Eric Owski and the problem waiting in the garage

Eric Owski’s first startup began with a problem his parents had already solved for themselves. They had the family photographs. Thousands of them, in print. Everyone else had to figure out how to see them. While discussing a trip to Europe with his father and brother, Owski began thinking about a less cumbersome way to put those memories into other people’s hands.

He and his brother Evan built Heirloom, an app that turned photographic prints into digital images and let people share them in private groups. It launched in November 2014. The ambition was domestic and recognizable: make the family album available to the family. The technical work involved detecting edges and correcting perspective. The customer wanted a picture of someone they loved.

A decade later, Owski was asking people to photograph something with considerably less sentimental value: an electrical panel. His company, Treehouse, uses information about a home to organize electrification projects, including EV charger installations. The subject matter has changed. The question running through these businesses is remarkably consistent: how much work must a person do before technology becomes useful?

The album before the electrical panel

Heirloom had a little Hollywood in its machinery. Owski recruited Willi Geiger, who had spent thirteen years leading a computer graphics team at Industrial Light & Magic, as chief imaging scientist. Software would handle the awkward geometry of photographing a photograph. Users could collect the results into albums and invite people into a smaller circle than a public social feed.

The company announced $1 million in seed funding at launch, with Tencent among its investors. For Owski, who had worked in businesses connecting employers and talent, it was a departure into an intimate corner of consumer software. His brother brought engineering experience. Their starting point was a shared family inconvenience, the sort that rarely arrives wearing a sign saying “business opportunity.”

That old personal page offers a useful glimpse of his interests: film, sports, politics, technology and television. It also describes twenty-nine years in the Midwest followed by two in San Francisco. He was presenting himself then as a first-time founder. The description belongs to the Heirloom period, when the next chapter was still unwritten.

Learning to ask better questions

Before Heirloom, Owski worked at CareerBuilder and held a sales and marketing leadership role at Bright, which LinkedIn acquired. He later joined LinkedIn through Heirloom. His work there crossed product management and global product marketing. There is a useful mix in that history: understanding what can be built, explaining why someone should buy it, and hearing what happens when the two fail to meet.

At LinkedIn, he helped develop and launch Talent Insights. The product, released in September 2018, gave employers a way to examine labor markets: where particular skills were concentrated, which companies were hiring, and where an office might sensibly open. Recruiting had produced a mountain of information. The task was to make it answer a working person’s question.

Owski’s launch essay laid out priorities that sound mundane until you have used software that ignores them. Answers should arrive on demand. People should be able to interpret them. The information should reflect changes in the world. More than eighty customers helped test the product. One example involved Intel deciding where to place employer-brand billboards in Poland. Data had found its way onto the street.

By 2020, LinkedIn was introducing him at its Talent Connect events as head of global product marketing for Talent Solutions. He had worked on products and on the business of bringing them to customers. Those are useful preparations for a founder about to discover that a purchase can be held up by a question nobody at the point of sale is equipped to answer.

A Chrysler connection, and a missing installation

Owski’s father worked for Chrysler. Cars were familiar territory long before they became Treehouse’s entry into home electrification. “I grew up around cars,” he said. The founding group wanted to apply its technology experience to reducing emissions. Electric vehicles offered a connection between a large environmental task and something close to home.

Treehouse began in 2021. By July 2022, Owski was announcing that the company, previously called Drive, had adopted the Treehouse name after an early test of home EV charging installations. It was operating across California and had become a licensed contractor. The new name gave the business room to extend beyond the car.

The opening was easy to understand. A driver could choose an electric vehicle without knowing what a charger would cost to install at home. A dealership could sell the car while leaving the owner to assemble the next part of the experience. Buying something new can be enjoyable. Being assigned a small construction project as a leaving present has a narrower audience.

“The industry needs an evolution, but not a revolution.”

Eric Owski, August 2023

In his 2023 funding announcement, Owski put electricians at the center of the undertaking. Treehouse would bring their work together with software in a vertically integrated contracting business. The company announced $10.4 million in early funding, led by Montage Ventures and Trucks. Its initial focus was charging, with ambitions to make other home electrification projects easier as well.

The contractor keeps the contract

The business model tells you something about Owski’s priorities. Treehouse takes responsibility for the installation journey, including quoting, design and permitting. It operates as a licensed electrical contractor. A customer is buying a managed project, with an organization responsible for carrying it through. That puts the consequences of a poor handoff much closer to the company selling the experience.

In April 2024, Owski announced a broader range of work: electrical panel upgrades, energy storage, bidirectional charging, induction stoves, and the electrical work associated with heat pumps, alongside commercial and multifamily charging. He described the repeated problems across these categories as hidden costs and fragmented responsibility. The product range was growing around the same operational problem.

That October, Treehouse announced a $16.6 million Series A led by Flourish Ventures, with investors including Eaton, MassMutual Ventures and CarMax. Owski said the money would support geographic expansion and more automation. At that point, the company reported a presence in forty states. That figure describes the moment of the announcement, rather than a permanent boundary around the business.

What a photograph can save

The practical work is almost wonderfully unglamorous. Treehouse’s guided upload process asks for panel photographs, locations marked on a map, and a short video of the route between the panel and the proposed charger. Those details help establish electrical capacity and possible wiring routes. A software company has persuaded a homeowner to make a very short documentary about their garage.

Computer vision checks whether an uploaded image is legible and shows the right thing. The system provides feedback when it needs a better photograph. Information gathered during the process feeds electrical load calculations and permit preparation. There is an echo of Heirloom here: the photograph is the accessible input; more specialized work happens behind it.

The electrician still has to install the equipment. The useful question is how much preparation can happen before that visit. Owski’s earlier work made labor-market information easier to use. Here, organizing information about a specific house can help skilled people arrive with a clearer understanding of the job. The value lies in the time and confusion removed from the process.

From one garage to an automaker’s customers

Treehouse’s partners give the approach a route into ordinary purchasing decisions. In November 2024, Eaton announced a collaboration combining its electrical equipment with Treehouse’s software and installation services. The plan covered home charging and other electrification work, with Eaton becoming a preferred supplier. It connected project preparation to the hardware an electrician would actually use.

The following month, Treehouse introduced a fleet-focused offering. Fleet owners faced a distributed version of the household problem: chargers needed to reach drivers’ homes, with consistent pricing and installation processes across many locations. Owski’s ambition was to make that work easier to coordinate. The company was extending its installation process to customers buying and managing vehicles in groups.

In February 2026, Toyota and Lexus introduced Treehouse for their customers’ home charging installations. The announced process used photographs and a survey to provide upfront quotes, with Treehouse targeting forty-eight hours or less and managing the work through installation. Those were Treehouse’s service representations; Toyota explicitly did not guarantee the turnaround. The collaboration brought Owski’s proposition into an automaker’s ownership experience.

For someone whose father worked at Chrysler, the connection has a pleasing circularity. Owski came to this business through software, but its work reaches into the physical routines surrounding a car: the dealership, the driveway, the place where it waits overnight. An electric vehicle becomes easier to live with when those routines have been thought through.

The family album and the electrical panel make an unlikely pair. Yet both ask a builder to take seriously the small tasks separating a person from something they want. Owski has moved from preserving old photographs to preparing homes for new equipment. In each case, the interesting part begins when the customer puts down the phone and gets on with life.