I appreciate that sentiment, @jenny-oest . This perspective is helpful for our team to hear as they work around the clock these past several weeks supporting our customers amid this crisis.
We’re all human, too. Some of us even have friends and family members who are currently sick or who we’re worried about. And while this is all going on, our focus right now is on 1) helping our customers through this brutal time, and 2) making sure our company survives this so we can continue to be here for you.
Our business has also been severely impacted by this - MyVR makes the majority of its revenue on booking fees - so we are truly “all in this together”. Like our customers, we are getting hit from two sides: bookings have come to a grinding halt and cancellations have spiked like we’ve never seen (an update is coming on this soon, as promised).
We hope things return to normal soon, but we’re preparing for a long dig out of this hole. To that end, our team has all taken on significant personal sacrifice to ensure MyVR stays alive. We are unfortunately not Stripe, Airbnb, Expedia/HomeAway, etc - we are not sitting on billions in cash. Like yours, our company runs on its cash flows, which have flipped upside down.
Here are some of the things we’ve done to date with our customers in mind:
We halted all business travel in early February and initiated work-from-home in late February to help prevent exposure to our team members from work.
Our team has taken on deep salary reductions across the board - most team members have taken a pay cut between 60% and 75% or higher, with the goal of keeping our software running and our team employed. Despite all this, our team is highly engaged and focused on servicing our awesome customers.
Some team members have even given up their salary entirely. I personally worked without salary for 7 years starting MyVR and have again taken myself off payroll in early March.
We are cutting any and all non-essential costs. Earlier this month, we closed our physical offices in SF, Reno, and Portland and terminated our leases to help future cash flows.
For all refunded payments by our customers, we have refunded (and have always refunded) 100% of the small portion of the Stripe fees that MyVR receives during payment processing.
We have lobbied the exec team at Stripe to refund Stripe’s processing fees, as well, and to stop the freezing of funds in select accounts - both of which have resulted in review processes being set up by Stripe. We are happy to hear that some of you are starting to receive refunds from Stripe, and that they’re doing it retroactively on past cancellations.
We have lobbied our large channel partner to soften the impact that their cancellation policies have on hosts and on us, as well. We’re as frustrated as you are with the actions they have taken and are equally concerned about the impact on all of our businesses.
We empathize with the pain our customers are feeling right now. We are “stepping up” in every way we possibly can right now. We hope to be able to help customers financially as best we can, and must keep a close eye on our own finances. We should have an answer on the requests around the booking commission refunds in the next few days. Please hang in there! We’ll do everything we can so long as it allows us to, simply put, stay alive. We must do what we can to ensure we continue providing our software to the hundreds of property managers who rely on us.
While it’s probably uncommon for a company to be this forthcoming about what’s going on behind the scenes, we strive daily to live up to our values of integrity and openness and have found full transparency to be the best approach, both with our own team and our customers. Hopefully my sharing all this allows everyone to understand the ways in which we’re stepping up where we can, and how we can aim to support each other during this time.
I also know from talking to leaders at other tech companies in our industry that we’re not alone. We’re all getting impacted, and many companies may not make it through it. We’re doing what we need to do to make sure we can not only survive, but also continue to provide the level of quality in our product and support that you need.
Thanks for listening. Stay healthy and safe, everyone!
