#234: Ryan Broderick - Co-Founder of Darwin Homes - Building the Amazon of Single-Family Property Management

Ryan Broderick is the Co-Founder & CEO of Darwin Homes. Darwin Homes is a real estate investment management platform focused on the single-family rental opportunity, enabling investors to invest anywhere simply with confidence. Darwin has raised just under $50m in venture capital from Khosla Ventures, Camber Creek, Fifth Wall, Canvas Ventures, Tony Xu, Ryan Graves, Ryan Roslansky, and other technology leaders.

Prior to founding Darwin Homes, Ryan was part of the founding team at DoorDash. During his tenure at DoorDash, he built and led the first Launch team, which was tasked with scaling the DoorDash operation from Silicon Valley to over 250 cities in the US. He then went on to build the Merchant Team responsible for Business Development, Sales, Merchant Products, and Merchant Operations. Before DoorDash, Ryan worked at JUMP Investors, an early-stage VC firm led by Randall Kaplan, the Co-Founder of Akamai Technologies. Ryan holds a B.S from the University of Southern California and an MBA from Pepperdine University.

In this episode, Chris and Ryan discuss:

• Lessons learned from being early at DoorDash and how he applied those principles to property management
• How they enter a market and all that happens
• How they've approached single-family property management from first principles to building revolutionary tools for owners
• Future opportunities that can be done when Darwin hits scale, including new resident monetization strategies

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(2:58) - Ryan’s early career with Doordash

(16:40) - What was the initial thesis for Darwin Homes?

(26:55) - What does scale give Darwin that the local PM will never have?

(30:55) - What do you mean by the Surface Area in Property Management?

(32:40) - What does a great engineering culture look like?

(36:13) - How does the best idea win when you’re first building a product that needs to 10x?

(38:58) - What happens from Day 0 of entering a new market? 

(42:22) - How do you source vendors in a market?

(48:00) - What makes a good city for Darwin to enter?

(49:22) - Darwin’s Build-to-rent operation

(50:12) - Why do you have an acquisitions team within a property management company?

(56:38) - Ryan’s vision for Darwin

(1:01:30) - How big is the SFR & BFR market getting?

 (1:04:53) - What do institutional owners care about and what do retail owners care about?

(1:08:11) - Are we moving to a world where people rent homes sight unseen? 

(1:11:38) - Resident Monetization

(1:15:10) - Is there room for managing homes for homeowners?

 (1:19:31) - Do you have any desire to buy property managers in other markets?

 (1:21:06) - Are the people you’re hiring already in the PM industry?

(1:23:11) - Thoughts on construction

(1:27:03) - What are you seeing going on in VC given everything happening in the economy?

(1:36:29) - Thoughts on Blue Collar work

(1:47:19) - Shooting the shit and bouncing business ideas off each other