Lewis Zhang
16 posts
We're excited to lead Probook's $34M Series A.
Every home services business runs on dispatch: which technician goes to which job, in what order, at what time.
Almost every AI vendor building for the trades skipped dispatch, instead rushing to build voice agents and chat widgets.
@probookai built dispatch first, then expanded outward into intake, data scrubbing, messaging, and outbound. Every customer stays on one text thread from the first call to the technician at the door.
@georgeprobook grew up in the trades, pressure washing alongside his dad, and spent a summer inside a $40M HVAC shop before building the software to fix it.
Welcome, George, @probookcto, Ben, and the entire Probook team.
By @arampell, @dhaber, and @omooretweets
George Eliadis@georgeprobook
Announcing $40M in funding from @sequoia and @a16z. I grew up pressure washing houses in upstate New York. Six summers in the truck, missing calls from the top of a ladder because I couldn't hear my phone ring. My co-founder Ben grew up plumbing with his dad in San Francisco. We entered home services because we grew up in it. I spent a summer inside TR Miller, one of the best-run HVAC, plumbing and electrical shops in the country, and their workflows were still raw. The first wave of AI in the trades was point solutions. One tool for voice, one for outbound, one for follow-up. Operators ended up with five vendors and more overhead. Probook is the AI operating system that helps you add points to your EBITDA and run your entire customer experience as one connected system, built around dispatch. Many of America’s largest home service brands run on Probook today. Summers Plumbing booked 2,542 jobs their first month with us, zero human intervention. Anthony PHCE ran 20% more revenue per job on a 50% leaner team. Del-Air more than doubled productivity from 10 to 22 techs per dispatcher. To everyone who trusted us early: thank you. Back to work. We're hiring.
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@dhaber @a16z @probookai @omooretweets @arampell David you are such a thoughtful partner, glad to be learning from you!
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1/ Excited to announce @a16z is leading @probookai's $34M Series A (alongside my partners @omooretweets and @arampell)!
George Eliadis@georgeprobook
Announcing $40M in funding from @sequoia and @a16z. I grew up pressure washing houses in upstate New York. Six summers in the truck, missing calls from the top of a ladder because I couldn't hear my phone ring. My co-founder Ben grew up plumbing with his dad in San Francisco. We entered home services because we grew up in it. I spent a summer inside TR Miller, one of the best-run HVAC, plumbing and electrical shops in the country, and their workflows were still raw. The first wave of AI in the trades was point solutions. One tool for voice, one for outbound, one for follow-up. Operators ended up with five vendors and more overhead. Probook is the AI operating system that helps you add points to your EBITDA and run your entire customer experience as one connected system, built around dispatch. Many of America’s largest home service brands run on Probook today. Summers Plumbing booked 2,542 jobs their first month with us, zero human intervention. Anthony PHCE ran 20% more revenue per job on a 50% leaner team. Del-Air more than doubled productivity from 10 to 22 techs per dispatcher. To everyone who trusted us early: thank you. Back to work. We're hiring.
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the best thing that has happened to me this week is hiring a recruiter
so much bandwidth has been unlocked to move needles again :)
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"the entrepreneur's dilemma"
if you found your own startup because you don't want to work for someone else's, how are you going to convince someone else to work for you when you need to hire? 🤔
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Our eng candidate is so locked in it's unreal. Definitionally intense 😎
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Grateful to be working with my best friends from middle school at @probookai, it’s the best feeling ever 🙏
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@jonathanzliu @im_roy_lee @cluely Equity might be worthless at some startups, but the team and experiences you make along the way is what makes the startup worth it
$400k is the premium you need to pay for great engineers when your company is a meme 😅
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something that @im_roy_lee is doing right with @cluely’s founding engineers is pay them 400k CASH
so even if the startup doesn’t work out you still would have made a lot of money anyways.
why aren’t more startups doing this?
jonathan liu@jonathanzliu
the biggest thing i’ve learned from being a founding engineer in the past is that i can’t be a founding engineer. like bro you’re getting 0.5% equity and working as hard as the founders and it’s not even your idea. this has resulted in some pretty bad financial decisions btw (i was at @mercor_ai pre series A lol)
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As someone who stopped using social media 5 years ago, getting back on Twitter is so much fun!
What should I be posting to get clout here? :)
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The secret hack to getting early stage investors to find conviction in your startup is to tell them you work 120+ hours a week and that most of your team sleeps at the office
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The amount of time I spent responding to constant Slack messages and emails everyday is insane
CLOSING SLACK
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If you’re a founder and not working on Fourth of July, get back to work 🛳️
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if you're in nyc and you work from home, you should make sure you get lots of natural light!
it's cloudy today in nyc and would be depressing af without any windows and a nice view of manhattan lol
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just created a twitter bc i heard that's where all the cracked engineers are!
looks like I've been doing it wrong on linkedin 😭
#cracked #foundermode
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