Alexander Jekowsky On Raising $80 Million To Build A Tech Platform To Help Laundry Businesses Run More Efficiently And Grow

In the entrepreneurial world, every journey is unique. Alexander Jekowsky’s path from aspiring baseball player to tech entrepreneur was marked by unexpected turns, unrelenting passion, and an affinity for solving unconventional problems.

In this riveting interview, he talks about vertical integration, verticalizing in the SaaS industry, and ultimately disrupting an industry many would consider far from glamorous—laundry. His company, Cents, has attracted investment from top-tier investors like Camber Creek, Contrarian Thinking Capital, Derive Ventures Management Company, and FJ Labs.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Alexander’s entrepreneurial journey highlights the power of resilience and problem-solving, from baseball dreams to disrupting the laundromat industry.
• His early ventures, like Ulyngo, set the stage for vertical SaaS success and sharpened his focus on B2B business models.
• Navigating M&A processes taught Alexander the value of cultural alignment and strategic acquisitions in building long-term businesses.
• With Cents, Alexander revolutionized laundromat operations by introducing a SaaS platform, bringing innovation to a traditional industry.
• His strategic low-profile approach helped Cents raise $80M and triple its business while avoiding competition.
• Alexander’s vision is to modernize the laundry industry through accessible technology, benefiting both business owners and customers.
• He advocates for quality work over hustle culture, prioritizing health and resilience as key factors in entrepreneurial success.

 

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About Alexander Jekowsky:

Alexander Jekowsky is the CEO and Co-Founder of Cents, the only all-in-one software, hardware, and payments solution supporting the way laundry business owners grow, manage, and understand their business.

Starting in 2020, Cents has become one of the fastest-growing SMB tech companies in the USA, supporting over 2.5k small businesses in the USA, with the sole mission of empowering independent operators through modern and accessible technology.

Alex is a serial entrepreneur who has raised over $80M in venture capital in his career, has gone through several acquisitions on both sides of the table, is a Forbes 30 under 30 recipient, and is committed to elevating and growing the laundry industry.

He cares deeply about his community and dedicates his time to improving the lives and business opportunities for SMB entrepreneurs.

Connect with Alexander Jekowsky:

• LinkedIn
• RocketReach
• Crunchbase
• TheOrg

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: All right. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the DealMakers show. So today we are with us, a repeated founder. We’re going to be talking about you know all of the good stuff that we like to hear, the building, scaling, financing, all of that. Also, show we’re going to be talking about how to acquire talent, how to go and think about M on&A, you know either on the buy side or the sell side, also how to raise money, how to think about cycles too. And then also, the whole idea about the vertically integrated or or verticalizing you know certain things in the SaaS um industry. But but again, you know brace yourself for a very inspiring conversation. And without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Alexander Jekoski. Welcome to the show.

Alexander Jekowsky: Thank you so much. Great to be here.

Alejandro Cremades: So originally growing up there, right outside of the Bay Area. So give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you?

Alexander Jekowsky: Yeah, I grew up in a ah and Marin County and in Tiburon, California, right outside of right outside of San Francisco. i ah While I’m in New York now, I feel very much of a California california kid still. Loved growing up in the Bay Area. My dad was a musician um and started something called the California Symphony. and My mom worked in the nonprofit world. and I had no reason to be doing what I’m doing today um from how I grew up. Just wanted to be a baseball player. and ah That was kind of the dream when I was a a kid and and in high school. and so i yeah I try to make it back there as much as I can, but right now New York has its has its claws in me pretty good.

Alejandro Cremades: So talk to us about, the you know, you you obviously had the competitiveness in you. I mean, you were into baseball, you wanted to become a professional baseball player, I guess. How do you think that has a shaping up to your ambition and and your drive?

