YouSaid · the spoken record

Kyle Hill

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29
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2016-07-15
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2016-07-15
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1
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  1. “Going home is going to be the default option. And so you are going to see a lot more non-medical, non-clinical home care providers like Home Hero partnering with hospitals, delivering an alternative to going to a skilled nursing facility. Nobody wants to go to a skilled nursing facility. They are just mini hospitals. They suck. People don't want to be there. They want to age in place and home. And so I think you're going to see a lot more hospital and home care partnerships. And then even if you want to look even further five years plus, I see a reimbursement code for non-medical home care being created by Center for Medicare, Medicaid Services, CMS. I think that you are going to be able to reimburse for activities of daily living, which are considered historically been considered non-medical. You're going to start seeing care. And I want Home Hero to be kind of the trailblazers in that effort.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Well, I think we can't really talk about home hair without talking about legislation. I mean, there have been a lot of changes with the Affordable Care Act has really changed our healthcare industry and it's really what it did is it changed the way that hospitals are paid. And so instead of paying on a volume basis, the number of people that come through the hospital hospitals are now being paid based on the quality of care that they deliver to patients, readmission rates are hugely hugely important. So what that's done is it's created enormous opportunity for home here to partner with hospitals and create better options for patients after they leave the hospital. And so what we are doing is we are working with hospitals specifically. We're partnering with hospitals nationwide to help them find more cost effective post-acute options. And so what I see in the industry and in our role in that is that there is going to be less reliance on skilled nursing facilities and medical home health.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “God, I like Black Swan. Yeah, I thought it was such a fascinating book. Yeah, I can go for hours about it. It's the likelihood of a highly improbable event.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Of course. You know, I think it is important. You come out of it so much stronger and so much more united. Come February 1st or mid January. You feel so recharged and rejuvenated for being a part of that company. And, you know, it's not that we sit here and try to talk people out of working here. It's just you really want people that they're not here for the paycheck and they're not here because they have legacy and they've been here a long time. You want people that are truly engaged and motivated by your mission. And that's how we keep it fresh. And it's very valuable.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “In and put the resumes on the table that I would rehire every single one of my employees. And I feel that way now, and I want them to feel that way about Home Hero. And so we have on January everybody reapplies for their job and we go through an interview process again. And it's really important to think about like, is this actually the company that I would want to work for if I was not working here? And we think to ourselves, is this actually the employee that I would hire if they weren't an employee of Home Hero? And to go through that process, it's kind of awkward, but it's really, really valuable when you get out of it. So we do that every January.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “A couple ways. Well, first of all, we have all the value statements up on the walls, which we put them in every offer letter before someone accepts an offer. They have to read all of the value statements and know what they're signing up for. And then once a year we have everybody in the team actually grade themselves on each of the value statements and they send it to the entire team, the rest of the team. And so for example, one of ours is just challenge yourself to do the hard thing. And you realize success comes from replicating the work of others and doing what other people don't necessarily want to do. And so we say, all right, we'll grade yourself on that value statement. And you say, well, I give myself a B. Why? And they have to explain that. And then the other thing we would do is every January, I tell the company, I said, you know, it's very important that the 20, 20, 30 people that we have on our team, that they always have a chance to reapply for their job. And so in January, I want to know that if everybody today was fired and they all came.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I'm a design guy, so I like the best designs.com. It's a design site with just beautiful kick-ass looking sites, and I get a lot of inspiration there.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Just a matter of how, and we've also seen competitors in our space raise the large sums of money. And so I just know that we were on the right track. I think what is more dangerous is when you're really carving out a new market and no one's ever done it before, I think the Airbnb, even the Dog VKs, even Uber in the early days, and there was a little, you know, I think Airbnb was probably the biggest example where they're like, this could not work. This may not work. But I know that home care works. It is a big problem. We're just going to do it better. And I like building businesses like that. And that was part of the conversation when we go into VCs is you just have to have that confidence that you are solving a real problem. You're solving a big problem, and it's only going to become bigger. That way, even when you get kicked out of a room, an investment room, you still have that confidence that you're onto something. And I hold on to that very tight.