home-renovation
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Rachel Collins and the 28-Year Fixer-Upper
A modest first renovation became a 28-year education in how people live. Now the Crown Point designer has turned a family partnership into a studio where a room begins with feeling and ends with the troublesome matter of making it all fit.
The Countertop Shop That Waits to Get Paid
In a trade haunted by deposits, delays and irreversible cuts, a Michigan stone shop has built its pitch around one disarming promise: inspect the installation before the bill comes due.
Jesse Lindeman’s Second Act Is Built on First Impressions
After shaping enterprise mobility at MobileIron and Apple, Jesse Lindeman turned from managing phones to managing the messy work between a dated house and its sale.
Metrie Built a 100-Year Business by Cutting the Paint Job in Half
The family-owned millwork company survived a century by turning trim from an afterthought into a system. Its most useful lesson for builders is simple: sell fewer decisions, fewer job-site steps and fewer reasons for a callback.
Alon Cohen Built Houzz by Treating Friction as a Blueprint
A frustrating ranch-house remodel gave the engineer a problem worth coding. Fifteen years later, he is leading Houzz into its software-and-AI chapter with the same operating idea: make the complicated feel simple.
Houzz
Houzz is an online platform for home remodeling and design that connects homeowners with millions of design photos, products, and vetted professionals - and sells business-management software (Houzz Pro) to the contractors, architects and designers on the other side of the marketplace. Founded in 2009 by Adi Tatarko and Alon Cohen after their own frustrating remodel, it grew into a two-sided business spanning inspiration, e-commerce, and AI-powered tools for running a renovation business.
Collov AI
Collov AI (Collov Labs) is a Redwood City visual-AI company that turns a single phone photo of a room into a fully furnished, photorealistic redesign in seconds. Founded by Stanford PhD Xiao Zhang, it started as an AI interior-design and virtual-staging tool for homeowners, designers and real-estate agents, and is now expanding into broader 'agentic visual intelligence' - systems that read camera input and act on it. The company reports more than 6 million users across 200+ countries and 300+ business customers, and raised a $23M Series A in April 2026 to launch a dedicated research lab.
Stella Wu
Stella Wu is the founder and CEO of Eano, a San Mateo construction-tech company that started as a way to fix the chaos of home renovation and grew into all-in-one software for contractors covering sales, project management, and payments. A UC Berkeley grad and the first marketing hire at Wish, where she managed $400M+ in annual ad spend, she built Eano after her own ADU project turned into 150 unanswered emails, a 350-day permit, and quotes that swung from $40K to $100K. Investors describe her as the opposite of the steel-toed-boots construction stereotype. Eano has raised over $20M.
Richy Nelson
Richy Nelson is the co-founder and CEO of Roofr, the cloud-based operating system for roofing contractors. A third-generation roofer who first climbed a roof at twelve years old, Nelson transformed decades of hands-on industry experience into a platform trusted by over 12,000 roofing companies across North America. After selling his house to fund the company, surviving Y Combinator in 2017, and raising a Series B from TCV and ABC Supply in January 2025, he leads a 150-person remote team on a mission to build the most trusted roofing platform in the world.