Neil Patel

I hope you enjoy reading this blog post.

If you want help with your fundraising or acquisition, just book a call click here.

Roman Pedan is the cofounder and CEO of Kasa Living which is a hospitality company that offers flexible accommodations for business and leisure travelers. The company has raised over $55 million from top tier investors including BoxGroup, Founder Collective, Ribbit Capital, NextGen Venture Partners, Touchdown Ventures, RET Ventures, and FirstMark Capital to name a few. 

In this episode, you will learn:

  • The sprint to prove the concept of Kasa
  • How to survive a pandemic crisis
  • How to thrive through trying times
  • How to balance your time as a leader


SUBSCRIBE ON:

For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) that I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash.

Detail page image

*FREE DOWNLOAD*

The Ultimate Guide To Pitch Decks

Moreover, I also provided a commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400 million (see it here).

Remember to unlock for free the pitch deck template that is being used by founders around the world to raise millions below.

About Roman Pedan:

Roman Pedan founded Kasa Living, Inc. in August 2016. He brings a unique blend of real estate, hospitality, and technology experience to the business that makes him well-positioned to lead it into the future.

Over his career, Roman Pedan was part of 2-3 person teams that purchased $1.2bn of hotel assets across the US. He was involved in every hotel transaction that KKR closed during his tenure. Hotel assets that have had liquidity events (all but 3) have generated a >2.5x equity multiple.

Connect with Roman Pedan:

 

* * *

FULL TRANSCRIPTION OF THE INTERVIEW:

Alejandro: Alrighty. Hello everyone, and welcome to the DealMakers show. Today we have quite an amazing story, a story of how someone comes here to the U.S. and is definitely making it happen and coming quite young. I think that we’re going to get into the details. So, without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today. Roman Pedan, welcome to the show. 

Roman Pedan: It’s a pleasure to be here, Alejandro. Thank you.

Alejandro: So, born in the Ukraine, but a few years there, and then it was time to come here and come to the U.S. I know that was a little bit bumpy, so how was that for you. Obviously, you were young, but for the family as well?

Roman Pedan: Yeah. I was very young when my parents took a risky and impactful decision to leave the Soviet Union and venture out to try to make it to America. They took a risk to go to a country that they didn’t know the language, that they had few friends in, and solely for the pursuit of the opportunity for myself and my older brother. That journey involved their having to leave everything behind. It was a treacherous journey from Ukraine to Moscow, where the customs agent took most of our things. There was a period of time when my family was homeless in a town outside of Rome because there were too many refugees, like ourselves, looking to get close to the U.S. Consulate in the hopes of gaining entry into the U.S. Plus, they had an immense amount of fortitude and determination, and finally, when we were granted entry into the U.S. to the north shore of Boston and learning English, finding jobs, retraining from their original professions to the professions that could have helped make ends meet in the U.S., all in the service of helping my brother and me have the opportunities that we have today. The reason that story matters so much to me is because it is a large reason for most of the opportunities that I have and the reason I’m even having this conversation with you, Alejandro. So, it’s a meaningful way to remember that many of the things that give us opportunities are outside of our control.

Alejandro: Oh, absolutely. One thing I want to ask you here is because I’m sure that face for your family, for your parents, obviously so many struggles to be able to come here to the U.S. I’m sure there was a before and an after and I’m sure that for them, that had a really big impact. And I’m sure that for you, it really influenced who you are today and how you look at things. So, how would you say that has made you who you are and perhaps impacted your entrepreneurial drive?

