The Exchanges

Q Yeah. Now let's talk about your background. It's not like you grew up with a ton of cash, building in Silicon Valley, doing all of this. Like, what was the come up story? For people who maybe look at you now and go, well, must be nice.

A Well, it's a, it's a grind, but I'll tell you, I was fortunate enough to watch the grind firsthand. And so, I don't know if you know, my parents were both immigrants. My dad grew up in India in a poor village, like outside the suburbs of Delhi. My mom grew up in Israel, moving around. Her father was in the United Nations, so moving around constantly. And they came to this country with nothing. Um, And at the time, what was so, I think, magical was anybody could come to the United States with a dream, and it was truly one of these places where you could come, barely even speaking English, and have an opportunity to build one of the most amazing futures for your family. And I got to watch firsthand, you know, when my parents had me, He had just got, my dad had just gotten his first kind of break and was, you know, a junior level role. He got moved to Seattle, uh, to join a company called Microsoft. And this is still in the early days. And I got to watch them not just build that, but then when I was six, My, just my parents decided they wanted to pursue their own entrepreneurial dream, and they quit their jobs, took our life savings. My mom and dad together started a technology.com company, and every day after school, my brother, sister, and I would get dropped off from school to the office, and we would just watch them build, and what became a really successful, um, .com business…

AI assessment note: “my parents were both immigrants. My dad grew up in India in a poor village”

Q Do you think that you just get anesthetized to it after a while? Like, does it just become sort of easier because you build up a muscle eventually to the difficulty?

A No, but I also think you can't get numb to this stuff. Like, some people, every day, I mean, you know, you just have, you gotta have the pinch me moments, you know. As things get bigger and crazier, You just, sometimes you look around, you're like, how was my day meeting with this person and doing that thing and seeing this thing? And it's pretty surreal. I think the minute you become numb to all this stuff, Kind of fucked. Um, because part of what makes this thing worth doing is that excitement you get every time you get a cool new opportunity, and I feel like every day at BuiltNow, the scale and things that we get to do are like, on a daily basis, things I would have dreamed of doing once, 1015 years ago.

AI assessment note: “No, but I also think you can't get numb to this stuff.”

Q seems like one of your superpowers and your team's superpowers is, um, you bring a lot of people on board. Lots of partnerships and deals and connections, which is not always what tech companies are known for. Um, how do you think about setting up partnerships and pitching people to come into your ecosystem? Like for somebody who hasn't done it before, do you have rules or frameworks for that?

A It's so funny. This is the part that I enjoy most about Builds, bringing all these worlds together from real estate to culture to, you know, this month we worked with airlines to do, you know, transfer bonus on rewards. We worked with Disney and Anne Hathaway to launch Devil Wears Prada too, and we're also launching a new mortgage platform to help mortgage brokers. So the breadth of what we get to do is part of the fun of what we build every day, but I also think it's where the value creation lies. And so I'd say there's two different things that I think a lot of folks miss when they're doing partnerships, and the first is they go into these meetings to go pitch their product. The reality is no one cares about your product. They care about their problems, and it sounds so obvious, but the first thing is understanding what each stakeholder in your ecosystem cares about for their business, right? And if you can just walk into a room and start with understanding what they care about, And solve their problem. You're already at night and day compared to the 50 companies that come in. I see it now on this side, the number of people who come in and start their meetings by pitching me on what they do without any concept of what matters to us. It's a tough space to start, right? But then the real fun, I think, is that, you know, if you're reaching the biggest company in entertainment, T…

AI assessment note: “the first is they go into these meetings to go pitch their product”

Q And now you guys do many things, but you start with one problem, and how do you think about what to do next? I like this idea of multiple teams, and if it, if it's not big enough to have a team, then it's probably not our opportunity, but do you have frameworks for how to go from your first product to how to not get distracted by 50 options?

A Yeah, so most companies die from indigestion, not starvation. There's never a shortage of opportunity. If you have Too few things to do. Your company is dead long before you've had the conversation. So the real question is how do you prioritize now and how do you make the right focused bets? For us, what's interesting is we actually really just have one core product, which is our hospitality platform, which has evolved from what was a loyalty reward. And so it's expanded in what the platform is, but in the same way, Amazon today, They started selling books, and now, then they started selling cameras, and computers, and clothing, and all that. It sounds like 10 different businesses. It's actually one platform, and 95% of the system is the same across all of those, right? You're still using this, using factories to store the products. You have an online website with a product page, a checkout, a way to deliver the product to the customer. It's one commerce platform. Built is one hospitality platform that starts at the home. That was our books. And we said, how do you take the rental experience and make it feel high service, rewarding, a great experience? I don't want to have 10 different places I go to to check my packages and my maintenance and pay my rent and then sign my lease. I want one unified experience. I want to make it so it's rewarding, so when I pay my biggest expense…

AI assessment note: “we actually really just have one core product, which is our hospitality platform”

Q How, how do you come up with a hook for a product? Like, how long did that take you to come up with that?

A Finding a hook At the very beginning of a company is very different than coming up with what you think, how you market your company later on. When you're starting a business, I would say you look at this big problem you want to solve. Ideally, it's a big enough problem that you have a lot of room to grow. If you start with something too broad, no one can understand where it fits in their life. I've got so much going on. The last thing I need to do is spend five minutes learning about a new platform. On the flip side, there's a lot of great products that launch as a great hook, right? I mean, when I used to work at Tinder, we had a very simple hook. Swipe right, swipe left, match, and that was it. Meet people anonymously, right? The challenge is converting that hook into a platform. So I would actually say it's not as hard to create the hook. It's really hard to find a hook that can evolve into a platform. And a lot of these businesses that are great hooks, you still have to get lucky and the right time and the right everything, but there's still a cap. And the greatest companies figured out how to evolve from a hook naturally into a platform without losing sight of what made them successful in the first place.

AI assessment note: “I would actually say it's not as hard to create the hook.”