Yeves reveals the turning point that led him to create Workbnb, a company now valued at a staggering $30 million.
This $30 million dollar company, Workbnb, a groundbreaking company providing housing solutions to businesses across the US, was founded by Yeves Perez. He was a popular kid in high school but dropped out due to a controversial paper on McBeth.
Yeves takes us through the highs and lows of his life, starting with the struggles of working low-paying jobs, realizing the need for change in his life, and the harsh reality faced by many hardworking individuals trapped in cycles of debt and unfulfilling jobs.
Throughout the interview, Yeves emphasizes the importance of breaking free from limiting beliefs, staying motivated, and persistently pursuing your passions. His story is a testament to how resilience, creativity, and embracing change can lead to unimaginable success, proving that you don't have to follow the traditional path to thrive in the world of tech and entrepreneurship.
Timestamps:
(1:45) Here’s why getting “out of your head” is important for success
(2:48) Salary ranges for CEO’s is almost limitless
(6:01) High school education is mediocre because it doesn’t prepare you for the real world
(6:43) First job was housekeeping at a hotel
(8:35) He wrote a paper on how McBeth was a sociopath and it lead to him dropping out of high school
(10:49) HIs mom was pissed when he said he wanted to go to college and threatened to kick him out if he dropped out of school
(13:40) What it was like couch surfing and working as a waiter and carpet cleaner. He realized no matter how hard he worked, he could never earn more.
(17:28) The illusion of “arriving”. The reality is, you exit one cycle and enter another. It was a struggle to climb the corporate ladder. A coworker had $60k in debt and only made $13/hr.
(21:54) A successful ad helped him to realize his passion for marketing and all the other businesses he failed at
(27:42) How helping his mom with managing her Airbnb lead to creating a $30M company.
(36:03) You don’t have to be a technical person to be in tech
(39:26) How his stubbornness and competitiveness helped him to stay motivated
(43:53) Advice you can learn from
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Transcript: E163 | Workbnb, the $30 Million Dollar Company Built by a High School Dropout –Yeves Perez
[00:00:00]
Yeves: I had to get out of my head about how the world works. One of the things that we're kind of like top when we're really young, is that there's only one pathway to success, which is to get a job. But at the same time, that's just not the only path. That's not true. If I would have been more aware of the different pathways to success as an adult, and what adult success really is, and what that looks like, I would not have made the choices that I made, you know what I mean? I would have thought of the world differently. So, blueprint is really to kind of just get out of your head, and not just assume that the world works only in one way.
Jonaed: Welcome to another episode of the No Degree podcast. I want to personally thank you for tuning in and supporting our show. If you haven't yet, hit that follow or subscribe button. I encourage you, don't keep this to yourself. Share these inspiring stories with your friends, invite them to subscribe and connect with us on social media. So today, I Yeves Perez as a guest. What do you do?
Yeves: Thanks for having me. I am the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of a travel tech company. It's called Workbnb. It's just such a pleasure to be here.
Jonaed: That's cool. So, if you could give a blueprint of what made you successful, what would it look like?
Yeves: Here’s the thing. I had to get out of my head, about how the world works. One of the things that we're kind of like taught when we're really young, is that there's only one pathway to success, which is to get a job. And I'm not going to say that that's not a good thing. But at the same time, that's just not the only path. That's not true. If I would have been more aware of the different pathways to success as an adult, and what adult success really is, and what that looks like, I would not have made the choices that I made, you know what I mean? I would have thought of the world differently. So, blueprint is really to kind of just get out of your head, and not just assume that the world works only in one way.
Jonaed: Let's talk about money. What's the salary range that someone like you can make?
Yeves: That's a really interesting conversation. Tech is definitely one of the most highest paid salary ranges as a tech CEO. You can definitely get into eight figure, nine figure range as well, which is really exciting. But it goes beyond that. If you are a founder of a company, and you have equity in that company, your life is going to change forever. Because as you work with your team to build this company, and the valuation of that, that company goes up overtime, as the saying goes, you get rich on paper. And you're able to get loans and other things on that equity that you own.
But you can also pass it all along as generational wealth. As black and brown people, we don't really own a lot of stock in tech companies. We just don't. We may know somebody who knows of somebody who owns a piece of a tech company, but it's not widespread yet. I'm part of the generation that's changing though. It's really exciting.
