Updated on April 9, 2025
Feature photo: Dave Krauss (center) with team Rent Responsibly at a team retreat in Lake Tahoe in December 2024.
Like most hosts, Dave fell into short-term rentals serendipitously.
During the Great Recession, he was renovating historic condos in Boston when he met his future wife, Courtney, who was then performing in a Broadway musical in New York City. Frequently traveling to see her, their long-distance courtship sent him in search of a short-term tenant to stay in his place. Airbnb caught his attention. “It was 2013, and I thought, this sounds way more interesting than Craigslist,” he recalled.
He and Courtney later moved to Texas permanently. He started investigating short-term rental opportunities in Dallas, where he became the first STR manager in the city.
Dave’s nascent hosting career nearly crumbled one night when a party at one of his properties resulted in a dozen neighbor complaints.
“I was ashamed,” Dave recounted in an interview with podcasters Alex and Annie: The Real Women of Vacation Rentals. “I realized I wasn’t fully in control of what was happening at my properties.”
This painful experience sparked the idea for NoiseAware, a smart home device that measures decibels without intruding on guest privacy. He called it “the smoke detector for noise.”
“It was about protecting neighbors and hosts,” Dave explained. “I didn’t want anyone else to go through what I did.”
The Rent Responsibly Origin Story
As Dave traveled to promote NoiseAware (now called Rest), he saw broader challenges facing the short-term rental industry and tapped into his roots to uncover a solution.
His father, Richard, was an architect who co-founded a firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts; his mother, Marty, was a professor and social advocate at Brandeis University.
As a policy researcher, Marty delved into ways to increase access to support and services for people with developmental disabilities. She instilled in Dave a deep sense of responsibility and service to others.
Having had these leadership and community-building skills modeled for him at home on a daily basis, he realized “noise issues were just one piece of the puzzle,” he said. “There was a need for education, advocacy, and community building.”
The concept for filling this need took shape in 2019 when he met Alexa Nota, then a journalist reporting on short-term rental regulations.
Their collaboration began with a shared frustration: the public narrative around short-term rentals focused on bad actors. Their initial project, “Humans of Short-Term Rentals,” profiled hosts and their positive impact on communities.
“Most people in this industry are responsible and community-minded,” Dave noted. “We wanted to highlight their stories.”
But the idea quickly evolved. Inside and outside of the Humans of STRs project, discussions with hosts began to exhibit a familiar pattern.
In one particularly memorable conversation with Dave, “One person started crying as they described how they were doing everything right–introducing themselves to neighbors, being proactive, following the rules–but their city still wanted to ban short-term rentals,” he said in his interview with Alex and Annie. “It was wrenching because that was me when I started. I knew it was solvable if we could just come together.”
Meanwhile, Alexa founded the Chapel Hill STR Alliance and co-chaired the town’s STR task force after an anti-STR coalition petitioned the town to ban them. She heard similar stories from hosts almost every week.
“When I was only covering regulations as a journalist, I didn’t understand why every city or every destination didn’t have a short-term rental alliance,” Alexa said. “Then, when I finally built one myself in the town where I could participate in the ordinance process as a citizen, I understood completely: to rely entirely on limited volunteer hours to run a successful group is an impossible ask.”
In October of that year, at an advocacy workshop in New Orleans before a vacation rental conference, Dave and Alexa realized the industry needed a unifying force to support hosts’ advocacy efforts and educate stakeholders on the merits of responsible hosting. They received support from others at the meeting, including Philip Minardi of Expedia Group, Mike Copps of VRMA, and Matt Landau of VRMB.
“Alexa had spent 40 hours just setting up her group,” Dave said. “I thought, what if we could reduce that to four hours and scale it nationally? That’s what we built Rent Responsibly around.” Making things 10 times easier has been their mantra ever since.
“Alexa and I shook hands on Bourbon Street and agreed to go all in,” Dave remembered. On December 3, 2019, they officially launched Rent Responsibly.
