Feature Image: Lindsey Montoya and Garrett Dobbs at a team retreat in Breckenridge, CO in June 2023.
Garrett Dobbs, Director of Product at Rent Responsibly, has a motto: “Business interest and social interest are not exclusive to one another, and it is the task of the 21st-century business to do well by doing good.”
This motto has guided him throughout his career and in his role at Rent Responsibly, where he is responsible for choosing and developing software for short-term rental alliance management.
As a small team of nine people, employees at Rent Responsibly typically tend to fulfill more than one function, and that is true for Garrett.
“I am often looked to as Rent Responsibly’s tech guru, and while I have ownership of the software we use and the experience it delivers to our customers, in my normal day-to-day, you may also find me meeting with clients or partners to better understand their needs, working on our internal software and processes, replying to support requests, conducting market research, or modeling new revenue opportunities,” Garrett said.
Backpacking trip to Southeast Asia
His first taste of vacation rentals was as a traveler. After completing a master’s degree in industrial design in 2015, he embarked on a month-long backpacking trip across Southeast Asia. That trip was his first and most impactful experience staying in vacation rentals, he said.
“I traveled spontaneously across Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand, usually only booking a day or two in advance,” Garrett recounted. “I fell in love with the experience that a vacation rental and a caring host can provide – I met wonderful and interesting people who not only shared their homes with me but also their communities, their culture, and most importantly, their cuisine. It was so much more of a cultural and personable experience than I could have found from hotels.”
Developing tech for the vacation rental industry
After returning from his adventure, Garrett co-founded a full-service design firm that focused on startups and small business needs.
That gave him a foundation when NoiseAware, a company that provides noise-monitoring devices for vacation rentals, came to call. In March 2017, Garrett accepted a position as head of product at NoiseAware, where he met Dave Krauss, Rent Responsibly’s co-founder and CEO, then a co-founder of NoiseAware.
“I had stayed in short-term rentals many times prior to joining NoiseAware, but it was Dave Krauss’ passion for the industry and its stakeholders that really sold me on why vacation rentals are such a special and important business,” Garrett said.
Joining Rent Responsibly
Dave and Alexa Nota came up with the idea for Rent Responsibly while Dave was still at NoiseAware, and Dave enlisted Garrett’s help to design the startup’s website, style guide, and logos.
“In my humble opinion, Garrett is a genius. I’ve brought many ideas to him – mostly half-baked or tangled – and he is able to string them out, find the essential value, and then actualize them,” Dave said. “When we were both at NoiseAware and Rent Responsibly was a germ of an idea, Garrett was the first person I went to. He saw the bigger vision and put it down on paper. His fingerprints have crafted the mission, vision and brand from day one.”
Dave spun Rent Responsibly out of NoiseAware in 2019, but it was a couple of years until Rent Responsibly was ready to design software to provide short-term rental alliance services. Dave and Alexa hired Garrett as Director of Product in October 2022.
“I remember telling Alexa about the ‘perfect’ person to help us when we knew we’d need to build software to help us scale our support for local alliances,” Dave said. “I definitely hyped Garrett up to the point where Alexa thought I was describing a unicorn. After getting to know Garrett through a few months as a contractor, Alexa said, ‘You’re right, Garrett is a unicorn. Let’s offer him a job.’”
Garrett decided to take the job because of his respect for Dave.
“He is a great leader and a genuinely good human,” Garrett said. “He was the reason for a lot of my motivation at NoiseAware, and I will always be happy to contribute my talents to his success.”
“But meeting the rest of the team, especially Alexa Nota and Dana Lubner, is what really sold me,” he added. “Their passion, intelligence, and desire to solve tough challenges was inspiring, and the mix of skills and experience convinced me that Rent Responsibly had the right formula for success.”
Garrett was initially hired to develop custom community and member management software for Rent Responsibly, but after a pivot in the spring and summer of 2023, the company is now adopting and customizing third-party software. Inside of this software, Garrett is architecting the country’s first interconnected network of alliances, nested within a national community of short-term rental operators of any type in any market. Both alliances and the broader community will have a full suite of tools and resources built and curated specifically for them, all underpinned by Garrett’s experience and expertise.
Bonding as a remote team
Like the rest of the team, Garrett works remotely from a home office in Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his wife, SJ, and their rescue dog, Nuka.
SJ and Garrett adopted Nuka from an animal shelter about four years ago.
“She’s a rambunctious but lovable little mystery-mutt,” Garrett said. “The shelter warned us that she would grow to 80 pounds or more, but she never grew at all and still looks and acts like a puppy.”
Garrett’s daily interaction with colleagues occurs over Slack and Zoom calls. But the team also connects in-person on a recurring basis at intimate leadership meetings and larger team retreats.
One of the ways he cuts loose and has fun at these gatherings is singing karaoke with Jenna Fuhrman, product marketing and partnerships manager. Early on, they discovered they have a shared passion for this pastime.
“Jenna and I have managed to find a karaoke bar during [almost] every trip we’ve been on together,” Garrett said. “Most recently, we dragged the whole team to a karaoke bar in Breckenridge at the end of the last retreat [in June 2023].”
He said he appreciates the supportive and caring environment that the Rent Responsibly team creates on a daily basis.
“It’s a company that doesn’t just talk about culture and values; we live it,” he said. “But we also cut loose and have fun too!”
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