John Andrew Entwistle of Wander

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that examines the changing landscape of our world. We'll have candid conversations with VCs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders grappling with our current challenges and providing solutions to key problems we face as a nation. I'm Jim Beer, president of CMBG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately to how they got to where they are today. That's really what I focus on the most is that I truly believe that each person has something that I can learn from them, something that I can admire, and I wanna figure it out.

On today's episode of the Puck, we sit down with John Andrew Entwistle, the founder and CEO of Wander, a next stage vacation rental company, integrating ultimate travel destinations with finely curated smart home services. John shares his passion for company building, his philosophy of hard work and mentorship, and how he and his team are guiding the future of vacation experiences. John Andrew Entwistle, I am excited to welcome you to the Puck. Let's do a little wandering together today. So tell me a little bit about your background and kind of how you grew up and how you got to where you are today.

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, first of all. I grew up in New York, small town called Katona, beautiful, beautiful place outside the city. Became an Internet kid pretty early. I just loved computers and tearing things apart, which I think is always problematic for parents who have that type of kid because it takes us a little longer to learn how to put things back together.

So, yeah, that was that was my childhood. Was raised by a single dad, a lawyer, just the most incredible, incredible guy. And I think a lot of folks who grew up with with lawyer dads remember the days of, like, essays that are super redlined and everything else, but it it makes you better, which is is always wonderful. And, yeah, throughout high school, I built a few other small Internet companies and really just became my passion, like wanting to build companies and bring people together and deliver products for customers and all that fun stuff. And so out of high school, I started a company called Coder with my co founders Kyle and Amar, essentially a enterprise developer tool company.

So it would move the development environment or software engineer rights code to an organization's cloud infrastructure. That company ended up being pretty successful. We raised about $45,000,000 from GGV, Founders Fund, Redpoint, Bessemer, etcetera, and a bunch of big enterprise customers as well, like Vanguard, Goldman Sachs, Palantir, and a whole bunch more. And so I ran that company as CEO for the last five years, and then somewhere in between became a Thiel Fellow, 30 under 30, all that fun stuff. And, yeah, I stepped down as CEO early in 2021.

And at the time, I was 23 and just, you know, couldn't resist starting another company. And so started Wander, and it's been a been an incredible ride since. So in reading about your background in Wander, I mean, you've got this incredible vision and passion for building this company. And you talk about culture. You talk about your family culture where you had this father who inspired you and but also it sounds like there was some not necessarily tough love item, but he gave you feedback.

Red line is a feedback. Right? There was accountability, presumably. Absolutely. So as you're building these companies, how have you managed your culture and how do you work compatibility into that, for instance?

Yeah. So regarding, like, expectations and quality, whether you like it or not, we we live in the real world. Right? And what we do and how well we do it matters. And so, like, you know, my pop was always incredibly kind and gracious with his feedback and otherwise, but having that real feedback is super important and that is something that we do have at Wander as well.

We know that our customer expectations are far higher than ours and the reality is far tougher than we think it is and so coming up with the right strategy and delivering the right products and being relentless in that execution is super critical. It's the only way that a company like this can succeed is if everyone in the company truly believes that it needs to be a quality and consistent product and executes day in day out because it's not an easy problem. And so when thinking about the culture and the types of people that we want, you need to have this shared ethics, these shared values across who you bring on to the company. Each person obviously needs to be great at their own skill set, but they also need to have some type of what I call is, like, the shared ethics, shared compatibility. Like, are you a good person?

Do you believe in working hard? Those different dynamics, things that regardless of how skillful someone is, if if they don't have it, candidly, it just doesn't work. And so that's really what we hire for upfront, and it's worked well so far. We have a an extremely hardworking and passionate culture that's dedicated to trying to make this wild idea work and couldn't be more lucky there. Let's jump into that for a second because we have a unemployment rate that's very, very low.

There's there's more job openings than there are jobs. You have a lot of discussion now about going back to the office versus working out, work ethic. You know, are we here to play and work hard? Are we here to work hard? From your perspective in terms of building a top tier company that's immortal after you you're gone, so to speak, how do you view kind of people's work ethic and work life balance, for instance?