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think one of the things that where I always felt protected with home heroes is that we are just solving such a big problem. I knew that we were in the right industry because this was, I mean, I'll give you some stats that just blew me away. I mean, 40% of adults are caring for a sick or elderly family member. Unpaid caregiving services is $470 billion a year, which is roughly equal to the value of Apple. And then our senior population is going to double by 2050. And so I talk a lot about, people talk about the silver tsunami, as they call it. It hasn't even really happened yet. The first baby boomer won't turn 80 for another 10 years. And so all this stuff, all these statistics are moving in the right direction. So I knew I was in a good industry. It was just a matter of, am I solving this problem in the right way? And the number of caregivers we have in our relative to the number of seniors is going to cut in half. So I know that we're solving a big problem. And I think it's just having confidence that your business will work.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Sometimes, most of the times, if they are in the early days, no in the early days you just don't care. You just send it. And worst case, they archive it. Now most of the people that we're sending that to is they've definitely opted in or they've requested it. So now I have to be a lot more careful with just spamming VCs. And I built much stronger relationships with them. So we've hired VCs on our team and we have ex-Cambi investors on our team. So I think we understand a lot better now really how to communicate properly with VCs.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Home here, just partner with Cedar Sinai Medical Center. We're now the preferred home care provider from Cedar Sinai. In case you haven't seen that, we are the first hospital to deploy care kit, Apple's care kit, into a hospital was through HomeHero. And so these are things that investors may want to know about, right? And so we send that information out on a kind of a monthly basis. And it makes it a lot easier come fundraising when you call them up and they're like, oh yeah, Kyle, of course. I've been getting your newsletters. I skim them occasionally and you're not a stranger to them as you would be if you just, it's been a year since you talked to them.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Mike and I have always done a really good job around the fundraising just because we have a lot of persistence. I do think it's important to really map out who you could potentially raise money from really, really early and get them on a, what I call a drip. One thing that Mike and I did even in the really early days, this is how I kept Mike Jones engaged with our last company, is we would send monthly newsletters out to all of our kind of investor network. And even if we weren't fundraising, it keeps them engaged in your story. And so you never want to go into an investor meeting and that be the first time that they've heard of your business, the first time they've met you, the first time they've heard anything about you. Because if they don't have a relative point to compare your progress to. So even right now, we send out kind of a monthly newsletter to anybody that we could potentially raise money from in the future just as a heads up.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And you go home and you damn better do your homework. And so there were a lot of those where Mike and I look at each other and we kind of laugh. It was like, yeah, we probably should know that. You know, what's your cost to acquire a caregiver? And we look at each other and we're like, I don't know. And they're like, you should probably know that. And I'd say, yeah, you're probably right. So it was just a lot of that.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Respect is really important to me, and I think that they need to understand that when I walk in that door, I'm putting my heart and soul into this business and it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with the business that I'm building, but you need to respect me. And that's something all my life that I've demanded. And I think I got that from everybody. Most people that I met. And again, I think you have to have tough skin. I mean, some, you know, chamoth, for example, they don't do a lot of hardware plays. And so if you go to him with the hardware business and he doesn't like it, don't get offended and say, oh, chamat's the worst person. It's just sometimes they might have gotten burned from it. They don't like the industry. They read something that scares them about the industry. Who knows, right? So I don't ever take it personal, but getting our ass kick does not mean you're yelling at me and you're making fun of my business. It's really that you're asking questions that I may not have a really good answer for. And it's okay to say, hey, you know what? I don't know that, but I'll get back to you on that.