Alexander Jekowsky: i mean I think i I saw at least from my dad of what it took to be excellent and in in any particular skill. One, I realized i you know I had always this thought that there would be always people better than me, but no good reason for somebody to work harder than me. And so I tried to transition that ah or take that and put it into my in my view of baseball. But I had it up close and personal watching my dad practice six hours a day, um reading scores and and working on his trade and his craft. So I think that built that idea of if you want to succeed, it doesn’t just happen. If you want to be great at something, it doesn’t just happen. You have to be

Alexander Jekowsky: willing to do more than anybody else. However, I think over time, I started to to realize when I got injured playing baseball, I wanted to play in college. That was really my whole identity and my dream. ah But I started to realize that there are other ways for me to channel that. And when I got injured ah during my senior year of high school, I started coaching. And that’s where I think I probably had the best experience of playing baseball I had ever had. I actually had started a coaching business when I was 13. I took my bar mitzvah money and ah bought a batting cage and pitching machine and had that in my backyard and had a, you know, coaching clients and and all of that. I ran summer camps, all of those things when I was a kid, but when I got injured and couldn’t play, I had the opportunity to coach kind of 13, 14 year olds or 12, 13 year olds, excuse me, in in in the town I grew up. And it was the best experience of of baseball I’d ever had because it had that element of a competitive edge, but you get to

Alexander Jekowsky: you get to see people and and and particularly kids actually develop and and hone their skills. We were projected to have the worst team. I got i didn’t get any of the draft picks I wanted. we you know They put all the best players on one team so they could keep playing together before they went to high school. And ah and so we got, ah you know I think that the undesirables as we called ourselves. And we ended up finishing in the top three and it was just an amazing experience ah ah to be part of. And I think that’s more of where I started to find what what I love most, which is being in the environment where you can build something together, build a culture, build a team, you know the product being ah you know a great baseball game that we’re all executing. But that’s where I think I started loving this concept of not just executing as an individual performer, but

Alexander Jekowsky: um helping other people kind of you know facilitate the growth of others on lock and unblock so they can, you know, deliver their best personal performance, but it’s all kind of in the cohesive unit of of what we can do together. And that that was probably, if I think back on it, was the the initial sign that I love doing what I’m doing today. um But it was always about take something that I love to do, which was playing baseball, ah and find a way to make money out of it out of my own business. And of course, I made some good money coaching as well. um But then you have to love it and have a passion for it. And I think that’s been the constant theme for me, is it has to be something that im I believe in, I’m passionate about, and I love.

Alejandro Cremades: So let’s talk about that because you got into college and it didn’t take long you know for you to really get going with a you know more of a formal ah company. So what happened there?

Alexander Jekowsky: Yeah, when I was touring ah college campuses thinking I might play baseball or at least try, uh, I was looking at a bunch of different schools and I saw pinboards at all of these locations, all of these campuses with thousands seemingly of flyers on them. And my thoughts to myself was that made no sense. Like why are there.

Alexander Jekowsky: You know, so everything’s digital all around us. Why are they still these pinboards with all these fires? You can’t see anything. And I’m sure if somebody’s going to take the time to print something out, go in front of a a board, put a tack in it, they probably want people to see it or engage with it. And so my idea was, hey, in college, maybe I’ll make these pinboards, but I’ll do it online and we can have big TVs and that and instead of these pinboards. And that was the original idea. ah And so I kind of went into college with a belief that I could do something and, uh, And part of it was I was never very academically strong and or at least the areas I was more academically strong or the areas I worked harder in were not ones that I found I could have a career ah in in anthropology and in history and things that I was just generally really, again, it was passionate and passion and interest ah is what drove pretty much all of my academic success or more

Alexander Jekowsky: ah more often than not, lack thereof. And and so taking some concept of of an idea, something I started to be really interested in as a concept, a problem that I thought I wanted to solve, um which is, I think, more of a creative expression than anything else. ah That’s when I you know started going into my freshman year of of college and had raised, you know I think, $16,900 during my first semester with one angel investor.

Alexander Jekowsky: And then the, the ball started to roll from there. um And originally the idea was like a Craigslist for college is how it turned into you log in with your student email and where this app and marketplace for students to buy and sell. And then over two years when I ended up leaving Chapman university, which, you know, they were extremely supportive and, you know, my parents had to make that okay. And, and the university was also extremely supportive of that um to kind of follow my, my passion in that context.

