One company's layoffs are another's best hires. Or in the case of online mortgage lending startup Stavvy, those hires might become the majority of your team.
"The internal joke was, 'if this whole real estate and fintech thing doesn't work out, maybe we should look at the restaurant industry,'" said Kosta Ligris, Stavvy's co-founder.
It was just a few months ago that restaurant management platform provider Toast laid off or furloughed roughly 50 percent of its staff—more than 1,000 employees—as the coronavirus pandemic began to sink the restaurant industry. The laid-off workers, according to a letter from Toast CEO Chris Comparato at the time, were offered a severance package, benefits coverage and other support, and the people operations team launched programs to get those who were let go placed in new jobs.
Evidently, those programs worked, at least for the eight or so ex-Toasters who now make up more than half of Stavvy's team of 14. By the end of July, Ligris had hired five software engineers, a product development professional, a QA engineer and an administrator from the restaurant management company.
"The reality is, because [Stavvy co-founder Josh Feinblum] and I are pretty ingrained in the Boston innovation ecosystem, we have relationships with people in senior leadership at Toast," Ligris said. "What was really intriguing to me was that senior leadership felt it was their responsibility to help their talent land their next opportunity. They were willing to hop on calls and make warm introductions. Some of the people we hired were the direct result of senior leadership making connections."
Ligris is no stranger to layoffs, having spent years in the world of real estate before co-founding Stavvy in 2018. He recalls how the housing crisis of 2008 hit that industry: "When the music stops, it stops pretty quickly," he said.
Now, virtually every industry is living through another crisis brought on by coronavirus. Stavvy, luckily, provides a good landing place for ex-Toast engineers. Stavvy exists at the intersection of fintech and proptech, designing platforms to manage security risk, eliminate fragmentation and increase speed and transparency in real estate transactions. It offers two main products: Stavvy Connect, a digital mortgage vendor platform, and Stavvy Notarize, which uses videoconferencing to enable virtual real estate closings.
Already familiar with some of the software's features, engineers from Toast's payments team caught on quickly at Stavvy.
"We’re in warp speed in terms of both R&D and engineering development," Ligris said. "We've been able to build very quickly and were able to make a major pivot and expand the product and go from pre-revenue to revenue during Covid, which I don't think would have happened in the absence of the engineering team."
Stavvy is now moving forward on tech that its team believes will disrupt the real estate industry by empowering small banks, community and regional banks and credit unions, which wouldn't have otherwise had access to such software. It's no easy task to build a startup from the ground up during a pandemic, but Ligris has faith in his team—and in Boston's startup community.
"Some of the most iconic companies come out of crazy times," Ligris said. "I’m a firm believer that innovation and entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship are not only what’s going to get us out of this, but are what’s going to make us a stronger innovation ecosystem."
