Chasing Opportunity

Why we’re building Zeus

Kulveer Taggar
Dec 9, 2019 · 3 min read

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about immigrants.

It takes real spirit for someone to leave their community, culture, and country, in pursuit of something better for themselves and their families.

My granddad went on hunger strike at the age of 16 in rural Punjab so that he could continue his education and not have to work on the family farm. He ran away to Delhi, taught himself English and joined the Western Railway as a clerk. He retired as the Chairman of the Railway Union. He was forward looking and knew that a city would provide him with much more opportunity. As a result, my mother’s horizons were not limited to the little village in which she was born, but included being able to see places like Kashmir and Mumbai.

Whilst I cannot know for certain what was going through my granddad’s mind in 1947, I’m pretty confident that I would not be writing this post from San Francisco today without his life-changing decision.

Human potential is bounded by location.

I experienced this when I moved to San Francisco in 2007. Running a startup in London in 2006 was not easy. It was still tough after the move, but at least in San Francisco I was in the thick of things, surrounded by serendipity, like-minded people, and investors who encouraged me and my co-founders to think big.

Our mission at Zeus Living is to make it easier to live wherever opportunity takes you.

We know that smoothing even small surfaces of friction in this process of relocating will unlock lots of potential energy.

Our team is building a world where the emotional, difficult experience of moving will be effortless, and the ease of home will be found wherever you are.

I’ve had friends from all over the world encounter amazing opportunities in the Bay Area, but dealing with housing has often introduced a friction that stopped them in their tracks. For many others, these difficulties suppressed the decision before it was ever seriously considered.

The nature of work is changing. Remote teams, distributed HQ’s, and technologies like Slack and Zoom have enabled companies to have an increasingly transient workforce spread across many locations.

While work is more flexible than ever, housing options haven’t kept up. Meanwhile, Airbnb has changed our expectations for how we want to stay while we are traveling. Long term stays in hotels or cookie cutter apartments aren’t enough anymore. Buying furniture and signing 12 month leases are real estate complexities that don’t align with modern professionals’ growing preferences for flexibility, asset-light living, and convenience.

You should be able to love where you live, and trust your landlord.

I’m happy to share that we raised a total of $55M for Zeus’ Series B.

Our ambition is global and we’re building a company to thrive for the long term. Come join us on this mission as we reconsider what it means to feel welcome and at home, wherever you need to be.

Kulveer Taggar

Written by

Cofounder & CEO of Zeus, www.zeusliving.com. @kul

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