Five men start a "girls-only" club in NYC

"For girls to thrive here and not just live."

Good morning everyone. Hope you’re sitting down because we have a wild letter today.

The American dream is pivoting your fraud subletting startup to a“girls-only” club.

In December 2023, my friend Dini (who I met on a bus in Chiang Mai and coincidentally went to Stanford GSB with a bunch of my friends) got scammed by Kiki, an invite-only sublet startup that I’m assuming was trying to replicate the service of Listings Project.

This is the LinkedIn bio of Toby Thomas-Smith, Kiki’s co-founder and CEO:

This is the LinkedIn of Mihailo Bozic, Kiki’s “founding launcher:

And this is the LinkedIn of Jack Montgomerie, Kiki’s other co-founder.

I’ll let those all speak for themselves, but now that that’s out of the way, let’s discuss what happened. After subletting her New York apartment with Kiki, Dini returned to her apartment in chaos — ruined flooring and couches, dirty surfaces, and an overall subletter’s nightmare. Despite photo evidence and an invitation to come inspect the damages for themselves, the Kiki team ignored Dini’s messages, blaming the silence on long flights or attending boozy brunches. They eventually paid a bit of compensation ($300 for the $7k worth of damages), but continued to question the possibility of her washing machine leaking. I’ve checked their LinkedIn profiles several times and can find no evidence of any of them being washing machine technicians. What also surprises and concerns me is all of the comms have been conducted via Instagram DM — they refuse to take any back-and-forth to email or phone.

Kiki claimed to be invite-only, where you need to know someone to use the service, but they ran a TikTok campaign where for each new follower, they would pay a percent of the social media person’s rent - so obviously they were not quality checking….. and that’s probably why this happened.

Fast-forward to this week, the 5-year-old startup (that closed $6mm last year from Australia-based Blackbird Ventures along with Airbnb exec Harry Uffindell and Facebook Marketplace founder Bowen Pan) is pivoting to a “girls-only” club in New York. The “first girl” (I don’t know why they keep using the term girl, it’s pretty odd) Caitlin Emiko, joined the team in December. On January 11, Kiki changed their Instagram bio, posted about the company pivot on Instagram, and sent out the below email: