Place.
Chief Product Officer through Place's hypergrowth phase. $3M to $50M+ SaaS ARR. 150 to 600 employees. A $100M raise from Goldman Sachs. Three acquired companies unified into one platform.
// The situation
Three companies. One platform. A hypergrowth scale-up about to take institutional money.
Place was a roll-up. The company combined a real estate brokerage running roughly $250M in annual revenue with a tech business assembled from two acquisitions: Brivity, the CRM that had acquired Blueroof360 (the company I co-founded in 2008), and Place's own internal tech stack. All three lines ran as separate businesses but all sat under one parent.
The mandate at Place was to take that fragmented tech stack and turn it into one unified platform, support the rapid growth of the brokerage side, and prepare for a major institutional raise. Around 150 employees when I joined. The runway was short and the ceiling was high.
// The team
From 150 to 600 employees in three years. The hiring sign never came down.
When I joined, Place had about 150 employees. By the time I left, the headcount was approaching 600. A 4x expansion through aggressive brokerage hiring on one side and platform-team scale-up on the other.
At the start, I ran product, design, and engineering together. Seventy-five-plus people in a cross-functional org reporting up to me. The structure was right for the size: fewer handoffs, faster decisions, one voice for the platform. Once we raised $100M from Goldman Sachs and the engineering team needed to scale faster than I could lead it alongside product strategy, we hired a CTO. My scope became product and design; engineering had its own executive seat.
// The bet
Unify. Build. Ship eight new products. The three-job version of one job.
Unify. Blueroof360 websites, Brivity CRM, and Place's own internal tools were three separate stacks doing overlapping work. The bet was to consolidate them into one coherent platform that the entire brokerage business and the SaaS business could run on, rather than maintaining three parallel codebases and three sets of customer experiences.
Build operating systems. A 75-person product org running on ad-hoc rituals breaks at 200 people. We needed quarterly OKRs that actually drove roadmaps, dual-track discovery for major bets, structured product reviews, design systems that scaled, and clear roles between PM, design, and engineering. None of that existed when I arrived. All of it had to exist before the headcount doubled.
Ship eight new products. Both sides of the business needed expansion. Eight new products and three mobile applications shipped during my tenure, covering home search, agent productivity, lead management, marketing automation, and reporting.
// The product portfolio
Eight products. Three mobile apps.
A new product shipped roughly every quarter through the scale-up phase. The four that mattered most to the business:
Place Home Search App.
Consumer-facing mobile app that connected home buyers and Place agents end-to-end. Buyers searched the latest listings, saved open houses, scheduled tours, and chatted with their agent. Place agents got a continuous client experience from first search through closing, instead of losing the buyer to Zillow or Redfin somewhere in the middle.
Team Websites.
Branded sites for every team in the Place network. Each customizable to the team but consistent with Place brand standards, with IDX search integrated (listings refreshed every 5 minutes), Home Value Reports built in, and Agent Rosters that agents populated with their own photos, videos, testimonials, and qualifications. The Team Websites product turned every Place team into a lead-generation engine.
Home Value Reports.
Real-time IDX data combined with automated home value modeling produced reports that told homeowners not just what their home was worth, but what was happening in the local market around it. Turned a transactional lookup into a recurring reason to come back to a Place agent.
Facebook Ads automation.
Let real estate agents automate their property advertisements. The system handled targeting, ad creation, and retargeting based on each lead's search history from the IDX websites. Took a manual, expensive lead-gen motion most agents do badly and made it something they could run on autopilot.
Plus four more products shipped through the period, supporting transactions, agent onboarding, internal operations, and reporting workflows.
// What it produced
Three years of hypergrowth. Numbers that made the case for what came next.
- $3M → $50M+
- SaaS ARR growth.
- $100M
- Goldman Sachs raise.
- 150 → 600
- Employee headcount (4x growth).
- $250M
- Total Place business revenue.
- 8
- Products launched.
- 3
- Mobile applications shipped.
- 75+
- Cross-functional team led (early phase).
// What it proves
You don't scale a SaaS by being smarter. You scale it by building systems that make the team smart in your absence.
What I learned at Place: when a company is growing 4x in headcount and 17x in ARR at the same time, the product strategy matters less than the systems you build to make sure thirty product managers are making the same kinds of decisions you would, in your absence.
Quarterly planning. Design systems. Clear roles. Discovery cadences. The boring infrastructure of product work, treated as a first-class deliverable.
I left Place with a CPO playbook for high-growth scale-ups. Every job since has been a version of that same problem at a different scale.
// Keep going