Dottid On Harvard Ventures: The Bottom Line
Alex:
Hi, I'm Alex. And today, I'll be speaking with Kyle Waldrep, founder and CEO of the Real Estate PropTech Firm, Dottid. Kyle has had many paths through life, but the one that led him to building Dottid certainly makes for a great interview. And now, let's get to the bottom line.
What drove you to achieve at such a high level?
Alex:
So let's start when real-life decisions start, high school. Looking back on your formative years and as a dedicated student-athlete, what really drove you to achieve such a high level on and off the court?
Kyle:
So, the ability to get to make my own decisions through tennis was a big driver of why I love the sport and why pursued it so much. I wasn't necessarily reliant on a team for team success, which has positives and negatives. But for me, I wanted to be able to put in the time and the effort and to have more of an individual result.
Hey, can I go win tennis matches and go beat my opponents and do that well? I felt like that was a outpouring of the time and the effort that I put in prior to those matches, which was through training or practice, etc. But also on the academic side, that worked hand in hand. You know, you don't take tests in a group. You have to go study and go put in the time and meet with teachers and read the books.
And for me, those things worked really symmetrically for how I viewed my world in high school. I wanted to see and achieve, and yeah, I felt like the individual aspects of tennis and also the academic side were really fruitful for me.
What made you go the start-up route?
Alex:
Cool. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, life definitely is a first-person game; you don't have teammates. That's well said. Of course, you like to make those teammates along the way, like you've done building this company. But moving on, how did that shift as you moved to college? As a D1 athlete, both in terms of, you know, your work-life balance—you’re stepping up a huge level on both sides of the court, so to speak. And then, I mean, along those lines, when you move to college, you also start to think about your long-term career. And obviously, a start-up is something that some people think about, but not everybody. So, you know, how did that all work out?
Kyle:
Yes, so college—college came quickly and kind of hit fast. Life doesn't really wait for anybody. My college experience was so unique because it got off to such a challenging beginning: getting West Nile virus my freshman year. Being very sick and dealing with an illness that obviously, you know, I just contracted (it was no fault of my own). And what was cool at that time is that my perspective began to change around how you view people and relationships, and I began to mature much faster. And as I came out of the illness, call it the back two years of college, so junior and senior year, I started looking towards my professional routes, started looking towards what I was really, truly interested in in life.
Whether that was law school or politics or business, people are the foundation of all of those things. And how you work with people, how you engage those people, how you lead people, edify those people, really plays just a central role in ultimately your success. Typically kind of one man shows are not always long-term the most successful, either businesses or ventures. And I got the opportunity to see and work with a really great team at the George W. Bush Presidential Center my senior year on SMU campus.
So I got to work on their external affairs and communications team. We got to actually start the Bush Center Snapchat for all of you younger generation people out there, which is great, but got to start Bush Center Snapchat and really just got to be a part of a team that was working to elevate the initiatives that President and Mrs. Bush were involved in, but also elevate the Dallas political scene and elevate, really, SMU as a broader institution on a global scale. And being part of that team taught me the good and the bad of working with people, but also just opened up incredible opportunities that I am forever grateful for, to meet people and to work with folks that I'll probably never get to work with again.
How did you get from your college career to where you are now?
Alex:
That place is such a special part of SMU. That's interesting. Now, I had no idea that you set up a large part of that, but how did you move forward from there? So what happens next when you're in college? You’re preparing yourself with so much professional experience in ways that you don't even realize. How did you make those next steps from working for the Bush Center to getting here?
Kyle:
Sure. So what became really apparent is post-college, I wanted to go into commercial real estate. So Dallas is a very large commercial market and lots of office and retail and industrial are located here. And Dallas was actually built by some early real estate investors as they just built, frankly, real estate empires that were headquartered in Dallas.
And so real estate was not just something that became interesting to me; it became this idea of how do you create and design places where people can be, work, live, enjoy? And the way I was going to get into that was actually through brokerage. And so I was talking to a lot of folks in commercial real estate. I think a lot of younger men and women take those interviews and those coffees as an opportunity just to hear about how successful you can be or how great the business is, or how many relationships you could form. I actually took a different approach.
So I sat down with the people across the table and I asked them what was wrong with their business, what was wrong in terms of the inefficiencies or the problems and the challenges they dealt with on either a transactional basis or a tech basis. And I wanted to hear, if it's wrong, can it be fixed? Because I didn't want to go kind of blinders-on into the industry and not have a clue for what do people actually really think?
