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.
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.
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.
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.