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Five years and our growth strategy. And so we just got kind of our butts kicked, and luckily they sent us to some folks that were kind of friendly and were just going to help us get to that point. And so by the time we actually met with Social Plus Capital in Shamath, we had about 10 investor meeting VC pitches in our bag already. So we just felt a lot more prepared and I felt a lot more confident. And Mike and I basically, we had made flashcards for ourselves of every single question that we would have ever gotten from a VC. And we knew our business so well that there was not a single question that they could ask us that we hadn't been asked before and that Mike and I wouldn't answer the same exact way. So it's not that you're ever, and I tell a lot of young entrepreneurs this, it's not that you're ever, you get good at pitching.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Well, I think one thing we did well is we had science on our side. I mean, that really helped Peter Pham knows every single person in the valley. And as does Jones. And so that certainly helped. We got a lot of warm intros into investors. And Chamath is actually investor in science. And so there was a little double dipping there going on. So we got very warm intros, but we were very prepared. I think one of the things that science did early on, which was kind of funny in retrospect, is they sent us out to fundraise probably four or five months before we were actually ready to fundraise just so Mike and I could go get our ass kicked. And of course you're always fundraising so you always want to put your best foot forward but we really got embarrassed the first time we went out and fundraised we had very we knew very little about the unit economics of our business. We knew very little about where we would actually look like.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “You know, very rarely did we make a human screw up. It was usually a technology screw up. So we're messing up someone's clock in or clock out. We've screw up a time zone. A caregiver messes up a clock in or clock out. We overbuild a client. So it was usually the caregiver making mistake and then us not catching it and billing the client something wrong. And it wasn't, these are not catastrophic events that involve somebody's health, but they do affect someone's money, which is the second most important thing in your life. You know, we were causing a lot of problems from the technology side because we were doing things that had never been done before. And so we had these geofences set up around houses where they would automatically clock in and clock out when you're at the house. And then we had to deal with, well, do we allow them to clock in if they are going to the grocery store first? And, you know, how do we deal with mileage reimbursement? And there's just a lot of nuances to your business.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Make the mistake right again is to throw money at the problem. And that's not always the answer, but it's one solution. And so we screwed up a lot in the early days and we were given out credits left and right. And I don't think that's unusual. You just try to not make the same mistakes twice, right?”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think that not where we are as a business, we're not placing too much emphasis on it. When we're constantly being bombarded with minimum wage laws and overtime laws, and we have a very highly regulated industry, and so these laws that come out every six or eight months do affect our business. And so we have to navigate those waters very carefully. I think in the early days when you're still figuring out what are we doing like chamoth and social plus, we had in the early days, they really didn't harp too much on what our margins were. I mean, we were operating on really thin margins, and we were just trying to deliver an amazing experience to our customers. And even if that meant losing money on a customer, we just wanted to, we so badly wanted to learn and wanted to just deliver an awesome experience. And sometimes, you know, as a startup, you make a mistake and the easiest way to”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “My engineers. And so the unit economics changed a lot. Now our price points at $22, but we have caregivers that are frankly just a lot higher quality. And it wasn't that we had a lower quality in the past. It was just now they are, these guys are going through the same level of credentialing and screening as nurses in the hospital. And so it's just a different breed. And we're delivering a much higher touch experience. So yes, we are now the low cost home care marketplace anymore. We are probably right in the middle and we deliver a much better experience, much more integrated with a lot more technology and we're able to keep patients a lot safer in their homes.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “It's my fiduciary duty to focus a lot on unit economics. And while it's not something we put in front of the faces of all of our customers, we have to pay a lot of attention to it. We were in a business earlier, say a year ago, we surpassed a million hours of home care in California, and we were operating on much thinner margins, a lower cost. We basically wanted to be the low-cost marketplace, and we were operating at a price point of about $15. And the caregivers were keeping 80% of it, and so they were still getting good wages. But we recently, in order to work with hospitals, we decided to convert 100% of our caregivers, or we call them heroes, from 1099 contractors to W2 employees. And in doing that, it raised a lot of our costs, right? We now have these employees that are getting benefits, they're getting 401k plans. Their benefits package isn't much different there.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “You're absolutely right. I think friction builds trust. A lot of tech companies want to take all the friction out of an experience, but the more time you spend with someone, the more they're going to trust you. And that's very important in this business.