Alexander Jekowsky: ah It pivoted to more of a white labeled solution for college campuses to facilitate student life commerce. So transitioning from that Craigslist to college to more of how can we help students transact and go through the things from a commercial standpoint that they need to during the course of their student life. So think of that as everything but tuition um and you know, but ran that move back up to San Francisco after I had had left school and ended up selling that business about five years ago. But that was my first kind of journey of have an idea, go all in, take risks, ah you know, completely pivot the the business from a more of a D to C get students to download your app to a white labeled SaaS product that we’d sell directly to college campuses and integrated with all the different

Alexander Jekowsky: ah campus technologies So i I started getting a little bit of a taste of a vertical SaaS of definitely I’m not great at direct to consumer and more interested in a B2B, B2B go to market experience and and and product standpoint. So I think it got me a little bit more ready to do what I’m i’m doing today and and fortunately had a great outcome.

Alejandro Cremades: So how was it like to to go through the M&A process, you know being on the sell side for the first time, you know being able to get through the full cycle of being an entrepreneur and now reaching the finish line? What was that experience like for you?

Alexander Jekowsky: Oh, it was a roller coaster. I mean, I, you know, I heard from one of my mentors that and I had no reason to be able to say this because I’m not a woman. But ah they say it’s, you know, it’s like childbirth every single every single time um is is is kind of one of my favorite quotes. It it From either the buy side or the sell side, it has these different elements of ah ah driving you nuts and getting you so excited. I mean, we had some very late inning drama that the deal almost fell through at at that time after we had been working on it for eight or nine months. And you know you get to the point where you’re getting really excited. We ended up running a process. It wasn’t an intention to run a process. We were actually trying to raise a Series A and most people we talked to, investors were like, we’d rather just buy you for one of our companies. And so we started realizing, you know what?

Alexander Jekowsky: Maybe that’s a better direction for a business like ours. Higher ed is a very tough market from ah from a sales standpoint, very long sales cycle. and When you’re not selling a necessity product, we were trying to transition from a nice to have to a need to have, but um we definitely had our challenges. and so As we went through the M and&A process, you know you get excited about who’s going to buy the business. and We kind of started to put our eggs in that basket and you know that kind of leverage becomes ah stressful and and concerning. But overall, ah in context, it went quite smoothly up until the end, but that’s kind of there’s there’s always a little bit of late inning drama to make the story better, I think. um But we couldn’t have been more happy once it got done um to to join the company that that that acquired us called Moto Labs, ah where I stayed for a year and

Alexander Jekowsky: We got a great product and and we really chose the company who was going to buy us based on the quality of the product um that they had and where I felt like I wanted to roll a lot of stock into this business. and Is this a business that I believe is going to you know deliver a lot of enterprise value and continue to scale and grow? Do they have ah ah a thoughtful business? I continue to be excited to be a shareholder there. and ah but yeah it was At this point, I kind of like buying the companies a little bit more than I like selling them from ah from that from the experiences I’ve had at Sense versus the my last business, but ah definitely good to get beat up enough to be ready for you know the real fight ahead.

Alejandro Cremades: So then let’s, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the, uh, the next chapter too, because I mean, after the whole, um, acquisition and doing, you know, the integration with MotoLabs, as they say, once an entrepreneur entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur, and then you went at it and, and that’s what you’re up to now. We sense, you know, your rocket ship. I know that there was quite a um ah sequence of events there that involved, you know, getting into the whole bar and then like the laundromats and stuff like that. So, so walk us through what was that sequence of events?