Jonaed: I was just working with a client today and he got an offer. His last job he made about 85,000-90,000. Now it's a tough market so the current job he got, he got 90,000. But he got 40,000 in equity. And the best thing is, he'll make the same amount of money, but he'll have this equity that he's not touching.
Yeves: Right. And it just sits.
Jonaed: Yes. I've seen people wait two, three years. And then let's say it goes up a little, whatever. Now you have this huge chunk of change, and now you have something to play with. It makes a big difference. So now, let's take it back. What would you want to be in high school and how's high school like for you?
Yeves: High school for me was kind of fun. I was popular in high school. I was one of those popular kids. I was kind of exotic in a little way where it's like, I'm half black, half Mexican. So, people just don't really know where do I fit in school so I kind of just fit in in all the crowds easily.
[00:05:04]
Also, I was athletic. People enjoyed watching me play basketball and all that type of stuff. I enjoyed my popularity in high school, I really did. The only thing that challenged me in high school was that I was good at some things, and I was terrible at other things. I was terrible at math, but I was excellent in English. And these were some things where it's like, I wanted to pursue some things beyond what was given to me, especially in the form of creative writing, performing, stuff like that. In hindsight, I really should have fostered more of that, either joining out of school, extracurricular type programs, or programs that were outside of my campus.
But would I do it again, would I want to be in high school again? No. High school is kind of like this mediocre education that does not prepare you for the real world. It really doesn’t. Financial literacy, all kinds of things, were just not like these huge emphasis. It's kind of getting out in the real world. It's like I could work a job, or I can contribute my energy to this one pathway to success. But I was not educated enough about the real world. It’s just, it's sad. It's really sad.
Jonaed: it is sad. Now, what was your first job?
Yeves: My first job was a service job. I worked for a little hotel doing some housekeeping and some extra stuff. Because the thing is, even though my mom had a really good corporate job, and my dad had a great job, we were living a middle-class life where it's not like you're not poor, but you're not rich. Now, that natural progression of being a student and getting a job, one of the things that happens is typically your grades start to slide. I mean, you're not 100% focused like you were before you had the job.
So, my counselor calls me in and says, “Hey, I noticed your grades are slipping. Do you want to tell me anything? Is there anything going on?” And I was like, “No, you know, I was just getting — I just needed a job. You know, I'm working.” And the counselor made this assumption and I'll never forget this. She said, “Are you sure you don't want to tell me anything? You know, maybe you got a girl pregnant or something like that?” And I was just like, “What? No, I'm tired of riding the bus as a senior. I want a car.” I was kind of rubbed the wrong way with those assumptions.
One of the things that I wasn't really good at as a teenager, and a lot of teenagers aren't, of controlling our emotions. I got emotional, I got upset. I was like, “You know what, I don't like this. I don't want to go to school.” And I started to get on this thing in my head of like, you know what, I'm going to rebel. I'm going to drop out of school. It's like these little things started to add up and it became like a big seed that started to grow in my head.
Jonaed: So, what happened next?
Yeves: I got into it with it and my English teacher, I'll never forget this. This is so crazy. I acted in this play called Macbeth. It was something about a passion of my acting. I played several characters, so I understood the play very well. My English teacher, out of the sky, came up with this assignment on Macbeth. I was so excited. She wanted us to write a three-page paper on why we thought Macbeth was a tragic hero. And I kind of thought about — I was like, what the hell's a tragic hero? I'd never heard this term before.
I went up to her and I said, “Hey, I need some help. I don't know what you mean by this.” I'll never forget that she looked up at me and she's like, “You get good grades. You always get an A in my class, just do your best.” I was like, “But I'm asking for help.” And she's like, “Well, I'm going to spend my time helping the C and D students. So go talk to somebody else.” And she just shooed me off. I went and talked to a tutor, and I went and talked to some other people, and they were like, I don't know. The Internet wasn't really a big thing just yet. We kind of had some of it. It just wasn't a big thing yet. So I was like, well, let me dissect these two words, tragic and hero.
[00:10:00]
It just didn't make sense to me. This guy is a pathological liar. He's a sociopath, all this type of stuff. So, I ended up writing an eight-page paper on why I think he's actually a dangerous sociopath. He's nowhere near the term hero. There's nothing tragic about him even in his first introduction, he's already plotting and scheming. It's not like he was a good guy that turned bad guy. I was just like, I wrote this big, huge paper, and she gave me an F. I was just insulted. I put all this effort and you didn't even give me a grade for the efforts.
