the automated back end. So we automate everything uh so that drives high NPS and high margin business. And uh in the, in uh as we are building this home services company. So I come from that automation background. Alex comes from that delightful experience, operations background.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Well, you guys both come from different backgrounds in a sense, but coming together, it seems like there's a real powerful team that you can build behind. And I really like um kind of the space that you're in. We'll talk a little bit about that. When we look at businesses, we first look at the market and say, what problem are you solving? And once you understand the problem, then do you actually have a service or a value that someone's willing to pay for? So, Satadru, for you talk a little bit about the, the company Dobby and also what problem you started to look at when you wanted to solve in the market.

Satadru Sengupta: Great question. So, home services industry has a reliability problem. That's the first problem. That's the primary problem that you're solving. Uh if you're a homeowner and if you want to get something done at your home, it's not difficult to find a handyman, find a plumber, find a electrical electrician. What is really difficult [is] that there is no guarantee that this would be done with five-star quality every single time. That's missing. When we entered this industry that was missing. That's the problem we are solving. So that reliability problem is the problem that we are solving as a primary problem.

Every startup, every company have secondary benefits. Like the way we designed our solution, and that was also a problem um, is the saving time, right. Homeowners are... we see a massive change in American home ownership. And our generation of homeowners are entering the home ownership and we are selectively lazy. We do not want to spend time, we do not want to be the project manager for our home services project at home. Uh and and and that's a very important problem to solve. So the primary problem is reliability, but the way we are doing it, we're saving time for homeowners. And all that they have to do is they have to drop a job on the Dobby app through a message, through a video message, or a few lines like "this is what happened." And we have access to publicly available data and their historical jobs and all that, and we can really deploy the right provider and getting this job done before they can realize even. And all that they have to do throughout that process from request to five-star quality is a few taps. That's it like you know. So that's the like you know, what we are doing, the problem. When we entered this industry is reliability problem, and that is the problem we're solving.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Well, I joined the club for that. I mean, we have things all the time going on with our house. You know, we live by the beach, you know, pipes get rusted, you know, windows break. You're always looking for that go-to service that you can depend on, but also make sure that it's something that's reliable. They're going to show up. They're going to do the work. It's going to be good. And, you know, you're going to pay a fair price. So those are the things that I look at in the problem you're talking about solving. Um there's other companies out there that do different things. What would you say is the one area that you have an advantage of, that you're providing a different level of service that they don't?

Satadru Sengupta: That comes back to that like you know, it goes back to the founding background, right? You know, Alex coming from delightful experience, really having that understanding of 11-star experience. Uh at DataRobot we spent tremendous time in understanding customer success. And so both of us are big on hospitality. We love people. We love customers, right? And that is what makes us happy, customers make us happy. And um the second element is the automation. So the big difference between Dobby and any other company in this space is that we are the only one that created high NPS, high margin. In other words, the only loved and efficient home services company ever built, right? So you like, you are right, there are so many home services company, but none of them were able to achieve this high NPS high margin business in a better way to say that, loved and efficient business. That's what we did. Love part is coming from delightful experience, 11-star experience, and the efficiency coming from automation.

And like today we have the highest, latest, and most loved home services app on the App Store. If you go to the, everyone should go to dobbyhome.com and like you know, go to the App Store, search Dobby, you will see that like the reviews are stunning. Like you know it is so different. And you are right Jake, like you will see people are talking about reliability, our home owners are talking about fair price and informed purchase decision like you know, and all of those things are there.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. You know, Alex, for you, why is this space important to you?

Alexandra Fontova: Well, I I shared a little bit about like, you know, more of the sentimental side, why home is so important. But I'm a homeowner. I bought my home in 2020. Satadru bought his in 2021. And it was just, there's such a glaring gap right now for me in my uh, we I like to call it our consumer product. So, you know, for engineers, you have your product stack, but for as consumers, we have our things that we use to manage our day-to-day life. So, uh for me and my family, Instacart is a big part of that um that consumer product stack. Uh DoorDash, uh Uber, you know, uh Airbnb, Amazon, those are things that are, are pretty critical into how we manage our our life. There is nothing for the thing that I have spent the most money on in my house, in my life right now. That's my house. And so it just, there's this glaring gap. And so at the end of the day, we're really building for homeowners like us. Uh because again, this is what we want to use. This is what we want to see. And I think whenever founders are building something that they truly want and truly need, that's when the magic happens.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Well, that's great. I I think it's always important to have some passion behind what you're doing and you have a real interest behind it. You know, you talked a little bit um Satadru about the product itself. And for the listeners that are maybe driving down the road right now or can't quite get the concept in their mind, can you walk us through visually what the step by step is when you log into your system and what that's like, the simplicity of it? Is it literally taking a job or filming yourself and showing what the issue is in your house and then sending it to you and getting responses through text messaging? Like what's, kind of walk us through the journey there of the, of the user?