Alexander Jekowsky: yeah i mean After I sold my first company, Eulingo, I was you know became an executive at at at the company that bought us. I was very passionate about what they were building and what the integrated products could be. and but i kind of you know You have that creative itch when you’re a founder that it’s hard to scratch as just an employee somewhere. and You want to find that in the best ways that you can. and ah For me, I thought I could find it in maybe a small business that kind of felt like an opportunity ah that I feel like could be meaningful for me. I never worked in a small business growing up. I knew the importance of it. And so I thought maybe opening a bar or a restaurant, I always had this idea for a Harry Potter theme bar and in San Francisco, however silly it was. and um But I started you know trying to talk to people that were in the hospitality space that owned restaurants, bars. And I heard enough war stories that as a passion project, it might not be something that ah

Alexander Jekowsky: would check the boxes of what I was necessarily looking for um and be much more buying myself a job and and headache and pains than the passion, excited, creative ah journey. And so I started you know thinking, OK, maybe not the right move. And I ended up meeting somebody whose neighbor at their lake house was the former president of the New England Coin Laundry Association. And he started telling me about the four stores this guy owned and in Massachusetts and that it just It just made them a killing and it was a great industry and a great business. and I knew nothing about laundry other than I hated doing it. I’ve been to laundromats. I you know used shared laundry facilities and apartments in my college. so It wasn’t like I knew the concept, but I was never interested in the laundry vertical or industry. My parents didn’t own stores. I you know i don’t have a hero’s journey from that perspective. I was just interested in but kind potentially being an investor in ah in a laundry and a laundry business. and so

Alexander Jekowsky: i started I love the weird unsexy things. i was you know When you’re at the National Association of Student Affairs Professionals Conference and the EDUCAUSE Higher Ed CIOs Conference, you know um um I wasn’t doing machine learning and AI and all the cool sexy things. I like getting into boring, unsexy, ah really complex, heavy industries um that have a lack of institutional technology where you can kind of refresh it.

Alexander Jekowsky: and bring something different. and That’s always what’s been interesting to me is to get deep and to solve problems ah in those kinds of businesses. So I thought this may be something similar. You know, it can scratch, it check the box of of that small business, the creativity that I can run from that perspective, but I can get really deep in something I don’t know anything about. That seems really interesting.

Alex JekowskyUh, so that’s, you know, I went to the golden state chapter gala at, uh, for the coin launcher association in the Bay area. yeah I went into as many stores as I could find work on the weekends and locations, talk to operators, really get to know the industry. And that’s when I started to just fall in love with the business, with the margin profile, with the the economics, as well as I think the kind of profile of asset it would have been for me from an investment standpoint. So was like okay I realized that most many stores are multi-store are owned by multi-store owners. That’s a very popular thing in the industry. So I went to look at buying two locations. And before I i pulled the trigger, I was like, OK, how would I run this?

Alex JekowskyYou know, i is there a toast in laundry? Is there a mind body or ah a gloss genius or a squire or a square for my machines? Like, how do I run this thing if I don’t want to do coins and stare at a security camera to know what’s actually happening in in in my store? And that’s the deeper I got the more I realized how is this one of the largest and most stable verticals on Main Street?

Alex Jekowskyand have no venture-backed institutional technology companies focused in this space. And so that started to get me even more and interested and realized maybe instead of buying stores should build for them. And ah my co-founder and our chief product officer today, he had sold his company a year before I sold mine and I started talking to him about this concept and he had a background in building SMB tech for a different vertical um in in the interior design space and started thinking, okay,

Alex Jekowsky: Maybe we can actually build something here and not just buy these stores. And that’s what led us to, to, to start sense and really launch it in 2021, despite doing a ton of work in the industry before that to understand it, but really launched the product after raising our seed round.

Alex Jekowsky: ah with Bessemer in January of 2021, to go after building a real operating system, an all in one business in a box, however you want to frame it, to help launchment owners kind of grow, manage and understand their business. And we were going to start with the point of sale, because that’s what I found getting into the industry that the full service element, particularly as we were building the business during COVID,

Alex Jekowsky: ah full service element of laundry where you bring your laundry and they do it for you was the fastest growing side. So we knew we wanted to build this kind of all in one option. And we had to think of like, what is the way we can start to penetrate this industry when we launched the business. And that’s kind of how I fell into it, which is pretty similar to how many other ah laundromat owners today have gotten into the industry. They saw P and&L, they bought a strip mall that had a laundromat in it. They heard laundromats were great investments and got deeper in it. ah it’s It’s an amazing business because it’s usually not something that you have a passion for. Like you might love styling hair and physical fitness and and coffee and things like that. So you’ll open a business based around your passion and interest. You don’t get into laundry because you love garment care and fashion. You generally do it because you love money and it’s an investment. ah So it’s it’s a pretty typical story, I’d say, in this space.

