Ajay Prakash
speaker
105 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Ajay Prakash’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
you know, take whatever the next step is. And so I feel like that was perfectly tailored to my situation.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, sure. So I started Rince with one of my best friends from college in early 2013. So it's been almost 12 years now. Wow. At that time, I knew I was going to start a company. And so I was looking at various trends that got me excited. And I kind of narrowed in on bringing technology to old school industries and looking at existing customer experiences that were full of friction.
And so I was exploring a bunch of different ideas of my own and nothing that got me excited enough to take the leap. And then one day I was getting breakfast with James, my co-founder. And, you know, we had kind of been acting as each other's sounding board, talking about entrepreneurial ideas. And, you know, he's a healthcare guy.
So I had been putting on my healthcare hat, trying to give him feedback. And he actually kicked off the breakfast and said, hey, before we talk about any healthcare ideas, I can't get this idea out of my mind about doing something in dry cleaning. And it was just one of those moments where, you know, all of the kind of bells went off in my head.
And I thought, well, dry cleaning is actually perfect for the trends I'm looking at. James was always someone I viewed as a potential co-founder, just didn't have any interest in health care. And then the fact that he had grown up in dry cleaning, actually, his parents were dry cleaners, his aunts and uncles were dry cleaners.
gave him that unique kind of unfair advantage of understanding how the supply side of this equation would work. And so, you know, we got really excited about it and just spent that entire breakfast talking about what we could do here. He lived in New York at the time. I lived in San Francisco.
He actually flew back to New York and then a week or two later came back to San Francisco and we set up a test. We picked 11 of our friends. We said, you know, we were going to just try to pick up their dry cleaning and laundry, clean it, bring it back. and see what we learn. James was driving the car. I was in the passenger seat.
I'd run up to the door as the valet and, you know, get their clothes and special instructions. We took him back to James's parent shop. cleaned the clothes and brought them back. And every one of our friends said, hey, that was awesome. When are you guys coming back? And so we hadn't thought that far ahead. We just wanted to see if anyone would respond positively.
And so, you know, that kind of gave us the excitement and incentive to keep going. And so we then spent a couple of months just talking to as many people as we could about the last time they did dry cleaning, the last time they did laundry. And what we heard in those conversations, you know, it's effectively the same thing we've heard for the last 11 or 12 years as we built Rint.
It's just the existing experiences are so full of friction. And it's not one big point of friction. It's all these little points of friction. We call it death by a thousand cuts.
But what we realized was there's an opportunity to kind of systematically remove all of those points of friction to create a seamless experience from start to finish, a customer centric experience, a technology first experience. And so We worked for a few months and kind of put a circle around three zip codes in San Francisco. And then we launched the service officially in May 2013.
Well, you know, my approach is a little bit different. So when I knew I was going to start something, my exploration was in looking at the intersection of three things, right? One was the, where am I an expert? One was, where's their market opportunity? And one was, where am I passionate or really excited about it?
And the expertise thing, you know, sometimes people will say, oh, you know, you have to work in an industry and you have to have this domain expertise for a long time before you can actually start something. And for me, the expertise that I brought to the table was someone who had always worked really long hours, was always really busy and never had enough time to do. the things I needed to do.
And so all of the ideas I was exploring on my own were around removing that friction that a busy consumer has. And at the time, if you think about when you start a company, people will always look and say, hey, why me? Why now?
The why now at the time was less about PE thinking about old school industries and more about it was when Uber and Lyft were really exploding and people were looking at their phone as the remote control for their lives. And the iPhone had become ubiquitous. And so there were on-demand companies in every vertical, on-demand car washes, on-demand shipping, on-demand house cleaning, you name it.
And I think for me, the idea of pressing a button and having something happen was really compelling as a busy professional. And so I was doing my research and I got great advice early on from another founder who said, Hey, as you're working on things, check and see how excited you are. And then a week later, check and see how excited you are.
And then a week later, check and see how excited you are. And if in the early days you can't maintain that level of excitement when you have to do research on the industry or have people tell you that's a dumb idea or whatever it might be early on, then there's no way you can maintain that conviction for the 10 or 15 plus years it takes to build a real company that's durable.
And that was great advice for me because I would dive into different ideas and, you know,
nothing really got me that excited and I think it was a combination of didn't feel like the right space and I didn't have the co-founder and because I think I knew that I wanted someone to do it with me so dry cleaning and laundry was not necessarily in my sights but James grew up in dry cleaning and so when he brought it up all of the pieces kind of fell into place and then we started working on it and I just I just kept getting more and more excited as we were building and I'm glad I did because now it's almost 12 years later and you know I'm still excited but
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