Why I Invested in Moved
The opportunity in "unboxing" your apartment
Any of you moved lately?
I have. It sucks.
Even before I moved, I invested in Moved. (They aren’t currently raising $.)
Before I get into why, I should tell you that I don’t love when VCs brag about or shamelessly promote their portfolio. That’s precisely why you almost never see me write about my portfolio here but I’ll chuckle about VC Brags on Twitter:
Still, I think there is some value in an investor divulging WHY they chose a certain company over the hundreds of others they were pitched in the past year. That’s different than boasting about how brilliant you are for funding a sexy company that everyone thinks is cool. (“You invested in SpaceX! Oooooooo! Ahhhhh!”)
Hopefully, if you are reading this, you can use this as a) a guide for how to pitch me in the future or b) a chance to publicly question my faulty logic and subjectivity below in the comments.
Either way, take my word for it that I’m writing this to inform and not to boast (although I am proud of being on this cap table).
With that out of the way, here are the three primary reasons why I invested in Moved:
Team
At the early stage, team is always the first priority in my underwriting. In almost no successful company ever was the initial version of the product the same as the ultimate product at IPO or sale. Great people will eventually create a great product. So I always start here.
I’ve known Caren for several years since Nestio/Funnel was a tiny Seed company. She’s one of my favorite people in the business and is just genuinely a great person. When someone with her success scaling Funnel takes another crack at MF Tech, I’m always going to be interested.
Adam, I’ve known for less time but have always been impressed with his measured approach. He’s not overstated or bombastic (looking at you, coworking guys) but just quietly building a good product with a great domain name.
For either one of them, I’d be very interested in leaning into what they are building. You put them both on the same team and now I’m unreasonably excited about it.
At the early stage there’s a saying that gets overused but has a foundational truth to it: “Bet on the jockey not the horse.” It means that the product (the horse) will change and evolve over time. If the jockey (company founders) are solid, the horse will find its way to the finish line.
I have zero concerns about these two leaders and their abilities. Which leads to . . .
The Problem
Moving sucks. For sure.
It’s a real problem and landlords want to do all they can to alleviate some of the stress on their new tenants. This is their first TRUE impression of your building.
So why not have a single platform where you can reserve an elevator, coordinate move-in dates, work with furniture and design companies, sign up for utilities and billing, obtain renter’s insurance, and everything else you need to do to make your new apartment a home? That is, after all, what apartment companies try to sell us on . . . home.
This is what I call “unboxing.”
Do you know that feeling when you buy a new iPhone and take it home? You can easily remove the plastic film around the box, slide open the laser-precise box, turn on the phone, and then be texting in a matter of seconds.
That’s the unboxing experience for an Apple product. It’s easy, simple, and there are no special tools required.
Now, think about that plastic-cased toothbrush/lightbulb/anything you bought. It’s vacuum-sealed in a hard plastic covering with even-harder edges to imprison your goods. You need industrial-strength scissors or a chainsaw or space-laser to open it. Hopefully you don’t destroy it or cut yourself in the process of opening it but there are no promises in this world. Good luck.
**Side Note - This is so common there is actually a condition for it called Wrap Rage. **
Moving into apartments is currently like that.
You might damage the walls as you move things in or injure yourself lifting heavy furniture. Your unit is not as big, not as clean (what is that smell?), and nowhere near as stylish as the model unit that cute 24-year-old leasing agent walked you through. No internet, chipped paint, some bulbs out. You’ve got a view of the air conditioners and only two windows to see them through.
Welcome home!
See what I mean? We need more Apple and less toothbrush.
This is where Moved can help.
By simply making things easier, simpler, and more renter-friendly, you can take a renter’s first impression from dejected sigh to delighted squeal. After all, isn’t this just what the apartment industry has been chasing after these last few years: surprise-and-delight moments that make an apartment feel more like a home or fancy hotel and less like a cold building of strangers?
Moved can help make the renter’s first impression be one that shows you’ve put an extraordinary amount of thought and care into how they spend their first hours in their new home.
It’s difficult to overstate how important that first impression can be for renter loyalty in the hyper-competitive apartment market. The property tour is what the owner wants tenants to think it’s like living here. The move-in is what it’s actually like living here.
Don’t botch it.
Upside
I’ve written about this before but one of the greatest FinTech opportunities in the next decade is the ability to get into renter’s wallets.
As has been well-documented, Gen Y and Gen Z are not buying homes at the rate our parents and grandparents did. We are a couple generations of renters. (Not to mention all the empty-nest Boomers tired of home maintenance and mortgage payments.)
That’s more than 100 million people not buying ladders, lawnmowers, homeowner’s insurance, etc. That means the enormous retail companies who have profiled buyers for decades are going back to the basics on how to sell us home goods and services.
How do you sell homeowner’s insurance to someone with no home? Lawnmowers to someone with no lawn? Home Depot, Target, Walmart, and most other huge retailers have been scratching their heads on how to get renters to be regular customers.
What if I told you Moved could help with that?
Remember how I said they help you set up all your utilities and billing? Guess what they need to do that? Your payment details.
Now, while Moved is not currently using your payment details for anything, they COULD down the road. I want to be crystal clear that this is NOT currently happening and your payment details are kept strictly confidential.
But it should happen.
You, Ms. Renter, want this to happen. I promise.
There’s a common saying that I’ll repeat here - “Everyone wants to buy but no one wants to be sold.”
You want to buy things. You probably bought something in the last 24-48 hours.
What if Moved could get you cheaper essentials every month (paper towels, toilet paper, detergent, etc) sent to your apartment because they can bulk order for 200 tenants instead of one person?
They could do the same with renter’s insurance. And furniture. Maybe Uber/Lyft rides? Amenify is already doing this with meal delivery. It’s called “batching” and it works.
If Moved could get you 10% off monthly essentials, and 20% of recurring costs, and 25% off delivered meals, would you sign up for it? How many hundreds of dollars could that save you per month? (And thousands per year?)
Assuming all of your financial information is safely stored, which it will be with Plaid, Stripe, or a dozen other open FinTech platforms, why would you NOT sign up to save this much?
Again, this isn’t something that is currently happening for Moved because landlords are CRAZY DEFENSIVE about renter’s data and payment details. But the ones who are focused on tenant satisfaction and understand tradeoffs will wise up to this opportunity. Shoot, treat tenants like adults and let them opt-in to it.
And if Moved gets your payment details BEFORE you even move into the unit, who better to set you up with a ton of great money-saving programs?
If they do that, they’ll bridge a gap between retail brands and two-plus generations of renters.
That is multiple-billions of dollars of revenue if done right.
That’s a TAM.
That’s some upside.
Now, whether we’ll get there is still TBD. But I think there are enough tech-savvy landlords that understand the tradeoff between renter privacy and renter experience that this is an inevitability for someone.
I happen to think that someone will be Moved.
Time will tell . . .
Those are the three main reasons I invested in Moved: a killer team, a real problem, and an enormous upside.
You’ll notice I didn’t mention competition.
That’s because I don’t care that much about competition.
Yes, I know Updater exists. It’s different but most landlords will be too lazy in their underwriting to realize it until it’s too late. (Updater is built to cater to consumer brands that pay them whereas Moved is built for landlords and their tenants.)
I don’t subscribe to the notion of one-winner markets in PropTech. Real estate is simply too big with too slow at adoption for a single player to dominate the entire industry.
Yes, Moved has competition. No, I don’t really care. It just validates the space as worthy of pursuit.
These two will figure out their lane and do great. I’m excited to see where they go and hope I can help them get there.
Great team. Would add Jason Deppen and also note that Adam is a 4.1 handicap ⛳️
💪