Jonaed: You know it’s sad because she could have just answered your question, it would have taken, like, a minute.
Yeves: Yes, she could have just said let me help you. We think the term is or this is what the assignment should be, or whatever. I was just rebellious, and I told my mom, I said, “I'm not going back to school.”
Jonaed: How do they reacted?
Yeves: She was pissed. She was super pissed. She wanted me to get my education. She wanted me to go to college. I wasn't really taking college. The thought of college seriously, as a senior in high school a lot of my friends went to community colleges and other programs. I mean, there's so many different programs out there, trade schools, and this, this and this, and I'm like —
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Yeves: Why do I need to go to college and take on all this debt? Why do I need to do this? All I'm doing is extending high school. I mean, not to say that there aren’t phenomenal, educational institutions out in the world. Yes, there are. But I didn't have the passion for it, and I was already starting to just get really pissed off by educators in general. You know what, fuck it. I could make it on my own. I'm a go getter. I can make things happen. I'm pretty popular.
So, I felt like I could work anywhere. And I'll never forget this. There was this rap concert in Sacramento. It was the Hard Knock Life Tour, Jay-Z, DMX, Method Man, Redman smoking, all of that. And it was on a Sunday night. I told my mom, I said, I'm going to miss going to school. I told her I'm going to drop out but she's like, “You better be at school on Monday.” And I said, “No, I'm not doing it.” I said, “I'm going to go to Sacramento. I'm going to go to this concert.” And she said, “If you go, your shit’s going to be out when you get back.”
And I'll never forget this. I decided to go. I was like, You know what? You can’t tell me. I'm going, I'm grown. I'm 18, I'm going. I went to this concert, and I got stoned for the first time. My first rap show, watched Jay Z do his thing, Big Pimpin’. I saw DMX, you know what I mean? It was lit. It was a lit show. I got back to Reno. That's where we were at and showed up at the house, late Monday night and all my shit’s outside. I was like, I thought she was playing. And I had to do the couch surfing thing.
Jonaed: How did you manage the couch surfing?
Yeves: It was rough. You know what it was? Pride, because it was like, I have my own room, nice furniture and nice house. All of a sudden, I’m in other people's houses, you know what I mean? It's like I'm staying outside of my comfort zone. Nothing is comfortable, people are coming and going in the middle of the night. It was just one of those things where I was just not ready for the world. I didn't have any savings. I didn't have anything so I had to basically go out there and find work and slowly start to pull myself up.
Jonaed: Now, what type of work did you end up doing?
Yeves: Anything I could get my hands on. I mean, I was working at restaurants which are easy service jobs, you can get tips. But when you get into a service job, you quickly realize that tips and that kind of job is severely inconsistent.
[00:15:00]
It's usually based on traffic, the volume of traffic. Even though I was in Reno, and the restaurant that I was working at was at a casino, there were the slow periods, and then these was busy periods. Yes, when it was busy, you would make some money, but if it was slow, they would cut your hours, and you're over here on the couch, like poor shit. So it's just the inconsistently — it always kept poor. And then I went and got another type of service job, which was carpet cleaning, Stanley Steamer, I was cleaning carpets.
And I also realized that they were capping me. It's like no matter how much of a goal I wanted to set myself, and how much I wanted to work, they would cap my income. You could only do so many jobs per day. You can only work so much over time. And we won't let you go over this. So I was always poor. I was working, but I was poor.
Jonaed: How much were you making if you don’t mind sharing?
Yeves: This was like 1999-2000 so minimum wage wasn’t shit.
Jonaed: It was $4 or $5 back then.
Yeves: I think it was like $7 or something like that. I mean, it was low. And then the tips weren't that great. I probably make maybe $50 to $60 and tips if I was lucky. I mean, that's the other thing. When you start off, you're not a server or bartender, you're a busser. You're the lowest of the food chain in the service industry. Stanley Steamer wasn't paying me that much. I mean, I was getting paid minimum wage, plus these bonuses.
And again, I'm starting off at the bottom of the food chain, I wasn't a carpet cleaning tech when I started, I was an assistant. So, you start off at the bottom, and you're barely getting enough to get by to barely pay your bills, barely could afford paying not even a whole rent by myself. There's no way I could have moved out on my own. Even as a roommate and paying a roommate and the rent at that time was $900 a month for a two bedroom. I could still barely make my rent food, my phone bill, get my hair cut. It was a very rough go for a couple of years.
