When Erik Tylek Kettenburg, the original CTO for the short-term vacation management company giant, Vacasa, was ready to jump into his next project, he had a specific type of company in mind. With his background in the short-term, vacation property space and ability to identify the need for technology to quickly help home buyers and investors identify the best properties to buy, he began working on a solution.
During the early stage of development, he came across Zumbly on angelList and recognized there were a lot of similarities to the solution he was seeking. This led Kettenburg to reach out to the founders, Jeb Carty and Joel Glenny.
Both Carty and Glenny quickly recognized the potential of the three of them working together and started negotiations on not only having Kettenburg come on as the CTO, but also as a technical co-founder. As Kettenburg said, “I really saw the opportunity in Zumbly the minute I looked over their web app. I’m very excited to move forward and mature the company.”
Kettenburg has been a technical leader from a young age. While in college he worked his way up the ladder at multiple dev shops with clients such as Gap, Finis, and Jiffy Lube. Erik became the founding CTO of Vacasa in 2011, where he built and managed all of their in-house technology and tech strategy from their business applications to the public website to their Smart Home Automation systems. Erik has now joined Zumbly to steer their technical strategy and enhance their industry leading platform.
Erik's professional background and personal interests have always been centered around open-source hardware and software. His "side project”, Digistump, is an open source hardware company with six very successful kickstarter projects. This led to Erik being featured in Steven Osborn's book, "Makers at Work: Folks Reinventing the World One Object or Idea at a Time".
In his nearly nonexistent free time, Erik continues to be involved in the tech community by serving as an advisor to hardware and software start-ups. And he does it all from his farm in southwest Washington, where he lives with his wife Jenni, daughters Maple and Juniper, and a menagerie of horses, chickens, ducks, geese, dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pigs, and a turtle.
Zumbly has been self-funded and is currently wrapping up its beta version in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. Hosting over twelve thousand beta users, the Zumbly founders say will be opening up a seed round in February 2020.
For business inquiries or if you would like to learn more about Zumbly, please contact [email protected].
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