The unconventional Journey to Making Home Maintenance Invisible Part 2

It’s been two years since I announced Setter’s Series A round of fundraising here, and now It is my pleasure to announce that alongside the amazing team at Setter, we have just been acquired by the market leader Thumbtack.

Setter’s mission of making homeownership invisible just got a whole lot more realistic now that we’re working alongside the folks at Thumbtack. 

You can read about the acquisition in Tech Crunch

Quick recap, I never thought that I’d be running a VC-backed startup in the first place, now here I am in a net new position again. This time it’s working with an all-star team at a $1 billion+ company to make sure that the homeowners, pros and all the companies that are part of the home ecosystem can work together to create a better 360-degree experience.

It was 18 years ago that I renovated my first house alongside Andrew Black and five years to the month that I incorporated Setter with Guillaume Laliberte. I couldn’t be happier with the way things turned out.

We started out with a hypothesis that homeowners weren’t as well equipped as a professional to manage an asset as complex and valuable as the home. That there was a world for a tech-enabled home manager to step in and become the General Practitioner or Wealth Manager for the home.

Over the past five years, we’ve worked on subscriptions, warranties, proactive and reactive products, all with the mandate to make the homeownership experience a little better and a little easier for both pros and homeowners. 

At Setter, we proved that we could build deep relationships with homeowners. But to take that experience to the next level, we knew we needed to scale the experience to millions of customers and have the right pros in every market to complete the work. 

Thumbtack’s marketplace spans every county across the U.S. Their enormous scale gives us the homeowner footprint we desperately wanted and the opportunity to form deeper relationships with even more homeowners and the talented local pros who know homes better than anyone. 

Our value alignment and a shared ambition to help homeowners maximize their greatest asset made Thumbtack the perfect match.

In addition to the products and experiences that we’ve built over the past five years, I’ve also had the luxury to work alongside some incredible people and some fantastic companies. 

Here’s a quick shout out to the three categories of people and businesses that were part of the journey alongside me. The folks at Setter have consistently been amongst the highest performing and gracious people I’ve ever worked with, I can’t name everyone, but I can shout out the leadership team that got us here; Gui, Bryan, James, Ambles, Lauren, Samantha, Brandon, RC, Campbell, and Bask Thank You. My investors have been brilliant, prescient and empathetic Jess, Pete, Greg, Eric, Andre, Tony all the Angels who believed in us, Thank You. The pros who were always open to every iteration and were integral to every moment, Thank You. A special thank you to Andrew Black whose DNA was built into this thing and who has supported me every step of the way.

Our amazing team and an incredible group of investors have helped get us here. Now it’s time to grow and share our vision for the future of homeownership with the rest of North America.

Homeownership is really hard. Together with Thumbtack, we will create a home management ecosystem that works for the homeowner, not against them. The experience of living in a home managed by the new Thumbtack platform will bring peace of mind to our homeowners that they say they’ve never felt before and will also make the jobs of our pros that much easier. 

Give us a try. We think you’re going to fall in love with your new home life.

Experience the future at www.thumbtack.com