David Borden Built a Business by Changing His Mind

David Borden had a proposal for his co-founder. They had spent years building Rentvine, and an adviser named Nat Kunes had been working alongside the company for six months. Borden thought Kunes should become CEO. There was no search under way. Borden had started the conversation himself. In a business culture fond of founders who refuse to let go, he had found a different use for his authority: choosing who should have more of it.

“I initiated it,” he wrote to customers in September 2026. Jonathan Ewen agreed. Kunes took the job; Borden remained an active leader and board member. He also made a promise about the trade-show circuit: “you'll still find me on the road and at the shows.” The business card would change. The conversations with property managers would continue.

That arrangement makes sense alongside Borden's earlier decisions. His career has moved through rental advertising, websites and management software, with customers supplying much of the direction. Several of the turns were unglamorous. One involved a product he initially did not want to sell. Another required years of development before a public launch. Persistence, in this account, has room for a revised opinion.

A helicopter pilot with a property manager’s inheritance

Before software, there was West Point and the Army. Borden graduated from the United States Military Academy, captained its team handball team and flew Chinook helicopters. Those are substantial entries on a résumé that eventually came to include rental listings and accounting software. The machines changed considerably. A Chinook offers rather more legroom than a browser tab.

Property management was already familiar territory. Borden was a second-generation property manager from Colorado Springs. His later work selling technology to operators therefore came with experience of the work on the other side of the sale. He served as president and CEO of RentClicks, which became Rentals.com, and helped position it as NARPM's first official partner. His company biography credits him with three National Affiliate of the Year awards.

The same biography presents someone with a booming voice and an appetite for jokes. Away from work, it describes a Broncos supporter who enjoys wings, historical documentaries and tennis. These details give the military résumé a less ceremonial companion. There is room in the picture for both the former pilot and someone happily arguing the case for Denver on a Sunday.

The website business he had to be talked into

In 2008, Borden was consulting at his former company when his path crossed a small circle of builders. Jonathan and Kristen Ewen were working at Moog and making websites on the side as Bizingo. Jonathan and Adam Field developed a prototype accounting product called Property Stampede. Borden joined to help sell it. The partnership began with a practical division of labour: someone had to make the thing, and someone had to persuade an operator to try it.

The software was not ready to carry the business. In 2009, Ewen and Borden launched Free Rental Site. A non-compete kept that venture outside the United States. Jonathan still had his day job; Kristen volunteered her help. A Craigslist feed was among the features that kept the operation going. These were experiments made under the ordinary pressure of needing revenue.

By 2011, websites offered a more dependable prospect. Borden resisted the idea at first. The opportunity nevertheless survived his objection. Property Manager Websites, or PMW, began winning business at small trade shows, sometimes with setup fees of $199 or even free. Early customer Mike Mengden saw results and helped spread the word. It was a modest beginning for a business built around helping other businesses get noticed.

The customers kept asking for the rest

PMW brought the founders into repeated contact with professional property managers. Those customers wanted more than a website. They asked for software to run their businesses. By 2018, Ewen and Jim Dubreville were building Rentvine with industry operators weighing in on the systems they already used: what frustrated them, what helped, what deserved to survive in a replacement.

The team added developers, including Danny Byland, its first official Rentvine employee. The product reached the public in April 2021. Behind that date were years spent developing and revising the software. A launch announcement makes a convenient anniversary; the work preceding it is harder to fit on a cake.

The scope explains some of the time involved. Rentvine would handle trust accounting, maintenance, leasing, screening, payments and relationships with owners and vendors. These activities meet in the daily work of a property manager. A repair affects a work order and money. A tenancy brings paperwork and payments. The software has to keep those relationships intelligible to the people responsible for them.

A large cheque for very particular work

On August 26, 2024, Rentvine announced $74 million in growth capital from Mainsail Partners. Borden described the ambition as software the industry could trust and enjoy using daily. The stated uses of the investment included product development and customer service, with a broader suite for residents, owners and vendors.

