---
title: 'Cozying up: Instrument and Urban Airship alum Matt King joins Cozy as they open a Portland office'
date: '2013-02-06T13:22:30-08:00'
type: post
word_count: 574
char_count: 3431
tokens: 747
categories:
  - '#featured'
  - News
  - Oregon
  - Portland
  - Startups
tags:
  - cozy
  - instrument
  - 'matt king'
  - 'urban airship'
---

# Cozying up: Instrument and Urban Airship alum Matt King joins Cozy as they open a Portland office

It’s a good time to be in Portland. And while our homegrown startups are knocking it out of the park, we’re attracting startups from elsewhere, too. Take [Cozy](http://cozy.co/ "Cozy"), a Bay Area startup that just hired Portland-native [Matt King](https://cozy.co/blog/the-newest-member-of-team-cozy-matt-king/ "Matt King")—an alum high-powered local shops like [Instrument](http://weareinstrument.com "Instrument") and [Urban Airship](http://urbanairship.com "Urban Airship")—and [opened up a Portland office](https://cozy.co/blog/cozy-portland-is-open-for-business/ "Cozy Portland is open for business").

What’s Cozy do? Quite simply, they make it easier to be a landlord. And easier to be a renter.

> Cozy was officially born in March 2012 with the goal of fundamentally changing the way people deal with rental real estate, and creating the highest quality experience for everyone involved. I say it was officially born then, but the story actually started a couple of years earlier when John and I were establishing Seabright, our previous company.

Cofounder and CEO [Gino Zahnd](https://twitter.com/gino "Gino Zahnd") was kind enough to share some thoughts on the Portland office and what it means to Cozy:

“There was never an original plan to open an office in Portland. Our hiring practice so far has been somewhat unconventional, and highly focused: seek out the best people we can possibly find regardless of where they’re located, and then show them why they’d be able to do awesome work at Cozy in San Francisco.

“When we started scaling the engineering team a couple months ago, we quickly noticed a pattern: we were finding top-notch talent in Portland, and an openness and high level of excitement to take on the ambitious set of problems we’re solving.

“After we hired our third Portland-based person, we knew it was time to build a studio here that would be equal to our San Francisco studio. We now have more engineers in Portland than we do in San Francisco. Our customer service team is also in Portland. That said, going forward, we have no preference as to which office new employees want to work from, and no teams are necessarily based in one city or the other. John, our CTO is relocating to Portland, and I will continue to split my time.

“Both San Francisco and Portland offer so many high quality opportunities around culture, food, and lifestyle, and yet they are vastly different places to live. In our hiring experience, the signal-to-noise ratio has been much better in Portland for reaching the kinds of talented, enthusiastic folks that make up Team Cozy. I have theories about this, but ultimately I don’t really know why it’s the case.

“[Our big hiring focus right now is a DevOps person](https://cozy.co/blog/were-hiring-a-devops-engineer/ "We're hiring a DevOps engineer"). Continuing the pattern, we are finding more qualified people in Portland than we are in the Bay Area. At our size, we not only need qualified people; we also need a great cultural fit. Everyone has huge impact and influence when you’re our size.

“Interestingly, Portland has had the single highest signup rate for our beta of any city in the United States. There’s obviously something special about Portland and Cozy.”

For more information, visit [Cozy](http://cozy.co/ "Cozy") or follow @cozyco on Twitter.