What it was
A peer-to-peer rental marketplace built around college campuses. Students renting the things they only need occasionally (gear, equipment, dorm and event stuff) to other students nearby instead of buying new. The campus was the wedge: a dense, trust-rich, high-turnover community where the same items get bought and abandoned every semester. We leaned into that: verified student identities, pickup at walking distance, and listings tuned to the rhythm of the school year.
Like any marketplace it was a two-sided problem: no renters without supply, no supply without renters. The real work was seeding one campus at a time and getting liquidity in a single network before expanding. That, and designing the trust layer that makes strangers comfortable handing over their things. It's also where the "own the whole thing" instinct started: not a class project, a real product with real investors to answer to.
What I owned
- Investor pitching to angels and VCs. That's where I learned to tell a technical story to people writing checks.
- Agile development. I led the build and decided what shipped and what got cut.
- Go-to-market — the first version of the muscle I'd later use to close enterprise deals.
What it taught me
Two lessons stuck. The gap between a working demo and a real product is where most of the actual work lives. I've been paid to act on that ever since. And an engineer who can also sit across from the buyer and the investor is worth more than either skill alone.
I learned to build the thing and tell its story in the same breath. That combination became my whole career.