Building tech and product for marketplaces (with Rover cofounder Phil Kimmey)

Ben Gilbert (0:00)

All right, Limited Partners. Welcome to another episode of the LP Show.

And today, we are going to be talking about the early days of rover.com, and how to build a marketplace business, and really the technology and the engineering behind building a marketplace business with dear friend of the show, Phil Kimmey. So Phil, thank you for joining us.

Phil Kimmey (0:19)

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Ben Gilbert (0:21)

Yeah, me too. Phil is the co-founder and director of software development at Rover, which he started in June of 2011

And as such, you would have been a junior in college.

Phil Kimmey (0:32)

I just finished my junior year of college.

Ben Gilbert (0:34)

So did not return after that.

Phil Kimmey (0:36)

Did not return as my mother frequently reminds me.

David Rosenthal (0:41)

Many fun conversations with Phil's family that summer.

Ben Gilbert (0:45)

Yes, I bet. Phil, you've gone on to, of course, grow the team at Rover. How large is engineering and product now?

Phil Kimmey (0:52)

All of engineering and product together, I think including design and analytics and other things are around 200 at this point.

Ben Gilbert (0:58)

Cool. Don't call it a unicorn, but right on the edge as reported. Phil, of course, should not comment on this, but as many news outlets reported somewhere in that range. Phil has been named 30 under 30 by both Forbes and Inc.

There were some pretty sweet pictures of you and a cute dog floating around the internet.

Phil Kimmey (1:15)

Multiple cute dogs.

Ben Gilbert (1:18)

And of course, Phil is a super close friend of both David and I, and we are lucky to have him today.

So Phil, I want to dive in starting Rover.

We got to hear a lot of the Rover story from Aaron when we had him on for the Dog Vacay episode last season, but we didn't really dive into the first six months of the company. And this time period is particularly informative to a lot of our LPs who are working on a startup of their own in kind of that pre-product market fit era of a startup. And so, you got to work for real the Monday after startup weekend. So what was the first sort of work that you did? How did you plan where you were gonna dive in? And what were you kind of trying to prove after that?

Phil Kimmey (1:56)

Totally. So David can keep me honest here because he was there for much of this.

Well, so a little bit of background. I came back home for summer after my junior year of college, and I went to this thing called a startup weekend, which is basically a weekend hackathon. So people pitch ideas on Friday, you work on them over the weekend, and then Sunday, you pitch them to a panel of judges. Greg pitched this idea of Airbnb for dogs. So I walked up to him and said, you know, I think I could build that. I like dogs. That sounds like fun. I worked on it over the weekend.

Over the course of the weekend, I learned that Greg did this professionally. And I had come back from school and intentionally didn't find an internship or anything to do.

David Rosenthal (2:31)

And for listeners to know, Greg was Greg Gottesman, the founder of Rover and at the time was one of our partners at Madrona, and was a multi-time, was and probably still is a multi-time Startup Weekend Champion.

Phil Kimmey (2:44)

Yeah.

Ben Gilbert (2:44)

And I think maybe cheating a little bit as a board member, but is now my co-founder at Pioneer Square Labs.

Phil Kimmey (2:51)

Yeah. So anyway, so at the end of the weekend, he goes, you know, Phil, what do you think of doing this full time? And I was like, that sounds amazing. You know, it's summer, just very least, we're kind of over the summer and see what happens.

So I came in Monday, didn't actually start on Monday, we started on Tuesday. So I came in Monday, talked to, met with Greg, met with Aaron, which I didn't actually remember until he told me later, and David, and we worked out the details. And then on Tuesday I brought my desktop computer in and set up in an office in the Madrona offices.

So at the beginning, the first thing I focused on, which I think now is pretty kind of expected, but the very first thing was set up CICD, so continuous integration, continuous deployment. I think if you're going to move quickly, that's kind of the basic thing you want to have under your belt. It's gotten a lot easier as well and has become kind of industry norm. This was relatively early days of AWS.