Rent Responsibly’s No. 1 supporter
Marty served as a muse and adviser during the company’s early days. She coached Dave and Alexa and provided a sounding board for their ideas. Later, she made cameos at staff meetings, dispensing some of her wisdom or encouragement.
Dave credits his mom with saving the startup “before it started.”
“The advice she gave me … was whatever you do, don’t do anything alone,” Dave recounted. “And Alexa was right there. I always tear up at this point because I just think if my Mom hadn’t said this to me, I could have a very different life.”
Dave believes that having Alexa as his partner in the process sealed Rent Responsibly’s success. While Dave came up with the original concept, Alexa brought the organization, efficiency, and powers of execution necessary to make it happen.
“There is no one else I would partner with on this endeavor,” Alexa said. “Creating something totally new from scratch like this takes an incredible amount of inspiration and drive to see the vision through, and that all comes from Dave. He’s one of an elite few who don’t just paint a pretty picture but also work hard every single day to make it a reality.”
Growing as a leader
Marty’s influence continues to permeate Dave’s approach to leadership. As CEO, he leads Rent Responsibly in long-term vision, company culture, hiring, strategic partnerships, and public representation. Intertwined with all of that, he emphasizes transparency, collaboration, and a focus on well-being.
“I want people to feel empowered to do their best work while maintaining balance,” he said.
When Marty died in 2022, Dave faced his grief with a determination to make her proud and emulate her many admirable qualities. He created the 3×300 Habit Challenge, a program to do three simple habits daily for 300 days straight.
“I’m doing this in dedication to my amazing Mom who showed me what consistency and an excuse-free life looked like,” Dave wrote in an Instagram post in early 2022.
His three habits were deleting social media from his devices on weekdays, going on a daily run or walk outdoors, and journaling for at least 5 minutes a day.
“Once you know Dave, you can’t not become a better person,” Alexa said. “I’ve learned and grown so much over the years thanks to him, in wellness and many other areas, but it’s not just me. There has been a groundswell of kindness and healthy habit adoption across this industry in the last few years, and I absolutely credit that to Dave.”
Looking to the future
Rent Responsibly now provides a massive library of resources and association management services (AMS) to short-term rental alliances and hosts. In 2025, the team’s unofficial motto is building bigger tables.
“My mom’s work was all about making sure people had a voice and a seat at the table,” he reflected. “That’s exactly what we’re doing at Rent Responsibly–helping hosts and managers get organized, be heard, and shape a future that works for everyone.”
The company is deepening its mission with new initiatives. One is providing AMS support to the new Right to Rent Collaborative, an independent nonprofit dedicated to raising and distributing funds that support STR associations across the US. The nonprofit will officially launch at Rent Responsibly’s spring 2025 RR Summit.
Dave’s goal is to eventually graduate from his role as CEO to running a future Rent Responsibly foundation. Carrying on his parents’ values of making the world a better place than they found it is his life goal, he says.
For Dave, these values apply far more broadly than just short-term rentals and even much closer to his adopted home in Fort Worth, Texas.
During a staff meeting in January 2025, Dave asked each teammate to describe one thing they hoped to do to improve their community this year. When it was Dave’s turn, his thoughts turned to his mother. As another tribute to her, he started an initiative to care for a waterfall in his neighborhood park, which he has named Marty Falls for his mom.
“Marty Falls was the last place where we took a photo with my mom. It’s a really special place for me,” Dave explained. He’d been cleaning it up on the weekends with friends but wanted to make it more accessible to the public, so more people could enjoy it.
“It’s in need of a glow-up. I’ve started recruiting other people to help with the project … I’m trying to get their buy-in, so we can go through the official process of getting a capital improvement project done with the city, but effectively done by the community with the city’s stamp of approval. It will take multiple years, but I think it’s going to be one of the best projects of my life.”
The project illustrates his belief that family, community, and company culture start at the top and the incredible influence his mom had and still has on his leadership style.
“She showed me that leadership isn’t about being the loudest voice in the room,” Dave said. “It’s about building relationships, about listening with both ears as she likes to say, and about creating systems that help others thrive.”
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