In our latest real estate tech interview, I’m talking to Joseph Walla of HelloSign.

Without further adieu, here’s a bit more from his own mouth…

What do you do?

Joseph WallaI’m the CEO of HelloSign, the easiest way to add secure, legally-binding eSignatures to your businesses workflow.

I focus on how we make HelloSign into a great and enduring company. Some days that means working with our product team on a new feature. Other times, I get involved with support, marketing, growth, hiring or sales. We have an incredible team that runs each of those aspects of the business and I collaborate with them wherever it’s helpful.

As we grow, the most important use of my time is hiring. There’s a moment when there are diminishing returns on time I can give to a given project – and the most important thing I can do is help find great people that can own an important aspect of the business.

Why do You Do What you Do?

I’ve always loved building things. The more useful the better.

I remember the first time I saw HelloSign on someone else’s computer. There’s something highly rewarding about building something that people use every day. Nothing beats that feeling; the feedback we get from our users is energizing and makes me excited to come to work every day. I absolutely love it.

What are you most excited about right now?

I get most excited when we build a product that makes a process an order of magnitude better than it had been before. For example, almost all real estate transactions are executed with pen and paper signatures. It’s not convenient. You have to print out long documents. Then you have to get the documents to the recipients. Even if you are able to send documents electronically it has to be printed out and signed.

Innovations like our Gmail app change that. Instead, documents are signed in Gmail without ever having to leave the mail client. That is a giant leap forward, altogether cutting out the painful step of printing, signing, scanning and attaching documents to emails.

Real estate professionals are making their processes more digital for the sake of convenience. I’m excited to be a part of this big wave of innovation, the mass adoption of eSignatures.

For your geekier audience, we’ve just launched an API (http://www.hellosign.com/api), which is making it so real estate entrepreneurs can integrate eSignatures into their application with just a few lines of code.

What’s next for you?

More building! We have a lot of work ahead of us and we’ve barely scratched the surface.

Fundamentally, everything comes down to team, product, and revenue – in that order. We doubled the team last year and we’re going to double it again this year. It’s a lot of effort to find the right people that will help build this company, so we talk to a huge number of candidates before we find someone who’s a great fit; not everyone thinks long term like we do. There are big product changes coming this year and now we’re growing out the business side of the team, to continue to scale revenue.

There isn’t a magic moment that happens. It’s about leveling up, just a little, every single day and building towards the long term.

What’s a cause you’re passionate about and why?

Net neutrality. The internet is an incredible place, anyone can build a product and have it accessible to everyone, everywhere…. there are over two billion people with access to the internet and it’s growing fast. It would have been impossible for one storefront to access that many people 50 years ago.

However, we’re at a moment now where internet providers may become the gatekeeper, making the internet more accessible to those who can pay, which will disadvantage new entrepreneurs that can’t afford fast lane access. Removing net neutrality would completely change the dynamic of the internet and make it more like cable, where only big companies can dominate, disempowering entrepreneurs. Supporting net neutrality is one of the most important fights in maintaining the pace of internet innovation and supporting entrepreneurship.

Thanks to Joseph for sharing his motivations and current projects. If you’re interested in connecting with him further, you can find him on LinkedIn and Oh Hey World.

We’ll be featuring other real estate tech entrepreneurs in the coming weeks. If you are an entrepreneur in the real estate vertical (past or present), and want to be profiled, please follow the steps outlined here. Remember, you can always discover other people in the Geek Estate community here.