Satadru Sengupta: Absolutely. So there are three things. I will talk about the user journey, but let's first share the book ends with you. Like there are three things that Dobby app does for the homeowner. Number one, for anything that you cannot predict when something you need. Like there could be a leaky faucet, you wake up in the morning and you don't know like you may have a leaky faucet, you want to fix that or so you cannot really predict when you need what. Or you may have a plan something, but whatever you need across 30 plus service categories across like you know from carpet cleaning to handyman to HVAC, to all the way to kitchen upgrade, to roof replacement uh we, Dobby manages all of these for you, right? So the very first thing is that we are a one-stop shop. So all that you need to have is Dobby in your pocket, Dobby app with you.

And then the second thing, for any given job you don't have to worry about that. You just drop the job on the Dobby app and we'll getting it done, we'll get it done with five-star quality and I will explain like you know exactly step by step in a bit.

The third component is that throughout, like there is a lot of unknowns in this industry. And what we did, and this is why we applied AI, we will talk more about that, like you know we are informing customers about the price of something. We have created this thing called Check the Price where you can actually go to our website or download our app and you can ask about price of any services, any renovation and it will give you a price range based on millions of data points and all that, right? So those are very, very powerful like you know kind of component uh that we have.

So uh now let's talk about the customer journey. So you download the app and we are password free. So you get a one-time passcode. So it is super easy to get into the app. And everyone should download the app, dobbyhome.com. And once, once you download it will ask you like in time you get your, put your phone number, get the OTP, you get in. It will ask you, the only information is the street address of your home. So you put the street address and then the magic, magic will start happening. So we'll scan through hundreds of publicly available data and we'll tell you everything that is like you know about your home that "this is what you have: single family home, this is the square footage, this is what kind of... you do have a pool or you may have a hot tub" and all that stuff. And then we'll be actually running another model that will give you five things that you should do for your home. And these are the five renovation ideas for your home, right? So if you uh, it will tell you how often you should uh service your HVAC, it will tell you how should you take care of the lawn, and all that, right? So that is really guiding you like you know how you should take care of home. That's the one, customer journey starts there.

Now you basically submit a job on the Dobby app. You may already have a job in your mind that's why you download the app, or as you're on the app and you see one of our checklists or whatever we are, our recommendation engine is asking you to do, you start that job submission process, which is lightning fast. Which is basically you as you said, either you take a quick video or you describe the problem or you show like you know, "this is what I want to do." And then uh that, we take it from there. Our algorithm assign the right providers. And that's it, you don't have to worry about anything after that. Sometimes people don't submit the job with video message. They just write the description, take a couple of pictures, that would also equally faster like you know. So that's the idea. Uh I will just finish up saying this that if you, one of the things that we did, we always count the number of clicks homeowners need to do on the Dobby app, and we minimize that to two or three. Compare that to 20 or so clicks on Thumbtack or other other applications that are out there, the lead generation apps. So this is something we optimize, that number of clicks the homeowner will have to like you know use in order to getting something done on the app.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. You're solving a problem for the consumer. How about the worker, the contractor that's looking for opportunities? I mean, they're probably inundated today with getting calls all the time, but how do you serve them?

Satadru Sengupta: Yep, I'll give it to Alex.

