CLIP: Why Kindred's Justine Palefsky Refuses To Let Hosts Get Paid!

Watch full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzi7WIDadKM

Justine Palefsky co-founded Kindred by cold-emailing a spreadsheet full of her old colleagues' spare rooms. Four years later it's a $150M-backed home-swapping network with 400,000 members who've hosted each other for half a million nights, and she still checks herself in the mirror every morning and says: don't mess this up.

Justine Palefsky is co-founder and CEO of Kindred, a members-only home-swapping community she launched in 2021 with co-founder Tasneem "Taz" Amina. Kindred has raised roughly $150 million in funding, including backing from Andreessen Horowitz, and has grown to around 400,000 members and 100 employees, with members hosting one another for over half a million nights. Justine grew up in San Francisco, raised by parents embedded in the city's counterculture scene, studied cognitive neuroscience at Brown, worked in management consulting at Bain & Company, then spent years at Opendoor and Homebound before founding Kindred out of her own frustration with the cost of living and traveling between the cities she loved.

In this episode:

- Why her parents' completely rule-free upbringing left her with a chip on her shoulder to prove she wasn't "too soft"

- The chaos of her first day at Opendoor, including a same-day flight to Phoenix and a night on an air mattress with no Wi-Fi

- Why Kindred deliberately built a model where members can't pay each other, and how that's different from Airbnb

- The five days she and her co-founder spent alone in a cabin pressure-testing their partnership before starting the company

- What building a $150M company has actually cost her, from missed birthdays to freezing embryos

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