Yes, commercial real estate, if you're successful, you can probably make some good money, you know, good living. All of that was great. I knew that. But I wanted to know what can be fixed because as I look to elevate whoever I got to work with, I wanted to make sure that I was not just elevating myself. I was elevating the people around me.
And if that was through greater adoption of technology and greater engagement with new tech tools, great. That was an option. If that was through a better understanding of the process and how to work with people, great. I needed to know that. And throughout that interview process, it became really clear that commercial lease transactions were inefficient. They're kind of marred in this “let's do it by email, let's do it by Excel. Let's make it really manual. Let's have a lot of paper. Let's have all these people involved,” multi-party, multi-month business transactions. And I just thought there had to be a better way. And so simply naive Kyle Waldrep graduated college May ‘16 and was like, Yeah, I'm going to take a job here in Dallas. About the first week of June of ’16. And I turned down the job offer; I got walked to the elevator and cashed out my savings that same day because I had an idea around how to build workflow technology to speed up the time it takes to get a deal done for lease. So that's really where it started.
Can you explain how Dottid operates today?
Alex:
Perfect segue. I mean, obviously, I know a little bit about what Dottid does and how you guys operate, but can you explain exactly how Dottid operates for our listeners who aren't so familiar with real estate or PropTech specifically, and how as you were building a business, how did Dottid evolve? How did your industry niche change?
Kyle:
Yeah, Dottid is the asset operating system of the future. So if I look at a commercial building, whether that be office, industrial, retail—there’s so many things that go into making a commercial building a commercial building. From the days that it's just land and it's really in design all the way to the days where you've got multi-tenants, and it's cash flowing for the owner of that asset.
Dottid is the workflow management platform that enables all of the people around that asset to hopefully do what they do even better. And Alex, I think to your question, as the company evolved, it was really just me to start. It was me, and my ideas and my bedroom, childhood bedroom, that I went to and I started writing out everything I could think about.
So to this day, there are a stack of legal pads that I have saved that have all of my initial notes. They have all of the initial meetings. It’s all time and date stamped. And you can see things from where my, you know, what were my first thoughts were and how you solve this problem. How do you engage the brokerage community, how do you engage the Asset Management community, how do you engage property management?
Because as I mentioned before, there's so many different pieces to the pie that Dottid needed to become so comprehensive that it was not leaving anybody out, but that it was elevating everybody, hopefully at the same time. And as we move forward and take you through a timeline, move to the summer of ‘16, really began to flesh out what the ideas were.
There's actually a very critical meeting on the Tuesday after Labor Day of 2016 with a guy who worked down at CBRE here in the Dallas office. And I mapped out all of my thoughts and I kind of slid this piece of paper across the table to him. And he told me not to talk to him for 10 minutes as he read through the piece of paper.
And he understood what I was trying to think about. And he looked at me and he said, If you can pull this off, you'll significantly change how business operates in this in this world. And I said, “Well, I don't want to change, change how it operates. I just want to optimize how it operates” because I think change management and optimization are two very crucial elements of what Dottid has built for.
And ultimately, we got to whiteboard out all of my thesis and my thoughts and my little drawings and the, you know, the little early days things that you do as an entrepreneur. I got to whiteboard those out for about an hour and a half that day. That day was really the start of my journey to raising money, to building organization, to building a product, to having customers, to having to go to market, to thinking about pricing.
Because he was the first, call it “seal” or “stamp of approval” that allowed us and allowed me the confidence to go in and do what I needed to do to move Dottid forward.
How often do you go back and read your original ideas?
Alex:
Wow. There's a whole lot there. I mean, it's obvious. I know a little bit more about your story than most people because I’ve known you for a little while. But let's take a step back there. Those legal pads, that's a huge part of everyone's life. You sit down and write things out at some point and it just all makes sense how often or have you ever gone back and just reread those old notes for either anything you're trying to do now and any new inspiration for what to fix or simply just for curiosity to see where you were at.
Kyle:
Yeah, it's a great question. Funny enough, I did. I went back and reread all the notes back when we first got funding. So first got funding raised from angel investors, and I sat down and I really took a two-year history as we were obviously entering a totally different stage of the business of going from “hey, this like wild and crazy kid with this idea” into “great there's now capital in the account. How do we go utilize it?” I sat down and read and read those notes then as a guidepost for, hey, this is what I believed back then. Do I still believe this to be true today? And how can I make what I believe to be true today into the platform of the future? Some of those notes have stayed really true and have been really incorporated into the business.