Roman Pedan: Yeah, and for context, the country we were born in, the Soviet Union, wasn’t a place that fostered entrepreneurship because it was a communist state. The circumstances in which my family was living were very trying. My father is a trained physicist. He has a Ph.D. in Physics. My mother has a Russian version of an MBA, and despite those credentials and that education, we were living in one apartment with eight families and one bathroom. In America, despite the fact they had to learn a new language and retrain – my father became a statistician – they were able to better provide for my brother and me in terms of education, housing, and opportunities as it related to college and opportunities thereafter. It has impacted me in a variety of ways. 1) To recognize how lucky we are to have the opportunities that are available in a country like the United States. 2) To recognize the value of resources and using the time and money we have in honor of the sacrifices that people before us took to give us those opportunities, and the fact that they’re heavy. 3) The third is the reality of uncertainly in the world. Before the Soviet Union existed, there was a more capitalistic society in Russia, and amid communism, a lot of assets were taken from people who previously were very secure in them. So, the realization that nothing is certain and that security is also not always available even in the most secure times is one that helps me build a company and also live my life with a healthy sense of paranoia and focus on reducing a risk constantly.

Alejandro: Absolutely. In this case, for you, you grew up in Boston, and definitely, very early on, you got into programming. What was that encounter with programming? How did you get into it?

Roman Pedan: Ukraine has a rich engineering culture, and it might as well be in the constitution that you’re required to study some form of engineering or science growing up. When I was four years old, my family may have not been in Ukraine, but that culture stuck with us. One of the earliest gifts that I was given was a small computer. This was a meaningful investment for my family to purchase this computer for me. It was a computer that had a very simple programming language, BASIC and QuickBASIC and a manual on how to use it. I found it endlessly fascinating that I could write a few lines of code and then build something that the computer would act on forever. It was one action of building that would cause a forever reaction of usability. That was extremely fun and exciting – empower that when you’re four or five or six years old, you rarely have in terms of economy and impact. I poured a lot of energy into learning how to advance that skill. I started with BASIC and QuickBASIC, then graduated to Visual Basic and eventually Java. The core fuel for me was the ability to create and influence a device that then could allow others to have a feature or product that they could otherwise not have. It was a much more simple product back then than what I aspire to and am building today, but still, that feeling of creation was what drove me.

Alejandro: Let’s fast-forward a little bit because I would say that created this influence, that drive, and that passion around engineering, and that’s definitely what pushed you to get into Penn. I’m sure that your parents were super proud that you were able to make it into one of the best universities in the world.

Roman Pedan: Yeah. It was a really exciting moment when I pressed the button to see that I was accepted to the University. Penn really stood out because it had that dual focus on both business and engineering, on creation, and then funneling that creation into a product that can serve others. I was fortunate to be able to study at Penn in computer science and then in engineering, finance, and real estate within the Wharton School. And as important as the curriculum, the people there were full of entrepreneurial zeal and excitement about learning and then deploying that learning into practical ways. It was a very proud moment for my family, and I was very honored to be able to be part of the ecosystem and with those kinds of peers.

Alejandro: And you even got your first entrepreneurial idea there that you executed. What was this company, Book.ly, about? 

Roman Pedan: My senior year, we had to do a senior project for the computer science program. From my freshmen to junior year, I’ve always been frustrated by the amount of time and money it took to buy textbooks. I realized others had that issue as well. I was spending $1,200 a semester on books. That happened to be the average amount that students nationwide had to spend on books, and that was rising at a rate far faster than inflation – about 10% a year. What I noticed was, the bookstore at the school often sold the same books for two times the price than one could buy it online, whether on Amazon or eBay, etc. My brother and I built a product called Book.ly that allowed students to compare the price of their textbooks against other places that those same textbooks were sold and find a price that was often at least 60% cheaper than in their bookstores. Book.ly would take a 5% to 10% commission off every sale, and students would save 60% on their books, so anywhere between $500 and $700 per semester, a meaningful amount of money that they would save.

Alejandro: Then, in this case, what was your lesson learned after this experience?

