Anthony Chow: From Airbnb Hustle to Global Smart Locks, COVID Pivot & the Rise of the Rental Economy – E676
episode
BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
37 min
2 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 18 days ago
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
How did Anthony’s Airbnb side‑hustle reveal the need for a smart‑lock solution?
Learn from Southeast Asia's best tech leaders. Build the future, learn from our past, and stay human in between. No BS on success. I'm Jeremy O, Venture Capitalist, Sarah founder, Harvard MBA, science fiction nerd, and dad of two daughters. Every week, we debate startup news, interview change makers, answer listener questions, and share personal insights. Join our movement of over 40,000 members and get transcripts, resources, and community at www.bravesea.com. Stay well and stay brave. Hey, I'm so excited to have you on the show. You're such a inspiring founder to be pushing out a property tech in Southeast Asia and and now globally. So I'm really excited to have you on the show. Could you introduce yourself?
Thank you, Jeremy, for having me on the show. My name is Anthony. I'm the co-founder and CEO of EGU, or in Singapore, sometimes we are known as EGU Home. That's kind of the name that we started from. Um, the journey uh for IGU actually started about 10 years ago. So I had just graduated from the US in Stanford. I came back to Singapore. I was working for SingTel. So SingTeu is this large telco over in Southeast Asia, and I was a data scientist for them. Basically helping them analyze their data records and helping generate insight. To improve their digital portfolios within the company. The interesting thing was on the side, me and my buddy we were actually running an Airbnb property right here in Singapore.
So this was when Airbnb was still kind of gray. But we had one unit and we realized that you know as long as you have 40% occupancy, you were breaking even. Also we rented a property and we supplied it out. And we went from, you know, one unit. We generally on good months we get like 70-80% occupancy. So you know you're making a About 50% margins on it. So we grew from one unit to about 10, 12 units. At one point, I think we had about 20 units and was making more money than our job as a full-time data scientist, right? So that was kind of what we were doing on as a side hustle. But one of the challenges that we found, you know, running this on the side was, you know, passing keys to guests. You know, uh, we have full-time jobs.
So and we're working very hard to have full-time jobs. So we couldn't meet our guests like 2 p.m. when they wanted to check in. So we started design, put our own technology. Background into use, and we started designing our own smart locks and our own smart home ecosystem using Z-Wave at the time to ensure that we are able to check guests in remotely and then when they check out we can switch off the AC and stuff like that. No.
And that was working kind of well for us. So this entire journey, I think we ran it for about one to two years. That was about 2014, 2015, around there. And what happened around the time was Airbnb became illegal. So the government actually regulated. That there's no such thing as Airbnb anymore in Singapore, you can't do it. Um, and so we had to shut down the entire business. So because we were not landlords, uh, we rented and we sublented on it, and so we made a bit of loss on it. But uh, because of the experience running, you know, this portfolio of uh Airbnb properties, you know, we realized that the solution kind of we hacked together this whole smart home system for ourselves, and we realized that this actually has a lot of value for anyone who's running Airbnb property management at scale.
Right. Right. So while we were running Airbnb, we do visit you know some of our friends who are running Airbnbs in like Thailand, Indonesia, and all that to learn best practices. So, as we can't do our problem management anymore in Singapore, so we started to reach out back to them and say, look, we have built this for ourselves, would you like to try it? And we got a very positive response. So we shut down our Airbnb business and then we started becoming a smart home solution provider for Airbnb hosts. And that was really the genesis of Eagle. So that was kind of how it started. Oh. Oh incredible. What a journey. You know, something interesting was that I'm always you know restless, right?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did Anthony’s Airbnb side‑hustle reveal the need for a smart‑lock solution?
0:10–4:40
2
What triggered the pivot from a Singapore Airbnb business to a global prop‑tech product?
4:40–8:05
3
How did Igloo redesign its lock to work offline and finally achieve product‑market fit?
8:05–12:48
4
Why did an Airbnb partnership accelerate Igloo’s worldwide adoption?
12:48–17:42
5
How did COVID‑19 collapse the vacation‑rental market and open a new long‑term‑rental opportunity?
17:42–23:00
6
What motivated the founding team to relocate to Texas and reboot the business?
23:00–28:05
7
How did Igloo evolve its leadership and organisational structure to scale globally?
28:05–32:44
8
What are the emerging trends in the rental and asset‑sharing economy that Igloo is targeting?
32:44–37:15
Speakers
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