ServiceTitan co-founder and President Vahe Kuzoyan and co-founder and Chief Executive Ara Mahdessian at their company's Glendale offices.
The tech hubs of Silicon Beach and Silicon Valley have germinated thousands of start-ups serving every imaginable need of the kinds of people who work at start-ups. But they had largely ignored the $400-billion home services economy. Kuzoyan, 35, and co-founder and Chief Executive Ara Mahdessian, 33, both have offices with sweeping views of the Verdugos. Both have stately homes on the same street just a few minutes’ drive away.The founders both moved to L.A. as young children in the ’80s — Mahdessian from Iran, as a refugee fleeing the brutal Iran-Iraq war, and Kuzoyan from Armenia, then a part of the Soviet Union. Mahdessian’s family landed in Glendale, where his father started a contracting business.
They both knew how small home services businesses were run on a hodgepodge of paper forms and one-off programs, thick appointment books and gnarly Excel sheets. And they realized they could build the software to streamline the whole operation. The dispatch system ran on a discontinued type of database software. Invoices, sales reports and orders came in a mishmash of analog and digital forms. Plumbers had to haul big books out into the field to show customers pricing and product info. A cup of coffee would spill on a check, and a plumber would have to waste an hour driving back to get a new one.
The mass adoption of high-speed internet fundamentally changed the software business. Customers used to pay big upfront fees for floppy disks or CD-ROMs, and repeat the process whenever an update came out. The model has grown Salesforce to a $123-billion company and San Francisco’s largest tech employer, and been embraced by tech start-ups and venture capital firms alike.
“That customer empathy and love and understanding, just coming from that world, has served them extremely well,” Deeter said. “It gave us complete conviction that they could build this product.” The threat of competition from one of the software sector’s true giants, or getting undercut by a newer start-up, is always present. But to date, heavy hitters such as Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle have stayed out of the home services business, focusing their cloud-based field software efforts on healthcare, IT and manufacturing.
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Source: Reuters - 🏆 2. / 97 Read more »