Yeah. Candidly, it's super important. And I'm I'm not the type of person to lie and say that I figured out the idea of work life balance. I mean, I I wake up. I work.

I work on weekends, like, I get invited to dinners and events all the time, and I say no to all of them. I work very hard, and it's not this hustle culture type thing, it's just that I haven't figured out how to get done everything I need to get done without it. And I think that when you're doing what you love and you truly believe in it, it is the most fulfilling thing you can do. It's it's actually interesting the, there's this difference between what I call comfort and happiness, right? And I think a lot of people confuse the two.

A lot of people think that just being comfortable is the right path to happiness when it's not. Like, you need to do things that are fulfilling. You need to execute. You need to, like, sometimes have a little bit of pain to reach the other side versus if I just sat on a couch all day, I wouldn't be moving towards my goal. I I wouldn't end up being happy at the end of the day.

So it's really just about succeeding in that mission, and it just requires work. I think there's like no way around it, and it's something the team knows as well, like we're all very hardworking people because we wanna see this thing succeed, and we also know that as an early stage startup, the odds are stacked against us, right? As with all startups, I think the statistics are 90% of startups fail, And so if we want to be in that 10%, we have to work super hard, like the odds aren't in your favor. And so I know it's like a little bit of a touchy subject, but we believe in working hard and doing good work and yeah, doing so for a reason to create something special. Obviously talking about reason, I know financial success for you and your investors is obviously key about that.

But from kind of a values perspective and having meaning perspective, what is it that gets you up in the morning, and what is it you're trying to build? It's actually it's interesting. I think that you have to think about what the end product is that you're delivering to customers. For us, when we do everything right, a family, a group, some individuals have memories that will last a lifetime. They go on an incredible trip and they leave smiling.

That's a product that, like, I could work on forever. And seeing it, like, sometimes it's, like, I won't lie, it's difficult, right? Like, you're working all day and all night, and the bigger the company gets, the further away from that, like, end product you get. But when I get to see, like, a customer story from marketing, or I get an email from, like, a family or pictures of someone proposing, I mean, it just it makes my day. And so that's really how I think about the end product that that we're delivering is is that if Wander succeeds in its brand promise for consumers, they're able to have these incredible memories in these incredible locations that if Wander didn't exist, they wouldn't have those same memories.

And so that's very motivating for me. And also, I think, like, a very pure a pure outcome. And so as you're building the brand and people are wandering around the world, so to speak, and they get to know your brand, is part of the goal that instead of, like, Tolkien, instead of wandering aimlessly, I now have an opportunity to wander from wander property to property, and I can explore the whole world, but do it in a way where I feel safe, where there's a familiarity, there's a concierge there for me. I mean, is part of what you're trying to do to make this a worldwide proposition? Absolutely.

Yeah. I mean, I firmly believe that people were meant to explore the world. And I know it sounds a little bit, like, spiritual and whatever, but when I go and and see a beautiful place, like, I believe you have a picture of Yosemite in the background. When you go to Yosemite in the spring, I mean, gosh, you feel something. Like, you really do.

And there are so many places like that around the world. And, unfortunately, today, the infrastructure to sort of get around is a little bit fragmented. It's a little bit disjointed. You go to a place that you don't know, you can end up staying in the wrong, you know, hotel or region or neighborhood or whatever it may be. And so this idea that, you know, fast forward three, four, five, ten years into the future, that someone can open up the Wander app and pick any location anywhere in the world, and then we just make that all seamless for them from flights to what time you need to show up at the airport to, hey, here's your destination.

Here's some good restaurants around. That dynamic, we think, is what it's all about, and it's all in service again of the real product, which is people getting to these destinations and hopefully, you know, achieving whatever it was they they sought out to achieve when they started the journey. In your desire to build this company and with with this vision, then we talked about kind of the issues that our society is dealing with. One of the issues that we're talking about is this notion of these high end destination places, but then do you have workers and people in the community that can service that? They're talking about these amazing communities they're building up in San Francisco, but then there's this concern that it's gonna be for end up being for the elite.

When you think about Wander and you think about your mission, from the perspective of the middle class and society in general, how do those two intersect? Yeah. Absolutely. So the goal for Wander over time is certainly to make travel as accessible as humanly possible. Right?

Right now, obviously, you need to have a lot of fortune to be able to go and take off of work and go to these destinations or if you work remotely or otherwise. And we really right now focus as much as possible on quality, like doing the best we can to offer this great quality experience. But over time, what we wanna do is figure out a way where we can offer that quality at scale. And when I think about affordability, I think that, unfortunately, there are some destinations where it's gonna be really, really difficult. Like, for example, Aspen, Colorado.

Like, Aspen is a market that we're not even in yet because it's just so expensive. But there are a lot of magical places in South America, let's say. And I think that if we can curate really high quality destinations that are in more affordable places of the world, that we can create a dynamic that sort of takes people outside of the bubble of these very, like, high class luxury societies and lets people still have a quality experience, but in a, like, more affordable way. And so that's sort of how I think about solving the affordability problem is that certain destinations are just really priced out at the moment, and so can we unlock those incredible places where they're not, like these undiscovered gems, which there are so many, like you think about Argentina or otherwise. I mean, like, just the most beautiful places in the world, and so that's the goal.

Back to your question of going global is that we think that by definition, by going global, we'll be able to make this a little bit more accessible. So we'll see in that regard, though. That's a very long journey going down market. Totally get it. So when you talk about the company starting a couple years ago, tell me a little bit about Atlas and how that figures in.

And and are you also the CEO of Atlas as well? And how how does that work in terms of you balancing your time? Yeah. So when you think about real estate, and this is something you're super familiar with, finance is the other side of real estate. And when we came up with the idea for Wander, we knew that we had to control the whole stack in order to deliver the experience for the customer.

A lot of people think that Wander started with like, it's like, oh, we're gonna do all this stuff, and then the output is a great experience for customers. It kind of worked the other way around, is that like, how could we provide a consistent quality experience for customers every time or the vast majority of the time? And what you end up with is this idea of owning the booking platform, the property management, and the asset management, which is a lot of solution for, like, a relatively simple thing. I like to use the example of, like, a customer just wants hot water. They don't think about the fact that that water gets piped from a reservoir into a filtration plant, and then, like, into the water heater and all these different very complex things.

And so in Wander's case, understanding that we had to control the assets meant that we had to figure out some sort of dedicated real estate capital. It wouldn't be possible for Wander to simply scale on balance sheet or buy all these properties with VC capital. And so we had a few different options and obviously, like, Wander is still in the early stages, so we're really continuing to explore all of them. But one of the ideas that I fell in love with was, is there a way to sort of take old school hospitality real estate mechanisms, right, like the old school hospitality REITs, and bring that into short term rentals, and in doing so, obviously create more value for Wander as a company because now you have that asset management revenue stream, but also allow your customers to be able to invest into this network. That was like the big idea behind it was if we wanna scale the number of locations, we're gonna need dedicated real estate capital.

In order to do that, we have to create some type of of propco, some type of fun to be able to do so, and really go and and scale it from there. Now, obviously, it's still, like, in its early days, so Atlas started taking investment really early February, and it's only from accredited investors and all that sort of fun stuff. And as you can imagine, it took so much effort to put together a re I mean, oh my gosh. Like, it's like for every hour of legal and accounting time is, like, another hour of review. And, you know, it's like, I don't think I slept for, like, six months.

But the end product is really a really cool idea. Now what's critical from here is, number one, ensuring the repeatability of the investment product, making sure that it can scale, making sure that it's able to obviously, like, meet its return goals or otherwise, like, there's so many different pieces with such an early stage financial product, but the cool thing is is that if it does work, what you'll have is this network of tens of thousands of top tier vacation rentals and a really powerful hospitality REIT behind it. And I think that it could work. Like, there's no reason why it it shouldn't. And so that's the journey that we're gonna be on for the next few years is is seeing how that scales.

You are a solo founder right now. You you founded your first company with a partner. Obviously, there are challenges and differences doing it on your own, but I have a question for you, which is being as bright and dynamic and successful as you've been, do you have a mentor? Yeah. So first of all, I don't think I could take those compliments, though.

I very much appreciate them. I do. And, candidly, the the biggest influence in my life has been my pop. He's, he he focuses in securities law and otherwise, and so, like, I kinda got to watch him, like, take down the bad guys for for quite a while. It's interesting.