Alejandro Cremades: So for the people that are listening to get it, what ended up being the business model of sense? How do you guys make money?

Alex Jekowsky: We make money, it’s a really classic vertical SaaS play, right? we We know that if we can build great product, we can charge a monthly subscription for it. And if we can manage and process the payments in a better, more transparent ah way for operators, we can charge a transaction fee ah that should be you know as affordable as we can make it for and for an operator. ah So we take ah you know in general or something like $299 a month, we have a 4% transaction fee, and that’s the core unit economics for us.

Alex Jekowsky: at the at the entry point of our business, right? As we focused on building that all-in-one solution ah with point of sale, right? If I take a step back, if you think about how a business makes money in in in the laundromat space, you’ve got about four revenue streams, right? Your self-serve business where somebody does it themselves on the machines, where that’s primarily still today, you know, based with coin. You literally are putting coins in ah in washing machines.

Alex Jekowsky: ah Because you know these machines are built to last 20 plus years, manufacturers aren’t building payment technology in these real, you know pushing they’re they’re focused on pushing steel, not building technology into their commercial laundry equipment from the payment standpoint. Then you have wash and fold, over-the-counter sales. So it could be products like detergent and laundry bags, you bring laundry, you pay per pound, and the laundromat will do it for you, dry cleaning, et cetera, would all fall into that over-the-counter service-based revenue.

Alex Jekowsky: Then you have pickup and delivery laundry, right? Which is the laundromat comes and actually picks it up and delivers it back, which is a nuance in any other vertical, right? Usually it’s a delivery from a merchant to a customer. In this case, it’s a pickup from a customer arrives at the merchant gets processed and, and, and cleaned and then goes back to the customer. And so that two way logistics actually presents huge challenge for an operator to leverage the gig economy and other things like that, that we started to pioneer in this space, but historically.

Alex Jekowsky: you wanted to pick them to deliver, you gotta buy vans, hire drivers, et cetera. And then you have commercial laundry, right? So think of the coffee shop, the the massage parlor, the nail salon, the the gym, the hotel, the laboratory, the the list goes on of all the linens, towels, uniforms, et cetera, that need to get cleaned, you know, potentially daily. And so with those four revenue streams, we knew if we could build a real operating system and payment platform,

Alex Jekowsky: to help these business owners grow, manage, and understand, we can charge a SaaS fee, take the payment, and then once we do that, what more can we do to help the business owner? So it’s it’s a SaaS and payments business, but over time, we actually developed a hardware component where we convert coin-operated laundry equipment to pay-by-card, pay-by-phone, pay-by-stored-value loyalty cards, um which can accept cash, EBT, credit and debit, etc.

Alex Jekowsky: because we wanted to support that. We built commercial invoicing management systems. We built online ordering tools, fleet management tools. The list goes on ah in order to really power that business. And once we can power that business, what can we do to empower them and help them grow? And those are all the amazing features and functionality that we continue to build and why we’ve raised the money we have and why we have the team that we have because the job is never finished. And it’s kind of our responsibility as I think the leading technology company in this industry to to focus on ways that we can drive that business forward, where we can continue to grow our incremental revenue on a per location basis, but we’re delivering an outsized rate of return for our customers.

Alejandro Cremades: so Talk to us then about fundraising, because you were alluding to it day earlier. and I know that you guys got a head start you know and with Seed, then going into Series A. It didn’t pass too long. so How much capital have you guys raised in total, and what has been the the journey of going through the motions there?

Alex Jekowsky: We raised – yeah, I mean, it’s it’s definitely a an atypical path for for how quick we’ve grown and how much capital we’ve raised in a relatively short amount of time. But we raised almost $80 million dollars in equity at this point.

Alex Jekowsky: ah and You know, we have gone through two acquisitions which which cost capital, right? So that’s a a function of of why we raise money. but But the real bulk of the capital we’ve raised has gone towards product development in order to build all the things that I just mentioned. Like it sounds great.

