FEATURE: Janine Yorio, Founder and CEO of Stayawhile

JANINE YORIO is the New York City-based Founder and CEO of Stayawhile, a real estate startup that provides furnished apartments on demand – think Uber, but for apartments. Stayawhile is launching the Stayabit token for the trillion-dollar-a-year rental apartment industry in November 2017, and I was lucky enough to get in touch with Janine to discuss her project, and her experience as a woman in crypto.

When and how did you get started in crypto?
I’m pretty new to crypto. My husband trades currencies for work, so he had been talking about Bitcoin for several years, but I first started noticing it last spring when my colleague, TJ Kawamura, told me about his crypto investment portfolio and our software engineer, Brett Woodward, explained how Bitcoin mining worked. By this time we had already begun building our real estate startup, Stayawhile, which provides furnished apartments on demand – like Uber for apartments.

As soon as we got a bit of press about our project in TechCrunch, interested people started reaching out to us because they needed our product. A lot of those people were international citizens; people who needed to find temporary housing in the US, but couldn’t get it because they don’t have a US bank account or US income (you can read more about this issue from someone who has personally experienced it here). I started thinking that we might be able to solve some of those issues if we had our own payment system, and that’s when it all clicked. We began talking about building a cashless payment system for use within our network. I spoke to everybody I could find in the crypto world to try to understand whether we could build this thing we had in mind, and whether it would even be legal to do so. Three months later, here we are building smart contracts for our own token, the Stayabit.

Tell me about your role in Stayawhile
I’m the founder and CEO of Stayawhile, which I started last winter from my base in New York City. I raised venture capital from NEA, Founders Fund and Global Founders Capital (the guys behind Rocket Internet). Stayawhile is a global network of apartments on demand.

My background is in real estate. I worked for a private equity firm covering the real estate and hotel sector for about 7 years, and then I was the head of real estate development for a hotel company. So I know how to build companies and sell them, to raise capital and to lead transactions. I met Brett Woodward last winter. He’s a software engineer who had been working for a New York City-based startup, and he is a blockchain geek.

And what about your token, Stayabit?
The idea is that we’re building a token for the rental apartment industry, which is at least a trillion-dollar-a-year business, and we’re catalysing adoption of the Stayabit token by first implementing it into our own company, the Stayawhile network. You can already pay for apartments on our platform using Bitcoin and Ether. After our token sale, you’ll be able to pay in Stayabit, and our token will have several smart contracts built into it that will make it useful as a proxy for a credit score and as collateral for security deposits. The Stayabit token public sale commences on 9 November 2017.

What advice do you have for women wanting to enter the field?
I have the same advice that I would for entering any field that is male dominated. Work hard, toot your own horn, have confidence in your abilities and be persistent. Just keep plugging.

What would you say are the main barriers for women entering crypto, if any?
Crypto is a boys club. But that’s true of at least 90% of all industries. Don’t focus on your gender – focus on doing a good job. If you do that, your gender won’t be something people discuss; they’ll talk about your results instead.

But help out other women. That’s our best hope for changing things: bringing other women – and people of colour – into leadership positions when we have the opportunity to do so.

What does the future of crypto look like to you?
Crypto is going to open up all sorts of opportunities that we can’t even fathom. The same way that 15 years ago we never would have imagined we’d all be taking photos with our phones or sending messages from our watches. I’m excited to see how it all unfolds.

Favourite three coins/tokens?
That’s a loaded question! Obviously my own is my favourite, the Stayabit. And then Ethereum and Bitcoin.

You can find out more about Stayawhile at Stayawhile.com, and the Stayabit token at Token.stayawhile.com. Thanks so much to Janine for sharing her time and expertise with the Women in Crypto blog!