In 2016, After spending a year in New York, I decided to move back to Southern California and take a product design job at one of the fastest growing fin-tech start-ups in the country. I found a great 2 bedroom back loft, two blocks from the beach that I absolutely loved.
Just a few days into living there I realized that I had no room to store anything. The entrance to my loft was through the alley. Something to know about many beach cities is that back houses generally have alley or backstreet access. Every day when I’d leave to go to work, I’d see my neighbor directly across from me open and close his garage to leave for work. Half his garage was empty. That’s when it hit me:
“Why is there not an app called Garage Space where I can rent out half of his garage and he can make passive income at the same time?”
Because this type of product didn’t exist on the market I ended up driving 20 minutes away to the nearest storage facility where I overpaid for the inconvenience of storing a few items I couldn’t fit inside or around my loft.
I pitched this idea to my roommate at the time (who is now my head of engineering) but I worked 16hr days at a start-up so I didn’t pursue it.
That brings me to the beginning of 2025 when I told my brother, Cody, about the concept. He immediately said, “Why are we not building this!?” Cody comes from a business background with a pretty successful set of companies he’s either helped build or invested in. He’s the left brain to my right brain. The partnership made sense and so we began to plan out what building this product would look like.
While we started planning on nights and weekends, I was still an exec at a pretty big tech company and had a lot on my plate. I traveled twice a week, to and from headquarters and managed a team of 120 or so designers, researchers, conversational AI experts and content designers. But, after my first year at this company I realized that I needed to do my own thing. It was time.
Cody and I, along with a small but incredible team, are building a product that helps millions of everyday Americans make passive income on space they aren’t using, like a garage, spare room, shed or parking spot. This mission is core to who we are because we know that life can be up and down, left and right, and having the ability to make passive income can be the difference between providing food for your family or having the lights turned off because you missed a bill.
We are excited to build this company and bring millions of Americans additional income from space they aren’t using, for decades to come.