I think we're probably batting six times out of ten that the notes have rang true. But even funny enough, I actually got to sit down and look at the notes about six weeks ago. So I was cleaning out some of the stuff in my childhood bedroom and found everything that I had written on and the drawings and all the legal pads and obviously, you know, save them in a much more secure place.
But it's fun to see the initial thoughts also knowing what we've built now, and getting to compare and contrast to, hey, where was I kind of actually really right? And where was I absolutely, completely, totally dead wrong? Because there is a lot of being dead wrong that ultimately leads you to being dead right. And yeah, it was neat to really see the comparison there.
Change vs. optimization: can you explain the distinction?
Alex:
That's definitely something I look forward to doing my future and I'm jealous of how awesome that experience sounds to see how much you've grown and how much your idea has changed. So the next thing I want to address from what you said a second ago was with your interview or conversation with that gentleman. You talk about change versus optimization.
Can you explain that a little bit more and talk about how you think the real estate structure of a major city like Dallas or anywhere in the world really is well-operated versus how it could change theoretically? And you've spoken to how you think Dottid can optimize the process of commercial real estate, but why is that difference so important to you?
Kyle:
Sure. So commercial real estate is typically known as a more antiquated business as it relates to technology engagement and adoption. And people in commercial real estate view themselves as relationship builders and cultivators of their business. And so real estate transactions aren't one-a-day. They happen over months and a long period of time that takes relationships to ebb and flow and decisions to be made.
And you have to go through a process and know this person, know that person, etc. All great parts of the business, all were actually very attractive to me—hopefully a decently relational person. So I really found that neat about commercial real estate. But ultimately to drive business forward, optimization can take place to where you elevate what you actually do.
And I think about a couple of softwares and platforms that are kind of industry-agnostic. I look at Asana or Trello or Monday.com, and I looked at what they built around, and they weren't trying to change anybody's process. They were trying to come alongside, help enable, create transparency and accountability, and also drive a process forward no matter what industry or business line that you were you were utilizing that platform for.
And I wanted to see if we could create something similar for the commercial real estate space, because accountability, transparency, what I termed the more open way of doing business- not that commercial real estate is marred by all of these, you know, all of these backroom deals and secretive things. But I think a younger generation of user and engager with technology is just used to having things on instant gratification on a very quick short timeline, and thus that younger user in commercial real estate needs the tools and the opportunities to be able to engage commercial real estate in a manner which suits them. And so Dottid really is probably somewhat ahead of its time from a workflow project management perspective, and really, ultimately Alex to your point around optimizations vs change management, I mean people have written books on change management. Customer success is all about change management. As I look at it, I have a few hallmarks that we try and tell our business: optimization is what we're striving for. I don't need people to change. I just want to help them. And if you come at it from the point of wanting to help somebody, then great. They're kind of hard-pressed not to help you back. And it's not this, “Hey, you have to go fit inside the Dottid box and you have to go operate inside this box.” It's really we wanted to build technology that enabled the optimization of the user.
And that user journey was so crucial to us because how you engage, how you see, how you view the product and how you operate your business inside of what we have built is the ultimate truth teller of “am I going to use this or not?” And so yeah, we get excited about how we view building out the product.
And ultimately, we also don't believe that we're 100% right. We, I hope, have enough humility to know that, you know, we're not going to get 100% adoption or 100% engagement. It's just where it is. And that's people. That's anything in business.
How do you envision the real estate industry evolving over the next decade?
Alex:
Moving forward. I mean, you just said that you think Dottid is probably still a little bit ahead of its time, which is great because as you guys evolve and as the business and as the product grows, that means that in the future, when you know, the industry is ready to adopt your product, you're going to be there. But how do you envision the real estate industry evolving over the next decade?
What are those changes going to be? And we've already seen so much change even in the past 20, 10, 5 years, just ridiculous amounts of change going on in the space. What do you see being as the, you know, the next steps beyond just—and this is a key phrase I got to be sure to mention—this idea of metaverse and digital real estate.
You don't need to address that unless you want to, because I know that's a completely different side of the industry and something that you guys probably won't have too much of a foothold in.
Kyle:
Yeah, I'll just a quick note on that. I joke; I actually think tokenization in the metaverse is fascinating. I think its ultimate model is the future long term, but amusingly I'm just trying to get people to adopt workflow technology. The idea of people trading buildings in a unique metaverse seems far off. If we're having a challenge doing work with technology, the metaverse seems like it's uh… potentially down the road.
So that's my only comment there. And on really more of your question around the change of real estate and kind of the industry as a whole, COVID accelerated everything. We're all aware of that. You know, you lived through it, I lived through it. It changed our lives in different ways. What it did was it changed the way people work and it changed where they work and changed how they work.