Like, it instills this, like, these business ethics in you and just, like, like, how you operate and how you work, and, like, long hours aren't, like, rare in the law as you're well aware. And so those sort of core pieces were super important. As I grew older and, you know, my network grew outside of just, like, who fed me, like, I got to meet these really incredible investors and and otherwise. Like, if you look at Coder's board, you know, that board started when when we were all 17. You had Andy McLaughlin from Uncork, Glenn Solomon from GGB, Alex Bart from Redpoint, and they had a remarkable influence on me from 17 to to when I left the company when I was 23.

And so, like, you end up collecting these people at such a young age who are helping you on your mission both, like, personally and professionally, and that doesn't even begin to count the team members. Right? I mean, you think about the executive team who's all twice your age having an influence on you. And so, you know, what you end up with is really this mentality of finding something special and something to learn from absolutely everyone. And that's that's really what I focus on the most is that I truly believe that each person has something that I can learn from them, something that I can admire, and I wanna figure it out.

Whether it's building a billion dollar company or it's something as simple as, like, this person makes the best banana pudding I've ever had, and, like, I wanna understand how and why and, like, their story behind it. So, really, it's I take a lot from everyone, but to start with, of course, like most young kids, I lucked out with, you know, having a a great dad to to learn from. You know, being able to look up to your parents is a very lucky thing. And then from there, as I got to build the companies, it meant that the people who were around me twelve hours a day, fourteen hours a day, you know, weren't like high school kids. They were people who are very far along in their career, and I was very lucky for that.

It's funny because, you know, I do a lot of reading about the existential loneliness that people are feeling in the world today and the lack of community and some of the existential angst that people are feeling. For a young person to realize, like, the Lao Tzu quote, you know, that you can learn from everybody. Ultimately, look, you're the CEO. You're the one making these tough decisions. You're the ones leading people into battle, so to speak.

But it sounds like you also have the wisdom, the humility, and you've been lucky enough to build this team of these advisers who you can go to after you've done your mapping out and your thinking, and they can really help prepare you to then take that message and that work and and go back into battle. For a young person, I mean, that that's a pretty unique story, I would think, and something that people should be aware of. Yeah. I I always like to say that young people are sort of like a computer without, like, any storage. Right?

It's like we have a ton of compute, but we have absolutely no experience. Our hard drive is empty. We have no context. When you're put in a position where you have to make decisions early, you learn that very quickly because you're wrong sometimes. And when you're wrong, you have two choices.

If you have an ego, you can say, like, you know, whatever, and, like, keep making bad decisions, and you just end up failing very early. Or you can say, why did I make this bad decision? Why did what I think was correct was wrong? Because obviously no one who's wrong ever thinks that they're wrong. And what you end up doing is double checking everything and creating as much context as you possibly can and asking people's opinions and, and otherwise entrusting your team as well.

Like you end up hiring people who are far smarter than you and far more experienced knowing that number one, hopefully you can learn from them, but, but number two, that they're hopefully gonna be more accurate than you are. Now at the end of the day, you still need to make a lot of decisions. And so for me, it really boils down to being extremely thoughtful. Anything that's a nonreversible decision, I like to take my time on. And if it's reversible, I make it quickly.

But if it's nonreversible, I'll take a few days, a week to make the decision and make sure that we get it right and then go from there because especially as you scale, the importance of those decisions really starts to amplify. You're dealing with dozens of employees' jobs and livelihoods. You're dealing with real customers and real money. You're dealing with real shareholders and, like, it all really matters. And so I'm definitely not the type of founder who kinda plays it, like, fast and loose, for better or for worse.

Right? Like, but I think that patience and sort of double checking your work is always important no matter how many times you've, you've seen the equation before. Going a little deeper for a second. When you explain it like that, it's very linear. And it's basically, you have this idea.

You go talk to people. You really think it through in a very linear logical way. You make that decision and you don't rush it. And I get all that. But for those people who experientially have not gone through that, when you're dealing with other people's money and you are dealing with the public like this, is there a moment of dark night of the soul when you're wrestling with yourself and you're ultimately alone where you have to ultimately kind of break through and make that decision and then present it in that confident way.