Days earlier, he had spoken with Peter Lohmann while moving between meetings in Austin. The founders intended to retain day-to-day control. Growth plans included faster feature development, more support and expanded legal and financial compliance capabilities. It is an instructive shopping list. A software business can need another engineer, another support specialist and another person who understands the rules, all at once.

Mainsail brought experience in property technology, including investments in ResMan, Nexus and PayLease. The partnership gave Borden and Ewen access to people who had worked through the demands of scaling related businesses. The cheque was large; the operational questions remained quite specific. How quickly could new work reach customers? Who would answer when an operator needed help? Could the organisation grow alongside the product?

The loud voice makes a case for listening

In August 2025, Rentvine placed No. 60 on the Inc. 5000, reporting 4,682 percent revenue growth over three years. Borden's explanation had a pleasing tension with his reputation around the office. “We did it by listening harder,” he said. For someone described as having a booming voice, he had chosen a quieter explanation of commercial success.

That year also supplied a place for customers to speak together. Nearly 300 industry professionals gathered in Tampa at the inaugural Be Herd user conference. Rentvine announced its acquisition of trust-accounting services provider Bynnd there. The gathering and the acquisition both brought attention back to the practical demands of running property portfolios.

Later in 2025, Rentvine ranked No. 18 on Deloitte's Technology Fast 500. Borden thanked employees, customers, early investors and Mainsail in his public response. His team-facing humour appeared elsewhere on LinkedIn: “Thank you! Now get back to work!” Gratitude, followed by a brisk return to the agenda. The joke requires no elaborate founder mythology to land.

“We did it by listening harder.”

David Borden · August 2025

He asked three AIs to predict the future

By 2026, Borden was discussing artificial intelligence on industry podcasts. In a conversation with Matt Speer, he described asking ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini when AI would become truly autonomous. Each offered the mid-2030s, then qualified the answer. There is something entertaining about convening three machines for a forecast and receiving three versions of a shrug.

His commercial test was more immediate. Property managers wanted access to data so they could understand their businesses and act. He distinguished an agent pursuing a goal from an automation following a rule, and included Rentvine among companies whose current work fell short of full autonomy. That admission narrowed the promise to something a customer could examine.

Maintenance triage supplied an example: helping a resident explain a problem, using property information and reducing unnecessary work orders. This gives an operator a more useful question than the date of a distant breakthrough. Does the tool handle this request well? Borden's willingness to discuss the limits sits comfortably beside his enthusiasm for what the technology might eventually do.

An open door still needs a lock

With Peter Lohmann, Borden traced Rentvine's AI position back to its open API. He acknowledged that the decision predated his own anticipation of AI's arrival. Customers should be able to use their data, and competing products could connect too. His response to a better outside tool was to improve Rentvine's offering. That is a competitive position with an unusually visible test: customers can compare.

He also described a cautious beta for connections between outside AI tools and Rentvine. Around 80 customers were participating at the time of the interview. Sensitive payment and accounting access remained restricted while the team worked through the implications. Elsewhere in the discussion, he acknowledged shortcomings in communication tools and described staffing support ahead of expected demand.

These are unfinished jobs rather than retrospective victories. They also explain why bringing in another experienced leader could appeal to a founder still invested in the work. The company had more to build, more customers to support and a new set of technical decisions to make. A founder can remain deeply involved while giving someone else responsibility for coordinating the effort.

More miles, a different title

Kunes arrived at the CEO role with more than 15 years in property-management software. He and Borden planned to travel together that fall, including the NARPM national trade show in Las Vegas in October. Borden's continuing role included strategy and more time with customers. For a person whose business relationships have repeatedly supplied the next product, that is consequential work.

His route here contains several kinds of commitment: to a partner, to a market, to a company, and sometimes to an idea only after reconsidering it. Websites became worth doing. Customer requests became worth years of software development. An adviser became worth appointing CEO. Borden's part in Rentvine now carries a different title, with familiar conversations still waiting at the next show.