Alexandra Fontova: So, for the service providers, what we do, we call it business in a box. And so what we've really done is just the same way that we've, you know, streamlined things for the homeowners, we are upleveling our service providers. We're giving them an easy way for them to build, manage, and and really run their business with Dobby. So we manage the marketing, we manage the uh lead generation because there are homeowners and they're able to use our tool for scheduling, communication, invoicing, payment processing, a lot of technology that they are not able to compete typically with the bigger players today. So we're really empowering these small businesses, these independent operators to be able to manage their business in uh with our technology in this next generation way to support homeowners who want to work directly with them. But again, they're looking for someone who can give them something that's going to block their Google calendar, right? They aren't looking for a phone call and a voicemail, and maybe they show up at your front door. Maybe they give you a a a quotation with a sticky note. Um, they're really looking for someone who's using a a streamlined way to provide this information to them. So, that's what we're doing is we're really arming these high-quality independent operators, small businesses to be able to be successful in this environment.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. By succeeding in this business you guys are building, who is the biggest benefactor for your, for your solution really in the market? Is it the, is it the consumer or is the contractor or is it both? Maybe something more than that.

Alexandra Fontova: Uh, it's both. Uh spoiler alert. Um so the first, the obvious one is the homeowners. Really the problem that we're solving, the problem that we're discussing, uh, everything that we've done has really been with that end user in mind. But understanding that as we've built this, just how much our service providers have benefited and just how much they're raving about it as well. Um, you know, we have providers who are using, who are solely on Dobby now. They've quit other platforms or they've built their entire business on Dobby. They're using us completely to manage um their workflow and, and uh you know we have stories of providers who are now making 3x what they were making before because we're really able to be creating a much more efficient system for them that again they may not have the resources or the business acumen or frankly the interest to manage their business. Right? These are craftsmen. These are people who have a skilled trade, doing that and managing a business, as we all know managing a business is very difficult. Um we want to take that piece away from them and really again level them, uplevel them and and create this business model that is small business friendly. That's um so they're benefiting and, and they're loving it.

Satadru Sengupta: And only thing I would be adding to that, what Alex and I talk about all the time, is that underlying all this we have an aligned economic incentive. So when homeowner's problem is someone should get my job done with 100% reliability, so once we get the job done and homeowners give the five-star rating, then homeowners pay. When they pay, service providers get paid. And when service providers get paid, we get paid. Right? So that alignment, that everyone is winning, the, the supply side, the demand side, the homeowners and the service providers, and us, the platform, winning at the same time is a critical component of our solution. Um to give you the context, like you know, if you go to the lead generation websites like Angi or Thumbtack, that's not what is going to happen. Like you when as a homeowner you are submitting the job, like you know you'll be getting connected with four or five providers and all of those providers will have to pay those lead generation websites already. So and the platform is making money at that point. So platform is benefiting before the homeowners' problem is solved and the service providers like you know making money from this job. Right, that's not what is happening here. So it's a very interesting philosophical standing for us that the platform happiness matter. The homeowner, service providers and us, Dobby, should be happy at the same time as opposed to in different time point.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. You know there's so much buzz in the market today around AI and how it's helping companies and how it's you know making industries better in a lot of different ways.

Satadru Sengupta: Yeah.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Talk to us, you touched on AI already a little bit with automations, but tell talk to us a little bit about how AI is being used really inside your application and really how it's benefiting how you run your operation.

Satadru Sengupta: Yeah, Jake, as you said that AI is bringing things like better, faster, cheaper, right? And that's exactly right. So, there are three areas where we apply AI and automation. The first one is large-scale process automation. So I come from particularly robotic process automation background where we look into different processes, manual processes, we distill them, we simplify them and then we automate them. The fun part about home services industry was when we entered we did not find any process. People are, 90 million American homeowners and 3 million providers are doing things in their own way. Someone is showing up on your door. Someone is calling you. Someone texting you. Someone is not at all talking to you. All of those things are happening. The first thing that we did, both of us wrote down what we need, what needs to happen from the moment homeowners has a job uh and all the way to the five-star delivery of that job and the payment and invoicing, quotation, pro assignment, everything in between, the communication. So we wrote down that process, that was the first piece. Once we did that, we automated that, right? So that's the first application of AI.

So behind uh Dobby is a two companies sitting in one. So the first thing we did is an enterprise-grade vertical AI software called Gryffindor. And with that software we are running this large-scale process automation that uh like you know, customer success. We do a lot of automation on the marketing side based on your historical data and other longitudinal data, will tell you what to fix and when for your home, right? So those are the things that we are kind of telling you, it's like Netflix for home services kind of stuff, right? So that is another element that we are doing. So large scale process automation on customer success, marketing, and business ops.