Roman Pedan: I ended up not pursuing Book.ly as a full-time career. We had an offer from a venture firm in Boston. Actually, at the time, I didn’t know what venture was, and we had an unsolicited inbound from a venture firm based in Boston asking if we wanted to continue pursuing this, and they gave us an offer to fund the company. And it was a very difficult decision to not pursue the venture and instead go elsewhere. The reason I didn’t pursue it was because I felt that eBooks were going to solve the problem we were solving over the long run. The second was, I had a passion for saving students money, but I didn’t have a passion for textbooks themselves. I recognized that I needed to be working on something that I had an intrinsic excitement and passion about to really push it and be in it for the long run, in terms of building a business and a really impactful product. One of the lessons was, I should try to deeply understand what has impact and also what combines that impact with the passion that I fervently hold.

Alejandro: Let’s talk about your next rodeo because next after this, you did a little bit of private equity first in Chicago and then joining KKR, one of the best private equity firms out there with the likes of Blackstone and so forth. I’m sure this was a very interesting segue into you doing your MBA and then actually going full at it as an entrepreneur. I’m sure that the experience of being on the investment side shaped your view more, and I’m sure that it taught you a few lessons in terms of how to execute and how to operate a business. What can you share with us as to what was that background or fundamental building block that it gave you being on the investment side?

Roman Pedan: I was very fortunate to be among incredibly talented, passionate, capable, and determined team members both at Walton Street Capital in Chicago and KKR in New York. Walton Street attracted me out of Penn because it was such an entrepreneurial place. It was a small number of investment professionals who were deploying billions of dollars of capital in an industry that I loved, real estate, by buying either real estate companies or assets like hotels, apartments, industrial buildings, warehouses, and shopping malls, among others. I was fueled by the amount of responsibility that, as a young investment professional, we were given. One of my formative memories was helping Walton Street evaluate whether opening an office in Brazil right as Brazil was gaining momentum in 2011 and 2012 was a good idea. The lessons I learned both in that experience and other investment experiences at Walton Street was around rigor in analysis, understanding comprehensively the business at a micro-level, but also the macro factors that impact the business. But, as importantly, the lessons I learned were around risk and not just about understanding risk. What kind of risk is a building or a business exposed to? But thinking through how to reduce risks with every step that a business or physical real estate investment takes. Most of our investments had a thesis on how we were going to improve a company or a property, whether it be redeveloping it or improving the company’s efficiencies, but also how we’re going to reduce risk over time. That systemic approach to reducing risk really is a lesson that I have carried today toward building the company, Kasa.

Alejandro: So, why Stanford? It seemed that here you were now collecting the badges of honor. I’m sure that your parents just couldn’t believe what they were watching as one of their sons just getting in one of the greatest schools, and then into even another amazing school. What was the segue? Why an MBA at this point?

Roman Pedan: Yeah, maybe I can take you back to leaving Walton Street Capital to joining KKR because the reasons I joined KKR were also some of the reasons why I was so excited about Stanford. KKR, this amazing institution, was just creating its real estate theme when I joined as its seventh member. Nine months before I joined, that team didn’t exist. I was excited to help build a business within an institution alongside other professionals who had deep experience building businesses in their past. I saw this as an opportunity to learn from the best in how to scale a business. And I saw that happen in spades. I joined the team as the seventh member, and over a period of three years, we grew the team to almost 100 people globally. Then we went from almost no investments, one shopping mall in Chicago, to nearly $10 billion of assets under management. The experience, the thrill, and the ability to contribute to that growth was a real honor and something that I wanted to learn from the best about but then hope upon joining that I’d be able to use those learnings to help, again, build myself. As KKR was transitioning from this amazing growth phase from a startup to a more stable real estate business, it felt like the right time to go to a place like Stanford that so much fostered entrepreneurship and the spirit of building to try to take those learnings and apply them in a venture of my own.

