New Homebrew Investment Pillow Lets Short-Term Rental Hosts & Guests Sleep Easy
“That merging of online and real-world operations is one of the most exiting startup trends of the past few years,” said Hunter Walk, a partner at Homebrew, which led the seed round. He thinks Pillow can help increase Airbnb listings by handling all the hassles for hosts. “Your average busy person may not want to take on the operational burden of cleaning, managing and essentially becoming a sole proprietorship,” he said.
I’ve previously blogged about how my former startup StayAtMy’s initial name suddenly was taken by a rapidly growing business in Portugal. Even more interesting is how our business idea, a physical layer on top of short-term rental services like Airbnb, suddenly is catching on in The Bay Area. We did the exact same thing as Pillow two years ago, and now Pillow is receiving seed funding from Hunter Walk and Homebrew.
We shut down operations due to lack of commitment, and difficulties with scaling it quickly enough. To be honest, at the time we probably did not have the vision needed to build the business Pillow is trying to build, however evident it is in retrospect. Yet another example how little value an idea has in itself, and how much more important the team executing on the idea is.