With find-a-roomie site Homie, an A-team of developers has found a home

After exiting from mobile security startup tenCube in 2010, entrepreneur and investor Darius Cheung has been on a mission to build a crack team to solve the next big problem, whatever that would turn out to be.

It’s an approach many successful startup teams have taken, and where Silicon Valley innovation labs like Betaworks and Obvious Corp seem to be heading towards: assemble a group with talent and chemistry, and tackle a series of problems along a theme until That One Project is found.

With his company Billpin, Cheung is also taking the team-before-problem approach, although replicating Obvious Corp wasn’t something he’s doing intentionally. He says:

My belief has always been about getting the best talent and building chemistry first, then giving the team breathing space to work on projects.

Once the group is assembled, the next immediate task was locating an overarching theme. Uncovering it was an eventual process, and the company’s first product, a bill-splitting app called Billpin, was more of an attempt to solve personal problems rather than meta issues.

The app got some decent traction (although Cheung didn’t reveal exact figures), and they even acquired a predecessor.

But it wasn’t going to be a core focus: The company will continue to maintain and support Billpin, although it won’t monetize the app. On the other hand, Homie, a find-a-roommate website that the company has officially launched today, is bringing the company one step closer to a raison d’être. Cheung says:

Homie as it is today is only the tip of the iceberg, and we have a lot bigger plans in modernizing urban mobility.

The Homie team (clockwise from front right): Darius Cheung, Saurabh Mandar, Anuj Bheda, Chua Ruiwen, Conor McLaughlin and Laurence Putra Franslay.

According to Cheung, as the world becomes flatter, cross-border travel will increase, resulting in a greater need for people to settle into a new environment as quickly and seamlessly as possible.