Wander raises $50M Series B to expand premium smart vacation home network across North America and Europe

alongside Red Point. Thank you, Logan Bartlett. Okay. Red Point. Yeah, Red Point, Starwood. Bunch of bunch of really incredible folks. Fantastic. And yeah, in terms of capital, it's really I mean, I'd love to get on here and act like we're going to do some like crazy stuff, but it's really scale.

Like, we have three core priorities, which is quality stays, quality customer support, and then quality homes. And that's really where we're where we're laser focused. Very cool. What's the key to onboarding more uh wanders? I I I've seen the numbers ticking up every week as we cover you guys.

Um what is the what's the funnel look like? Yeah, it feels like you guys have a relentless pace. Yeah. And like a culture that really celebrates that and yeah, break it down. Yeah, Wonder definitely has a very high output culture as a as a startup.

I I tell the the team that like culture is not um you know like uh happy hours and you know like that kind of stuff. It's it's about winning. And so you know as as a company we we obviously very much focus on on that idea.

From from a growth perspective there's about 300,000 wander worthy locations across North America and Europe. And so that's really our our target.

Um, you know, from a systems perspective, we actually built out a a fleet of AI agents that went and found each one of these homes and then enriched it with owner contact information. So, we we know exactly who we're who we're going after.

Um, and so that's sort of the the focus right now is really a salesdriven model onboarding these homes onto the platform and then automating their operations with Wander OS and delivering that great experience to customers. Talk about kind of looking back a little bit.

I mostly want to spend time looking forward, but like navigating through the the ZERP era, lessons learned like that era allowed for a very different type of business model that you guys have have evolved, but I would love to hear kind of the the backstory.

Yeah, I mean, when Wanderers started, interest rates were were pretty much zero.

Uh and so that allowed for us to have a very asset heavy model where we actually went out and bought those first few locations on balance sheet really with the idea of solving the cold star problem of a marketplace do things that don't scale. And so as as we grew, obviously that had to transition.

You had two crazy events happen at once. You obviously had um sort of the massive, you know, rise of interest rates. But Wander actually at the time had a hund00 million credit facility with Credit Swiss as a six-month old startup. Uh which was incredibly hard to put together.

Um and then to have, you know, this uh systemically important bank, you know, explode as a as a CEO trying to scale the company was pretty pretty wild. Traumatic. That was yeah a pretty quick transition.

Talk about uh I I I feel like one of the one of the craziest things you can potentially do as an entrepreneur is go into a a category where there is a there's an active startup even if they're scaled. Uh that's still founder. That always seems dangerous because they're still somewhat agile.

But obviously you've counterpositioned the company against Airbnb. Um but but how uh what decisions are you making? How are you thinking about maintaining differentiation and and really competing as uh you know Chesky goes on a on a run building out different products and different strategies?

It seems like there's more opportunity than ever to differentiate. But how do you think about it? Yeah, I mean first of all like I think Airbnb is a great a great company and Brian's like an incredible founder. So I have nothing nothing negative to say there. Yeah. Yeah.

I think I think for Wander, you know, we we do deliver a little bit of a different experience. So, our our net promoter score for Q1 is, you know, 85. Uh, which is, you know, phenomenally phenomenally high. Like, thank you. Uh, yeah. Like, true true customer love. Yeah. And that doesn't happen by accident.

I mean, literally, if anyone has a negative sentiment in the concierge chat when they're like talking with our support, that literally gets flagged across the entire company. If there's a stay that's below an eight out of 10, then they're going to get a call from our COO.

And like I see that feedback and we're going to be hyper aggressive on fixing it. And that's across, you know, every single stay, every single home, every single customer. And so I think that that like relentless customer focus is um just a very different model than, you know, Airbnb.

Airbnb is sort of that um unmanaged marketplace um versus, you know, Wander. like we truly do care about the quality of our inventory, the quality of your customer experience, you know, to the point where literally like I will hop on the phone and like deal with whatever the issue is to ensure that it gets there.

And I know that sounds obviously like very unscalable, but I think that just purely from a a cultural perspective, it forces, you know, systems and automations to be built.

in in a time where I think that you know given everything that's happened in AI you actually do have this opportunity to deliver hospitality and like perfection at scale and so that's that's really where our focus is. Can you talk about advertising in this category?

Um, I was I I was we were talking to Keith Ra Boy about whether or not Airbnb should have an advertising product because we've seen with Uber and uh and is it Instacart where Fiji Simo was where she spun up advertising.

