Tangent: Conversations with Real Estate & Tech Innovators

Marshall Cox is a PhD in Electrical Engineering, and the Founder and CEO at Kelvin, winner of the MIT Clean energy prize, the Popular Science Innovation Award, and the Verizon Powerful Answers award. The Kelvin team has developed a system that eliminates overheating in pre-war buildings. The system, called the Cozy, is a wireless, low-cost, and easily installed retrofit that drops on top of radiat...

Marcus Räder started his first company when he was 11 years old. Since then, he's been learning about the world of business, growing up in an environment where global communication and connectivity gets better each day. With 10 years of experience in EdTech and online marketing at various startups, he decided it was time to help others. By founding Hostaway, he helps Airbnb and short-term rental h...

Bryan McLaren is the Chairman & CEO at Zoned Properties, providing regulated Cannabis Real Estate and knowledge since 2014. Cannabis is now legal across 37 US states, and NYC's recent roll-out has put the industry under scrutiny. In this episode, Edward Cohen & Zach Aarons explore the opportunities for Commercial Real Estate investors and retail owners within the Cannabis sector. (0:42) -...

Groundfloor is a private real estate lending marketplace open to non-accredited investors. Groundfloor opens the door to short-term, high-yield returns backed by real estate. Their platform brings together individual investors looking for short-term lending investments and borrowers looking for short-term financing for their specific real estate projects. Borrowers get access to more flexible, fas...

RCKRBX is the first real estate SaaS platform that puts the voice of the renter at the Multifamily developer's and investor's fingertips, including across key investment, development, marketing, leasing, and management decision points. The platform delivers actionable intelligence around the preferences, priorities, attitudes, and viewpoints that drive renter decision-making combined with predicti...

Remen Okoruwa is product-minded leader who's working to unlock data for the property management industry. Remen and his co-founders met while they were working at Hubspot, and are now bringing their deep expertise about integrations to streamline Multifamily property management operations for all stakeholders. Propify (YC W23) recently raised $3.3M from VC firm Prudence, with additional funding fr...

As the Co-Founder of DXD Capital, Cory Sylvester brings 14 years of Real Estate & Finance expertise to revolutionize the Self Storage industry. Passionate about utilizing data and technology, Cory is building the largest platform for building and buying self storage facilities in the US. His Self Storage journey began with co-founding Radius+, a successful platform providing essential data for...

Aleksandr Gampel co-founded Cuby Technologies with Aleh Kandrashou in 2021 to tackle the construction labor shortage. After 200,000 engineering hours, Cuby is setting the stage to commercialize hundreds of mobile micro-factories (MMF's) on or near construction sites to enable developers, general contractors and local partners to build better buildings faster, more affordably with less labor. This...

John Rogers is the Chief Innovation Officer at CoreLogic, leading R&D on the biggest asset class in the world - the US Real Estate Economy, and driving new product development to market via an iconic property & location intelligence platform called Discovery. This platform allows clients that rely on data, insights, models and answers to drive growth or mitigate risk on their book of busin...

Spencer Rascoff co-founded and ran Zillow for a decade as its CEO. Spencer is also the co-founder at Pacaso and, through his startup studio and VC firm, 75 & Sunny, is an active angel investor in more than 100 companies and is incubating several more. Rascoff is a NYT’s best selling author based in LA who focuses on Proptech, the future of work and the creator economy. Spencer is Visiting Prof...

Mike Schneider is the CEO & Co-founder of Acre Homes. Acre combines the ease of renting with the financial upside of owning. Acre is available in Raleigh-Durham, and will be launching in Atlanta and Nashville soon. Previously, Mike served as the VP of Technology Strategy at RE/MAX, and Co-founded First, a real estate tech company that leveraged machine learning to help agents win more business...

Brent Wadas is the CEO at BotBuilt, a Y-Combinator Construction technology company based in Durham, NC that is revolutionizing building homes with robots to address the labor shortage and housing affordability crisis. Brent served in the US Army in Afghanistan after 9/11, where he fulfilled his patriotic calling. BotBuilt employs a methodology that makes homebuilding less capital intensive, creati...

Jenna Louie leads partnerships and strategic outreach at Ivory Innovations, and was previously an investor with the Urban Development Deal Team at Stanford. Ivory Innovations' mission is to catalyze innovation in housing affordability by promoting the most compelling ideas in housing by convening industry experts, inspiring students to tackle housing issues, sourcing and supporting the best innova...

