Blake on Aruba Unplugged: Smart Living-as-a-Service

Nathan Potter on the Future of Travel

Nathan leads Wander's product and engineering team. Their core focus is on building and delivering high-quality products that delight customers and help scale business functions. He has previously spent time building established products at Fortune 500 companies and also greenfield products as an early-stage startup team member. Nathan has 7+ years of experience where he has built and deployed systems that have needed to handle scale for eCommerce giants like Target and security constraints for Intelligence Agencies and large financial institutions across the globe.

In this conversation, Nathan discusses how Wander is paving the way for a more automated and luxurious travel experience than ever before. 

 

Discussion: 

1. Background of Wander. 
2. Why was having a Tesla onsite important for creating a good experience?
3. What has it been like to integrate with Tesla?
4. How do you choose which smart devices to integrate with?
5. What are some of the surprises of creating a concierge experience? 
6. What are some of the processes you have created for your team's back-office system?
7. How do you allocate resources for your client-facing system vs. your back-office system? 
8. Is there anything that you have wanted to build but decided not to? 
9. How do you approach integrating the whole tech stack? 
10. Lightening round questions. 

 

Links:

https://www.wander.com/

 

Transcript: 

Nathan Potter

We're working directly with Tesla and our auto insurance companies to basically build out a miniature Turro within our app. So we've gotta go through the onboarding process of signing the agreements for the rental and waiving all of the policies and the auto insurance and everything and then integrating with the Tesla API as well. 

Blake Miller

Welcome to the Future Living Podcast. Today I've got a really exciting episode with my friend Nathan Pottery, the CTO of Wander. Wander is, as I've been describing to a lot of friends, kind of the company that I've got a startup crush on. And I'm excited to bring this one to you as one of our first episodes back for the Future Living podcast because we're doing a lot of similar things, but they're focused more on vacation rentals.

Nathan, welcome. Why don't you give everybody a little bit of background on what you guys are doing with Wander?

Nathan Potter

Hey, thanks for having me on Blake. Love what you're doing over at Homebase. Yeah, would love to. So we're basically building a network of smart homes across the globe. Currently, right now we're located across the United States and looking to expand into Canada, Mexico, and Europe this year. But each home you can imagine as a luxury real estate property. You walk in the lights turn on, the music is playing, and the fireplace is on setting the ambiance for your stay. You can control everything through the app, whether that's the shades, the lights, the locks, the garage doors, really anything. You can control the Tesla through the app as well. So each of our properties comes with a Tesla for you to use.

We love it. It's a ton of fun. We've been able to build some really cool integrations with Tesla and have been working with their API team to integrate directly with them and that's been a lot of fun to experience. 

Blake Miller

We're talking about the home and all this stuff and maybe that's something we can start with because what you're describing is something that's just so cool. You guys are designing such an amazing experience for people that are traveling, right? And what I think is so cool too is it's not just for your standard family or couple that's getting an Airbnb, you know. You support this group travel model. And I'm curious with all of that, why was having a car on-site or having a Tesla there so important to creating a good user experience or a good resume experience?

Nathan Potter

Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of our properties are relatively close to airports and a lot of times people will fly in and get an Uber to the property, and we want to create a travel experience from the future. Like if you're looking 10 years down the line, what does travel look like? You know, and so you can kind of imagine that whenever self-driving cars are to a place where it can be like, okay the car comes and picks you up from the airport and then takes you to the property, and then you can use it during your stay, instead of having to rent the car at the airport. 

And a lot of times we work with teams, so a lot of remote companies will use our platform and basically rent one of our larger properties. For them, it's like they already have a car on standby if they need to go on trips or anything–super easy. 

Blake Miller

So what's it been like starting there at that integration? I mean, you've got locks and thermostats and all those things inside the house.  Starting with that integration of getting somebody access to that car instantly, what's that been like? What's it been like working with Tesla? 