There's it's it's not quite a marketplace business, but there's an element of that, but the take rate was low and so the advertising product was very meaningful at those companies.

Keith Reo's take was that in the housing vacation stays market it's less relevant because the take rate's a little higher but do you agree with that or do you think that there is a future where uh where just broadly the category is driven by advertising dollars in a meaningful way? Yeah.

I mean, when you when you go on to like Booking. com, as an example, or even VBO, like you will see ads sure promoted to get to the because if I have a house and I want it rented, I'm willing to sacrifice a little bit of my margin to try and rise to the top of the rankings, right?

You'll actually even see offplatform ads. So, like very typical like, you know, go buy this product type where they're actually taking people off platform, which is pretty interesting. Um, like I'm I'm sure that it's a a revenue source.

I mean, these these platforms spend a ton of money on getting traffic um from a performance marketing perspective, from just their own internal marketing, SEO, etc.

And so, it certainly makes sense to like try and monetize a percentage of that traffic that's never going to end up converting um to actually like booking a home. But that being said, like Keith is obviously, you know, correct and very smart that the the take rate on vacation rentals is really high. Sure.

So for for Wander, our average order value is about $5,400 and you're looking at like an average take of about 30%. Um, and so like for us, that would have to be a lot of like random ads to, you know, like make that up and and of course the customer experience is is not not great.

We're really trying to market users on on that that that booking. But yeah, I mean I think for a company like Airbnb it would totally make sense, especially to the, you know, on the avenue you mentioned where hosts are just paying a little bit more to promote their house to the top of the feed.

You know, they have a lot of inventory and um, you know, sort of pulling pulling yourself out of that is, you know, difficult for your mom and pop Airbnb host. Yeah. Talk about uh disintermediation in the context of uh marketplaces and platforms.

We saw the canonical example of the dog walker, which is basically just a lead genen company because as soon as you find a good dog walker, you immediately disintermediate. And there's some things that those companies can do to prevent that.

Um, with with some rentals, it's very much like I'm going to be in this town for just this week. I need this place. I'm not going to bother disintermediating. But if you fall in love with a place and you're going there every year, we've heard about people kind of trying to Google the place and find a different way.

Airbnb has an issue where property management companies will list a home and then the person that's booking the home stay there and then just reach out to the property manager and do a deal off platform. Whereas Wander you guys are just full stack, right?

So it's like you could even get you could look up the title or whatever and get to the owner and they'd be like, "Okay, if you want to book the house like it's still going through wander, but yeah. " Yeah. How do you think about that? what what what does that tech stack look like to prevent that or help that?

Yeah, I mean, so I I do think that it is like the core the core risk and I think that's even something that like has been talked about on their earnings calls is like direct booking websites and there's ways for them to mitigate it.

And you also have a ton of supply that isn't professionally managed where the operator isn't going to have their own direct booking website. They're just going to list on Airbnb. And so I think they're actually like positioned relatively fine. You know, I think it's like a a travel hack that not many people use.

You know, for for Wander, like I am a huge fan of like having complete and total control over the business and the platform that I'm building. Like when I was a kid, um my first little company, I was like 13, 14. Um we're like hosting Minecraft servers and whatever else.

And when Minecraft got purchased by by Microsoft, they rolled out a ULA. Totally killed my little business. Had to fire like four or five people. And so I learned about like platform risk at like pretty, you know, pretty young age. Never again. Wow. Never again.

Um, and and so, you know, for Wander, I knew I wanted it to be verticalized. I knew I wanted to have like my own booking engine. I knew I wanted to have my own property management software. I felt like that was like the most durable piece.

And then you also have to ask yourself like, you know, as a space and a and a brand matures, like that brand, that brand promise, you know, actually matters. And so if people look at Wander and associate it as a a brand that says, "Hey, this is a quality stay, you know, you don't get uh replaced quote unquote.

" Um, and so I think that's also like a really important piece is the underlying brand and sort of that guarantee to the customer they're going to have a good trip. Yeah. Uh, how do you think about taste in the context of of what you're doing?

Wanderers always felt like a just a very it's felt like a hospitality brand as much as it's felt like a technology company. Uh where did that come from from anywhere?

I mean you were you were building uh coding coding tools historically which which you know I guess it's you know important to have good design in that category but maybe when you started coder it wasn't even the case. So I'm curious where it came from besides you know people like Kyle crushing it. Yeah.

Um, you know, my my my journey as a founder has been like pretty, you know, pretty fascinating. Obviously, like my first ventureback company I started when I was 17, 18, you know, coder, enterprise developer tools. So, radically different space than, you know, travel.

