Tasneem Amina and Justine Palefsky of Kindred: Inside the Strategy to Build Radical Affordability and Trust Into Home Swapping

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tasneem Amina and Justine Palefsky, co-founders of Kindred.

Tasneem Amina is the co-founder and President of Kindred, where she oversees product, engineering, and design. Before founding Kindred, she was a product GM at Opendoor where she worked closely with the executive team to lead several key initiatives across consumer, pricing, and operations. Her work also included serving as product lead overseeing the company’s machine learning efforts to fully automated extremely accurate home pricing. Previous experience includes being the Director of Analytics at Yik Yak and an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs.

Justine Palefsky is the co-founder and CEO of Kindred, where she focuses on customer experience and brand. Before founding Kindred, Justine was part of the early team at Opendoor where she launched several markets, developed the home Trade-Up product, and scaled the company’s unique Self-Tour program. Justine’s cultural contributions include founding Women of Opendoor, leading the company’s engineering retros, and serving as designated culture interviewer during hypergrowth. Prior experiences also include being VP of Customer Experience at proptech company Homebound and working at Bain & Company.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

Tas: I was born in South India, and immigrated to the US when I was 14. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I was quite fortunate to have been born into a family that encouraged higher education for both men and women, which meant that I always had the privilege of attending high-quality institutions, despite not coming from a lot of money.

My mom & my aunts served as my childhood role models since they were strong, financially independent women, despite coming from a society that, at the time, did not look favorably upon women for doing so. In many ways, I think my entrepreneurial ambitions began watching them hustle for their livelihood. Some of my fondest earliest childhood memories revolve around sitting in my mom’s imported goods store, watching her make sale-after-sale as she grew the only female-owned business at the local mall.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Justine: “I can do hard things.” This was my sister’s motherhood mantra that I borrowed as a startup founder.

It may sound a bit trite at first, but I find it to be quite profound. Many of us are uncomfortable doing extremely hard things. We struggle to find shortcuts, get frustrated, or want to quit. Something is empowering about saying, this is hard, but that’s how it’s supposed to feel and I’m going to keep doing it anyway. It’s hard…so what? Acknowledge that it’s hard, and keep going.

When I start to feel that frustration that comes from struggling with something hard, I try to remind myself that my capacity to just persist is a superpower in itself.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

Tas: There’s a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” that has always stayed with me: “Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts everything you said today.”

I love this quote because it inspires me to own up to & embrace the concept of change. People are often hesitant to change their minds because there’s a deep human discomfort with being inconsistent. I believe that being able to assemble, examine, and then dismantle every idea you have is a key part of the human experience. To change is to grow.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?

Justine: I think many people start by looking for an idea when they should be looking for a problem. You need a problem worth solving to find an idea worth building.

By starting with the problem and then exploring ways to solve it, you are more likely to end up with an idea that delivers real & defensible customer value, which is critical for finding product/market fit.

Tas and I knew our problem way before we knew the solution. People wanted to live more flexible lives, but travel was too expensive. We gave ourselves the design question of how we could make travel not incrementally more affordable, but radically more affordable. We knew that if we could come up with a solution, we’d have something worth building.

Tas: I have two simple pieces of advice: 1.Start, and 2. Keep Going.

Often, most people fail because they never get started in the first place. Don’t worry about figuring everything out before you get started. Bias towards action. You’ll learn what you need along the way as long as you keep your eyes and ears open.

And then — keep going. Anticipate and welcome failure. Success is rarely a straight line up & to the right. And like the Emerson quote — don’t be afraid to change. Be willing to challenge every idea you started with. Be responsive to new information coming in and use that to inform your next step.

People often underappreciate that a successful business is often nothing more than a long series of small steps, not all of which may have been taken in the right direction.

Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?

Justine: Elad Gil has an old blog post on this subject called “Who cares if it’s been tried before?” He argues that every large market with big and important customer problems will likely already have incumbents chipping away at the edges — but that doesn’t mean they have necessarily found the right implementation, or that there isn’t still massive opportunity in the space.

Breakout successes often aren’t the first to have the idea. The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, Google wasn’t the first search engine, and Facebook wasn’t the first social network. But these were the first that had the right implementations, and they unlocked massive market opportunities because of it.

I would argue it’s quite helpful to explore an idea that is already out there but hasn’t had a winning implementation yet. You can study them to understand why they haven’t worked and save yourself iteration cycles in figuring out the right implementation for the market.

This was certainly the case with Kindred. Home swapping has been around forever but has always been niche. By studying where other attempts fell short, we were able to start developing conviction in how to do things differently. We realized that by bringing more trust and convenience to the model, home swapping could become mainstream.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

Justine: The first thing to do is get crisp on the problem you are looking to solve with that product. What value are you adding, and for whom? Does your product make something meaningfully better, cheaper, or more efficient? Would people pay for it? If not, it might make more sense as a hobby than a business. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s important to know the difference.

If you feel confident that there would be a compelling market for this product, the next step is to make a scrappy, flexible version that you can get into the hands of real customers ASAP. The feedback that you get will guide how you refine the product.

Imagine you’re finding your way through a pitch dark room — you can’t see, so you have to feel your way. Getting critical feedback is like bumping into something in the room — finding what doesn’t work is the very thing that helps you orient yourself. Your goal, in the beginning, should be to allow yourself to get as much feedback as you can.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

Tas: This is such a personal process. Although Justine and I did not seek out an invention development consultant during our journey, each person is different and should make the choice that feels right for them in their journey.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

Justine: Raising venture capital means giving up significant control and equity, so you should only raise venture capital if you are sure that getting an influx of cash is the critical rocket fuel that your business needs to achieve its potential, and if you will be able to get that cash at decent terms.

If you plan to grow extremely quickly and can imagine your company becoming a >$1 billion business, chances are you’ll need venture capital to get there. If you are ok with slower growth or are in a smaller market, or if your business generates enough cash flow straight out of the gates to fuel your growth, bootstrapping likely makes more sense.

If in doubt, bootstrap. You can always go from bootstrapped to VC, but it’s hard to do the reverse.

You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

Justine: It’s hard to say what movement would bring the MOST amount of good, but one thing Tas and I care deeply about is our opportunity to inspire or encourage other women to start businesses. We’ve heard the statistic that only 2% of venture capital goes to female-founded companies. That’s an outrageously low number, and as women who have worked in male-dominated industries for our entire careers, we know how impactful it can be to see even just one incredible example of someone who looks like you succeed in a leadership position. I worked under a female founder & CEO in my last job, and that was game-changing in helping me believe that maybe, just maybe, I was capable of it too. I quite literally wouldn’t be here without her.

I truly believe that if an entire generation of women were empowered to build, we’d see an immeasurable positive impact on the world.

The solutions to humanity’s biggest problems are out there, waiting for us to invent them. If innovation creates progress, the world needs more founders. When women aren’t empowered to chase down their ideas and bring them to life, we are tragically wasting 50% of our human potential.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

Tas: I’d love to meet Indra Nooyi. I find her to be very inspiring.

Justine: I would invite Angela Ahrendts. I think she’s just incredible professionally, and I’ve heard she’s a terrific person and leader as well. I’d love to learn from her!

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.