Meet Janet & Jaina

Last week I told you the thing I was dead wrong about at the start. That I could do this myself. That I could be a solo operator and still build something nobody else could copy.

This is what I did about it.

Janet Ng

Janet has overseen $1.5 billion in assets across 3.4 million square feet of residential, office, and retail. That's the line on paper. What made me want her on this is the belief sitting underneath it, which is that real estate performs best when it actually feels like something to the people standing inside it.

She's brought 13 dining, wellness, and event venues to life. She's held tenant retention 25% above market. She's kept a 4.8 out of 5 guest rating across those venues, and anyone who has run a property knows how hard that number is to hold once real people show up. Twenty-five years spent at the intersection of real estate, hospitality, and human behavior.

She's also in MasterClass Executive right now, a program built with the University of Chicago Booth School and OpenAI, learning from Ray Dalio, Mark Cuban, and Indra Nooyi alongside academic faculty. What she's using it for is the exact question Cavara lives or dies on. What makes a person feel like they belong in a five-star environment.

Janet runs marketing for us. She's automating our funnel end to end, and she's building AI tools on top of it that I couldn't have built at the pace she's building them. She's also working on operations and guest experience planning, which is where those 25 years really land.

Jaina Pallasigui

Jaina is a limited partner in two wellness hotels in Palm Springs, Terra and Kora. She owns 10 long-term rentals in Indiana and an 18-acre Airbnb in Temecula wine country. She raises capital for a ground-up multifamily development team in San Diego. She's seen boutique hospitality from the ownership side, which is a very different view than the one a guest gets.

The part I keep coming back to is what she built on Instagram. She teaches real estate investors how to turn their business expenses into points and miles, then use those to book five-star stays anywhere in the world. She personally travel hacks north of $40,000 in travel a year doing it.

That matters to us twice over. She's stayed in a lot of the properties we're measuring ourselves against, so she knows where they get it right and where they coast. And she built an audience from zero by being genuinely useful to people, which is the same playbook she's now running for Cavara.

Jaina owns our social. Growth, engagement, all of it. (The alternative was me making reels, and I'll spare you.)

What starts this month

We're kicking off the marketing and social campaign. It starts on Jaina's account rather than ours, and that's on purpose. What Cavara has right now is a build, not a booking. Founder-led, in public, the messy parts included. Once that has legs, it migrates over to @staycavara.

If you want to watch it from the front row, follow Jaina at @jaina_anne, then follow @staycavara while you're there.

Last week I wrote that a system doesn't run a resort, people do. This is the people part. Full direct booking and an operating system we actually own are not things I get to at 1am on a Tuesday by myself. They happen because there are now people on this who are better at their piece of it than I am.

I'll take that trade every time.

Jeremy