Alejandro: So, let’s talk about Stanford because Stanford is like the Holy Grail of entrepreneurship. Here, you land in Stanford. You, obviously, had that entrepreneurial spirit, and it was seated with the way that your family had come to the U.S. and really created a future for themselves. Then, on the way that you continue to go, you had already done your first small rodeo in college. But tell us about that moment where you realize that there is something that you want to do. You already had some exposure in the travel space and with your stints with putting your stuff on Airbnb and things like that. But how did you really incubate this idea, which is your recent company, and how did you go about bringing it to life because it was pretty much at the time that you were in Stanford?

Must Read: Nick Hazell On Raising $100 Million To Create Plant-Based Meat That Tastes Like The Real Thing

Roman Pedan: Yeah. I started Kasa between my first and second year at Stanford. What Kasa does is democratize travel in many ways. It offers guests a place to stay that is well priced, in great locations, and is trustworthy. Think of us as the best of Airbnb and hotels. From Airbnb, we take the attractive prices that Airbnb offers and the great locations and ample space, but we are the host versus Airbnb, where there are 5 million different hosts. So, we can offer and deliver trust. The initial idea actually came from living in New York, working at KKR, and Airbnb being an apartment in New York City. I was living this cognitive dissonance where we were deploying capital – quite a bit of capital, billions of dollars to buy hotels that stood for the old way that people traveled. And at the same time, I was hosting and staying in Airbnb’s myself and noticing that increasingly people wanted a different experience in their travel. It was hard to mesh the fact that we were spending so much time on something that seemed like it wasn’t the wave of the future. It seemed like the textbooks that I was focused on in the past, and the new way was driving more and more growth and more and more changes in travel and yet was missing a key component, which was reliability and trust on the Airbnb side. That was the core idea behind starting Kasa. I started the company with that core idea between my first and second years. My essay into Stanford was actually, “I want to innovate in real estate and combine my love for technology and my love for real estate. So I started out with a broad range of companies and ideas involving hospitality and real estate, and technology in combination. The summer that I started, I actually had an internship at a company called Juniper Square, which at the time had three people. Now, I think they raised a Series B which is valued and has appreciated at an incredible amount. They had an amazing team and an amazing product, and I found myself not being drawn toward what they were doing as much as the idea that I had felt so strongly about while Airbnb being my apartment. In the initial stages for Kasa was to try it. Let’s see if this will actually work. Initially, that meant going out to apartment owners in the Bay Area and asking if we could run a small hotel in their apartment building. We got an immense number of noes from the apartment community, so much so that we had to change our pitch. Finally, one apartment owner, a large owner in the Bay, said, “Yes. We have a new development in the Peninsula of the Bay Area where we can give you four apartment units that you can run your professional hospitality operation in. But because you’re new, we need you to do this extremely quickly.” They said, “On Tuesday, you can do this. Thursday will be a start of your agreement, and Sunday, you’ll have first guests.” Those first days of getting the apartments ready without having much of a plan in terms of how to furnish those apartments or what even to put in them involved a 2:00 am scramble to find a truck on Craigs List that could go to ITS and find furniture that we could deploy into the apartments, a credit line from JPMorgan Chase and credit cards that they gave me that financed that furniture, which was personally guaranteed by me. Then, three days of sleeping on the floor of the apartment unit that we were building because we didn’t yet have beds set up while trying to set up AT&T internet and insurance and get all the furniture ready. We had guests to check-in in all first four apartments on that Sunday, and they had no idea of the chaos that came before, just an hour before their check-in. But they had a great experience in those first units. Those stays were profitable, and that led us to have confidence in the initial four units and, in some ways, post the NBP for Kasa that we embark on. 

Alejandro: What were the early days of Kasa like?

