Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology
00:00:00 · James Pringle, Dan Lifshits, Hector Mason
[00:00:00] S0: This episode is sponsored by Seapoint, the business account built for startups. If you're a startup founder fed up with finance admin, you need Seapoint. Seapoint is different to neobanks because it connects all your bank accounts and your Stripe account to see your cash position, burn, and runway instantly. It automates bookkeeping by pulling invoices and receipts from your whole team's inboxes, so you just sync the whole lot to zero and pay outstanding bills with a click. Plus, it has a 3.51% yield on treasury and real human customer support. Find out more at seapoint.co. That's seaprint.co. Use code unicorn for a free month. Seapoint offers money market funds managed by BlackRock. Rate recorded at 10/01/2026. Rates are variable and subject to change. Capital at risk. Welcome to the riding unicorns podcast. Today, we have Dan from Dwelly. Dan, great to have you on. Thanks for joining. It'd be great if you could just introduce yourself and the business. [00:00:56] S1: You for having me. Yeah. My name is Dan Lifshutz, and we're building Valle that is The UK based lettings and property management AI first platform, where we're growing by acquiring and partnering with existing traditional letting agencies to evaluate this level of service and experience. [00:01:13] S2: Dan, it's great to have you on. And we go back a long way now. I made the fatal error of not angel investing because I was buying a place at the time. You made [00:01:21] S1: the right decision. We'll see.
00:01:21 · Dan Lifshits, Hector Mason
[00:01:21] S1: the right decision. We'll see. [00:01:24] S2: Was trying to conserve cash, but I wish I had now. I mean, you've... Of course, it's early days. You would have obviously say that as well. You're very modest, but you have had some real success raising a lot of money from funds like General Catalyst already. So we'll hear more about that in a bit. But tell us a little bit about your career. You've been at McKinsey. You were then senior at Get, the taxi company. And so tell us a little bit about that journey before Dwelly and kinda how how that sparked the interest in being a founder, but specifically with Dwelly?
00:01:58 · Dan Lifshits
[00:01:58] S1: Sure. I think that every kid growing up wants to be a realtor, right? So I think that this is the short version of the story. Yeah, think a bit of a longer version is, yeah, kind of effectively spent a significant part of my childhood growing up in between Israel and Russia. Then he came here in The UK, finished mathematics in London School of Economics. And I think, as as discussed, being a son in a Jewish family and not being a lawyer and a doctor already implies that the fact that the family give up on me. So I think that being either in property or investment banker, I think that one of the only ways to try to recoup some of this love back and so that the family doesn't give up on you completely. I spent a bunch of years in consulting. I was at McKinsey in my early days and was able to grow there very, very fast and be probably one of the youngest associates here in Europe and the world. And it was pretty much the times when the whole ride hailing kind of journey was effectively just starting up. And I think that not me, guys, to tell you what formal feels like, right, when you feel like the whole world is moving into one direction and that you're a little bit missing out of that. But a few friends of mine that I knew really well for a long period of time invited me to join when it was a really pretty early company. I don't remember exactly, but I think it was just around our Series A back at GET in somewhere around twenty fifteen ish when the whole ride hailing world was just evolving, especially in Europe. And you might know the rest of the story. During the early days, when it was a very, very small business, we scaled the business to more than a billion of GMV to more than a thousand people. I think that all these stories, especially in tech enabled operational businesses, do not come without its own ups and downs, high ups, low downs. You know how it works. But, I think that you get to learn the most on these sort of stories. And that's effectively what I think professionally, to some extent, informed me and gave me some experiences for sure. I've been doing different things. I was in charge of operations first, then moved back to Israel, was in charge of a significant chunk of our product engineering teams. And then I came back to The UK and was a GM of our consumer business here.
00:04:11 · Dan Lifshits
And I think that that experience coupled with, Hector, you probably know and remember, all my co founders have been general managers at Uber kind of for themselves before as well. So that's where we met each other more than ten years ago, fiercely competing between each other on the ride hailing front. I've been, as we keep joking, I've been on the bright side of things, yet they've been on the dark side of things at Uber or maybe vice versa, like who knows? And, yeah, after that, been looking what are the other markets resemble very, very similar features to that of ride hailing, effectively huge operational business, untouched with technologies to significant extent, two sided marketplace that is highly fragmented both between demand side and supply side. And the co founders already had experience of building, scaling and then selling successfully with scale to become the largest tech enabled letting agency focused on long term residential rentals in Eastern Europe. And we decided to build on top of that experience, our marketplace knowledge and of the previous experience of scaling letting agencies to try to reinvent the business model and reengineer something new, given some of the localities and some of the limitations of the organic growth in certain markets.
00:05:25 · Hector Mason
[00:05:25] S2: Yeah. No. It's a great story. And and, I mean, maybe we can touch on the the the... You know, Ilya and your cofounders a little bit later. But was that... How obvious was it to you that you should dwelly? And, like, what was... Was there anything holding you back? You know, it's never an easy... There'll be a lot of listeners probably thinking about starting a business. Like, what would you say to them when they're working out whether they should take the plunge?
00:05:50 · Dan Lifshits
[00:05:50] S1: This is a great question. I think that this is not my first attempt of the business. This is not the first business that Ilya and Dimitri are building as well. So I think it's all kind of second or third kind of business for us. And I think that this is applicable both to develop and even before that, that I think there is something inside you at some point of time where you're thinking what you want to do in your life. And I think that at certain point, you arrive to the stage where you understand that something within you wants to build something, and this is like a desire that you cannot hold. And there is no reason to do that, honestly. That just dominates in a way, and you understand that there is no other way rather than trying and going to do that. And I think there can be different motivations. It can be... What I probably believe is the best motivation is the motivation to really make an impact in the world and change something. And I think whenever you experience renting out pretty much across the world, in The UK included, you understand that potentially there is a better way. Because I think that unfortunately, but quite rarely, people refer highly to the experience that they had in their journey. I think that for some of the founders, might be the experience coming from a personal pain, it might be the experience coming from a desire to leave the mark in the world and some legacy. But I think it's it's a combination of factors. For me personally, it was all of the above. Plus, I think that it's only the business that you're building yourself where you can leave some culture and some personal mark that you want to inherit as much as you want to be building things and not that you need to... Anyway, the culture is gonna be the summary of the key leaders that you have in the business, and I think that's fine. But the question is, like, how much of an impact and opportunity you have to navigate this culture? And I think that whenever you're feeling and whenever you get to know yourself too well at some point, and you understand what things you can compromise with, what things you cannot compromise with, you understand that it's only building your thing that can create the sort of unique feeling and vibe that you want to have.