Tech Talks Daily
00:00:04 · Neil C. Hughes, Dan Lifshits
[00:00:04] S0: What happens when three people shaped by the intensity of Uber and Get turn their attention to one of the most overlooked corners of the housing market? Well, today, I'm joined by one of the cofounders of a company called Dwelly, an AI powered rental platform that is buying and improving letting agencies across The UK. And on the surface, this is a story about property operations and automation. But if you look underneath it, you'll find a much bigger conversation about how AI could change traditional service businesses from the inside out. So my guest today will share a few lessons from ride hailing, scale, speed, operational discipline, and customer experience, and how all these things are now being applied to long term rentals. We will talk about how AI is already changing maintenance workflows and property management and what this all could mean for landlords, tenants, and the wider services economy. So if you've ever been hearing the phrase AI roll up and watching what it actually means in the real world, this conversation brings it to life in a way that feels practical, ambitious, and very timely. But enough scene setting for me. Let me introduce you to my guest now. So thank you for joining me on the podcast today. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do? [00:01:36] S1: Thank you. A pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. My name is Dan Lifshitz. I'm one of
00:01:36 · Dan Lifshits, Neil C. Hughes
[00:01:36] S1: Thank you. A pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. My name is Dan Lifshitz. I'm one of [00:01:40] S0: the cofounders of Dwelling, the AI native platform for long term residential lettings and property management. And not only that, I was doing a little research on you. You are... You and your cofounder both came from ride hailing giants like Uber and Get. So I've I've got to ask. We'll talk about the future and what you're doing now, but I've got to go back to your origin story there. What what experiences from high growth environments like that? Did did any of that experience from those times shape your thinking when you you first looked at the rental market? And what's the story there? I I feel like this is almost a story on its own right now.
00:02:18 · Dan Lifshits
[00:02:18] S1: Oh, absolutely. And I think that, to be honest, the story goes, I would say even beyond that because I think that all... Actually, we have three founders and kind of two of us being at Uber and kind of I... I've been at Gap. And I think that we've all been, super, super excited and passionate by those things. I think by kind of highly scaling businesses, number one, and by, technology that can, enable and maybe to some extent disrupt the real physical operational world, number two. And obviously with the appearance of the mobile phones and apps and everything, I think that the first massive conduit of, like, think, tech enabling the operational business was obviously the taxi industry because, like, one of the largest industries in the world. So I think that in a very disconnected manner, we all made decisions to, I think, join the party, back at the time when I think Uber was expanding pretty aggressively in Europe. And I think that GET was, like, effectively starting to open its international markets. I think we correspondingly ended up, leading different markets across Uber and GET. So effectively, been fiercely competing with each other, for some period of time. It was somewhere in the range from 2014 until 2018, 2019 when we've all been there. So kind of good old hustling crazy days when effectively growth at all cost and, effectively market grab and all the things. And, you are absolutely right that I think it taught us a lot of things. I think that not just it taught us a lot of things on the personal front, such as, like, what is it about healing the good kind of scaling the high, speed, and kind of high effects of the... Highly operational complex, but high velocity businesses that obviously kind of Uber and the likes and get pretty much are. But I think at the same time, what does it mean to build an operational rigor in tech enabled and technological businesses? It's also a lot about, I think, the pace at which you do that and twenty four seven type mentality and kind of never switching off that, from the, I think that just the personal standpoint, and I think from your mental consciousness is definitely not the great thing. But I think in terms of the business results, there's definitely something that drives the results.
00:04:22 · Dan Lifshits
So kind of not that we learned a lot of things on the personal front, but I think we also learned a ton of things on the professional front. Meaning, how it is to kind of enable and I think transform huge existing operational businesses with the appearance of technology is number one. I think number two, obviously, how to do that in the industries where the baseline of the technological adoption is not particularly high. And obviously, in the historic taxi fleets and taxi stations, it hasn't been really technological companies where I think that most of the taxi ordering and dispatch and everything for the driver still was done kind of manually effectively. Simi manually or kind of riders picking up the phone and kind of calling the nearby taxi station to order a taxi, right, or or a cab. And I think that number three taught us also a lot how to kind of be building businesses in highly fragmented marketplaces where the kind of fragmentation happens on both sides, on the demand side and the supply side. So if you talk about the taxi, it was on the rider and on the driver's side. If you talk about the long term residential rentals, then if I could, it's on the tenant side, the landlord side. So in general, I think that the kind of long term residential rentals ticks very similar boxes to that of ride hailing. So, like, huge business, one of the largest household expenses in the world, Very, very, very labor intensive business still, even kind of these days. And I think that adoption of technology is kind of is quite limited across most of the kind of agencies, and highly fragmented, effectively same two sided marketplace where you have millions of individual kind of tenants on one end, you have millions of landlords on the other side. So effectively kind of some consolidation can help you to increase efficiencies and in general start providing better level of service. A lot of parallels for sure. And I think partly that's what inspired us on the journey we're on at the moment.
00:06:13 · Neil C. Hughes
[00:06:13] S0: And one of the things that I love about your story when looking back is that you were almost competitors across different continents before building something together. So what was it that brought you into that same room, and what was it that convinced you that, hey, this was the right problem to solve?
00:06:29 · Dan Lifshits
[00:06:29] S1: Actually, kind of I think that this is a very good question and, honestly saying, I wouldn't be thinking about ourselves much as competitors per se. I mean, yes, we've been in competing businesses, but I think that rather, sometimes it's maybe kind of not very obvious insight and observation. But I think that you actually end up sharing a lot of trades because I think that, yes, we're working in kind of vis a vis directly competitive companies, but we're both working, all three of us, in, high scaling tech enabled organizations. And I think that not everyone makes a decision to go for such a journey. So meaning that there is something shared that we have that kinda brings us there. I think number two, we obviously all share a very huge passion for invention. We share the desire to try to provide the best level of service to the customers. We share how we're running things, meaning kind of based on numbers, based on data, try to do the kind of data driven decisions, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So I think that these are all the things that brought us to be kind of where we are. And I think the second thing that unites us is I think that, yes, you might have been on the competitive sides, but in reality, I think within each business, you usually know who are the people that are exceptional. Right? And I think that usually everyone knows that because you talk to someone within an office and usually in every office, there is like one, 2% of people that are just like kicking it. Right? And everyone knows that they are the best. And, don't wanna say that we've been the best, but I think that definitely there was some reputation, around us that, we've been noticed at least. And I think that you get to know these people usually from the kind of thousand miles away. So I think that, that's why we've always been on the outlook of each other. And I think we remained in touch for some period of time. And whenever we all happened to be in The UK, and I think that reconnected and started thinking, is it a good time for the next venture? Then it was like almost by default that like, why not to do something together? Because I think that you have a very very high opinion of each other and impression. And especially so being on the competitive sides, you might have observed how the other people behave whenever they are kind of...