Roman Pedan: We had the four initial units. We had the initial guests that stayed with us. They had a great experience, and they left us amazing feedback and good reviews. That led to more guests, and those next guests are profitable, too. We started to reinvest those profits into growing the business. We started with four apartments, and we grew to 18 apartments. Then we grew to 32, all in the Bay Area. At the time, I was still in my second year at Stanford. We were building this without raising outside funds. So, we didn’t have the budget to hire a 24/7 customer service team. That meant that if you were staying in a Kasa and called our number, you were reaching my cell phone, and I would duck out of class and help you check-in or answer your questions. At 32 hotel rooms, it became quite burdensome. But it was also very important because by living in those details, the details of the guests, I understood what parts of our experience resonated and what parts did not. After graduating, we continued to grow organically. We made a conscious decision that we wouldn’t raise money until we had answered core assumptions behind the business and remove important risks around product/market fit and the economic model, and the ability to grow. We saw the number of units grow from 32 to 65 to nearly 100. One day, we woke up, and we had operations in three states: Illinois, Texas, and California with a team of almost 20. We hadn’t raised money. We were, fortunately, able to pay down the large credit card debt that we initially incurred, and we had to make a choice as to what our next steps were around raising capital and growing the business.

Alejandro: Let’s talk about raising capital because you guys have raised quite a bit of capital for the business. At what point do you decide, “Let’s take some money now.” Because it took you a little bit before you actually decided to make the move and get some outsiders to come in and invest, so what would you say prompted that? 

Roman Pedan: Alejandro, I really admire the legacy of entrepreneurs in America who started their businesses without raising capital for a very long time. I think Sam Walton when he grew Walmart, or Phil Knight when he grew Nike, and many others in the 50s, 60s, 70s, who built their businesses without raising significant outside capital. There’s something elegant and self-sustaining about building a business that doesn’t require outside capital initially for it to exist. We took a focused approach to building the business in that way up to a point. At about 100 units spread across nine buildings in eight cities, we realized that our operation needed deep investment in technology in order to continue to grow. We were operating a hotel that never existed before. Our hotel had 100 rooms spread across nine different buildings in eight different cities. Typically, a hotel has 300 rooms in one city and 300 staff that operated it. We had only 15 to 20 people operating 100 rooms. So the software system and the operating system that existed on the market were not well-suited for the type of operation that we were building, and that type of operation was very poor to our competitive advantage and our ability to sustain that advantage over time. In order to build that system, we’d need to pull up a hefty Cap X, a hefty amount of capital expenditure in order to deploy into the technology that allows us to operate hotels in a very different way than the systems that exist too. We raised a Series Seed in December 18 of about $6.3 million in order to build that technology, and we supplemented it with a Series A in December 2019 of about $20 million in order to continue building that system while growing our number of units and our operation over time.

Alejandro: So, quite a bit of money that you guys raised here. What is the total amount that you have raised to date?

Roman Pedan: We have raised about $55 million dollars to date.

Alejandro: $55 million. I know that for anyone, COVID has been a killer, especially for the travel industry. I know that in this case for you guys, it was very intense. You saw cancellations going from zero to 25%, revenue dropping by over 70%. Crazy, crazy times. I’m sure those were very dark times for you guys, so what kind of course-correction or things were you able to do to deal with this uncertainty?

