Fix Supply Before Demand, Marketplace Resilience & Experience-Led Branding with Punsri Abeywickrema

Hey, everyone. I’m Punsri Abeywickrema, the founder and CEO of a company called Cloud of Goods. The brand really enables people to experience life, whether they need access to mobility gear, baby gear, or some other kind of gear so they can experience life to the fullest when they travel. They turn to Cloud of Goods for temporary-use equipment so they can enjoy whatever experience they came for.

As for my background, I’m an engineer from Silicon Valley. I’ve worked at some big brand names there, from LinkedIn to PayPal to Oracle, because I really wanted to learn how to build a global e-commerce platform. I worked at those companies, learned from the people who came before me, and then launched my own platform.

Tracking back about 15 years, I got the idea when I needed a wheelbarrow. I had bought a house in San Francisco and needed one to do some backyard work myself. I knew it was a one-time project and I didn’t want to buy one that would go to waste, so I looked online to see whether I could rent one from someone who would bring it to me and take it back when I was done. To my surprise, in the age of Amazon and great e-commerce, there was no platform for that. I talked to colleagues and friends in the area, and everybody said it was a great idea, because we can all think of something we need only temporarily. More often than not we end up buying it, and our garages are full of stuff. That’s the problem we wanted to solve.
The first iteration was a peer-to-peer rental platform where people who have stuff lend it to people who need stuff. One of the lessons we learned fairly quickly from that failure was that demand outweighs supply. There’s a huge amount of demand because it’s a compelling problem in society, but supply was the problem, and that’s probably why several companies ahead of us that tried the same concept didn’t work out. We also tried to go wide and deep at the same time. Demand is very wide, since anybody you talk to can think of a temporary-use need, but by trying to be everything to everyone, we ended up becoming nothing to anyone.

We took that learning into the market research for the second iteration, which is Cloud of Goods. We found a lot of vacation rental homeowners telling us that people at their destination can’t find the things they want. Traveling parents keep buying stuff and leaving it behind when they go, and Airbnb hosts had collected so much that travelers left. So we identified a real problem for travelers and decided to narrow our focus to travel-related gear first, even though we wanted to become that big rental platform serving everyone someday. It worked, but the problem was still supply. We had far more demand than supply, so in 2017 we decided to build our own warehouses and delivery networks. That worked until COVID, when our heavy-equipment marketplace collapsed. We had rented out millions of dollars’ worth of stuff that we couldn’t go and collect, and that iteration collapsed too.
Post-COVID, I decided to launch again, because the one thing that stayed consistent over 15 years was the demand. They say if you build it, they will come, so it was a matter of figuring out how to build it properly. And for the third iteration I had an additional factor: I had no money left. I had personally lost all my savings during the COVID collapse, so I had to find creative ways to launch a marketplace without any cash. I called local rental companies and said, “I have demand, can you supply?” Some said yes and some said no, so I started with the ones who said yes. This time the marketplace connected, with both demand and supply. We’re closing in on our 600th city around the world and we’re in about 14 countries now, so we finally found the right model through all those iterations.

Today we have a wide range of suppliers on our marketplace, from established local rental businesses to a stay-at-home mom who wants a side income, and everyone in between: micro-entrepreneurs, side hustlers, anybody. It’s a very diverse supplier network.
Because we don’t control things end to end, that was a fear, and it’s why we initially built our own warehouses and delivery networks. We wanted to control quality and make sure a customer renting in New York gets the same experience as a customer in San Francisco, or anywhere in between. There were some unknowns going in, but what we figured out was to help suppliers realize the vision: we are not a rental company, we are way bigger than that. We’re serving humanity and helping people go out and experience life, whether that’s an elderly person who can’t walk long distances or traveling parents with small kids. Rallying everyone around that one mission helped build a unified marketplace around quality, standards, and culture.