Amir R. Korangy is an Iranian-American publisher and film producer, who founded the business magazine, The Real Deal, about real estate and finance news. He also produced the PBS documentary, "Building Stories", about architect Costas Kondylis. Amir Korangy is also an adjunct associate professor of media and real estate at New York University where in the fall of 2018 he will be teaching a course...

Timothy Swanson is the President & CEO of Inherent L3C, a Chicago-based low profit LLC focused on enabling and empowering long term affordable homeownership and generational wealth creation through modular housing development, workforce platform and a smart home marketplace for future homeowners. 💚 Learn more: ➡️Inherent L3C ( site ) - Transforming lives, communities and generations through h...

Stefan Schwab is the CEO of Enlighted (acquired by Siemens), a Proptech provider of IoT solutions at the intersection of people, space, and work. Enlighted combines cognitive environmental IoT sensors and lighting controls that connect to intelligent workplace experience apps, offering a singular, scalable, interoperable solution to address a spectrum of building, space, and productivity needs. Cu...

This is a Tangent Special episode. Discomfort Zone: the art of stepping out of your comfort zone to pivot in business and in life, and the science of changing your mind when you are faced with new facts and acquire new experiences. (0:25) - Zach Aarons (GP & Co-founder at MetaProp ) (3:03) - Nick Romito (CEO & Founder at VTS ) (3:47) - Kevin Ortner (CEO at Renters Warehouse and President a...

Daniel Dorfman is the Co-founder at Roots, an Atlanta-based company aiming to help 1 million people create wealth through residential real estate investing and their innovative ''Rent it like you own it'' program. 💚 Learn more: ➡️Roots ( site ) - The real estate portfolio that creates wealth for you and its Residents 💚 Feature: ➡️ Dottid ( book a demo ) - The single source of truth for your CRE...

Mike Sroka, CEO and Co-founder of Dealpath, a leading cloud-based software platform for commercial real estate investment and development teams, including Blackstone, Nuveen, Oxford Properties and L+M. Mike currently also contributes to Forbes' Real Estate Council, and previously worked as a PM at Zynga. Edward & Jeff are joined by friend of Tangent Zach Aarons (GP & Co-founder at MetaProp...

Sukesh Shekar is the CEO & Founder at Altgage, the Google search of mortgages, bringing simply affordable mortgages to home buyers. . Sukesh believes in the American dream of homeownership. However, mortgages are more unaffordable than ever and most mortgage processes lack transparency. Altgage makes home buying more affordable with smart mortgages that build wealth over time. 💚 Learn more: ➡...

Hosts Edward and Jeffrey are joined by MetaProp Co-founder & GP Zach Aarons, and special guest Brad Hargreaves, Founder and Chairman at Common and contributor to Thesis Driven, to discuss Silicon Valley Bank's and Signature Bank's unraveling and it's potential implications on Proptech, commercial real estate and VC investing. (2:05) - SVB's fallout timeline (7:13) - Advise for Proptech founder...

Nick Romito is the CEO and Founder of VTS, Commercial Real Estate's leading leasing and asset management platform. Under his leadership, VTS has grown to more than 60% of Class A office space in the US and over 12 billion square feet of office, retail, and industrial is managed through the VTS platform globally. (1:23) - State of the Office market (7:20) - Office space in the hybrid work era (11:5...

Kevin Ortner is the President of Appreciate Holdings and CEO of its operating arm Renters Warehouse. Kevin Ortner is the author of Rent Estate Revolution: Today's Key to Retirement Security, Financial Freedom & the New American Dream. (1:24) - State of the SFR market (4:36) - Strategies for institutional and retail SFR investors (8:43) - Starting an SFR property mgmt. company (13:56) - How to...

Jason Fudin is the CEO and Co-Founder of Placemakr . Placemakr is a tech-enabled real estate and finance optimization platform that partners with developers, property operators, and investors to curate a collection of apartment-like spaces in selected neighborhoods. Their buildings range from brand-new apartments as they’re leasing up to established apartments looking to maximize their value. Jaso...

Noah Isaacs is Co-founder and Co-CEO at Bowery Valuation, a commercial real estate appraisal firm that is powering the best-in-class appraisers to help them appraise smarter and faster. Before co-founding Bowery, Noah worked for BBG, valuing over $2.5B worth of commercial real estate in New York. Noah graduated from McGill University with a major in Statistics and a double minor in Operations Mana...