Alex Jekowsky: Uh, in, you know, to be an all in one solution and to build innovative products and to do these things. But when you’re, when you’re building a, a a product as wide and large as we’ve built in such a short amount of time, which is in my view, what, what is demanded by this industry in order to build the kind of company we want to build.

Alex Jekowsky: If we wanted to build just a simple POS business, I wouldn’t have raised any money and I would have just built kind of a a lifestyle business on point of sale. It’s not a big enough industry to just win on point of sale. To really deliver value to an operator, to get them to buy something, for them to switch from pen and paper or legacy tools, you got to deliver something better. Because pen and paper, yes, it sucks, but it’s fast.

Alex Jekowsky: right And it doesn’t go down when Wi-Fi goes out and all these other things. You got to deliver you actually got to deliver something ah meaningfully better than an existing process because people bought laundromats because they really can have 30% cash flow margins like or more. And so if you’re going to say, I’m going to give you something better than your 30% margins, you have to deliver on that.

Alex Jekowsky: and And so that’s you know a function of why we’ve raised the capital. We raised a seed and a seed two round. um So we’d raised $10 million dollars at that point in I think June of 2021, ended up raising our Series A in December of 2021, January of 2022.

Alex Jekowsky: ah so you know In 2022, in just a year from existing, we had raised $37.5 million, dollars but we did no press. We didn’t want anybody to know about this because all of our focus was take capital, reinvest it in the business.

Alex Jekowsky: grow our product line and focus on delivering the best product for our customers. we don’t I don’t want anybody to know about our business. We have no ambition other than laundromat owners and garment care ah professionals knowing about us. We didn’t want anybody to know because I also thought this is one of the best key kept secrets in vertical SaaS. We didn’t want to inspire competition um when there’s access to capital out there and ah in a booming market of 2021. We weren’t trying to inspire folks to learn how incredible this industry was.

Alex Jekowsky: ah And over 2022, we grew our business, we tripled our business um in 2022 and things were we really moving well. Of course, during that time, we had some of the worst moments where we had to rebuild our entire product and I’ll go into into those stories maybe ah maybe later on. but Heading into 2023, going through the headwinds that we experienced, a lot of what I start to think about is how do we de-risk our asset in the pro you know and in terms of the profile of our asset and the from our investors? How do I de-risk our asset? How do I de-risk our business? How do I de-risk our own execution?

Alex Jekowsky: um because that’s really our biggest risk in terms of what’s going to make sense, you know really grow in the level in which it can. um So how do we how do we you know de-risk it as much as possible while also accelerating our growth and accelerating our product development at the same time? And that’s where M and&A becomes interesting from my perspective. It has to be a perfect formula for it to go as well as it’s gone for us. um But that’s what’s kind of led us into M and&A and additional financing where we closed our Series B and announced it in August.

Alex Jekowsky: um was this concept of and this thesis of de-risk to business accelerate growth um without kind of shifting focus or you know taking and leveraging ourselves too much. And so that’s what led us to our $40 million dollars Series B ah and that’s kind of the the financing history of the business.

Alejandro Cremades: And what about the thesis of M&A that you guys have used here? you know Walk us through that as well.

Alex Jekowsky: Yeah, I mean, like I said, that the the first thing is, does it de-risk our own execution? And does it accelerate an existing roadmap of an existing business unit that we have? We have, I consider the best product in the industry with the best product team, the best R and&D team and the most momentum. So we don’t need to buy, we don’t do bolt-on acquisitions, we don’t ah buy business units and buy products and buy go-to-market ah new go-to-market concepts that we have not done before. For us to buy a business, we have to know it. It has to be where I don’t become dependent on the business that we buy. It has to be purely accretive and an add-on to an existing play we have going. So while building our own hardware business was a real challenge and hugh you know incredibly ah cost-intensive,

Alex Jekowsky: It enabled us by having a business unit of hardware internally to buy a hardware business and roll that into our existing operations. And by basically a product that we were about to go on and build, but by a company that was doing it so much better, right? And we knew that our core function of our business is SaaS and payments. The the company we bought was really not focused on the payments area. We knew that was an area that could be hugely accretive if we could move that onto our rails, move that into our infrastructure.

