53. Why This Founder Bet $140 Million on Laundry
Join the Gildre Community: https://www.gildre.com/membership Free Newsletter: https://gildre-for-founders.beehiiv.com/ The advice that wins in SaaS can fail spectacularly in the real world of small businesses. Alex Jekowski has raised nearly a quarter billion dollars, built two companies, and turned Sense into a category-defining platform for laundromats and other overlooked verticals by betting on what most investors dismissed: hardware, software, and the operators powering the business.If you’re a founder trying to find product-market fit, raise smarter, or build in an industry people keep calling "unsexy," this conversation will change how you think about scaling. Alex breaks down why he never owned stores, why the best advisors give brutal feedback, and why the biggest opportunity often lives with the people everyone else underestimates.You'll discover: How a college startup evolved from campus classifieds into a payments business serving student life commerce The exact lessons Alex carried from his first exit into Sense, including co-founder selection, fundraising timing, and capital discipline The culture framework behind Sense’s extremely high employee retention and near-perfect customer retention Why falling in love with the problem beats chasing the founder identityWhy laundromat operators resisted "Silicon Valley tech" at first, and how trust became the real moatAlex also shares what surprised him most about raising a quarter billion dollars, why hardware looked "dumb" to investors until it suddenly looked inevitable, and how Sense is expanding beyond laundromats into dry cleaning, shared laundry rooms, RV parks, multifamily, and campuses.This is essential listening if you want the unfiltered version of building a venture-scale company in a market most people ignore, and the mindset shifts that keep founders from chasing hype instead of real value.