Um, you however like I've always had a deep passion for, you know, design and as a kid, I you know, did high school online, traveled, you know, 200 plus days a year all over the world. Um, and you were you were you were race car. You were driving race cars, right? Yeah.

I don't really I don't really talk about it, but yeah, I used to I used to race Formula 4. Uh, no way. And then Yeah. Formula Formula Mazda. It was funny.

John John and I got lunch in Malibu like a couple years ago at this point and uh I was like, "Oh, do you want to like I you know knew he drove cars at a at a high level. I was like, "Do you want to go drive my Ferrari or whatever?

" And John gets behind it and he like, you know, normally when people like are like trying out a car, you know, like everybody's car, they're like taking it tame and he's like, you know, really experiencing the na naturally aspirated V12. That's amazing. But I was confident. I was I was okay.

I was confident that that he was going to take care of it. So he's got the experience for it. That's awesome. Yeah, it was a it was a great it was a great time. Great meal.

Um, and so, so yeah, I think with Wander, I mean, candidly speaking, like Wander is like my soul, but like as a company, like everything needs to be high quality. The software needs to be on point. I also don't think people realize like how much is truly automated with Wander.

Like at the top you have the booking platform, but underneath is literally this property management software that's running all the vendor communication, coordination, payouts, preventative maintenance, task tracking. like Wander doesn't actually employ any local property managers.

Uh that's all just through software, the underlying coordination of vendors, which I don't think that like anyone fully, you know, realizes because of course we don't we don't market it that way. Like you you want it to feel like a like a magic trick.

Um, and so I think like I think that's probably where you're seeing the design come from is that like if there's anything on the site that that that bothers us like the entire team is just obsessed over this this principle of quality. Last question for me and we'll let you go.

Um, are experiences or local other services a a true complement to vacation bookings and and housing or or is that kind of a round peg in a square hole? Yeah. The the way that I look at it is that I I think it's a feature of a platform. I don't think it's a platform in and of itself.

And I think that you have this rare moment where you can effectively abstract the way that you connect to these service providers. So, you know, if you were to go back in time, let's look at like Open Table as an example, they had to build out integrations with the restaurants.

The the restaurants had to use Open to measure, you know, manage their reservations or whatever else so that you could provide this online platform. you know, now with, you know, what exists from a technology perspective, you can have an AI agent call a restaurant and make the reservation for you.

And so, you no longer need to force these types of integrations. And so, the way that I look at it from a services perspective is you just end up with this like aenic concierge that exists inside of your travel app that goes ahead and calls the, you know, local chef or the restaurant or whatever else.

And so, you don't really end up building necessarily direct integrations. you more build like an abstraction layer and a curation layer. Yeah. On the experiences. Makes a lot of sense. I I mean I have one more question about uh SEO was really big in the early Airbnb story. Are you looking at any of these AI SEO tools?

Do you think that it's important to show up in Chat GBT for example? And are there any services or kind of best practices that you think relate to AI SEO or isn't it GEO according to Andre Norwoods? Yeah, I don't know what the the acronym is, but that it sounds like a good acronym.

It's actually something that we we have started focusing on pretty intensely. Um, so the the real key is sort of where these agents are referencing, you know, the materials and the facts that they're that they're getting. And so what you end up with is like you basically need a source of truth strategy.

Um, which is is a really interesting phenomenon. Basically, it's like how do you how do you sort of like uh become the system of record from a fact perspective or get the data onto, you know, a platform that that is is viewed as having the facts. Like for example, chat GPT references Wikipedia a lot. Sure.

Um and so like that candidly speaking is a little bit harder to like quote unquote hack versus like traditional SEO.

Um, and there's definitely going to be like an entire push and I actually think you're going to see a lot of value creation from platforms like Wikipedia uh come from the fact that they are viewed as like a source of truth. Very cool. Anything else, Jordy?

Uh, you said there's 300,000 homes that you guys have sort of softcircled as targets. I'm assuming you're going to get all of them in the fullness of time. What do you what do you want to do in the next uh what do you want to do by 2030? Do you have a do you have a target?

Yeah, I mean hopefully by 2030 we've accomplished that for sure. Um that's the that's the pointing to the Yeah. Pointing to the the I like I I I can't wait for there to be like five homes left and you're just following following around the owners like in a in a helicopter being like I got you. I got you.

Give us the keys. Listen, we we'll we'll we'll get it done. And before I jump, one thing I want to note is as a a sponsor of of this show, how incredible you guys are and how happy we are.