Jonaed: So, when did you catch a break? When you got out of the cycle, was it like I could see. There’s some hope.
Yeves: It took a long, long, long journey. And then there's this illusion that you've arrived. What people just don't realize is, no, you're out of this cycle, but you actually entered into another cycle.
Jonaed: So what was the next cycle?
Yeves: The next cycle was me lying about graduating from high school and getting a job at Wells Fargo. Because it was a low-level entry job. It was customer service, being on the phones, and I lied. I said, “Yeah, I graduated from Galena High School.” Nobody checked and they accepted me. Now I'm making $12 an hour. I'm like, okay, cool. But the thing is, it's just another cycle where it's like, okay, I'm working full time now. Now, I have these things coming out of my check, taxes and various other types of things. I'm not really getting ahead, I have a little bit of extra money to buy a new shirt if I want to, or something like that.
But I'm not eating that great. I'm not saving that much money. And then I thought to myself, well, if I stay with Wells Fargo for a couple years, maybe I can move up and you get to this illusion that you can climb the ladder, right? What you don't realize is that there are people that are in the business five, ten years, trying to do the same thing. But they're only getting these incremental bumps that are barely a dollar or two increases. So, I had this illusion of like, okay, I'm going to get out of customer service, and I'm going to go into the branch, and I'm going to work my way up from a customer service agent to a personal banker.
Okay, now I’m making $14 an hour. Well, guess what? The personal banker that I'm sitting next to is bitching and complaining because she had a $60,000 education from North Carolina. But she's a personal banker, making $13 an hour and I’m like, really? She's like, “Yeah, this is fucked up. Like, I didn't take out all this debt just [AUDIO SKIPS 00:20:04].
[00:20:05]
But again, if you think about it, jobs, were asking for these credentials to get these jobs, these lower – not lowest entry, but low. It wasn't really high entry level jobs. So, they were asking for a bachelor's degree or this or that, and it's like, well, I'm only making like $14 an hour or $13 an hour. Whereas like me, I haven't started for 12 to get to there. I mean, I had to put in a year and a half already in the company to get to that next level. So then, I talked to the manager who was making $16 an hour, he's like, “Man, I've been with the company five years to get to this point.” Five years to get to $16?
So, there wasn't a lot of hope but one of the things that I kind of felt was going to be a come up for me, was thinking about going back to carpet cleaning, because I had remembered that the carpet cleaning techs were making closer to $18 to $20 an hour. And I thought, okay, well, maybe if I can get closer to $20 an hour, maybe I'll start to see a quality-of-life change. But again, even when I got there, it just wasn't happening. And what I wasn't aware of was the cost of living going [AUDIO SKIPS 00:21:28].
Over that time that I was trying to climb, again, that was the next rat race was that I was not paying attention to the food costs going up, the gas prices going up, the utility, the rent prices going up, all of that was going up while I was trying to climb. So, I was basically at the same point at which I started.
Jonaed: Now, how do you get out of that? What was the first break where you got into, now I actually have, I can move up.
Yeves: I decided I wanted to get into something that I was passionate about, which made me pay attention to advertising. I always paid attention to Superbowl ads, and when ads came out, and stuff like that, I paid attention to it. And then I got kind of interested into marketing and how marketing works. But I didn't have any marketing degree. I didn't have any marketing background. But I always felt that I could be a little bit more talented than some of the stuff that I was seeing.
So, I thought to myself, how can I start my own business? How can I be a consultant? I heard this term consultant for the first time. And when I started looking to consultancies, it's basically like, you're just a hired gun, right? Like you're just a talented person, or you think you're talented and you can add value to somebody else's business. I was in San Diego, and I gotten tired of banking, I got tired of carpet cleaning, I wanted to do something else. So, I started my own little consultancy, and I needed to get my first client.
My first client was a chef, and I was a big fan of him. I was a big fan of his restaurant. He got into some trouble, where he was working for a celebrity chef, the celebrity chef decided out of nowhere to fire him. It was in the newspaper, Chef Chad White, exiled by Malarkey Empire, and I was like, “Oh, shit, this sounds horrible.” And he's like, “Yeah, fucked up my life. Nobody wants to hire me anymore.” I was like, “So dude, what are you going to do?” And he was like, “Well, you know, I'm going to do this thing called a pop-up dinner.” I don't know if you ever heard of a pop up before.
