Tech Talks Daily
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...
00:08:35 · Dan Lifshits, Neil C. Hughes
You can appreciate how well they are doing because, like, if, they out beat you and effectively the competitor wins them, I mean, okay. These are really strong people. So I rather wanna be with them, for example, kind of next time and not be kind of effectively against them when we'll do something. [00:08:52] S0: And what we're talking about here, of course, is dwelling, and I don't wanna leave anybody behind here. So for anyone listening that are hearing around what you've created here for the first time, my understanding is it is for independent letting agency owners who want to exit smoothly, profitably, and on their terms. Me more about the company. What makes it different, from everything else out there, and if if there's a story behind the name? Tell me more about what you've created here.
00:09:18 · Dan Lifshits
[00:09:18] S1: Yeah. No. Sure. I think that the story behind the name is pretty straightforward. I think that we started the business, close at the end of twenty three when, Chad GPT and AI was just booming. And I think that we just asked Chad GPT what would be the best name for the business that, has to do with long term residential prop... Rentals. And they were like, valley. We're like, no. It sounds cool. Let's go for the valley. Two years after, we're meeting Rachel Reeves at the number 11, and The The Valley is, like, effectively all across the board. So I'm like, okay. Maybe we should have been a bit more calibrated with regards to selecting the name, but probably it's already a bit too late to change anything. And, probably the costs of doing any backward thinking decisions would be too far... Too high. But, anyways, it is where where we are, I think, already right now. But with regards to who we are, what we do, how you can, think about us, I think that the long term residential rentals is an example of the industry where, effectively, kind of you have a variety of different customers that you're serving. Obviously, kind of your end customers is the landlords that run the properties out. It's the tenants. It's the maintenance contractors that come into the properties to kind of to do the works and, like, fix the issues and everything. And, effectively, these are our core end customers that we prioritize. And then I think the open question that you have is, like, how can you effectively grow your customer base in the most efficient and scalable manner? And this is the point where, structurally, because of the fundamental reasons that, the landlords don't switch between agencies often, Just because usually it's, you just start working with one agency and because it's almost like your wealth management style business. You just prefer to stick with the same agency for some period of time. So hence, it makes organic acquisition of landlords where you go and put the kind of Google marketing or billboards or or kind of office spaces to acquire landlords one by one. It becomes pretty hard and pretty slow.
00:11:16 · Dan Lifshits
And that's exactly where the point of acquiring existing agents is and effectively in the way of doing so, primarily buying its landlord's customer bases really is one of the pretty known go to market approaches that I think some of the private equity backed consolidators already pursuing for some period of time, and not just in The UK, but across the globe in general as well. If we talk about The UK then such as Dexter's or Foxtons or Lidus Romans or Lomond or some of the other consolidators, private equity backed consolidators. Or I think that our core difference is that we're a tech company in the heart and in the mind. So meaning that the core of what we do is effectively, developing and building the technological platform that aims to achieve two things. That aims to, number one, provide the best level of service to the customers being the kind of landlords, the tenants, the contractors. And at the same time, to streamline the processes as much as you can streamline them with all the AI and the technologies in the twenty first century. Where I think that this is where the biggest, difference versus us and some of the private equity, call it, consolidators, where in reality they don't develop almost any internal technology or internal solutions whatsoever, but rather rely on some of the off the shelf technologies out there that sometimes might be not fit and best proper to the existing businesses just because they don't allow to achieve some of the degree of customer level excellence that you wish to achieve sometimes.