But is is there that internal battle that you have to go through? Yeah. So what I do is I I find it a lot easier to think through these things on paper. And so I try and kill an idea or figure it out on paper as as far as I can. And I ask every question that I can and, you know, write the corresponding answers.

And if the answer seems to lack strength, then that creates a whole bunch more questions, and I check it and check it again until this document feels concrete. It feels like something that I truly do believe in. And at the end of the day, this exercise actually has a a negative side effect, which it can create a lot of doubt. Right? Because when you're constantly trying to figure out what's wrong, which you can do all day long with anything, you end up creating this sort of, like, little seed of doubt, which I think is actually super healthy.

It's like this little bit of paranoia as you go down this journey of saying, like, what if I am wrong? And if so, what am I gonna do about it? And so that's what I recommend for people who are making any type of big nonreversible decision is write it down, break the problem down into into little pieces. And if the answer that you write isn't strong, then maybe you should sort of revisit your thinking around it. And then take that little seed of doubt because that that little seed of doubt is very helpful if things don't go to plan, which very rarely does everything go 100% to plan.

So being able to be quick on your feet because you're not drinking the Kool Aid is is super important. That makes sense. So in this environment, I mean, you you started this company in 2021. We're now, you know, in 2023. To give an example of kind of going from one extreme to the other, I'm the president of an HOA up in Mammoth.

And last year, I got elected to the board, and we were walking the property to figure out how we were gonna deal with the drought. A year later, I'm walking the property to figure out how I'm gonna deal with 15 feet of snow on the roofs and shoveling the snow off. Yeah. So you came into this in 2021 with a host of challenges and so forth. And now you're dealing with a different, you know, set of challenges, and we all, at the POC, like to know where the world's going.

Absolutely. What were the issues you were dealing with then? And then let's spend some time. Macro, what are you challenged by and struggling with today, and where is the world going from that perspective? Yeah.

Totally. So when starting the company in 2021, there were a ton of tailwinds, which were all very helpful for early stage startups. Right? Number one is the availability of of capital. Like, being able to have your idea funded quickly and by great folks makes for a really wonderful early stage.

And also, fortunately, a lot of innovation, I think, which is super important for this country. But obviously, as that macro shifted over the last twenty four months, what ended up happening is is that a lot of a lot of folks who were sort of, like, ahead of their skis ended up in in in pretty treacherous places. Fortunately, for us and and for Wander, having sort of done this all before, I've made the mistakes of over hiring and, like, paying too much for folks and not having, like, you know, scalable profitable unit economics and realizing that that's the base and that at the end of the day, all companies actually need to be profitable. Like, you can't just rely on VC funding. And so we ran a very like lean team and shop from the start and actually cared about things like cost per employee and otherwise to make sure that this company had the potential to be profitable as early as possible in its life.

And so, you know, thinking ahead to current challenges, right, I think what you're seeing is is that the availability of capital is far less, and that boils down to number one, like venture funding, and also for investment products and, you know, lending and all that sort of stuff and that's of course by design, you know, that's the Fed's intention in terms of its tightening. But what you do see is you do see good companies who are willing to accept this reality and you know, take in capital at adjusted valuations and otherwise able to put together rounds and and secure their future. And so that's what I see a lot of companies doing right now is they're taking flat rounds or otherwise or even down rounds, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. The most important thing is obviously to capitalize the company and ensure that in the long term if you truly believe in the idea that the company has enough capital to go and survive the next five, ten years and build something special. And so that's the dynamic that I'm seeing a lot of today just in the venture and capital markets is that the good companies and the founders that like don't have an ego are saying okay my valuation in 2021 maybe wasn't, like, super real, and so even though I've made a bunch of progress, it'll be a flat round or a down round or whatever that looks like.

And I do think there are a lot of companies where they don't know how to deal with this reality. You know, a lot of founders who who took valuations that they simply couldn't grow into and now are left with, like, a very, very challenging dynamic, but at the end of the day, I think I think the good leaders will will navigate it, and, you know, the ones who don't want it, who sort of checked out, then, you know, they obviously won't. As a bellwether in terms of where the world is going in terms of what you feel comfortable sharing in terms of acquisition of property and sale prices, and also just in terms of the types of vacations people are planning. Yeah. Are you seeing any change in consumer behavior and economic things that would be interesting to our listeners?