But it's basically where talented chefs get access to somebody else's restaurant on an offline, it would typically be closed. They would put on their own event, and it would be like their own custom menu. People would buy tickets and go, and he said, “I'm going to put on my own pop-up dinners. And you know, I'm going to try to see if I can make it.” And I said, “Well, hey, I would love to do your marketing for you.” He was skeptical at first, but he was honest with me. He said, “You know, I don't really have money like that. I can barely afford to pay my staff.”
So I said, “Listen, you pay me 100 bucks a week and you pay me and food. I'll do it. Right? And he said, “Sure bet. Let's do it.” So I did his marketing. I did his social media. I did his marketing. I wrote all of his concepts, but I actually created his first ad, and it was a really interesting ad concept. It was like an image of a beautiful black and Ecuadorian woman with red lipstick, and it was only the image of like, here down but it didn't go past her bust. On her tongue was his logo for his pop-up.
[00:24:59]
It was cool, seductive, it's kind of edgy and then we did a YouTube video. We sold out all of his tickets. But what ended up happening was we won best advertising campaign of the year. My first client, out the gate, I got accepted this award, I'm out in front of all these marketing professionals that are doing marketing for like 20 years. And we won best campaign of the year. I was just like, oh, my God, this is it. I'm going to be rich and famous.
All these clients are going to — it didn't work out like that. They were like, “Oh, good job.” I was like, “So, you guys want to work with me?” And they're like, “Well, no, you're an individual. You're not an ad shop. You don't have any staff. We can't risk our account on a guy who got lucky.” I basically got shut down and for a couple of years, I really struggled at that, too. The whole concept of overnight success just did not happen for me.
Jonaed: I don't think it happens to a lot of people.
Yeves: No. it was cool. It was cool to add on my resume. People knew me. Oh, you're the guy that did the pop-up marketing. Oh, yeah, that's me. Yeah, I did that campaign. Oh, my God, that was so great. But I was poor, again. I was just poor. It was rough.
Jonaed: So what happened after that few years of doing that? how did you move up?
Yeves: I tried starting another business, failed at that business. I tried another business that I thought would be hot. It was like before we work, I tried to open like a co-working space. And that failed. Nobody was on the co-working thing yet. I was too early. I was trying a lot of things because I wanted to, one, attempt to be an entrepreneur. And the reason that really got me going with that was I read a book called The Millionaire Mind. I don't know if you've ever heard of the Millionaire Mind. But it's a really interesting book.
It's based on a survey of millionaires. And out of this survey, something like 70 something percent of millionaires had either dropped out of college or dropped out of high school and started their own businesses. I was like, “Yo, if I could get on that tip of like, catching that wave of being a successful entrepreneur, and creating my own hours and creating my own wage and all that type of stuff, I want to try that. I want to do that. So, I failed at again and again and again. Then I went back into service jobs.
Then out of the sky, my mom calls and says, “Hey, my little Airbnb business in Reno is popping off. There's this company that paid me, you know, a lot of money to open up a bunch of rentals for them because they're relocating to Reno, can you come and help me I bought you a plane ticket. I need you to come tomorrow.” And I was like, “What?” I was trying to pretend I was busy. I got things to do. And she's like, “No, I need you to come out.” And I was thinking to myself, well, if I'm ever going to be invited to Thanksgiving, ever again, I better get on this plane and get off over here.
So, I went up there. At first, I just thought I was going to help her move into some rentals and set up some furniture and stuff like that. I don't know if you've ever been to an Airbnb before, but we're just setting them up. And then she's like, “Well, you're good at marketing. Can you help me get more clients like this?” And I was like, “Okay, well, I'll give it a shot. I'll look into it.” And what I noticed was a pattern. I started to look at these patterns and this data was telling me the pattern was continuing, that 65% of her bookings were not vacations at all for a two-year period. There were these longer stays that were coming to her rentals that were workers. They were like traveling for work.
I was like, “Did you know this?” And she was like, “No.” I was like, “You should think about getting into this seriously. You're calling your rentals vacation rentals. You're only listed on Airbnb.” I said, “You should really reconsider this from a marketing perspective of like marketing specifically to them. And what I had learned from the pop-up thing was like, you have to know your client persona. Whoever is going to buy an $80 ticket to go out to dinner, you have to market to only them.”