And so to anyone who's watching this thinking about where to spend their ad dollars or what podcast to sponsor, I cannot encourage you more enough to work with these boys. They are incredible and the ROI is is through the charts. Thank you, man. That that that really means a lot. You guys bet uh you guys bet early.

You're one of our very first ones and uh we will never forget it. Yeah, I think my favorite thing is that uh people might think that we ran the song by you before doing it live. We did not live. We didn't get any push back and I think it's all for the better if there's less oversight. So, we've been having fun.

It's funny. Did Did we create Did Did we create We created singing. We created jingles. We created the jingle. We created the jingle from first principles. Copy. We created the jingle. No, we literally they didn't send us any copy. We didn't ask for any copy. We didn't ask like how do you do an ad read for your company?

We just went to your website and just sang the first tagline on there. If it had said anything else, we would sing. Funny. It's so drilled into my brain now that I just assume that you guys were singing forever. Like we just we just went to wander. com and started singing Find Your Happy Place.

Well, we should take you out. I want to make I I want to make a a We should We should make like a radio like Absolutely. Yeah. Hey, this is John and Jordy VPN. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is fantastic. And congratulations.

super excited for you and the team and uh John and I are like basing our summer plans off of Wander Vacation uh Wander World. So, for sure. Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Cheers. Thank you guys so much. Later, John. Uh one last news item I want to hit before we get out of here.

Uh we we were talking about the poly market on Elon Musk out as Tesla's CEO in 2025. It is lower than ever. Uh it was around 20% in March.

uh crashed down to 18 15% was recently sitting around 13% and now is down at 9% and so uh the news about Elon leaving the US government has been uh you know a bull case for him staying as Tesla CEO which makes sense because he has a lot of work to do a lot of opportunity between uh self-driving and humanoid robots robots who better to run that company than Elon and another one I've been tracking circle IPO in 2025 is up to 94% chance.

It dropped to 47% chance on uh May 21st, so about a week ago, and it has just rocketed up to uh 95 and I expect we'll see some news on that front. Yeah. Uh I mean the other market since we're in poly market mode, these are fun. I love these. So uh there's of course our market on how much the iPhone 17 will cost.

Uh, over $1,000 is at a 13% chance. Over $1,500, 2% chance. Over $2,000 is only a 2% chance. Uh, I think Tim Cook's going to get it done. Keep keep iPhones cheap. Uh, the other interesting thing is, uh, which which company has the best AI model at the end of May? Google's running away with it at 96 uh 96. 5%.

Yeah, that's May. If you go out farther, if yeah, if you go out farther to the end of the year, Google's at 40%, open uh OpenAI's at 22%, XAI is at 23%, Anthropics at 7%. And so, a little bit closer of a horse race towards the end of the year.

What I want is I want benchmarks and evals for video models now because VO3 seems to be just completely running away with the game. It but you know, we haven't seen what the next iteration of Sora looks like. OpenAI clearly cares about that. They've been building a product in image VO.

In fact, the first the first consumer product from OpenAI was not a chat model. It was Dolly. Dolly 2 was the first was the first product they released and then Chat GPT came out. And so it's obviously in their DNA. They're not just going to let that they're not just going to let Google run away with it.

There's so much more that you can do in video. Uh we see this with Runway. We see this with a bunch of other products in the space. Um, it'll be interesting to track that, but we don't really have a great benchmark or eval for that. So, uh, we'll have to get one and then we'll have to put it on Poly Market. Got it.

Anyway, uh, we will see you tomorrow. It's going to be a live show. Uh, Aurora, we launched a new product today. A filtered shower head [Music] there. Let's see. Big news for Aurora. Filtering your shower head, cleaning up the water you're bathing in. Yeah.

So we this is a product that was in the works for uh couple years at this point. We we were pretty strategic about when the right time uh would be to roll it out uh and made the best shower filter in the game on a bunch of different metrics. Flow rate, filtration, very cool uh ergonomics and uh yeah, go check it out.

I made a code or I had Brian CEO make a code TVPN little discount and um love it. Yeah, excited to see how this goes. So, we will be back tomorrow. Little bit of an earlier show. I'm doing some traveling and it'll be no guest, just me and Jordy chopping up the timeline throwback episode.

I think these are some of our best. It's going to be fantastic. I can't wait. Uh, so it'll probably be an hour, hour and a half around 10:00 a. m. If you're looking to tune in, uh, we will of course let everyone know and it'll be in your RSS feeds.

And if you're listening to the RSS feed, please go leave us five stars on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Do it. Ben Ben's pointing a a gel blaster at us right