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Driverless car, Travis has always talked about driverless cars could potentially make up a predominant part of the workforce. Instacart, if I had a drone delivering my groceries, I wouldn't even know the difference. There's no human component. On the other side, you have these heterogeneous marketplaces that are more about kind of cost and quality. And so I look at Airbnb and TaskRabbit and Thumbtack and the Home Hero in Hotel Tonight. And in these heterogeneous marketplaces, Each of the workers or your unit of supply are uniquely different. You're building oftentimes relationships. You're building human touches. We are in a business where we are creating relationships that will last potentially”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yeah, it's definitely not. It took us a while to learn. We had to deliver a high technology and a high touch experience. And that was really important. And, you know, I speak at a lot of different healthcare conferences. And the first thing anyone wants to say is, oh, you're the Uber for caregiving. And I almost shout on stage. I said, hell no, we're not the Uber for caregiving. And I'll tell you why. I look at places as almost two categories. You have these homogeneous or these homogenous marketplaces. which I call Uber handy Lyft Homejoy, rest in peace, Instacart, Postmates, all of those are really built around cost and speed. I look at those and No offense to any of those companies, but you could probably replace those workers with robots. If I had”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Our core business and our differentiators were in technology and process and operations. And so it allowed us to really focus on our business, kind of get out of our own way.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “What I particularly liked is they had had a couple successful marketplaces under their belt. They had built a vent up and then they built Dog Vake. And so I knew that by coming in there, we wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. We had a lot of help with SEO and SEM. That's kind of their bread and butter. Mike Jones basically built an entire company around that or sold a company before around that. And then they also just give you a lot of resources that you don't really want to focus on. Our core differentiators as a business with Mike and I Townsend is my co-founder and then Mike Jones is our investor. When we started, we weren't trying to differentiate in accounting, in legal, in SEO, in SEM.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Mike Jones and I have been friends for many years. I actually, when before Home Hero, I was, I started a company called FlowTab and it was a mobile ordering and payments application for bars and nightclubs. And admittingly, it was one of those scratch your own itch kind of problems. And when you're 24 years old, you don't have a lot of problems. And so getting drinks in bars was a big deal. You know, frankly, it was just more exciting for me to build a mobile app. And I think we wanted to do that. And I was trying to get Mike Jones to be an investor. And Mike Jones probably did the smartest thing he could as a VC and didn't give me money, but he gave me really good advice. And he connected me with one of our largest distribution partners. It was a company called DEX1, and they helped us distribute and scale to three different cities and states. So he's always been really, really helpful to me. And so I had a lot of trust in him when I wanted to start the second business. But when we started at Science,”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “To hurt a few times. And so frankly, I was just very sick of watching this happen, and I started, I built an app for my dad just coming from a technology background. It was a weekend project. And I built him an app to allow him to schedule and pay his caregivers more efficiently. And I didn't realize that I was building the early stages of what would eventually be home hereo. And, you know, it wasn't until I got connected with Mike Jones at Science before he really opened my eyes to how big this industry really was and started throwing some pretty crazy statistics at me. And it was only a matter of time before we were teamed up with science and started building this marketplace.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Well, it was probably a more of a series of aha moments. You know, I come from a technology background myself. I've been started a number of technology companies in the last couple years. And I started watching some of the problems my dad was having finding care for my grandmother back in 2012. And when my grandfather died, my father became the primary caregiver for my grandmother. And the problem was that I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and my family lived in Columbus, Ohio, and my grandmother was forced to live alone in Seattle, Washington. And so there was this big disconnect between Seattle and Ohio. And my father was forced to take an extended leave of absence from teaching after a series of really unfortunate events in the home with my grandmother, and they related to caregivers not showing up and caregivers no showing for shifts and really just left my grandmother in kind of a world.”

    2016-07-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Every Employee Should Re-Apply For Their Job Every Year & The Strategies To Prepare For A Successful Fundraise with Kyle Hill, Founder & CEO @ HomeHero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source