Idea
Ruumr: Bring a Trailer for houses, an eBay-style home auction
Sam invested in Ruumr, a real-estate auction site with live bidding and a comment thread (like Bring a Trailer for cars). It solves the sealed-bid problem where a winner overpays or a loser would have gladly bid more, by making bids transparent and live.
“If you're bidding half a million dollars for a house and you see that the winning bid was $505,000, you're like, well, fuck, if you guys would have told me, I would have bet $510,000 and you would have made more money and I would have got what I wanted.”
Steal thisReplace sealed-bid processes with live, transparent auctions to capture the extra value bidders would pay.
Story
The Ruumr founder did $100M revenue, raised $60M, then crashed
Sam was drawn to Ruumr partly because its founder previously built Stay Alfred (a Sonder competitor leasing whole buildings for work travel) to $100M revenue on $60M raised - then went out of business. Sam treats that spectacular flameout as a positive signal.
“this guy started Stay Alfred, which was like a, you know, Sonder. It's like a competitor to Sonder where they would like rent out entire buildings and then sublease them for work travel. Got to $100 million in revenue, raised $60 million, crashed and burned and went out of business. And you know what? That's awesome. I love that.”
Framework
Don't disintermediate the gatekeeper - bring the real-estate agent in on the deal
Sam explains why Ruumr keeps agents in the loop rather than cutting them out: agents are integral and will badmouth any platform that bypasses them. The play is to make the agent's job easier and take a smaller fee.
“the problem with real estate is, the agents are still like integral, like they're still very important to the industry. If you cut the agents out, then like the agents are like, oh, fuck you guys, I'm going to badmouth you. I'm going to make sure no one ever uses them. So they actually get the agent in on the deal and they just like make the agent's job a little bit better and a little bit easier.”
Steal thisWhen disrupting an industry with entrenched middlemen, co-opt them - make their job easier instead of cutting them out.