Yeah. So going to in terms of, like, sale prices for certain homes. So what we saw in 2021, and this was a real challenge for Wander, is that there was a lot of homes that we would love to buy that we simply couldn't because the prices just were way, way, way too high, and everything became a bidding war. We like to sort of define it as, like, a frenzy. Right?

So I'll never forget the first location we looked at was on Pajaro Dunes outside San Francisco, and the home was listed at 2.8, like, had great underwriting, great rental income, durable market, limited supply, all these things that are sort of what we look for from a real estate perspective. But that house ended up going for, like, 4,200,000 or something. Right. And, like, we didn't even end up putting in an offer because it just ran. And so there were a ton of things like that, which is candidly why Wander's scale has been a little bit slow.

You know, we only have 15 locations and that's because we're sort of constrained with this idea that we need to buy really great houses at a really great price, ideally below the appraisal price so that we have a little bit of cushion in a, you know, supply constrained market in an area that's durable. That dynamic in 2021 made scaling very difficult. Now what we're starting to see is that more of the types of locations we're excited by are coming on market. And what's interesting is is that they're no longer sort of going off market, like, within the day or the week. They're sort of sitting there for a month or two months, and the prices are actually being adjusted closer to reality.

Now to be clear, there still is a a pretty strong housing market, and I think that, like, that's being seen, at least in some areas. Some areas are taking, like, a complete hit, but in some more desirable areas, it's it's still pretty strong. And so, you know, for good quality assets, like, at reasonable prices, there's a market, but the days of, you know, those $100,000,000 mansions being sold, like, those headlines every single day or otherwise, it's starting to disappear, and the buyer frenzy is also starting to really disappear, which for Wander as, like, you know, an asset manager, like, it's our job to buy really high quality assets in great locations that have limited supply that we can hold on forever. And this is now starting to be a little bit of an easier market. Now to be clear, obviously, like, we're still super picky as as you would imagine.

So we aren't obviously, like, going on a buying spree. If if you see Wanda go and buy, like, 50 houses in a month, then, like, someone should someone should call me. But, yeah, like, I feel like that shift has been both, like, a pro and a con. Right? It's, like, it's useful in the sense of we're able to go and look at, like, more inventory, but, of course, also, like, you have a little bit less of a frenzy in case you need to go and dispose of a potential property or otherwise.

So So it's sort of a yin and a yang in in that perspective. And in terms of, like, consumer data, Wander is such an early stage company that we have the benefit of being a very small fish in a big pond. And so all of our metrics, like, point up into the right in terms of rent growth and average order value and all those different pieces. But candidly, that's a byproduct of the fact that we only have 15 locations, and we're a brand new company and not a, like, Airbnb that's this massive behemoth. And so I think that we have this benefit of being small and nimble and a growing idea that, you know, even if there is, like, continued compression over the next few years that we should be able to outgrow it.

The way I like to say it is, like, the river is now moving against you. Like, the current is moving against you. And so if you were one of these big behemoths that sort of stood still, then you're gonna go down river. But if you're, like, a little motorboat then and you are already flying, you may go a few miles an hour slower, but you should still hopefully be, be moving upriver. So Well, yeah.

And I think by being strategic and not going out and racing into it and looking for those opportunities, you know, Joe Kennedy made a lot of money in a tough economy. I mean, if you've got the liquidity and you've got the discipline to wait for those opportunities, at some point, cash is gonna be king, so to speak, and the pendulum does swing back, and you'll be in a position where you can actually buy some of those properties that you otherwise weren't gonna stay away from and build those dream locations. Yeah. Exactly. And that's the other thing too that happens as you unlock certain markets.

Right? So, again, Aspen is still outrageous. We still can't, like, get into it for a reasonable price. But, like, maybe, like, at some point, and I'm not hope to be clear. I'm not hoping for this.

