When Aaron and Adora Cheung launched house cleaning service Homejoy two years ago, they took their research seriously — they worked as traditional house cleaners for a month, and they discovered two things right away: 1) Cleaning people’s homes is really really hard; and 2) the current system was so broken and inefficient that there was opportunity to change everything. “We worked on a team of about a dozen cleaners,” says now CEO Adora Cheung. “We had plenty of clients, but for scheduling we literally worked off an Excel spreadsheet that couldn’t possibly factor in transportation time, breaks, or clients’ schedules. As an engineer, I just thought, ‘Wow, software could solve all of this in less than a second for thousands of cleaners.’” Homejoy was founded to bring this type of speed and scale to the house cleaning business. In just over six months, the company expanded into over 30 U.S. and Canadian cities, and it just established a new headquarters in London to spread into Europe. As more companies like Uber, Postmates, and Airbnb grow their footprints from city to city and employ people outside the tech economy, developing best practices has become mission critical. In this exclusive interview, Adora Cheung shares the strategies and hard lessons that allowed Homejoy to sprint across two continents while keeping service quality high.