Good Monday morning!
The most exciting part of working at a startup is “really the people who are all rowing in the same direction,” Pacaso CFO Nina Tran told me in our recent chat about her leadership role and workplace culture.
That sense of community is part of Pacaso’s business model, says Tran, who joined the company in March. “Since we launched in October of 2020, more than 800,000 people have visited Pacaso’s website, and more than 60,000 people have engaged with us directly,” she says.
The startup is geared toward those who want to own a second home, but elect to become a co-owner with likeminded individuals rather than buy their own place outright. Pacaso works with real estate agents to help buyers find their desired homes, and pairs them with other homebuyers with similar interests. Pacaso then sets up an LLC around the property, vets the potential co-owners, and handles all the sales details. The co-owners get 100% ownership of the home at closing, unlike with some timeshare arrangements. The company says it has helped more than 100 families become second homeowners since launch.
Pacaso announced in March $75 million in Series B funding, bringing its total financing to $90 million. Pacaso also secured $1 billion in debt financing to purchase additional homes. Pacaso says it now has unicorn status: “We are valued at $1 billion, and have achieved profitability,” the company announced in a blog post.
“Key investors have identified Pacaso as a top company,” Tran says. “We’re a category leader in this new space [and] our valuation really reflects that.”
Pacaso’s chairman is Spencer Rascoff, a former Zillow CEO and cofounder of that company. Austin Allison, Pacaso’s CEO, is a former Zillow executive and a founder of Dotloop, a real estate transaction platform. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, with more than 50 employees across more than a dozen markets.
Before joining Pacaso, Tran served as CFO at Veritas Investments, a real estate investment manager. Prior to that position, she took Waypoint Homes public through the merger that created Starwood Waypoint. Tran then served as that company’s CFO through its acquisition by Invitation Homes.
Looking back on her financial leadership roles, Tran says she volunteered to take on “a lot of projects and initiatives that came our way during the growth of the company,” which helped her career progression. “So even if it’s outside of your job description, I would encourage people to raise their hand to take on special projects, because I think those opportunities don’t come very often,” she says.
Having been at Pacaso for about a month, Tran has completed her first priority of getting the company’s financial audits done. She says she’ll now focus on recruiting talent for key positions on her teams, and on “building and implementing an efficient and scalable infrastructure for not only finance and accounting, but also our people and talent teams.”
Trans has diversity top of mind when recruiting, and she says a remote workforce may alleviate some of the geographical barriers to hiring diverse talent. “We’re a distributed workforce, so we can work from anywhere in the U.S.,” she explains. “It allows us to recruit a really great pool of candidates throughout the U.S., and it brings diversity.”
And so far, she’s enjoying the company’s culture.
“We’ve got a lot of talented crew members who want to do the right thing, who are very mission-driven, and who believe in the business model. And so that makes it fun to work with everybody, every day.”
See you tomorrow.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
Big deal
Juniper Networks, a multinational corporation that develops and markets networking products, has released a new study of corporate attitudes toward artificial intelligence. Juniper's survey of 700 respondents, all of whom are involved in their company's A.I. and machine learning plans, found that a whopping 95% of them believe their organizations would benefit from embedding A.I. into their daily operations, products and services. Their number-one challenge: processing and managing data to feed the A.I. technology.
Going deeper
A new report produced by MIT Technology Review Insights in association with Databricks, takes a look at what makes an organization successful in deploying advanced cloud-based technologies, including analytics and machine learning capabilities. The report is based on a survey and interviews with more than 350 CDOs, CIOs, and other data leaders at organizations with over $1 billion in annual revenue. It found that only 13% of organizations surveyed excel at delivering on their data strategy. “This select group of ‘high-achievers’ deliver measurable business results across the enterprise,” according to the report. The high achievers found success in adhering to the “foundations of sound data management and architecture, which enable them to ‘democratize’ data and derive value from machine learning,” researchers reported.
Leaderboard
President Biden nominated Margaret Schausto be CFO of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Schaus currently serves in the Department of Defense as the director for business operations in the Office of the Under Secretary for Research and Engineering.
Ismael Savadogo was named CFO of Change.org, the global online petition website. Before joining Change.org, Savadogo was CFO at the National Aquarium and Color of Change.
Matt Puckett was named executive vice president and CFO of VF Corp., a global lifestyle apparel, footwear and accessories company. Puckett joined the company in 2001 as a senior accountant in the finance organization. Puckett succeeds Scott Roe who announced his retirement from VF to pursue other opportunities.
Overheard
"Just by riding shotgun into a world unbeknownst to people like myself, you start to see how it works."
— Alejandro Guerrero, a first generation Mexican American and general partner at early-stage venture capital firm Act One Ventures, on experiencing the lack of diversity in the venture capital investor field, as told to Fortune.