Roman Pedan: Yeah, Alejandro. When we raised our Series A on December 19, I can promise you that a massive 100-year pandemic was not in any of our risks, nor in any of our pitch materials. So, when March hit only three months later, it was an incredibly, incredibly difficult time. Let me take you back to that. You alluded to it. We were looking at our occupancy numbers, and we saw them going from 70% to 60% down to 35%. Sitting in our shoes, we were tracking this by the hour, not knowing where the bottom will be. We saw our revenue drop, as you pointed out, by 75%. We had a term sheet from a debt provider pulled at the last moment that was going to deliver to us significant capital. We later found out it was pulled because they had funded a company in our sector that was close to going bankrupt and ultimately did. At that moment of intense uncertainty, we had to act quickly in order to both stabilize the business, but in the ideal, find opportunities in all of the mayhem. The first order of business was to stabilize things, and we did two main things: 1) We worked with our property partners, who are key stakeholders for us – the owners of the buildings that Kasa partners with and where we have units. We realigned incentives in our agreements with them. We thought going into these conversations that we’d be able to negotiate one or two agreements, maybe 5%, 10% of the agreements, and we were able to accomplish renegotiation of 90% of our agreements. That demonstrated the trust that we had built to that point with our property partners, as well as their belief in what we can deliver to them in terms of income and risk reduction over a long period of time. The second thing we did was on the marketing side. Previously, we had people who were road warriors, business travelers staying with us as a majority of our guests, traveling from anywhere between five to seven nights in their stays. We re-engineered our marketing efforts to attract longer stays, to attract essential workers and traveling nurses. We thought, as a result of those efforts, an average length of stay increased from 5 to 7 days to 15 to 20 days. We saw a different customer type with a reduction of business travelers and an increase in essential workers and families. Our occupancy, which had dropped all the way down to 35%, started climbing to 40%, 50%, 60%, and eventually got back to 70% very early on in May, and then has stayed at that level since then. That was Step 1: stabilize the business. The second step was there was a lot of turbulence in the hospitality and travel industry. We thought companies, in what was a very crowded field, start to have trouble, and in many cases, they ended up closing shop. We admired the entrepreneurs who were building those companies and were excited to be peers for them, so we, by no means, were glad to see that happen. But we also knew that on the other side, when those companies were going under, that the owners that those companies were partnered with would be left without an alternative for furnished inventory in their apartment buildings. So, we went out to owners, and in many cases, owners came to us as well. We said, “We can help you take what would be empty space that is hard to make any money on, and we can start operating in it. We saw significant growth in the number of units and the number of markets that we were open in. By the end of the year, our revenue had doubled year-on-year. Our number of markets had increased from at least 28 to 35 markets in the United States. We had nearly doubled the number of units we had open. So we went from this insane excitement about what a fundraising round of a Series A could be to the depths of crisis in March. Then through an intensity of work from our team and partnership from our partners, and a lot of effort to re-engineer our product, we started to see growth again in strength as the year drew to an end in 2020.

Alejandro: There are a lot of people listening now that they’re going to be encountering, eventually, a moment of uncertainty, a dark situation with the business. For you and this situation, I’m sure that it armed you with the experience of dealing with these types of situations, but then also, in the analysis and also in the way in which you developed a plan to face whatever you have in front of you. What have you learned from this experience, from these tough moments that you can share with the folks that are listening so that perhaps they can take a page out of it and implement it in their own journeys when they have to face one of those similar situations? Every business, eventually, is going to face the downs as well as the ups. So, when they’re looking at the downs, in this case, what did you learn?

Roman Pedan: In those situations, I think the best thing to do is throw out the normal life best practice playbook and instead focus only on the essential life-supporting functions for a business. For example, during that time, I took away some of the things that I normally do that are really good practice, like having one-on-ones with all direct reports that were prescheduled. Instead, we went to an ad hoc model where we meet multiple times per day but removed our prescheduled meetings. We had board meetings with our board nearly every single week, and in some cases, three or four times a week in order to align on direction. But as importantly, there was an enormous number of things that we said no to. One of those was the distraction of having to do too much in terms of reducing the costs of the company. We heard a lot of companies that were renegotiating every single contract that they had. We said we wouldn’t do that. Instead, we knew that 20% of our contracts represented 80% of our entire expense spend. So, anytime someone mentioned a contract that was outside of that 20%, we would refocus our energy on those 20. All of our efforts were aligned in driving forward the most impactful things on the expense side. For us, the agreements with our property partners were the most impactful thing. We avoided going through line-by-line every single expense. Instead, we focused on the most important. On the marketing side, we did the same. There were a thousand ideas that were thrown out on how we can ensure growth, and we took three of them and focused all of our energies on targeting specific folks who we thought would need cost more than ever in our new world and avoided and ignored everything else. Some of that meant ignoring things that were best practices in marketing or in organizations such as the one-on-ones that we now have brought back or in cost-reduction efforts where you want to make sure you seek all vendors eventually, but that focus was essential in a moment of crisis and saying no to things that were important, but perhaps not crucial and critical was a lesson that we would want to repeat going forward if we ever had that kind of crisis again.

