Flow

“So we're able to take a company like Flo, Adam Newman's company, bring him to Saudi Arabia, introduce him to the right people in the government, introduce him to the right people in business, introduce him to the right investors,”

“We run a super interesting survey at Flow where we asked our paying customers if they use feature X or they use feature Y, if they engage with that feature, if they enjoy that feature. And you know, the answers were around, I don't really distinguish between t…”

“For example, flow is 50%, I think, static.”

“And I think it's going to end up being one of the best investments we ever made.”

“Like, I go to all Adam's board meetings, you know, Mark's on the board. I go to all his board meetings because I'm the one who's good at like killing a guy who's that confident. When he's like, okay, that's not your best idea.”

“And what's amazing about flow and VO as a model is that we're starting to get to this point where you have consistent characters and scenes.”

“I think flow, you can think of it as really for folks who might have a longer duration project. They may want to do something over several minutes, or maybe we've seen people do up close to an hour of stitching things together.”

“But I think across Stitch, across Flow, definitely across the Gemini app, you're going to see a lot more features like that photosynthesis example, where we're trying to get people into a more natural state. Chat is not always the most natural state for intera…”

“Flow and VO, it's, like, VO two is actually the default, and you have to, like, navigate a bunch of, like, little hidden buttons to change it to VO three. So there's, like, YouTube videos with, like, millions of hits of just, like, how do I find VO three withi…”

“And I ended up losing ten million dollars trying to compete with venture-backed businesses and bootstrapping. It was all my own money, poured ten million dollars, lit it on fire, trying to compete with Asana because I didn't understand how the business world w…”

“When you, when we get into flow, what I see is it's a single idea about how people live that's enabled by design and technology and a business model and a culture and a whole set of things. And if you remove any one of them, it's not flow.”

“And our first five acquisitions, who turned out to be amazing acquisitions, who we're going to get to talk about afterwards, but all have amazing basis were done like that.”

“And it took six months from that point. A lot of people think that this happened fast. It didn't. It took six months from that point to the actual investment”

“Specifically though, if you want to control the actual customer experience end to end, you have to vertically integrate. It's the only way to actually do it.”

“We talk about raising money for real estate funds. We're not talking about raising money for flow parent company that that door is closed.”

“The thesis of the value of the community, the technology everything that Adam's talked about, the design. Is proven out like before, you know, the product is maybe five percent done but it's already able to kind of generate, you know, kind of much higher deman…”

“We will sell our five buildings. We will sell our first asset in a month and we'll keep a management deal for the unforeseeable future.”

“There are people, many people who all of their clients for their business live in the building that they live in.”

“The other kind of capability of the software that's amazing is because it's so flexible. Yes, this could be Multifamily living, or this could be condos, or this could be a hotel, or this could be office space, and it can change literally with the press of a bu…”

“Our building in Fort Lauderdale NOI net operating income is 30% higher than when we took over it.”

“80% of most leases in, in South Florida come from brokers. 90% of all inbound into flow is direct to the direct to us, direct to the website.”

“We raised it from actually 33 different investors. We put our own equity. We got debt from the local bank. We bought these five properties. It was about a billion SAR, which about three hundred million dollar fund.”

“We achieved over 90% occupancy within 60 days.”

“And it took 60, it took six months to become NOI positive.”

“The conversion rate has been phenomenal. 90 something percent of anybody who took the month is able to stay.”

“In the US, we actually bought 30% of a publicly traded company in Israel. We're non-controlling shareholders. That company has access to retail investors and institutional investors, and with partnership with that company, we have bought two developments In Mi…”

“So let's say our engineers, we hire engineers that want to be in the office and the ones we hired before who weren't, We let them be wherever they were, because when they were hired, that was the deal that was made with them.”

“Adam Newman, who raised a bunch more money, a hundred million bucks, at a two and a half billion dollar valuation, to do, like, the same thing Basically, that WeWork already tried to do that, you know, failed in a spectacular way.”

“Like it's just a re it's literally just a property management company. Which is not a bad business. It's just not like a tech company.”

“Now we simultaneously have 200 running experiments, 200 simultaneously.”

“Last year, Flow added to active audience more users than all our competitors, all our standalone competitors have, but one. Just one single app at our market has as big a audience as Flow added last year. Just in one year. Because last year we added 17 or eigh…”

“When we turned on billing for our beta users, we jumped to 20,000 MRR in the first month. We started growing at 10% per month, and we're the new hotness.”

“I was consistently spending two to three times our monthly revenue and losing money, and not venture capital out of my personal bank account.”

“By this point, we were burning over a 150,000 dollars per month.”

“12 years and over ten million dollars lit on fire. We are done burning money in a losing battle.”

“We lost the war due to inexperience, product myopia, and a lack of capital in a highly capital-intensive and competitive space.”

“At its peak, Flow did about three million dollars of ARR.”

“Today, it's sitting at about 900,000 dollars of ARR, break even with a low growth rate.”

“Sure, it could turn into something, but I will never make my investment back, and barring a miracle, it will never own a large chunk of the productivity market.”

“But are they going to generate huge rates of return? Probably not, because that's not what real estate is known for.”

“Also, he's no longer doing long-term leases. He's buying the buildings.”

“Starting with alignment, Adam's put three hundred and fifty million dollars of his own money into Flow Living alongside us.”

“And we actually talked for a year and a half before anything happened.”

“We're winning on the basics, we're focusing on profitable buildings, and then we'll have leeway to grow this to many different places, larger even than just residential.”

“What I see more frequently is that when we time the expected time that you eat, irrespective of what you're eating, but that you eat generally at the same time, let's say seven o'clock, one o'clock, six o'clock, five days a week, the body feels safe. It can pr…”

“70% of thirty-five-year-olds and youngers are currently renters. They don't actually buy, and this number is not because of the interest rates that have been going up over the past six to 10 months. This is a number from 12 months ago. And we believe that that…”

“Most prop tech companies come in and solve a point solution. They have this one solution, but then they need to take that solution, convince the landlords who are not even interested in buying anything because they're making money anyway, go to these old ERP s…”

“I think for us at Flow, and this is another lesson from the past, we used to think, and I used to think we had to own everything. I think the category is so big that the only way we're going to achieve anything is through partnership, partnership with governme…”

“I mean, I think a lot of people know the story of flow, the project management software that I built where I basically poured ten million dollars into it because I was competing with Asana and didn't understand the dynamic of when you're competing against you …”

“Meanwhile, meanwhile, I still wouldn't have done the deal, but hey, that, that's why I'm, that's, maybe that's why I'm not taking this call on my goal stream between Santa Monica and Miami Beach, my Santa Monica and Miami Beach offices, as I run my venture fir…”

“And I ended up losing ten million dollars doing that.”

“So it's like, we don't want to be at work, but we forget in some ways the, like, good things that work does for our psychology, which is that sometimes Kind of puts us in challenge mode, puts us into flow, and I think the answer is that we kind of all need, we…”

“The story was basically, we started productivity software called Flow. I decided to bootstrap it like Basecamp. And we had a big competitor, Asana. And Asana was run by a billionaire, the co-founder of Facebook. He raised a shitload of money. And originally I …”

“The irony of it is that when that's happening, you don't think to yourself, I've gotten more time. You're like, oh, this day is dragging. So there's something peculiar about our hedonic experience. We all wish we had more time on, you know, our mortal coil wou…”

“Happiness to me is flow. I actually think the thing all humans are seeking in life, and this is kind of a weird way to say it, because we usually use different words. You know, we usually use words like meaning, fulfillment, but I think it's flow.”