But maybe Wander will be able to go into that market, or maybe there'll be a development opportunity or otherwise. And so it really just boils down to being, like, incredibly patient, incredibly disciplined, making sure that we're buying the right places at the right price in the right markets. And I think in real estate, there's no shortcut for that. I also think there's, like, a long history of folks breaking that rule. And, like, you can look at, like, a lot of, like, the iBuyers, for example, or otherwise, where they were buying, you know, 10,000 homes a quarter.

And it's so you're telling me that someone's actually underwriting and seeing each one of those assets and really making sure that they're high value and that the data's correct and otherwise. Not necessarily. Now certain teams are obviously better than others. Like, Opendoor is a company that from a logistical and operational perspective, I find, like, remarkable that that they can do what they do. You know, for me and, like, for what we're doing at Wander, the assets need to be, like, really just really good assets that not only are are gonna be durable in terms of value, but also are something that guests actually wanna go to.

We believe in this idea that a vacation house is actually a vacation house, that you can't just buy, like, a cookie cutter home in some, like, neighborhood and say this is a short term rental and truly believe that you're not gonna have, like, a miss in your underwriting. Like, you need to have real vacation destinations that people are actually excited to go to that have had a long history of vacation rentals. Because that's the other dynamic as well is that obviously vacation rentals have existed long before Airbnb. And so you have families who've said, we go to the Florida Coast every summer for twenty years. And like those are the markets that we really wanna be in.

So that's sort of how we how we think about it from a real estate perspective. So in building your intellectual capital and getting to the point where you are today, tell me a little bit about your experience as a Thiel Fellow. Yeah. So for those who who aren't familiar with the Thiel Fellowship, it's a program that was put together by the the Thiel Foundation, so Peter Thiel. And effectively what it is is they find young people who are building new companies who didn't go to college and they fund them.

So they give them a $100,000 grant and mentorship and community and help them try and be successful. You know, as you can imagine, there aren't too many kids who sort of go down this path. And also, you know, looking back, it's a pretty controversial decision to say I'm not gonna go to college or I'm gonna drop out. And so typically you don't actually have the support of your family. And I saw that a lot with other Thiel Fellows was that they didn't have the support of their family, but they had this big vision and this big idea.

And if it wasn't for them being accepted into the fellowship that, like, they would be on the streets or sleeping on a friend's couch or otherwise. And so it it's pretty impactful for for quite a few people. A lot of people also share the grant with their cofounders, which, you know, I think is also a pretty special dynamic. You have these three kids working on this idea in a garage all splitting this, you know, 100 k check to, like, make the dream happen. It's pretty beautiful.

You know, for me, the real benefit was was community. You know, I sort of sacrificed my high school years, like, building companies. I wasn't a particularly social kid. Obviously, like, you know, when it came to college, like, that didn't exist. And so when I got to meet other kids who were super ambitious and were, like, my same age, it felt like it was the craziest thing in the world.

It's like meeting friends for the first time, and, like, a lot of those kids have obviously gone and done, like, really incredible things. Like, you look at Dylan Field with Figma and, like, Vitalik with Ethereum, and I mean, there's so so many stories obviously. But, yeah, the the big benefit for me was, like, the community. You know, building a company is a pretty pretty lonely journey, and the idea that that I got to be part of this fellowship and meet these other kids who had similar ambitions was was really special. And then, obviously, the support from an entrepreneurial perspective was invaluable.

So I'm beyond grateful for for that opportunity. You just got me to think about something that that I'd never really thought about, which was when we're children, you know, and we're in a home environment, and then we go into high school and so forth, we are with generalists. If we're a singer, you know, for professional athlete, if we're an entrepreneur, we may be the only one in a school of a 100 people. As you were telling me that story about the fellowship, I was thinking about for me, I had the same experience when I went to Gibson Dunn as a young lawyer. All of a sudden, I was with all these really bright people, and I didn't even know that I could relate to these people because I had grown up with a bunch of just different types of kids, and all of a sudden, for me, it was that community you're talking about.

But when you think about young people today, church and synagogue are not as big as they used to be. The college campuses are being very politically polarized. You've got colleges that are 94% Democratic, and then you've got the Republican colleges. And so you're sorting. Right?

You're gonna be with people just like you, potentially. How do you bring people together and create that sense of community as opposed to creating two nations? Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I think to your point around, like, the separation from a political perspective, I think for some reason in in America today, everything becomes, like, political.