It changed, ya know, I got my office... You could have an office in New York City, but now I live in Bozeman, Montana, and I'm working remote. I can still keep my job, whereas back in 2019, everybody was in the office five days a week. That was just the norm. And so COVID created a different norm. How that norm ultimately plays itself out, I think, is up for an incredible amount of debate.
At the very least, hybrid work is here to stay. What that means for real estate is while hybrid work and people being in the office is here to stay, the acceleration of logistics in e-commerce was just massive. And so you have people ordering and you have supply chain issues and you have all the things that we've experienced. These are real estate problems.
If people are not in the office and you have office vacancies that are incredibly low and you have owners of those buildings that obviously have whole periods and debt cycles and people wanting their returns, that has an effect on real estate. Similarly, like what we've seen in industrial, if you have an unbelievably high demand for e-commerce things at your doorstep, you know, call it fewer interactions in person and more point-and-click type of interactions.
Well, you’ve got to go build tens and tens of millions of square feet of manufacturing or warehousing space to go handle the supply chain—either problems or opportunities, depends on how you look at it. And those are real estate problems. And I'm hopeful that the—not only the larger audience here, but ultimately people—recognize that totally going away from the office is probably not the future, just because that would have much larger economic impacts.
But also embracing this idea of, gosh, industrial real estate is an absolute darling right now. Even multi-family real estate is an absolute darling right now. But what you're speaking to is: everything's all about speed. The industrial portion’s all about speed. And even work remote is all about speed. I can get the same work done I used to do in the office without a two-hour commute right from my home. Well, great. I saved those 2 hours. Is that 2 hours turn into productivity? Is that 2 hours turned into family time? That's not the value judgment here.
But that speed and efficiency of people has all been accelerated the last 24 months. And so, as I look at the changes of real estate, technology is going to have to enable and optimize what people do throughout the business. Whether that's virtual touring, whether that's better understanding, building operations, tenant experience, etc., and also understanding, hey, I need to go execute on building a building and I need to utilize technology to do more with less.
So hopefully what you're hearing is the speed and efficiency of real estate is very much picking up. I think it's a change for the space. I think it's a needed and welcome change for a business that has been historically slow and historically antiquated, both on the transaction timelines and how things get done, but also on the technology adoption engagement timelines
How will the new definition of office space affect PropTech?
Alex:
Interesting. And how do you think, I mean, you touched on a little bit there, but how do you think the future of, you know, the distinction between an office space and, you know, anywhere else really will affect this this PropTech industry?
Kyle:
Yeah. So I'm, I’ll give you a personal opinion on the office: I think the office is great. I think the office is a place for collaborating well, and a place that enables one-off conversations that are just more challenging to have in a virtual environment. And my personal view is that people are wired for relationships, and relationships through a screen, whether that's Zoom or teams or whatever, it's just a little bit more challenging. And so I think the office is a really good outlet for teams to get work done and, you know, to make things happen. Do I believe you have to be in the office 100 hours a week? No, I don't. And so I think there's definitely a balance. That hybrid process is really what I think is actually the key.
And now it becomes the “everybody's changing all at once. How do you enable those folks, and ultimately, what does that mean for PropTech?” Well, PropTech is booming. PropTech has never had a better three-year stretch from a VC [venture capital] funding perspective. Even in the midst of COVID, there is so much opportunity. I fully believe we're probably in the maybe top of the third inning at worst, we're top of the fourth inning from a PropTech kind of expansion perspective.
I think there's a number of great companies that are doing things across the spectrum that enable people, and that's the whole goal. PropTech is all about the enablement of people and processes around where we work, live, and play. And so, if PropTech is expanding, that likely means that people enablement is expanding because that's going to equate to platforms and to interactions that previously didn't exist, are now existing.
And so quick example, if I look at tenant experience, ten years ago, tenant experience wasn't really a thing. As an occupier of office space, there was not really an app on which to engage the building. Like I couldn't order my coffee from the downstairs lobby. And now tenant experience is very much part of how people live, and they work, inside of their workplace.
They do have the opportunity to book out a conference room from an app. They do have the opportunity to, you know, order their coffee or their food from their app. But also even on the flip side of that, the owner of the building now has a better understanding of, hey, where are my tenants sitting in my asset, and I can use, you know, heat detectors and better understand where I need to push and pull AC based on the usability of my space.
Well, all of that is about speed, efficiency, and so it's both. It's both for the tenant and the user and the kind of person that comes in and out, and also the person that's owning the building. They want to know and optimize what they own because it makes their business better and stronger. Similarly, the tenant wants to know how they're interacting with where they're spending a lot of hours each day so that they can know how to make their work better and ultimately their work experience better.