Alex Jekowsky: ah So it needs to de-risk and accelerate. It needs to be something we know really well. when when On face value, if it checks those two boxes, or maybe three, I guess, then it’s about the relationship with the team and the company. Do we align culturally um from a mission basis? It doesn’t matter how great a product is. It doesn’t matter how great the cash flows are. It doesn’t matter any of that. If we don’t align align in the vision ah for what we’re both trying to accomplish as separate businesses and together, nothing flies.

Alex Jekowsky: ah we I have to rely that they’re not here for just an earn out and just all that. they They continue on with Sense because we have a shared vision that we know together we can execute better and faster for our customers. ah the company we Any company we buy has to have a real personal responsibility and relationship with their customers and care very deeply about their experience. So the the cultural element becomes huge for us.

Alex Jekowsky: ah And then from there, it’s it’s it’s synergies and how do we underwrite it? And and does the math make sense for us? Because we don’t need to buy any company. We don’t need to do anything to succeed on our own. But if I can lower our risk and accelerate our path to building a real generational business, I think we can build here. ah that’s All of that together becomes a really interesting story. And You also take some dislocation in the market ah in the public markets, which can be really accretive and present a lot of opportunities if a company is in enough of a defensible and strong state, um which we what we were fortunate to be.

Alejandro Cremades: Let’s double-click on on Vision here. so Imagine that you were to go to sleep tonight, Alex, and you wake up in a world where the vision of sense is fully realized. What does that world look like?

Alex Jekowsky: Well, you know our our dream I’d say it’s the dream comes from what we can deliver to businesses and what we want the industry to look like. I believe that everybody should be sending out their laundry and that the local laundromat and dry cleaner, garment care repair business is a critical function of Main Street.

Alex Jekowsky: It serves the upmarket people that want white glove pickup and delivery, everything perfectly folded with a lavender spritz at the end. And it serves the lowest of income customer who’s going to a laundromat, paying with a welfare card and doing laundry on behalf of their family of five, where sometimes they’re deciding, am I going to have clean clothes or food on the table?

Alex Jekowsky: You know, the actual, a lot of people that, you know, we sit here in our tech companies with our raising, you know, nearly a hundred million dollars and everything sounds really great, but you realize the end user of who you’re serving is most of America.

Alex Jekowsky: across the board. And so if we can help elevate the experience of what a laundromat is, what a garment care business is through accessible technology, through infrastructure that enables great operators to continue to scale to offer services to a whole wide range of customers. Our dream is that everybody is visiting a… lot Everybody is sending out their laundry, visiting a laundromat and having the best possible experience, getting the best rate of return for the service that they’re purchasing, and that business owners, particularly great business owners doing right with their communities, are able to scale and deliver good ROIs. right Great operators can get into this space if they can make it economically sound and technology can help them

Alex Jekowsky: ah do just that in scale. So it’s it’s so what we can hopefully do. And even if it’s a 1% impact on what we can do for a business owner to deliver a better experience to Main Street, i that’s that’s a huge vision for us. And also, you know there’s there are labor challenges.

Alex Jekowsky: Small business owners have a real tough time maintaining labor. And so how do you make the experience of working at a small business better? That’s better for the overall macro economy when you can retain labor and you can justify paying the higher costs of labor because of the rate of return.

Alex Jekowsky: and retention and loyalty that the labor will deliver back. And so how can technology and companies like us play a role in that? So it’s the consumer side of what we can do to create a better laundry day experience. I have yet to meet many people, there are definitely some that don’t mind doing laundry, but the vast majority of people hate laundry day. And if we can make an element of your life like something that you don’t hate as much ah while elevating Main Street, helping great operators continue to scale and make the employees at those stores lives better. That would be our dream realized and really have laundry day in America powered by the local business. That’s, that’s the dream on our side.