The second thing that we do there is called agentic AI. Right. So we are, right now in this industry you need to have uh when homeowners and service providers are talking to each other, Dobby is also there. And when we are there, that is, we're facilitating that with a three-way chat which is extremely effective and, and very popular. People love that, homeowners love that we are there when they're talking to service providers, right? That chat is right now kind of rule-based, based on your historical data and different milestones, we invoke payment and etc., etc. We have enough technology now and we're growing the data so we can create and like you know kind of a smart system, what do people call agentic system, that will drive that quarterbacking uh like, while keeping us in the loop, right? So that's the second application, that is something that we're building.

The third element is that throughout the customer journey when you are, you are looking to do a job, you may not know the price of the job. So we deployed a foundational model that is telling you what the price of the job. You may not know what you as a new homeowner, what are the things I need to worry about? I did not know anything that I have to do winterization of my sprinkler system or how many, how often I have to do HVAC. Dobby's AI model is actually telling me that based on the publicly available data and my historical data. So that is the another thing. So three things we're doing: large-scale process automation, RPA, and then the second thing we are doing is agentic system which is kind of automating our chat and etc. And then the third thing we are doing is this really plugging in all this foundational model wherever we observe a knowledge gap in the customer journey so homeowners and service providers get to know about like what to do next and so on.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Yeah, thanks for summing that up. You know, part of building a company is, you know, you always go through shifts and pivots and challenges. Alex, what's the biggest challenge the company's facing today?

Alexandra Fontova: I'd say the biggest challenge we're facing today is positioning. Uh there are a lot of home services companies that are, came before us, that are here now. Um, and really understanding that we are foundationally different than those companies. How do we make sure our prospective homeowners know that? That's, that's really um the challenge we're facing right now. Uh, for example, we are the only home services company with a climate program. We are the only home services company that's really focused on these small businesses that I was mentioning earlier. Uh, you know, building a business model that is actually small business-friendly. That's a very important piece to us. But again, that's something that oftentimes people find out after they've peeled back the onion a little bit. So, um, how do we really, and then of course all of the technology that we've used foundationally to build Dobby since day one. So, Satadru shared, you know, a lot of the AI that we're implementing today and there's so much more that we'll continue to do. So, how do we make sure that all of those things are uh clear and presented uh as soon as possible to someone? Because again, it's very easy to see a lot of noise in this market and not recognize uh Dobby is different than anything that's been around before and why exactly it is the right positioned, the right way for this to be the only home services company you'll need move forward.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. You know, we touched a little bit early on about just the shifts and pivots that companies can go through. Satadru, what's a, what's a shift or a pivot you've gone through that really has helped, you know, transform the company or maybe just redirect it in a path that's got more success for you?

Satadru Sengupta: Yeah, that, we actually have a great story around that. So, in 2014 when I was at AIG, that is as I highlighted before that is first time I thought about starting a company. So what I did, I wrote down a two-page business plan and that two-page business plan was about a company called Hello's Insurance, which is still our official name, Hello's Insurance, uh doing business as Dobby. What is the story of Hello's Insurance? The idea there was that I saw at AIG in commercial insurance people provide not only insurance policy to all these insurance uh policy holders, but they're also giving them loss preventative services. So they help policy holders to actually like mitigate losses. I'm like, why we're not doing this to the homeowners like we should, I should start a home, home insurance company, not home services company, home insurance company. That was the original plan, and partner with the best-in-class home services platform out there and sell insurance to home owners while also giving them all these preventative maintenance and whatever they need anytime and with, with partnering with that home services company.

Um fast forward I realized that I did not know anything about home services at that time, that there is not a single good home services company. There is a reliability issue in this market. NPS is negative 24, that is worse than Spirit Airlines. So uh I understood that what we really have to do in order to build that insurance company eventually or adding any other product, we have to solve the painkiller problem. If you're a homeowner your biggest problem is not insurance. Your biggest problem is the home services and reliable home service and renovations. So we realized that that is the mountain that we have to cross. If we can build the most loved home services company in America, we can add any other product after that and that's the pivot we made. So we stopped building a home insurance company, we rebranded ourselves from Hello's Insurance to Dobby and we started building the most loved home services company.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, that's amazing. That's a big change too. It's something it takes some courage and you hope for the best. You never know what's going to happen, but sometimes that's how you get the biggest breakthroughs in a company or the biggest sort of aha moments that happen. Um, what's been the biggest breakthrough for you as a company? Maybe technically or maybe personally.

