The Inspiring Startup Story of the Team Behind Rover.com

• Learn the inspiring story behind Rover.com.
• Find out how a little bit of luck took the germ of an idea and helped it grow.
• Discover how Rover.com took its startup to the next level with a powerful partnership.
• Find out how Rover.com is faring now.

If you're not a pet owner, Fiducial will forgive you for not really knowing about Rover.com. A lot of people do know about it, however – particularly in the entrepreneurial community. It’s the stuff startup dreams are made of!

In 2011, Phillip Kimmey was finishing up his junior year at Washington University in St. Louis. He was a computer science major confronting the fact that he would graduate soon, and he really didn’t know which direction his life would take. A lot of his friends and classmates were getting internships, which certainly would have been an option. However, he decided that he'd prefer trying to start his own company to see what that might be like.

It's a decision he's thankful for to this day.

Rover.com: In the Beginning

Looking at the calendar, Kimmey realized that it was almost time for Seattle’s (his home town) Startup Weekend. A weekend-long, 54-hour event, Startup Weekend brings developers, business managers, marketing experts, and other professionals together.

It has a simple goal: using a contest-style format, event organizers wanted to bring as many enthusiastic people together as possible to form a startup in just two and a half days. In that sense, anyone could be an entrepreneur.

It was here that Kimmey was involved in the initial idea for Rover.com. Participants saw it as an "online matchmaking service" for pet owners in need of help. The service would connect pet owners with people who might be able to offer care services in their area. That kernel of the idea was actually presented by a team of software developers and designers. This group included Greg Gottesman, then a managing director at Madrona Venture Group.

A little bit of luck

This idea was the contest's first place winner. However, nobody left that Startup Weekend with a successful startup on their resume. But Kimmey's performance so impressed Gottesman that he immediately called him up on Monday morning. He asked if Kimmey wanted to devote as much time as possible that summer to bring the project to life.

This is a perfect example of just how important luck can be in the early days of developing and running a successful company. Everyone involved admits that if Philip Kimmey had taken a full-time job that year or had taken a summer internship like so many of his friends, Rover.com would literally not exist today. Not only that, but the millions of pets that have benefited from Rover.com's services over the years would be in a worse position because of it.

After Rover.com’s other co-founder Aaron Easterly came onboard as CEO later in the summer of 2011, the company was ready for prime-time. The site went live and began connecting owners with pet carers in the areas around Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon.

A Startup is What You Make of It

Things started happening pretty quickly for the team behind Rover.com at that point. The company’s first round of investment funding happened in April of 2012, during the expansion of their services into all 50 states. This was led by Madrona Venture Group. They secured another round of funding in February of 2013, this time from The Foundry Group.

But it was in July 2013 that Rover.com hit the map. Petco announced an investment in Rover.com not only in a business partnership capacity, but for cross-promotion with all of Petco's stores nationwide.

Though the fee structure of Rover.com has changed somewhat over the years, the core business model remains the same. Rover.com acts as a broker, matching dog owners and dog sitters together. For this, it takes approximately 20% of each transaction that is booked through the website.

Over the years Rover.com has expanded beyond dog walking and now offers both doggy daycare and drop-in visit options. As is true with so many other companies operating in the gig economy today, all the dog sitters on Rover.com work as independent contractors – they are not considered to be employees.

Where are they now?

Flash forward to today and Rover.com has raised more than $91 million in venture funding. At the end of 2016, it had 181 employees – not bad for an idea that began over a long weekend.

But more importantly, it has also managed to double its revenue for three consecutive years. They even recently acquired their first competitor – a company called DogVacay – in an all-stock deal valued at almost $300 million.

For Kimmey in particular, his goal is to one day make Rover.com a household name. He acknowledges that this will not and cannot happen overnight. He said that overnight successes like that don't actually exist: For every company that seems to come out of nowhere and become enormous, there are a team of people who have been working for a decade to make that happen.

This year marks the 10-year anniversary of the original founding of Rover.com over that Startup Weekend in Seattle, so it'll be fascinating to see just how correct Kimmey and the rest of the Rover.com team are on that point.

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