Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology
00:19:26 · Dan Lifshits
[00:19:26] S1: Yeah, I remember when we've been discussing that topic with the team in Hull, and actually, it's a completely outstanding team of an agency, the first one with whom we partnered. And I think that whenever we were making some of the investor conversations from the open office and sharing that we moved to HAL, etcetera, etcetera, I remember that at first, the people were like, okay, what's the heroism here? I mean, it's amazing, Sisi, and we've been leaving her for all of her life. Why are you putting it as such a kind of thing? And whenever you're speaking to the New York or kind of London based investors that usually do not travel beyond M 25 quite often, you're like, moving to Holland. They were like, oh, wow, kind of this is such a conviction path. I mean, it was fine. I remember that. But coming back to the point that effectively the business is about... I think you can look at it from two distinct angles. I think you can call it a roll up with technology. And I think that this is wrong way to position what actually are we doing. And I think that another way to look at it is that we're building the tech first AI native letting agents of the new era, where it happened to be that our growth and effectively the way that we acquire customers, Tactically, it's just a go to market angle is acquiring existing businesses, because this is the only way to grow fast. And I think that that changes the perspective of how you look at things. Because eventually, when you say the word roll up, I think that there are too many hashtags sitting on it. It's like PE term, and you preserve not just the kind of customer base, but also the business, the processes, the team kind of etc, etc. Reality is majority of what we're buying, it's primarily the customers. Yes, it comes along with great kind of local teams and property managers and lots of other educated professionals that know how to run the property space. But we're also reengineering the target operating model of the value delivering of the service quite significantly as well, with changing roles and responsibilities of the people, changing how certain activities are being done, with unifying these operational activities, because obviously you can expect that lots of very kind of moms and pops traditional businesses implies that there is a variety of different operational ways how to do the same activity.
00:21:28 · Dan Lifshits
And that's why the only way to really build a product and build your target operating model that would allow you to achieve the goals of increasing the user experience and efficiency of the underlying businesses is only by kind of sitting in this office as yourself and on the fingertips, feeling and understanding what product are you deploying, how is changing the processes, how to change the process to adopt the product, how to change the product to fit in all the existing processes. Because differently from distributing your typical b2b SaaS, it's not that you're building a product, but then you're going and like selling to the other customers. But you have one goal and one goal is like serving your end customer. Now he's like landlord tenant contractor. And then you can attack it from both ends. You can approach it from the end of changing the operational processes, you can change it from the way of changing the product and technology. And you need to understand both sides on your fingertips really well to understand what are you actually building and changing. And this is not achieved by sitting in the fancy view work and drinking smoothie, sitting on the phone call with property managers and telling them which buttons to click. I mean, this is about rolling up the sleeves and going back to the board modes of the world and sitting side by side with these teams and co creating targeted rate model and technology to run these businesses.
00:22:43 · Hector Mason
[00:22:43] S2: And with what you learned sitting alongside in this kind of forward deployed, you mentioned FD earlier, sort of manner, did you... Have you learned that... I'm sure I'm sure these agents have slightly different ways of working. There are idiosyncrasies between them. And have you learned... Have you had to build your product in a sort of configurable modular way? Or have you sort of build it in an opinionated way where the agents that you acquire and start working with are forced to fit your product?
00:23:15 · Dan Lifshits
[00:23:15] S1: That's an amazing question. That's exactly the latter. And I think that's exactly where the difference between your typical kind of buy and build and what we're doing is coming up. Because our vision is effectively with the use of technology and AI is to streamline the entire lighting lifecycle from finding a tenant to collecting rent or property management to enhance the user experience. And you cannot do that while preserving the variety of different operational practices and having a very versatile product supporting these different ways of work. You can achieve it only by choosing one way of work and then effectively in a way pushing or suggesting everyone to adopt this way of work because you want data has proven that this way of work is better than a variety of other ways of work that exist out there. And important to note is that this is not that you defined it and that's it and it sets its tone, but it's effectively a continuous feedback loop where you test it versus reality. You buy another agency, you look at some operational process they're doing there and actually figure out that some things they invented to be doing there are smarter or more efficient or something. And then you go back and revisit your target operating model and your product supporting that for all the agencies that you already bought and fully integrated up until now. Alli is effectively the selection of the best practices of operational processes across The UK, with not just selecting the best one of the variety, but also quite often selecting none of the existing and reviewing all of them completely and rewiring your new one instead of replacing the old one. This is what effectively we built.
00:24:43 · Hector Mason, Dan Lifshits
[00:24:43] S2: Yeah. Fascinating. So, I mean, you're you're able to use data to work out and determine the optimal process across every part of the Lettings journey. And, yeah, really fascinating stuff. [00:24:55] S1: How are you... And that work, can you allow bringing most of this needed transparency and guaranteed level of service through unification, and this is critical, and through very targeted adoption and deployment of AI, integrating it into very specific predesigned workflows, where after understanding very clear process and states that this process needs to follow, this is when you then can apply AI, because effectively, it's going to be primarily just your facilitator to move the process from state A to state B, whenever you predefine know which states you want to process to follow through. [00:25:29] S2: Well, it's a great segue, because I was going to ask you how are you using AI to achieve your sort of North Star metrics? Like, what are the most exciting applications of AI and what you're doing?
00:25:40 · Dan Lifshits
[00:25:40] S1: It's across the board. I think that this is an example. The beauty of the lighting agency is that it's an example of the industry where by far most of the service delivery is communication centric workflow orchestration, where it's primarily quite labor intensive and quite repetitive admin operations that are structured around either project management type activities or communication center things, write emails, read emails, make phone calls, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And this is where I think it's not that it's specific activity that you can enhance, but it's rather the type of action, such as like phone call or conversation or conversational application of AI. So a few examples where we see the biggest change in adoption is, for example, on finding a tenant process to help them find the property and help landlords find the tenant is where, for example, we can increase the number of validated offers that we receive per property from one to, as usually agents are doing that, by increasing the top of the funnel, by allowing much more tenants to leave inquiries on the property and have the conversational experience with AI and chatbots and everything, and learn more about the property to the way that they can leave an application for the property, and increase the number of applications they receive per property from one tool, as traditional agencies will be doing, to like eight to 10. That allows not just to rent it faster, but also potentially have a more broad selection of the potential applicants for the landlord that benefits them because they can select a better person and a better couple. And effectively, that just makes the process more transparent for all the parties, right? Or another example might be, for example, on the property management kind of jobs resolution, where you have like a bathroom leak or something. We're cutting down the job resolution time by somewhere around 30% because kind of, yeah, I'll be surprised, but I can understand the tenants and the landlords and the British plumbers pretty well. And happy obviously to share more about how it works. It's pretty brilliant. But that allows to reduce the average job resolution time from around fifty days that is average across The UK to around thirty where we're now. And I think that we'll get this to less than ten days as product continues getting better and better.