Alejandro Cremades: I love it. So Alex, a quick question here. If I yeah was to put you into a time machine and I bring you back in time, you know, maybe to 2014, now when you were thinking about starting something there and you were able to have a chat with your younger self and give that younger self one piece of advice before launching a business, what would that be and why, given what you know now?

Alex Jekowsky: I would say, I think it’s, it’s it I’ll give it a two parter because they they really go hand in hand. One is, i you know, there’s this concept, I remember Alex Ohanian ah said this quote i when I went at her and heard him speak a couple of years ago.

Alex Jekowsky: of this concept of of hustle porn where, ah you know, you love to show how hard you’re working on Snapchat and Instagram and this, and it became much more about the concept of working hard than the thing you were actually working hard on. And when I started my first company, I love to lock myself away in an office.

Alex Jekowsky: and you know post on Snapchat that I was at there at 11.55 PM and how hard I was working and all this nonsense, when in reality, one, there’s rate of diminishing returns. True. ah But the the the love of working versus the love of quality work, I think would be the first thing where Uh, at sense, I’ve never had a more, uh, you know, incredibly stressful and some of the worst days of my life and all of those things. That’s, that’s, that holds true. But, uh, a work-life balance where the quality of the work and the time spent on the work don’t necessarily mix. There are some days where you’re working, you know, 20 hours in a day and some that you work in the normal nine or 10, but the, the,

Alex Jekowsky: The concept is focusing not just on the vanity of of working hard, but the love for what you do and putting your your wellbeing and your mental health alongside the quality of your work. Now, that’s more of a that’s a luxury to be able to say that. We’ve raised a lot of money. We have a lot of resources. i I do see that, but I found that even in our earliest days, when I prioritized my own mental and physical health and wellbeing, the exponential Exponential rate of return I was getting in the quality of the work that I was able to deliver the way I could think.

Alex Jekowsky: ah you know, I think enabled a lot of faster growth and and and got me working in the right areas a lot faster. So I think the advice I give to myself is one, you know, find that balance and and and care about doing great work, not a lot of work um unnecessarily, work faster, work work smarter, not harder, but that pairs with, I think, ah continuing to not try to find a way out of the pain. I think that, ah you know, there’s,

Alex Jekowsky: the The CEO of Nvidia gave this great quote at at Stanford great this great talk at Stanford when they were asking about, you know, what’s the advice you would give to Stanford MBA students, and I’m paraphrasing terribly but basically the concept was success.

Alex Jekowsky: i you know can’t live without Essentially, ah resiliency. And the way that you build resilience resiliency is through immense suffering and pain. And that suffering and pain is a huge part. I’ve gone through more terrible months and weeks and days and everything at Sense than I ever have in anything. um But the ability to get punched in the face every single day and get back up is probably the only difference between ah you know a great founder with a great idea and a great founder whose idea is struggling is, can you endure the pain?

Alex Jekowsky: and And I think that is, i it’s that balance, working really smart and working on um quality work. But that doesn’t mean that you’re ignoring or or avoiding the painful experiences and getting just punched in the face and kicked in the nuts and everything you can imagine. um Because that resiliency, if you don’t actively welcome that, I think we’ll

Alex Jekowsky: I think we’ll well well will will help you fail much faster. And I think I learned that towards the end of my business, of my last business where that pain and resiliency compartmentalize those feelings, put that feeling to work in good quality work and don’t just work late nights because it seems sexy to do. and ah But when then it really gets hard and you have to focus on quality, you run away from it.

Alejandro Cremades: I love it. So Alex, for the people that are listening that would love to reach out and say hi, what is the best way for them to do so?

Alex Jekowsky: Uh, you know, LinkedIn is great. Uh, always, uh, always try to look at, uh, at my inbox there and Alex at try sense.com. Uh, anybody who’s interested in get investing in laundromats or getting into the industry, or I always love swapping notes with, uh, people that are better and smarter than me, which is most. And so, uh, any opportunities to do that, uh, always welcome it. So Alex at try sense on LinkedIn. Uh, and we’d love to hear from you.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, hey, Alex. Well, thank you so much for being on The Dealmaker Show. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us today.

Alexander Jekowsky: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun.

*****

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