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Horizon Needs Your Help

Horizon Needs Your Help

Horizon is a way to discover friends and friends of friends in the cities you’re visiting. Beyond friends and friends of friends, Horizon uses communities such as college or fraternity / sorority alumni, former colleagues, and service communities like Returned Peace Corps Volunteers to connect people to…

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The Reality — Startups Fail

The Reality — Startups Fail

The first true “product” I brought into the world — Oh Hey World — failed. That’s a bit hard to stomach. We contemplated and tried many, many pivots (such as a focus on relocation). Ultimately, the product didn’t solve an urgent or frequent problem for a…

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Reali, Yet Another Taking Aim at Commissions

Reali, Yet Another Taking Aim at Commissions

Reali, which raised 2 million in 2016, is another startup taking center aim at commissions (that topic no one likes to talk about). Sellers, pay a low total commission and get more out of your investment when listing with Reali. Experience selling with Reali. Video overview:…

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The Fog is Very Real

The Fog is Very Real

Founders, entrepreneurs — as well as agents/brokers — should all read Fred Wilson’s post about seeing through the fog. The fog is a big part of the obsession with shiny objects (there’s more than enough of them in this industry). If you don’t know where…

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Real Estate and Skunk Works Departments

Real Estate and Skunk Works Departments

I’ve been working within the fast-paced, risk-loving, fail-fast worlds of four different real estate industry startups for the the last 10+ years. I founded them all but three were bootstrapped and one was VC-backed. And while two of them went nowhere and two others resulted…

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Meet the RE Tech Entrepreneur: Jack FitzGerald from Disrupt Property

Meet the RE Tech Entrepreneur: Jack FitzGerald from Disrupt Property

In our latest real estate tech entrepreneur interview, we’re speaking with Jack FitzGerald from Disrupt Property. Without further ado… What do you do? Disrupt Property is a global database of real estate tech start-ups organised according to asset class (residential, office and retail) and category….

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Revestor and Defensibility

Revestor and Defensibility

I came across an article titled This Real Estate Startup Is Exploiting Zillow And Airbnb’s Blind Spot on Forbes yesterday. It’s about Revestor. First, let’s get the obvious out of the way. The headline is misleading; they are not exploiting a blindspot. Revestor is a B2B play,…

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Local Experts, Parkbench, and Escaping the Local News Graveyard

Local Experts, Parkbench, and Escaping the Local News Graveyard

Rob Hahn got me thinking about the topic of local experts again. If you haven’t noticed by now, it’s a topic that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Parkbench, the subject of a recent founder interview, is a neighborhood news platform helping real estate…

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More on HouseCanary

More on HouseCanary

I’m on record as being a skeptic on HouseCanary. I thought I’d share a video of a presentation by their CEO, Jeremy Sicklick (via VendorAlley): After watching the video — I’m still a skeptic. It seems home price indexes at the block level is their…

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Branding in a World Where There is No Free Lunch

Branding in a World Where There is No Free Lunch

Rich Barton (Zillow’s chairman) wrote an article every entrepreneur should read: The New Age of Marketing (Don Draper is making a comeback). The Don Draper mention is timely for me, given I’ve recently gotten addicted to Mad Men (which I’m sure many of you reading have…

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