Culture plays an important role. I go from city to city, meet with our suppliers, and we throw networking events, and we’ve built a very unique culture around our mission and vision that helps create a unified experience across geographies. On top of that, we have a review and rating system, and internal teams who run mystery shopper programs and randomly call customers for feedback. All of those programs are there so we do our best to maintain quality.

It’s a combination, and there are two main groups. One is traveling families who need baby gear, from strollers to car seats to cribs, because it’s a pain to lug them when you travel.

The second group is traveling seniors: baby boomers, the elderly, and even people who got injured mid-trip and find our services. We often get notes saying, “Thank you for saving my vacation.” In between, there are adventure travelers who want anything from camping gear to other adventure gear. That’s a smaller group, but it’s growing as our brand gets more popular.

Having been in technology in Silicon Valley for over 20 years, one thing I’ve learned is that technology keeps changing. That’s a fact of life, and not just for technology, because the whole world keeps evolving. I think we’re at a crossroads again. AI is transforming the way we work, the way we do research, and the way we find brands. People are moving away from traditional search toward smarter search using AI, and a lot is changing in how we operate.

I see AI as a tool. We are very much a human, human-centric company: our suppliers and partners are human, and so are our customers. With that said, there are AI use cases where we can enhance the human experience. It’s a tool to help us do a better job and keep a better eye on things so our customers get the best possible experience. We use AI to enhance our user experience and surface better, more contextual content so customers are more informed about their choices, and internally as an assistant to boost the productivity of our team.

I think it’s our brand and what we stand for. What we do is rent equipment, but our mission and vision go way beyond that. We are an experience enabler, and that’s not something we branded ourselves. Our customers kept saying, “You guys enable experience, you saved my vacation.” If you look at our reviews, people describe all kinds of things they were able to do because we exist. So customers found us to be an experience enabler brand, and we decided to be that for them and for millions more current and future customers.

At every layer of our organization we say we are not just a rental platform. That’s how we provide the experience, but why we exist in the world is to help people unblock their physical limitations and go out and enjoy whatever life and the planet have to offer. Rallying around that theme is what differentiates us from a standard rental business.

It’s an interesting question, because when customers use our services as travelers and go back to their hometown, they say, “I wish I could rent this from Cloud of Goods,” whether it’s home improvement projects, backyard equipment, party rentals, or a wide variety of other things. We constantly get requests asking, “Are you in my hometown yet? Can I rent this other stuff from you?” It’s very tempting to go wide again and launch all those product verticals, but we have to be disciplined so we don’t go back to that very first iteration, where we couldn’t connect the marketplace.
We’ve nailed it down to a science now: we don’t launch a product vertical until we have sufficient suppliers. I have internal teams responsible for launching additional verticals in cities and countries. They look at where the demand is, for which products, and whether we can source enough supply to serve it. If everything checks out, we launch.

Looking ahead, the first priority is helping travelers find us wherever they go, so we’re launching new cities. When somebody uses our services in Orlando, they’ll want them in London next time, or Dubai, or Australia. We’re prioritizing city and country launches based on the journeys of our repeat travelers. In parallel, in our current markets we’re looking at what else we can supply, because we want our suppliers and partners to grow and thrive on our platform too. So over the next couple of years we’ll march geographically, city to city, launching wherever supply and demand connect, while expanding our offerings in the places we already serve.

Resilience. If I had given up on the first iteration, I wouldn’t be here today talking to you. If I had given up on the second iteration, when it failed and I fell very hard on the floor, I wouldn’t be here either. Many people thought I was crazy for not giving up and for trying the same thing over and over again, but now they realize why.

If you believe in your product or idea, keep going, because every time you fail you learn something, and you take that learning into the next attempt. Eventually you will succeed. And if you find that the marketplace or whatever idea you’re trying isn’t connecting, follow the consumers and keep pivoting. At the end of the day, we are providing a product or service to someone, and you need to identify and define that someone and make sure they get value from it. The picture in your head might not connect initially, so follow where the market wants you, start from there, and take the journey to where you want the market to be, instead of trying to change everything overnight.

Absolutely. It’s great to be here. Thank you.