Meet the ‘Uber of lawn care’
After interviewing enough tech startups in San Diego, a pattern has emerged around the male founder archetype. He is usually the graduate of a prestigious university, a confident and charismatic speaker and a devoted networker.
Jeremy Yamaguchi, the founder of fast-growing tech startup Lawn Love, is an exception. Self-educated and a bit of a loner, the nervous but brilliant entrepreneur has built a software company that grew to employ 100 people after only four years in existence. His startup has growth statistics (shared privately) that put it in league with the fastest-growing tech companies in the city.
Described by many as “the Uber of lawn care,” Lawn Love is used to find, book, and pay yard workers online. In the years after Uber’s massive growth, companies like Lawn Love gushed into the market — all trying to replicate the tech giant’s success in different industries. The wave of Uberlike tech startups became known as the “Uber of X” trend, and most companies fizzled out within months of launching. But Yamaguchi’s startup caught fire. Now available in 38 states and 120 cities, Lawn Love has expanded into new services such as snow shoveling and Christmas light installation.
Despite the company’s growth, Yamaguchi has largely stayed out of the spotlight in San Diego’s tech scene.
“In the early days especially, most networking is a waste of time,” Yamaguchi said. “Spend that time in a garage with your head down writing code.”
It’s not that Yamaguchi doesn’t value a supportive network and community. But he believes that building a good product should be the No. 1 focus for any founder. And for someone his age — 31 — he actually has quite a lot of experience doing just that.
The son of missionaries, Yamaguchi was raised in Tokyo and moved all over the world throughout his youth, from Rwanda and Tanzania to the Philippines and Myanmar. Home schooled from kindergarten to high school — and skipping college altogether — Yamaguchi never stepped foot in a traditional classroom. He immigrated to the U.S. when he was 16, landing in San Diego to live with his father. Traveling had hardened him to culture shock, but one thing stands out in his memory.
“American highways,” Yamaguchi said. “They were enormous, and I’d never seen anything like it.”
Once he arrived, Yamaguchi taught himself how to design and write code, and opened up a digital agency doing web development, app development and branding. Then in 2009, he launched his second venture — a startup called Golden Shine (the Uber of maid service), which was sold to a private equity search fund in 2013. A year later, Lawn Love was born and Yamaguchi was admitted into the highly competitive startup program Y Combinator in Silicon Valley.
Although he says Y Combinator played a large role in his development as an entrepreneur, Yamaguchi credits his deeply rooted habit of perpetual self-learning as a big key to his success. The way he communicates (unusually precise and articulate) reveals he is well read. He admits to be a voracious reader, studying philosophy as much as he studies business.
“Business is about solving human problems, and philosophy is useful to that end,” he said. “Studying the underpinnings of human nature will give you more insight, I think, than studying the past successes of S&P 500 giants. After all, the lessons you learn from past winners might not be the same lessons that help a future crop of winners.”
Even for one accustomed to adapting, Yamaguchi said entrepreneurship is the hardest thing he’s ever done.
“I characterize early stage entrepreneurship as an exercise in solving tough puzzles ... the reward for which is increasingly harder puzzles,” Yamaguchi said. “It happens infinitely. First you learn code, design and marketing, and then you realize you need to learn finance, strategy, fundraising, team dynamics, culture ... and eventually things like macroeconomics and legislation. If you knew how high that mountain was before you started climbing, you almost certainly wouldn’t take your first step.”
But Yamaguchi said growth makes it all worthwhile.
“If you’re good at learning, you just get more capable than you ever imagined possible,” he said. “Before you know it, you’ll grow into this indomitable version of yourself.”
Whether its hurdles at Lawn Love or ventures down the road, Yamaguchi appears ready for the next mountain. For now, he’s laser-focused on Lawn Love’s growth.
His advice to fellow entrepreneurs is this: “Focus on building growth, and don’t worry about shaking hands with elevated people. Those great people will find you once you’ve built something worthwhile. Slick networking does very little, but building great businesses does a lot."