Ethan Anderson

And I did a month later.

And that was Red Beacon.

What year was that?

Yeah, so that was 2008.

And, you know, the idea for Red Beacon was mobile phones and smartphones are becoming, you know, just taking the stage.

And I was like, why is it that you can't get bids for home service jobs?

Why do you have to call around or go to Yelp and then compare all the different bids yourself and the availability and the ratings and reviews when somebody should just do it for you?

And I didn't even know that there was an industry out there called lead gen, lead generation.

That's exactly what it was, but I wasn't familiar with it.

And so I kind of started Red Beacon in a blind, quickly realized there was competition.

Service Magic, owned by IAC, was one of the big competitors and had been around for about 10 years.

And Thumbtack started about the same time as us.

So they were some nascent competition.

Now, one thing that really set us apart is that we launched a TechCrunch 50 and won TechCrunch 50 on stage in front of about 100,000 people, either in person or on Ustream.

So we got just an amazing amount of publicity on day one of our launch, and that really helped propel the company.

Okay, so I can't talk about confidential information.

Obviously, I've signed a lot of documents, but I will say how we made money.

So the way Red Beacon worked is service providers would bid on your job.

So let's say you need a fence painted or you need a toilet installed.

You could just take a picture, describe the job, and our algorithm would select four or five high-quality service providers in your area to bring bids back to you.