Founder Spotlight: Homeslice Free Ventures Fall ’16 Batch
It began with one simple idea: Young professionals are spending too much money on rent.
Shortly after commencing their second semester of business school, Anna Roumiantseva, PJ O’Neil and Anne Ready collectively realized that they had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on rent. After interviewing many of their peers, they found that millennials are comfortable renting apartments together, but almost never own property together because a down payment is too expensive. With that insight, they created Homeslice.
After doing more research, the team found a second barrier to entry for millennials: counterparty risk. When two or more people want to buy together, they are both jointly responsible for the mortgage. In other words, if one person does not pay their share and defaults, then the other person is financially liable. Moreover, signing a mortgage commits the buyer for a longer period of time than renting, creating yet another hurdle for homeownership among millennials.
To address these concerns, Anne, Anna, and PJ set out to create a platform that would remove barriers for individuals buying both residential and investment properties together.
Starting up as an MBA at Berkeley-Haas
Anne and Anna met in Toby Stuart and Rob Chandra’s entrepreneurship class. Along with learning about the process of creating a company, the class required students to form teams, create, and pitch a startup. At the end of the semester, Anne, Anna and the rest of their team pitched Homeslice. After receiving a lot of positive feedback about their idea, they decided to see where they could take it.
After deciding to pursue their idea beyond the entrepreneurship class, Anne and Anna found a third member of their team — PJ O’Neil, a former investment banker and consultant — at the beginning of the Fall 2016 semester. The new team then applied and was accepted to UC Berkeley’s Lean Launchpad (LLP) — a course that aims to “provide real world, hands-on learning on what it’s like to actually start a high-tech company”. This particular edition of Lean Launchpad was supported by Berkeley’s College of Engineering, helping to offer diverse perspectives on their idea outside of the business environment the team was used to.
The Free Ventures experience for MBA founders
Within the MBA community, Free Ventures has become an increasingly popular program over the past three years. After getting into Lean Launchpad (LLP), Homeslice felt that Free Ventures would allow the team to receive even more access to the startup community at UC Berkeley.
A few factors differentiate Free Ventures from LLP. Most significantly, the rigorous pitch practice provided by Free Ventures helped Homeslice get “comfortable talking about an idea that wasn’t fully baked to people who are a big deal…the sheer practice and quantity of the pitches was incredibly helpful”, said Anna.
Free Ventures also helped connect the Homeslice team with Eric Liu (YC alum, Founder of Bayes Impact, and Forbes 30 Under 30). “[Eric] was able to talk to us about how to get ready for YC and approach some of the questions that investors might have…because he had gone through the process himself”, said Anne.
The Homeslice team also met with Mike Olson and Rebecca Lynn who were both very helpful mentors throughout their process in the two programs.
Through their time in Free Ventures, the three MBAs learned from many of the other undergraduate founders. PJ commented that the program has “only further opened my eyes to how impressive this university is…the access to talent and resources from just being at Berkeley. It was really inspiring to see young people doing really awesome work. We were very impressed by all of the teams”, he continued.
For future MBA founders
Given today’s founder-friendly climate in the Bay Area, it is not surprising that entrepreneurship classes are among the most highly sought among Berkeley-Haas MBAs. Since the dot-com bubble, UC Berkeley has been inundated with resources for MBA founders. Based on the Homeslice team’s founder journey, here are their recommendations on how to get involved.
Anna, Anne, and PJ agreed that the best way to get into the ecosystem is to start a company, and “as an MBA and graduate student Free Ventures is a great place to start.” The three team members added that it is admittedly difficult to navigate the ecosystem. “Free Ventures and The House are the glue that sticks the entrepreneurship community together”, added PJ.
The team was able to tailor their experience in the program to their business model through Free Ventures work to help teams find experts in each team’s respective industry. Each week, mentors help teams better understand their industry, provide assistance with a revenue model, and develop relationships with founders in the program. “For people who are nailing down an idea, Free Ventures is a great place to start,” said Anna.
Next steps
Currently, the team is thinking critically about their place within both the residential and investment property market. The Homeslice team recognizes that there are many incumbents in the real estate industry that do not want to see innovation in the space. As a result, the team still has a lot of work ahead of them to bring this idea to market.
“With the help of Free Ventures, we arrived at a place where we answered a lot of questions about the product and landed on a business model we’re really excited about. We’re now in the process of testing it by doing our first couple of real estate transactions,” said Anna.
In the short term Homeslice will be operating in the Bay Area and Denver. “Overall our thesis hasn’t changed much since we started — we want to democratize home ownership by enabling shared purchases — but we are testing it in a more targeted way,” said Anne.
“We are all hustle this semester. We have put very strict milestones in place to determine what we do next and have given ourselves until May to get this off the ground,” said PJ.
The team is currently looking for engineers to build out their online platform. If you are interested, please send an email to daniella@freeventures.org.
