I’m excited to be able to unveil our recent investment in PaintZen. The company is a technology-enabled service marketplace for the home and commercial painting industry. They have gotten off to a torrid start in New York, and just announced their launch of San Francisco today. Check out more details here and here. What I think is really notable about Paintzen is that coupled with their rapid growth, their quality standards and subsequent referral activity is extremely high. Check out their yelp reviews here, and just contrast them to the reviews of other service marketplaces in some other categories, and you’ll see that the reception has been night and day.

A couple weeks ago, an essay was going around by Paul Graham that talked about how many entrepreneurs “play house”. The article describes entrepreneurs that go through the motions, read all the blogs and online resources about building a company, say all the right things, but are more interested in “imitating all the outward forms of a startup”  vs. being deeply committed to building a great business. Mike, Justin, James, and the team at Paintzen is one of the most stark counter-examples of “playing house” that I have ever seen. No unnecessary flair or pretense. Insanely deep understanding of their vertical, as well as deep understanding of service marketplaces generally (the Mike and Justin previously co-founded MyClean in NYC as well, which is growing at a great clip). And simply building a great business with nicely developing economics, scaleability, and increasing returns to scale.

We were excited to join a number of previous co-investors in this round, including the good folks at Lerer Ventures, Quotidien, and others. Thanks in particular to Sean Black who re-connected us with the team and also joined us in this round.

Congrats everyone – onwards!