about · the founder
hi. i'm the
reason this exists.
i am a woman in tech, which is to say i have spent most of my career being the only person in the room who finds the room upsetting. RoomBnB is what happens when you let someone like that ship a product.
the founder.
i graduated with a CS degree, which is a credential people like to challenge me on at parties before i tell them what i graduated in. my first job was at a startup whose entire pitch was "uber for X." X has since changed three times. the company still exists, somehow, like a fungus.
a partial list of my accomplishments
- been the only woman on a 14-person engineering team and been told that was great because it meant i was "really good"
- built a feature shipped to millions and watched a man explain it back to me in a meeting i organized
- been promoted on a friday and asked to take notes on monday
- attended a conference panel called women in tech that featured one woman and four men who were "allies"
- been the technical co-founder, the technical co-founder's therapist, and the technical co-founder's office manager — sometimes in a single afternoon
- been ghosted by a VC who called me "scrappy" four times in forty minutes
i am, despite all of this, a person who really likes building things. which is a problem. because the more you build, the more you learn that the bottleneck is rarely the code. it's almost always the people. and the people are almost always at home.
i was living with three flatmates in a flat we technically all loved. the kind of flat with a plant nobody owned and a knife block where the knives migrated. i had moved my desk into my bedroom because we all worked from home and the kitchen had become a nine-person standup.
one tuesday at 11:47 pm, my flatmate knocked on my door to ask whether i had ever considered that the bathroom mat looked "passive aggressive." i had been asleep. before that, asleep. before that, on a call with someone in singapore. before that, asleep. the door, in this story, is not the villain. the door has done nothing. the door is, if anything, the only thing in the flat with a clear sense of boundaries.
i lay there at 11:53 pm thinking: we have figured out how to share calendars, codebases, electric scooters, and one specific bird. we have not figured out how to share walls. there is no app for the knock.
RoomBnB started as a notion doc titled "passive aggressive bathroom mat: a treatise." it became a figma file. it became a prototype. it became this. it is a real product, with a real database, and people i've never met sending me real emails saying things like "this changed our flat" and "my partner is upset i installed this."
i am, broadly, building it for:
for
people who own a door and would like to use it
for
people who share a kitchen with someone they love but not at 7 am
for
adult children visiting their parents' second adult children
for
anyone who has ever said "no it's fine i wasn't busy" through gritted teeth
i am, narrowly, not building it for:
not for
people who think setting a boundary is the same as building a wall
not for
people who would describe a knock as "spontaneous" and not "invasive"
not for
anyone considering using this on me, specifically
things that are true
- i still write most of the code. occasionally i let claude help.
- the rejection messages were a feature request from my actual mother.
- the company is technically incorporated. the website was harder.
- i have rejected three of my own access requests during testing.
- none of those rejections were unjustified.
if you got this far
you're either someone who would build the same thing or someone i would build it for. either way, the waitlist is open. i read every email. i don't accept every email. that's not a bit. it's a feature.
— the founder, on her bed, with the door closed