Interview with Eden founder Joe Du Bey

Eden, which raised $10M in fresh financing, lets office managers find and schedule services

If you're an office manager at a fast-growing company, you're probably inundated with daily tasks, like scheduling cleaners, handymen, movers, photographers, etc. The list goes on.

Now a new web platform can make your job easier. San Francisco-based Eden lets office managers find and schedule various small services. The startup announced Wednesday that it raised a $10 million Series A investment led by Spectrum 28 and Fifth Wall Ventures to increase its services and spread to more U.S. cities.

Joe Du Bey, CEO and co-founder of Eden, talked to VatorNews about how the platform started and its mission.

AV: What's your mission? 

Joe Du Bey: Eden's mission is to create a better workplace for everyone. We provide every service an office manager might need, from cleaning, to handyman, to tech support, and more. You can purchase products through Eden as well, so we’re the marketplace for the office.

A cool thing about Eden is that we’re an all-inclusive company: we build software that gives voice to a lot of small businesses, we help them run more effectively and enable them to get more revenue. That ties to our mission, and what’s really critical about that mission statement is “everyone.”  

We want to create a rising tide for all different stakeholders in the office ecosystem, or in the commercial real estate ecosystem, and that’s why the welfare of our service providers is so important: we see them as true partners, and it is critical to who we are.

AV: How does Eden work? 

JDB: Eden’s partners are small local service businesses, who get free access to the platform and software training. Eden’s clients are offices and property managers, who request service through the dashboard.

Here is an actual example. Shift, a used cars company, joins the Eden platform. On Eden’s dashboard, they place a request for a cleaning service. Eden matches the request with several partnering businesses, who then bid to the client. Shift chooses a provider, and Eden gets a percentage of the transaction. Shift sees how easy it is to communicate and customize service through the interface, and secures a mover and a painter when relocating, then a photographer to take their employees’ portraits. Shift now uses one web platform for office management in their five locations around the Bay Area [slightly edited - AV].

AV: How did Eden come to its present stage?

JDB: Kyle Wilkinson (CTO) and I created Eden in 2015 from a shared idea to resolve the needs of small local service companies.

We initially started targeting consumers, in our very early stage, but we learned that businesses needed us more, so we switched to a service platform for businesses. Ultimately, what Eden has become has been the consequence of following data closely and measuring over time that customers were happiest with a mix of small businesses and our W2 workforce. Our development, the evolution of Eden, has been the consequence of analyzing data.

AV: Kindness is Eden’s first core value. Why is it important?

JDB: Before we started Eden, Kyle and I sat down and talked about the values that we want the Eden team to represent, and we aligned on those six principles [Kindness, Communication, Learning, Empowerment with Real Ownership, Recognition of Success and Acknowledgment of Loss, and Humaneness]. We didn’t know what the future held, but we knew that this is who we wanted to be. We are building this company that is going to touch all these different stakeholders, and, ultimately, affect a lot of small businesses, so we cannot just be a software company, we have to be a company that cares, a company that is very responsible, and that is why kindness matters so much.

We even have partners sign and agreement that they will pay minimum wage, which sounds like a small thing, but we discovered that a high percentage of small businesses do not pay their employees the minimum wage. We’re trying to elevate the most ethical, talented small businesses, and give them the recommendations they deserve.

We put clients first, partners second, HQ third, and everyone else fourth. Success without integrity – it would lose its value. On a business standpoint, and from an ethics standpoint, we’re going to succeed when our partners and our clients do, and for us to build what we want to build is for us to be the best version of ourselves, and to be fundamentally very kind.

AV: Tell us about your team.

JDB: Our team is young, but experienced, and is very hardworking: the extreme of both kind and competitive. We have team members with advanced degrees in various fields, many came from banking and senior roles, and everyone is very focused on making sure that we build Eden into a large company as quickly as possible.

AV: What are Eden's plans for the future?

JDB: At the start of 2017, Eden operated only in the Bay Area. By now, the company has grown to over 1000 clients and has spread to Los Angeles, New York and Austin.

Over the coming year you should see us invest the funding into scaling across more U.S. metros. In addition, we will be investing in building the right products for office and property managers, and for our partners. Lastly, we plan to invest in the experience: it’s really important to train people on how to use the equipment. To be the all-inclusive company we want to be, we want to make sure that we train and re-train our partners, because we want to be really supportive, and we know that their success is tied to making sure that they remain relevant in an increasingly digitized world.

Image source: Eden.io