Right? It's, like, Democrat or Republican, and then I think most people are, like, I am, like, somewhere in between. Like, I don't wanna worry about this. This is where I like come back to this idea of like core and shared ethics and values or passions, right? I think that if you organize groups of people in that perspective, you have a very diverse group actually that has, like, one shared idea.

And in in the Teal Fellowship's case, the shared idea is is that they're young and ambitious. And what you end up with is literally kids from all over the world, both, like, girls and guys, you know, people from Europe and Africa and Asia and like all these places from all these different backgrounds and stories, but they have one common thread which is they're building a company and they wanna do something really special. And so I think that if we organized more like that and we're sort of more accepting of the idea that, hey, like, this person may be a Republican or this person may be a Democrat, but we're both very passionate, let's say, about, like, Mammoth Montana or, like, or whatever. That's how you have, like, a really beautiful dynamic and a really great conversation. And so I think it's just more getting back to that.

And I think in order to get to that, people need to be able to like people who may have not a 100% overlap with what they believe. And that's something that I try and practice as much as possible is, again, going back to the conversation earlier about finding something to admire in everyone, is that even if I don't agree with someone necessarily, that doesn't mean that I can't respect them or like them or be friends with them or otherwise in the same way that, you know, if one of my friends puts, like, mustard on their french fries, like, I'm not gonna freak out. And so, like, that's how I go through life. Now I also recognize, though, that I am in the luxurious position where I can do that, where, you know, like, in certain realms, it really does matter. And that's also completely understandable.

Like, some issues are issues of passion and, you know, really do matter. You know, that's where I think, like, things can get a little bit tough, but I wish that rather than drawing party lines, we were able to sort of focus, like, on independent issues and address those as opposed to putting people into two buckets because, obviously, people are are far more dynamic than that. And that makes good sense to me. And as I'm listening to what you're saying in terms of this common value, which is they're super ambitious and they wanna build this company, I get that. When you think about values, and, presumably, you've got a lot of those values, it sounds like from your father.

Yeah. From a societal perspective, where do you think values can come from? When I was younger in MBA schools, they there was a book called the seven habits of highly effective people, which was written by Stephen Covey. And he was a religious guy, but he didn't use the g word at all. But he talked about win win and seek first to understand and the value of sharpening the saw.

And he he had these values and principles, right, that led to a balanced, successful, righteous life, so to speak. Where does your generation and where when you're looking and you're building your team, where do you come up with your core values, and how do you promote those? Yeah. So Ben Horowitz has a pretty wonderful book called What You Do Is Who You Are. And it breaks down this idea of company values, and he calls them virtues.

Right? It's these virtues that people have that align them. And so when starting a company, we created this list of virtues, the things that we wanted everyone, no matter what, to agree on. That has been a really powerful guiding force both in terms of the types of people that we hire, but also how we operate. There are things like we are servants to our customers, and we're always going to do what we think is right.

And, like, we're going to be kind, and we can take a punch. Like, all these different dynamics and virtues, and there's about, like, 30 of them, that we think that regardless of who you are or where you come from or what you believe that we can agree on on these things. And if we do, then we can build a really special company or at least it's the right right operating framework. And so when I think about society as a whole I think that like a lot of people have shared virtues. In fact I actually think most people have shared virtues.

I think that we actually disagree on like very few things. Now, I'm not saying that the things that we disagree on aren't very important but, like, a lot of the virtues of like helping others and being kind and all those things like maybe 99% of people can agree with. And so that's what I focus on is this idea of shared virtues and making sure that there's agreement and alignment. And, you know, if someone doesn't agree with the concept of, like, we're servants to our customers, like, let's say they think that, like, it's, you know, they wanna just do for themselves, then this just isn't the right company for you. I am inspired, Johnny Andrew.

This has been a great, great conversation, and we at the Puck wanna see where Wander goes, and we're gonna check out some of your properties. This was a, yeah, a super enjoyable conversation. Thank you for taking the time. The Puck Venture Capital Beyond is produced by CMPG Advisors. If you enjoyed the conversation today and haven't yet subscribed to our show, you can find us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.

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