Opening Moving Doors

Advice kept me at a safe distance

After Foody, I advised many startups. Staycaee, which later rebranded to Moving Doors, was of particular interest because it brought furnished-living operations and software into the same product.

Advice let me contribute, but it kept me at a distance from the decisions and consequences that made the company interesting. I wanted equity and a real stake in the outcome, so I became the technical co-founder.

That commitment came with a different responsibility. I was no longer only helping the team see technical options; I was accountable for turning those choices into a product and an operating system that could support the company.

Starting again after Foody created a tempting shortcut. I had seen a marketplace grow, built operating systems and worked through an acquisition. I could have treated those memories as a template. Housing had different constraints, slower inventory and a physical experience that no interface could rescue if the operation was weak.

I knew where to look, not what I would find

Foody experience helped me know where to look: transaction completion, operational exceptions, customer trust and the boundary between software and human service. It did not tell me what the answers would be in housing.

Software cannot compensate for reality

A technology-enabled property company still has keys, maintenance, cleaning, neighbourhoods and homes that people must actually live in. The physical operation is not an implementation detail. It is the product.

We did not need to put an app between every person and every task. The software needed to remove avoidable coordination, keep a clear record and help the team respond before a small issue became a bad stay.

Customers did not care that a workflow ran. They cared that the stay worked.

Founding again

Starting a second company was less innocent. I could see more ways it might fail. That could improve judgement, but it could also make experimentation too cautious.

The work was to test which Foody lessons still applied and which belonged to one company at one moment. Experience helped find risks, but it could not decide which ones deserved a no.