[00:29:59]
So That's what I did. I use my marketing skills, and I helped my mom with her business. What we really did smart was one thing. It was mainly one thing. We stopped calling them vacation rentals and we started calling them workforce renters. Once we did that, we were over flooded with demand and I helped my mom become the number one short term rental operator in Northern Nevada with 45 rentals, like we scaled up 300% in revenue, I made my mom a millionaire. I was like, “Oh, shit.” She and I were on the front page of a newspaper, chillin, you know, black power and it was wild, it was lit. That was the moment where my skill set hit.
Jonaed: And that was the overnight success from failing all those times.
Yeves: Yes. It was crazy. And really what made it overnight too was the fact that COVID hit, we were hitting on all cylinders, and then boom, here's the shutdown. All the vacation travel dried up, nobody was traveling except workers. If anybody remembers this, if you were going out to the grocery store, you would see construction people working, you would see all this shit going on. These workers were traveling double time now and when they were googling workforce housing, they would see workforce rentals in Reno. And they went, “Oh, this is where I should book. This is where I should stay.”
So, we were basically 95% occupied where vacation rentals were a 0%. We made all this money, things were popping, but then, here's the thing about success. Some people can handle it, and some can't. My mom was struggling with success because it was more money, more problems. It was just like more supply, she had to buy more inventory, she needed to get, more marketing dollars that I was telling her to spend. And she had never went through any kind of formal education on business management and all this type of stuff, so it was a lot for her to manage.
I told her, “You need to scale up to 100 units. You're going to be a multimillionaire who scales this thing bigger. And she was like, “Oh, I don’t know.” But then, the big thing happened to us. It changed my life forever. During COVID, there was a big freeway expansion project in our area. This construction company called us up and they said, “Hey, we need a lot of rentals. We need like 20 rentals.” Another golf course construction company called us up too at the same time, “We need seven three-bedrooms and two one-bedroom like they were calling us up like pizza ordering rentals. And then this big booking hit.
I never even heard of this before. They said, “Hey, by the way, we need a two-bedroom condo for the site supervisor. He's our top employee on the project. And he's a little difficult to work with. You know, he's kind of demanding. He needs like NFL ticket. He needs like a smoker to smoke meats on the weekend.” And I was like, “So what's your budget?” They're like “Two hundred bucks a night.” Now in Reno, Reno isn't like the Bay Area's New York. So it's like $200 a night. It's pretty good. And I said, “Well, how long do you need it for?” And they said, “We need it for two and a half years.”
In my head, I did the math. I was like, that's $180,000. And I'm like, “Yo, can you guys sign right here? Just sign here.” Like, let's go. But my business brain turned on, my marketing brain turned on, you ask questions, get them to sign but you ask them questions. You say and I said to him, I said “Sir, how many states does Ames operate in?” He was like “We operate in 27 states. And we're expanding into five more.” And I said, “How many projects do you bid on per month, per state?”
He said, “We bid about 25.” And I said, “And how many of those bids you net.” He said, “We net about a quarter of that.” And I was like. “So, every single month you need housing at this much scale for this law?” He's like, “Yeah, we're the 74th largest industrial general contractor in the United States. We don't build McDonald's. We do roads, bridges, highways, rails, all kinds of stuff.” And I said, “So, let me get this straight. You do all this work, and you travel a lot. What do you use to book your housing?”
[00:35:01]
He said, “We don't use anything like there's nothing for us. We typically have to do 20 different things to get housing, we have to talk to real estate agents. We have to talk to brokers, we have to talk to individual landlords. Sometimes we got to drive through neighborhoods and knock on doors to talk to people. Sometimes we have to look at Craigslist, which are a lot of scams. We go on booking websites to see if we can beg people to let us stay in their rentals.”
He’s like, “It's probably one of the biggest problems I've ever had in my entire career.” And I said, “If I create an app for you, would you want to be the first client?” He said, “Absolutely, shit.” And I said, “Okay, I will only do this on one condition. You need to sign right here that you're going to be my first client.” And that's what happened. He signed, and the rest is history. We started to build Workbnb.
Jonaed: Wow, dude, I love it. I love it, man. And I love how everything just came full circle.
