The summer I sold pine straw to lift my truck
In the summer of 2016, my mom drove me to the Fulton County DMV, I showed off my parallel parking, and I walked out with a driver's license.
My parents had bought me an old F-150, and what I wanted more than anything was to level it and throw a set of 35s on it. A level kit and 35-inch tires cost real money. My best alternative for earning it was working for somebody else at eight to twelve dollars an hour. I'd heard the lore of older Atlanta teenagers pulling in thousands selling pine straw, so I figured I'd give it a shot.
My best friend Tommy and I posted an ad on Nextdoor. To my surprise, people responded.
Our first job was clearing invasive bamboo from an elderly neighbor's backyard. The bamboo was no match for two sixteen-year-olds with loppers and hatchets. But as we worked, more responses to the ad kept coming in and I started to panic, since my truck was already full of yard waste with nowhere legal to dump it, half the backyard was still covered, and I had an AP European History test and a precalculus test bearing down on me at the same time.
My mom came to the rescue. She took the truck to a dump site and offloaded all the bamboo herself.
The customer paid $250 by check and tipped us $25 each, which came out to $150 apiece for twelve hours of work. Even after the $50 we owed my mom for the dump run, we'd beaten Georgia's $7.25 minimum wage by more than three bucks an hour.
The summer of pine straw
By the end of May, AP exams were behind us and our mornings were filling up. We had cross country practice at 7am, but Tommy and I would head straight home after, eat fast, and get back out before the Georgia afternoon turned brutal.
Customers paid by check. We'd mobile deposit them and wait two or three days for the cash to settle. During busy stretches we'd run out of money and have to borrow from our parents to buy materials for the next job, my first run-in with working capital, though I didn't have a name for it yet.
We made neat invoices with free Google Docs templates and showed up in person to give free quotes. After enough reps, we could estimate how many bales a yard needed just by looking at it. Eventually we started asking customers to text us a video of the areas instead, and if we came up short we'd clear the difference and pull a few extra bales off the truck. Turned out they were busy too, and doing it async was easier for everyone.
We were making decent money by then, but the real jump came later, once we learned how to price it right, and that lesson traces back to where we bought our straw. We bought it all from a landscaping materials wholesaler, where we got to know the guys working the pine straw trailers, and one of them, Rolando, took us under his wing. He showed us how to stack the maximum number of bales for safe transport and lash them down with red twine. Our record was 65.
One day Rolando asked how we priced our jobs. I explained my system: time, plus materials, plus transit. He shook his head. "You're giving away money," he said. "Just charge a flat rate per bale. We charge eight bucks a bale for a crewed job. You can charge $6.50 as a kid and still make 2x more income than you're earning now. Customers pay more when you package it as an all-inclusive rate."
We tried it, and it turned what had been fun money into real money almost overnight. I'll never forget being seventeen, counting out all of our cash by hand on the drive to the beach for the Fourth of July.
What it turned into
When I applied to college, I wrote my Common App essay about a big job we got ourselves into (one we probably should have said "no" to) and how we managed to get through it. That story got me an interview for a full-ride, merit-based fellowship at the University of Georgia, and after a two-day interview weekend I was selected for the Foundation Fellowship and never had to pay a dime for college.
From there I worked on ventures in the nonprofit and tech worlds, landed an internship in investment banking in New York, and started my career as an M&A banker. Today I invest in private services and industrials businesses, and I'm building Village.
Why I'm building Village
The world has changed a lot since I was hauling pine straw ten years ago. We've lived through a pandemic, and agentic AI is changing everything, fast.
Something cultural shifted too. People trust their neighbors less than they did ten years ago. Pew Research Center found that the share of Americans who say they trust all or most of their neighbors fell from 52% to 44% over the past decade. An elderly woman writing a $250 check to two teenagers she found on Nextdoor, no contract and no reviews, is a harder thing to picture now. Folks are more guarded about who they let onto their property. And yet the kid down the street who mows lawns or details cars is still one of the few things that holds a neighborhood together. People will take a chance on a neighbor's kid in a way they rarely would on a stranger, because there's still an old instinct that raising the young is something a whole community does together. A student running a small business is a neighbor first, in a way an app or a national franchise never quite manages to be. People know his name, and they want to see him win.
I work in private equity, so I have a front-row view of where home services is headed. The sector is being rolled up at every level. At the top, the big players are deploying sophisticated AI to shorten their speed to lead and cut back-office costs, widening their margins without lowering prices for homeowners. At the bottom, MBAs fresh out of business school are hunting like vultures for the small lifestyle businesses that used to belong to a retiring plumber or a sixty-something with a steady route, snapping them up to run roll-ups of their own. In the skilled trades, licensed techs are brutally hard to hire.
The little guy is getting squeezed. Taking a home services business from a $20k side hustle to a $100k lifestyle operation to a $10M business that builds real generational wealth, the American Dream itself, has started to feel impossible.
Village exists to close that gap. It gives independent providers, from sixteen-year-olds with a truck to licensed pros, the communications tooling and business infrastructure to grow a real business profitably.
It matters to me who's building it. Nearly everyone who has worked on this product ran some kind of small business growing up, whether they were designing the app, writing the code, or interning for the summer. They've all had their own version of that drive to the beach.
Somebody in my neighborhood took a chance on a kid with a truck and a Nextdoor ad. I'm building Village so the next one gets that same chance, with better tools than a Google Docs invoice.
William Ross is the founder of Village. He ran a landscaping and pine straw business in high school in Atlanta and studied at UGA on the Foundation Fellowship. Before building Village, he worked in investment banking and private equity.