Satadru Sengupta: Right? So, um, technically like if you think about building a company oftentimes we are told that bring automation, bring AI much later, right? Because that's the thing that will help you scale the business, right? We broke that rule. We said no, we need to build that automated backend from get-go, from the very beginning. Why we needed that? Because it is not only going to bring the scale, it is also going to bring the power of data hyperpersonalization. And we were right about that. That was the like you know, something we did because that's how we build something like you know. But what we fast forward, what we realized that in order to achieve high NPS, high margin outcome you have to have that automated back end from the very beginning which is informing customers like you know about like you know different steps of the home services very easily, they are not worried about that uh and it is just getting things done for them, right? That "do it for me" app concept for homeowners, that is happening because of that automation in the back end.

Um on the contrary many home services company they start by throwing people at the problem as opposed to automating background. That does not work. This is very paradoxical because you would be thinking that these companies are starting with this objective of like you know uh concierge model helping the homeowners, but then why their NPS is so low? It is low because if you introduce human in this process which is already complicated, it would be making it more complicated. One of the outcomes that we do not talk about AI and automation, we are always very um kind of excited with the magical effect of AI and automation. But AI and automation is also very boring. Right? Tesla parking like auto like you know parallel parking, it will apply Euclidean geometry and will do the parking exactly the same way every single time based on the data, right? There is no exception of the rule. And that's actually a beautiful thing when you are dealing with home services with otherwise very variably, like things can go wrong many different way. So we are basically streamlining everything and that is something that that is our biggest aha moment. Uh I will wrap it up by saying that so like the best way to understand this is that most of the companies look at this problem as a bad actors problem. Homeowners do not want to pay, service providers are terrible. We do not believe that. What we believe is a bad process variance problem. Like process variance is very like you know, is very high in this industry. Things can go wrong. But if we can quarterback everyone and streamline everything then right homeowners and right providers, if we can match them then things will automatically happen. And that's what we see in the results we have. Plus 80 NPS and 82% gross margin is proving that point.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great, you know, technology is one thing but the people behind the technology really make the difference when you talk about hiring. Hiring can be challenging it can also be frustrating. Talk a little bit about what's been challenging and maybe what's been successful when it comes to hiring for you, right? Hiring our own operators, right?

Satadru Sengupta: Absolutely. So, Alex, you also like add to it. Let me start, like we are big on undiscovered talent, right? We believe in opportunities, like and there is three aphorisms. Like when you get opportunities, you say thank you, and then you make it big, and you create opportunities for other people. Those are the three things, right? And we apply that everywhere. We apply that to ourselves and we like apply that principle in our hiring. Uh coming from DataRobot, we have a 300 people team in Ukraine. And in Ukraine, like you know we started this company with team members in Ukraine. That is not a outsource model, it is literally the hub model. So we are basically very, I've been there seven times before COVID. And we literally built our, our entire engineering is built by team from Ukraine. Um and, and that, we are the best product in this 500 billion industry and built it this way. And, and like you know, so that is like what we do. And I will tell Alex, like because our recent finding is that now as we are building customer success, that team was historically in the US, but we are also doing very good with that team as we are building our offshore team.

Alexandra Fontova: Yeah. So I think the the breakthrough around hiring is uh for us has really been what the power of technology does in terms of again this undiscovered talent. What can we by creating uh our system by creating uh our backend we're really able to work with people literally anywhere. And I think that was something that probably a lot of people saw in terms of 2020 remote workforce. Uh you know we of course were benefits of that, beneficiaries of that, but then we really saw what happens when again we expand that circle a bit and, and expand what that could mean for for a company. So our customer success team now is actually growing in El Salvador. So that's another market where we found that the level of hospitality, also the level of uh professional experience. There's a lot of large companies that actually have had bases there and I was not aware of that before uh before this. And and it really I think just opened up both of our eyes to the potential of uh talent being anywhere. And what um Satadru kind of mentioned earlier, we're both so passionate about people that if you have the right founders that really care about building up talent, really care about giving these opportunities, then the world is quite literally your oyster in terms of finding that talent. If uh we were people who were maybe not as interested or or maybe didn't have see the value of spending that time or training or, or building up um this workforce, I don't think it would have worked out so well for us. But, but I think again really being able to recognize the potential and that talent and those opportunities that we were given at one point in time. And so how are we extending that um around the world, quite, quite literally.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. I love that strategy. I also know that it is easier to, to build local or globally, and also remotely. And it really, there's some big advantages. You give people opportunities that they didn't have before. And cost structure wise as a company, you know, you're fair pay to people wherever they live. And at the same time, you can really optimize your business in a healthy way, which I think is, you know, very strategic. What do you know now that you wish someone would have told you before you started the company? Alex, Satadru, whoever wants to answer that one.