Alejandro: Absolutely. One of the questions I typically ask the guests that come on the show that I’d like to ask you too is if you had the opportunity to go into a time machine – your journey is incredible, and all the things that you have experienced and also endured as an entrepreneur. If you could go back in time and have a chat with your younger self, with that younger Roman that is thinking about launching a business. Knowing what you know now, what would be that one piece of business advice that you would tell yourself and why before launching a company?

Roman Pedan: Perhaps I would go to Roman in 2018/2019 and whisper that there is going to be a massive pandemic in 2020 and to prepare for it as best as one can. If that’s an exceptional answer– [laughter]. In all seriousness, I think one of the pieces of advice that I think is a really good one that I’ve heard often, but that I disagree in many instances is trying to be as high-level as possible as a leader. So, delegating as much as is possible, looking at things at 1,000 feet rather than in the micro-level. I agree that it’s very important to create leverage in an organization and provide economy for leaders on the team, but I also think it’s important to complement that high-level view with a level of being in the details that is usually not prescribed by best practice. An example of that is a recent road trip that I did from San Francisco to Boston, where I stayed in Kasa’s along the journey at every stop. I stayed in Kasa’s, and during that trip, I actually had a few bad experiences checking into our own units. One of our core promises at Kasa is a seamless check-in experience and a clean room, a level of trust that you can’t get when there are 5 million different hosts in delivering hospitality and that you can promise at Kasa as the single host on the Kasa platform. On my trip, I had a bunch of problems with check-ins, which was quite disheartening, but as a result of those sets of issues, I started to dig into what was causing them. I realized that I was checking in every single time at night, often past midnight, always after 10:00 pm. We realized that there were certain changes that happened in our buildings that only occurred after 10:00 pm and, in some cases, in our systems, after midnight. So, that allowed us to diagnose a problem that, when looking at things at a high level, were very hard to see in the data unless you knew precisely where to look and what to look for because these problems only appeared in certain buildings and at certain times. By being in the details, we were able to discover those problems and solve them so that we can live and deliver on the promise of trustworthy check-ins and trustworthy stays. That was, for me, living in the details, but that lesson, I try to emphasize to our team where it’s important to complement being at a high-level was getting into the weeds, so you can provide texture and understanding to the data that you’re seeing. Often that texture allows you to look into the data and find the patterns that you’d otherwise not be able to find. So, often, best practice and the advice you’re given is, stay high-level, look at the data, but often getting into the details, experiencing the nitty-gritty of your product is really crucial to actually seeing systemic improvement in an organization.

Alejandro: That’s pretty profound, Roman. I’m sure that there are a lot of people listening now that are wondering how they can reach out and say high. What would you tell them?

Roman Pedan: I’d love to hear from you. My email is

ro***@ka**.com











Alejandro: Amazing. Roman, thank you so much for being on the DealMakers show today.

Roman Pedan: Alejandro, thank you very much. It’s an honor to be here. 

 

* * *

If you like the show, make sure that you hit that subscribe button. If you can leave a review as well, that would be fantastic. And if you got any value either from this episode or from the show itself, share it with a friend. Perhaps they will also appreciate it. Also, remember, if you need any help, whether it is with your fundraising efforts or with selling your business, you can reach me at

al*******@pa**************.com











.

 

Facebook Comments

Neil Patel

I hope you enjoy reading this blog post.

If you want help with your fundraising or acquisition, just book a call

Book a Call

Swipe Up To Get More Funding!

X

Want To Raise Millions?

Get the FREE bundle used by over 160,000 entrepreneurs showing you exactly what you need to do to get more funding.

We will address your fundraising challenges, investor appeal, and market opportunities.