Adi Tatarko, co-founder and CEO of home remodeling and design site Houzz, dropped a stat that hits home for many people: 12% of couples consider divorce when renovating their home.
“We started running surveys in the early days and got feedback from our community, and that was so prominent. And 12% did say, we did consider a divorce during that process,” said Tararko, speaking at the Coins2Day Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit in Laguna Niguel, Calif. On Monday.
Tararko and her husband, Alon Cohen, came up with the idea for Houzz when they were renovating their own home. And as stressful as it was to find designers that could match their tastes and execute on their vision, the couple found that running the company together—Cohen is president—was much easier.
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And there’s a lot to stress about when you’re starting your own company. According to Tatarko, the couple bootstrapped Houzz without realizing how big the company would become, a move that gave them a lot of flexibility and leverage later on. “In retrospect, we learned how to do everything by ourselves,” said Tatarko. “We were so lean with our approach, because we didn’t have the funds to sponsor everything, so we had to figure out the best ways and most efficient ways to do everything.”
Ultimately, however, the couple realized that they needed to take on outside funding—a decision that can cause problems among any co-founders, let alone married ones. Over a year after Houzz had started, the site had more than 300,000 monthly users. “We met someone who told us that we are pretty much crazy doing it as a side project and if we’re not going to raise money and bring in more people to help us, somebody else will,” Tatarko said.
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In June, Houzz raised $400 million in funding, valuing the company at around $4 billion, making Tatarko one of a handful of female CEOs of “unicorn” startups that are worth $1 billion or more.