Alexandra Fontova: Um, iteration. Um, so really understanding the value of rapid iteration and fast learning, that's, you know, so, so foundational to being an entrepreneur. Um, but I think what's really been the biggest learning for me is of course when something's not working, you have to keep trying and iterating on it, right? I think what I, one of my biggest learnings is even when it is working, how important is to continue to iterate and optimize on it. Uh because the pace that a startup grows, because the pace the market changes. If you don't, if something's working, you just say "Okay, I'm not going to pay any attention to that, I'm going to focus on something else," by the time you go back to that thing that was working, everything has changed already. And so I think that uh really understanding that rapid iteration, uh fast learning doesn't just happen when things are not working, it actually needs to continue to happen when things are working. And that's where we start to see that 2x, that 10x, that uh improvement level that, that makes a company, makes a startup grow the way that it needs to.

Satadru Sengupta: And it's a principle that we use it for life also: cannibalize your own success continuously, right? And, and that's been very successful so far like you know. And that's a very big principle on how DARPA does research. When I was at DataRobot I came across this Harvard Business Review paper where people were studying about how people invented internet. We are in applied research right? So here no one knows what's the next breakthrough. We, we know what breakthrough we want to achieve and the best way to achieve that is really moving fast and trying different things. And as Alex highlighted, the market is changing, competition is changing, people are changing. So in that changing environment, faster we try different things, better outcome.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. What a great story. I like what you guys are doing and I know it impacts a lot of consumers. I will be a fan for sure. Um what's the world going to thank you for when you execute this model and scale it out?

Alexandra Fontova: I think being able to actually enjoy home ownership. I know when I bought my home and we had our first kind of hiccup, the thing we had to get, you know, taken care of. I looked at my husband, I was like, "What did we just get ourselves into?" And, and I know that's a very universal feeling that a lot of uh home owners feel when the first thing goes wrong. Um, but owning a home is such a big life milestone. It's where you create memories. I have a two and a half year-old little boy. Uh, so when I think of my home, I want to think about that. I don't want to think about the deck that cost three times what we thought it would cost to repair. Uh, and so I think that's really when, when Dobby is everywhere and and is doing exactly what we want it to do, people are going to be able to take back ownership, home ownership as a positive thing.

Satadru Sengupta: And that what Alex just described, that's the sentiment of our homeowners, right? So we hear this every day like you know, working partners, working parents, they're busy like you know kind of uh, we are just like you know, we want to get things done without thinking about it. Like I was telling Alex that the most magical thing would be even before they submit we are just getting it done. And that's our vision: self-managed home, right? Property management company embedded inside our home ownership experience and getting things done without even we realizing it. And uh another thing that is really passionate like you know, we are passionate about, it's an open problem. People, home is not something new. Home ownership is not new. But no one was able to solve this problem. And we have the technology now, we have a new generation of home owners now, new generation of service providers now. So, we're at the right time in the right place to really bring the right solution to the problem. So, that would be very exciting for everyone.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Well, as we wrap up here, um I want to thank you both for coming on and joining. If anyone wants to find Dobby or find you, where do they go?

Satadru Sengupta: It's very simple. Dobbyhome.com, right? That's our website. And if you go to the website, there is a big QR code. You can just scan it and that's it. And um it is even simpler to download the app, dobbyhome.com/app. That's it. It does not matter. We are very technologically advanced company. It will recognize your operating system and lead you to Google App Store, Google Store, Google Play or App Store. Like you know, it's as simple as that. So dobbyhome.com.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Very cool. Well, thanks so much for joining. Um I want to thank you for having the courage to come on and share your story and also for the listeners for listening. It means a lot to me that you spent your time with us. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to catch up with you all on the next episode. Until then, take care.

Satadru Sengupta: Thank you Jake.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: If you like what we're doing, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen and follow us on YouTube where we go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to be a startup founder.

‍