2020 was a challenging year.

The pandemic crushed my startup, @ZeusLiving.

We were in a mad fight for survival.

I learned a lot about resilience, teamwork & belief, whilst making some mistakes along the way.

I'll share some of that experience here.

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TLDR, we overcame:

- losing tens of millions of revenue
- two layoffs (60% of the company)
- cofounder's wife diagnosed w/ cancer
- core business (business travel) going to zero
- switching to remote whilst undertaking a save-the-company pivot
- fundraising nuclear winter

The good news is that we survived & emerged stronger.

Despite everything, the pandemic allowed us to bring forward our vision (“live without the traditional constraints of housing”) more quickly, as remote work accelerated.

But it was the toughest thing I’ve done.

Early in the pandemic, when we had only a few weeks of runway, I told the team what happened next would be our choice.

I'm not sure where this belief came from, but we made the collective decision to fight, pivot & live.

It’s corny, but I believed that if we decided this was the end, it would be.

If we decided to come together and find a way, even if we didn’t know how to immediately, we would.

To set the scene, we've grown revenue 3-4x each year since we started in 2016.

Our product is high quality, flexible furnished housing for business travelers.

In 2019, we raised a $55M Series B ( https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/09/airbnb-zeus/).

2020 was the year we'd become an international company.

We had staffed up for growth and 9 figure revenue numbers.

But when 2020 started, I felt uneasy. Uber & Lyft's IPOs weren't up and to the right, & WeWork imploded. Something felt off.

January 23, 2020 sticks in the memory.

It was the date the Wuhan lockdown began, when the virus cases numbered in the hundreds.

It felt like a big deal & I wanted folks to pay attention.

@balajis' twitter updates were clutch.

Two weeks later I was flying to Japan.

I left booking flights to the last minute and consulted with my doctor about the safety of travelling.

I have an autoimmune condition, so had to take extra care.

All this is to say that February was the beginning of the rollercoaster.

A coworker approached me in the office asking me why I looked so stressed (do founders ever not?).

I responded that the lockdowns in China could come to the US.

Then, March happened. I didn't expect things to cascade so soon.

At first, our business didn't see much impact.

(We designed our product for 30+ day stays, so our residents aren't living with @ZeusLiving to attend conferences, for example).

The respite was short lived though.

Trump's travel ban shutdown international travel. Companies like Facebook began stopping travel. Cancellations snowballed.

We had to make a decision about refunding millions of dollars, which put our balance sheet in a perilous place.

I remembered @bchesky's advice when navigating tough decisions.

You can make a "business decision": see what’s best for the business.

Or, you can make a "principle decision": how do you want to be remembered irrespective of outcome?

We refunded residents, & offered credits for business customers when possible.

Occupancy dropped from 85% in March to 65% in April.

The lucrative summer months that drive our business disappeared.

In parallel, I had been gearing up for fundraising in Q2. I had spent months building a pipeline & preparing the data room.

That pipeline disappeared. Investors "keen to get into the space" stopped responding.

The market crashed.

I had to confront layoffs for the team we had carefully built up @ZeusLiving.

Executive leaders that I had painstakingly recruited no longer fit the future we were facing.

It was awful & I deeply regret how the layoffs were communicated.

I’d never done layoffs before, let alone on zoom.

The bad news kept coming. Each day felt like a week. Key team members left. The rocketship they signed up for was crashing back to earth.

My usual support of friends & family, weren't available.

I'm not a religious or superstitious person, but the circumstances led me to keep a Ganesha and Daruma doll on my desk.

I leaned heavily on my Five Minute Journal & each morning blindly reaffirmed to myself that we would get through this.

(NB: must give Daruma his other eye)

The exec team met daily & worked relentlessly to turn the ship around.

We captured all the demand we could. Our software improved in the way that only maniacal necessity can drive.

An existing investor, impressed by our execution, stepped up to capitalize the company.

We applied for PPP, and then gave it back and had to do a second set of layoffs.

This time, we did it better, but it was still heartbreaking & difficult. We had an emotional, respectful extended goodbye, culminating in a goodbye Zoom one afternoon.

I didn't expect to become teary in front of the company, but I worried about the wellbeing of the folks we were letting go in the midst of a pandemic.

I could see 4 years of collective work & effort unravelling in front of my eyes.

Nothing could prepare me for what came next.

As our goodbye Zoom ended, my cofounder called & told me his wife had stage 4 Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia. The doctors hospitalized her immediately.

It put things into perspective. The company struggles no longer felt important.

Around the same time, the press took great interest in our problems and wrote unflattering articles.

My ego suffered as our valuation dropped in half and our struggles leaked to the wider world.

Then came the pivot & glimmers of a growth strategy.

No one was travelling to our markets like San Francisco or New York.

But searches on @ZeusLiving for secondary markets like Miami were growing.

"Remote Work" was a new use case, and we had to figure out how to adapt.

We decided to add 3rd-party inventory to our platform in new markets like Miami, Denver & Austin.

This meant an entire software rewrite. The existing platform had property management assumptions baked across the architecture.

But there was millions of $ unmet demand if we did.

We pulled it off and doubled the available homes for Zeus residents.

The revenue we send to partner operators has grown each month.

To wrap up this tweetstorm that should have been a blog, I'm proud of what we achieved despite the headwinds.

Q4 was our most profitable Q4 in company history.

We expanded from 6 markets to 30+.

We had 6 straight months of 85%+ occupancy.

We cut burn by 75%, and will still grow revenue this year.

Goodbye 2020, we won't miss you.

And, as the greatest final blessing, my cofounder’s wife is in remission!

I have immense gratitude for my cofounders Srini & Joe, & to the whole Zeus team for giving it everything this year.

And of course, to my wife @meghankamat1 for her unwavering support.

Onwards.