Yeves: Yes, that was it. He was my first client. Let's go. Here's the thing about tech. I'm a non-technical type of guy. I don't shit about coding shit. Just because you don't know doesn't mean you can't apply your ambition. It doesn't mean you can't apply you're willing to go get it. And the best way to build a tech product is to build it with a client, to build it side by side to say, “You know what? Here's what I'm thinking the user journey is going to be.”
A user journey is like, one slide to the next slide when you're going through an app, the next page, the next page. If you build that journey with them, and you get their feedback early, you're going to build a better product that when you roll it out, people are going to be thoroughly impressed that you did so much research. That was our journey was just to just take a lot of the experiences that I've had over my life and apply it to this new opportunity. And one of the things that I applied was the ability to overcome rejection or overcome problems because entrepreneurship is a landmine of problems.
Problems everywhere, I really took everything to the next level, but I also did something even crazier. I basically committed my life to an industry that I know nothing about. I knew nothing about tech. The only thing I knew about tech was my phone and my computer. Like you know about Facebook, and you know about this, but you only know how to use their product. So, I really got into product immediately and that was difficult. But now fast forward, it's two years later, we've raised capital, our team was accepted to Techstars, which is like college for startups. I like to proudly say that at 42, I went back to college.
We built a company that is really gaining like a ton of traction, I'm proud to say that we were accepted into the NFL’s Business Connect programs. We're actually the housing supplier for the NFL coming for Super Bowl in Las Vegas later next year. And I'm also housing workers for the Formula One track and I’m housing workers across the country. Next month, I get to put a logo up on my website that says I'm a proud supplier to the NFL, like that's super lit.
Investors that come and talk to me about my valuation. I'm like, “Yo, my valuation cap is 30 million if you're not cool with that, bye.” That's crazy right now. In this climate valuation caps are like at 10 million or below. They're like, why do you think you're 30 mil and it's because I have a huge client that signed up from day one. All these other startups don't have shit so come talk to me when you're ready to write a cheque.
Jonaed: I love it. One thing I want to ask you, how did you keep up the ambition? Because it wasn't like you failed once or twice. It's like fail, fail, fail, fail, fail.
Yeves: I think it's a combination from hardheadedness. I've always had a little bit of it, I've had a little bit — yes, even back when I was playing basketball and stuff like that, I was always kind of like, okay, I lost this one but I'm going to comeback. There's a little bit of that you can call competitiveness too. The other thing that makes it what it is, is also passion.
[00:39:57]
And really kind of just, again, like enjoying what I do, though. That's actually the more fascinating part about this is that, whether you call it finding purpose, or you call it like, do what you love, love what you do type thing, it's kind of like when you're forced to think that there's only one way to be successful, which is to do something that you don't want to do for money, and so that you can survive. That's a very tough life.
Because even if you do climb up the corporate ladder, and you start to make big bonuses or whatever, if you have a hard time looking at yourself in the mirror, or you just don't like who you are anymore. Like I kind of feel like now you're poor in spirit. You may have some money, but you're poor in spirit. And this path is kind of led me to be rich and spirit, where it's like I can get hit with a problem. But I'm cool with it because I'm grateful that I'm doing something that I love.
Jonaed: Now, looking back, what would you say you're most proud of?
Yeves: I'm most proud of coming to this realization that I can't do this by myself. I can't do this alone. I chose a co-founder that was young and ambitious. But she needed somebody to see what was in her that I couldn't get people to see me when I was young. I had it in me when I was younger, it was inside of me. I just didn't know it. Nobody fostered. Nobody was like, hey, what do you want to do? What are you passionate about? How can I help you achieve that?
As young people, we are technically told, don't pursue your passions, don't pursue these things. Nobody's going to help you. You're going to be out on the streets if you try to do shit. Even though she didn't have all this huge amount of experience, I go back to that example of me starting my marketing thing and getting that first, yes, that first person to believe in me. And we won this award together, right? So, I really thought about it long and hard. I asked her, I said, “Will you be the president of this company?”
And she was like, “I don't even know what a president does.” And I said, “That's okay. I'm willing to mentor you and help guide you into this role. This is a leadership role. This is a role of making decisions that we don't know what they're going to be until two, three, five years later, right?” So she said, “Yes.” We started to build the company together. One of the things that I recognized was that tech is historically dominated by white guys, like white males.
If you look at all these apps on your phone, a lot of them are all led by white males. All we know is what they tell us is this is how it should be. I thought to myself, and I was like, you know, we need more representation. We need more diversity, equity inclusion, you see it now. And I'm proud to say that 50% of our board are women of color and we're 100% minority on tech.