Nathan Potter

It's been a lot of fun, honestly. It's been huge, though. I mean, there's a lot of moving parts. We're working directly with Tesla and our auto insurance companies. So basically we had to build out a miniature Turo within our app. We've gotta go through the onboarding process of assigning the agreements for the rental and waving all of the policies and the auto insurance and everything, so we can send that over to our auto insurance providers.  Then, integrating with the Tesla API, as well. 

So we were working with their business team to get access to their fleet API, and since we were able to get that, it's been a big game changer for us. Now it's kind of fun. We can basically allow the guests to unlock the Tesla whenever they've gone through that flow and then provide them that access throughout the trip, like viewing the battery level and seeing where they parked, all of those sorts of things. And then after their trip is done, it'll automatically lock after the cleaning crew is done cleaning the car up and getting it ready for the next guest. Then it's locked waiting for the next guest to arrive and go through that same onboarding flow—the rental agreement and everything.

It's been a big challenge, but it's been a ton of fun, and cool to see the delight that it brings the guests. It's not every day that you get to drive around in a Tesla, so it's been fun to provide that along with the beautiful properties. 

Blake Miller

I think it's probably pretty obvious why you guys chose Tesla to work with on the vehicle side of things. Moving inside the house, or inside the vacation home, how do you, especially as the CTO, choose what devices you're using and how you connect them?  I'm kind of jealous because it seems like you probably get to pick just one or two and not have to be spread so thin with several devices in each category like we have to, but how did you go through that process? How do you evaluate the hardware that you're working with, and what are the things that are important to you guys? 

Nathan Potter

Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of that is in partnership with our home ops team. They are absolutely incredible. They're really the boots on the ground setting up these new homes and renovating properties that we bring onto the platform. 

Blake Miller

And you guys have vertically integrated the whole team, right? 

Nathan Potter

Correct. Yeah. So those guys are on the team here at Wander and they travel around the country going to these beautiful locations. 

Blake Miller

That'd be fun. 

Nathan Potter

Yeah, no, it's a blast. They seem to be having a great time.  So they will go to a home and–it's interesting, we do have to support a wide range of things. Primarily locks, because some of these homes that we acquire already have smart home setups.

So they're either like with Crestron or Troll Four or Savant or otherwise. And so we have to integrate with kind of what's, what's there, and what's available to us to minimize the overhead in terms of like retrofitting or renovating. 

Blake Miller

Oh, interesting.

Nathan Potter

Yeah. And so we do end up having to integrate with a wide variety of devices, but we've been able to kind of create a middleware on our system that kind of abstracts it away. So all of the locks look kind of the same to our client. Like our mobile app, it's just a lock, whether that's a Dana Lock or a Yale Smart lock, it doesn't really necessarily matter to the client, it just kind of looks like a lock. And so it's interesting. We purchased a pa

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Lee Odess - Future of Access Industry

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Labeled as an uber-networker by the Washington Post, Lee Odess has over 18 years starting, building, and leading businesses with an exceptional track record for sales growth and marketing effectiveness.

Discussion

1. Blake on the Inside Access Control podcast.
2. Lee on the Future of Living podcast.

Links

https://www.insideaccesscontrol.com
https://www.group337.com
https://www.insidemfac.com
https://twitter.com/lodess
https://www.linkedin.com/in/leeodess

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Abbey Wemimo & Samir Goel are the Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of Esusu, the leading financial technology company helping individuals save money and build credit. Esusu's groundbreaking rent reporting platform captures rental payment data and reports it to credit bureaus to boost credit scores. The company's mission is to provide financial solutions that pave a permanent bridge to financial access and inclusion.

Conversation

1. Introductions
2. What is happening with rent right now?
3. How does this affect landlords?
4. What is Esusu's Rent Relief campaign?
5. How does Esusu help to build a renter's credit?
6. What ways does this help renters and landlords?
7. Why do this?
8. Lightning round.

Links

• esusurent.com
• esusurentrelief.com

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Learn more about Aruba and their podcast:
https://www.arubanetworks.com
https://blogs.arubanetworks.com/podcasts

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