Jonaed: I love seeing it, yes. I'm on the about us. And I was like, I love seeing companies just do a different — and it's a very interesting concept. You know what's interesting? I was talking to a real estate agent, and she was telling you about this, right? Like, the nursing housing and all that stuff. So I was like, wow, this is definitely something big. And I'm happy for you. Now, I want to ask, if you saw your 18-year-old self, walking across the street, what would you tell them?
Yeves: First of all, don't be out here chasing girls, stop wasting your time. It's so crazy how we want to be grown so fast. I would have told myself, you need to read more, you need to learn more about what's going on here in this world. I would have definitely told myself, you need to get up on your financial education. Because not building your credit and not knowing how to build credit is going to hurt you over long enough, right? I come from this place of being a founder, where it's like, I didn't even have credit cards to help me build this company. I wish I would have known so much before to where I am now where it's like, there are ways to finance and bootstrap a tech startup, when you have something that's really hot, and something that's going to change your life.
[00:44:57]
If I would have just known a little bit more about financial literacy, I would have had a better chance at succeeding in different ways. I'm getting financial literacy now at 42. So, I would definitely tell my younger self that but also, I would have told my younger self 18, listen to for the stars, you can be a tech founder, you can be these things. Unfortunately, I never saw myself as being anything other than an athlete, or a rapper, or this because that's where you see the most representation, right?
So, I would have never pursued — just again, based on you what I was exposed to, and that's challenging when you're trying to figure out where you're going to go and what way you want to go and what you want to do with your life. I definitely would have told myself to read The Millionaire Mind like it's okay to drop out. It's not a bad thing. I would definitely tell my 18-year-old self, dude, hey, listen, it's not the end of the world, you can make it.
You just need some direction on where you're going to go. If you're going to do that, that's it. I definitely would have tried not to do the rat race on service jobs and shit jobs that would have kept me poor, I would have much rather been an entrepreneur with a T-Shirt Company or something else that was making some profit margins because I had some hustle.
Jonaed: What a story, what a wild ride. I got to have you back when your company's worth 100 billion, or whatever.
Yeves: Yes, I would love to come back. I would love to tell more people about the pitfalls of what can happen to you, how to overcome these things. My story is nothing but overcoming roadblocks and objections. And again, I'm just getting it at 42. I'm just getting to the next level. But I get to officially say now I'm in the NFL tech. I'm a tech superstar now. I mean, Techstars ecosystem. I have commercials that are coming out, I have big numbers that are coming out. New clients that we're going to be rolling out doing different things. And I would love to tell people how we got to 100 million in revenue. You know what I mean?
Jonaed: Yes. Look, I was here, I'm going to watch the journey and all that. So, how do people follow you? How do people support you?
Yeves: I'm easy to find, workbnbCEO, workbnb app, our handles. You can also follow Daj’Anique, Workbnb Pres. It's really easy to find us. I’m on LinkedIn. I'm very vocal on Twitter, on Instagram, Facebook. I don't really do TikTok, that's not really my thing. But we do have a TikTok channel. It's just, to me, it's like, I'm in B2B, so I'm talking to more clients on Twitter, and stuff like that. But also, we're headquartered in Vegas. We're going to be hiring, we're going to be rolling our company. Building on the tech ecosystem in Vegas is going to be crazy for us because tech isn't really known out here in Vegas. But we're really leading the way out here. Also, again, go on Spotify and all these other places and just look up Workbnb, find this podcast, find the next one when we come back.
Jonaed: I’m excited. Thank you so much for your time. It was great interviewing you, one of the best stories I ever had.
Yeves: Appreciate it.
Another great episode. Thank you for listening. Hopefully this information was valuable, and you learned a lot. Stay tuned for the next episode. This show is sponsored by you. No Degree wants to remain free from influence so that we can talk about the topics without bias. If you think the show is worth a dollar or two, please check out our Patreon page. Any amount is appreciated and will go towards making future episodes even better. Follow us on Instagram or Snapchat @nodegreepodcast, on Facebook @facebook.com/NoDegreeInc. If you want to personally reach out to me connect or follow me on LinkedIn @jonaediqbal, spelled J-O-N-A-E-D, last name I-Q-B-A-L. Until next time, no degree, no problem. Nodegree.com.
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