What makes Dallas an attractive city for real estate activity?
Alex:
Hmm. That really is interesting. I mean, obviously I'm on the younger side of things and haven't had too much experience in commercial real estate today, but tenant experience being such a large factor is not something I considered before. Thank you for sharing that. Now it makes a lot of sense to start Dottid it in Dallas. I mean, you're born and raised here, went to college here.
And Dallas is nationally known as a hotbed of real estate activity, especially in the past few years. But what makes Dallas and other cities more or less attractive beyond just the social and economic aspects of living in a certain region?
Kyle:
Yeah, it was important for me to start Dottid here. I got told numerous times that I needed to move to New York and be in the, you know, kind of what's known as the real estate capital of the world, and New York's great. I think New York is wonderful. I think how the city evolved, has evolved, is really tremendous from a real estate perspective.
Incredible developers and incredible organizations are located there. But for me, it was how do we take some of the aspects of what New York has done and ultimately how we infuse that into some of the lifeblood of Dallas? A little bit challenging, frankly. Dallas is a little older-school city, which is fine, a little bit slower to, you know, to some change and, you know, obviously, a very different culture, very different dynamic than New York or even other Northeast cities.
But Dallas has such incredible opportunity to be really the future of tech enablement with resources that, you know, stretch throughout the Metroplex from colleges to capital. I mean, you obviously see it with all the corporations that have moved here in the last 5 to 10 years. Dallas is quickly cementing itself as one of the top, not just destinations for business in the United States, but really cementing itself as potentially the second-best real estate market in the country. And that couples incredible retail with incredible multifamily and options, livability, etc. But you've then got access to so many different parts of the city through, you know, even offices from downtown to uptown to Frisco. And then you've got an incredible, really, logistics hub. I mean, DFW Airport has enabled industrial development to be at a frankly, a different tier here in Dallas.
I think it's hard to drive on any of the major interstates without seeing some new warehouse going up, which is great, because all that means is that there's expansion and there's speed that's coming. And suddenly Dallas is really ripe for obviously continued real estate growth. And there's been great leaders who have built into that. But what it does need is the continued real estate technology growth to help support it.
And so, Dottid being in Dallas, being headquartered here, we're not leaving. We're not moving. We're excited to grow here. We love having our people here. And we want to be part of that conversation and hopefully play a small role, if we can, in driving forward to the city.
What are your thoughts on large real estate firms renting out single-family residences?
Alex:
I mean, obviously I'm biased, but that's really awesome to hear about the commercial and industrial speed that Dallas has thanks to its location and the general set up of how DFW Airport works and how the city is laid out. On a different level, looking more at residential real estate, which you'll have a little bit of play in, I think, especially on the multifamily and commercial side of residential real estate. In the past 8 to 9 months, people have seen a lot of news about so-and-so giant real estate firm or investment vehicle purchasing billions of dollars of family residences and jacking up rental rates.
Do you think those changes are you know, what do you think of that? Obviously, that's a touchy question.
Kyle:
It's touchy, kinda put me on the spot a little bit.
Alex:
That's what we're here for.
Kyle:
It's good, I need to be on the spot. So totally different climate at which residential real estate is operating in. The rise of SFR (single family rental) has been frankly massive the last three years and I know institutions have gotten in the game on it. I actually had a good friend who, back during Covid, he left working for kind of an office industrial developer to go do it here in Dallas. And you kind of know what SFR is, but when you start looking at it, it really becomes a really unique business model. Obviously, I can't get into the politics of is it good for the commercial real estate economy? Is it not good? I think everyone can fall on different sides of what's good or not good based on their purview.
Alex:
It's also not your niche. So yeah.
Kyle:
It's not our kind of bailiwick. And so as we look at market, look, it's growing, it's something that has to be accounted for. It's something you have to keep your eye on. It's an incredible opportunity for investors. And so for real estate out there, real estate investors out there, like, great. I don't know why you wouldn't be looking at SFR, but it's also new, and the long-term play on it when things are new, you know, just the way it works.
SPACs [special purpose acquisition companies] uh, SPACs used to be a thing, and we kind of saw how some of those played out over the last two years. And so I'm always hesitant when you look at “new” to just jump in. Jumping in without wisdom potentially leads to foolishness. And I don't think SFR is foolishness by any means, I just am excited to see it evolve and I'm excited that they're really smart, great thinkers that have really stepped up to the plate.
I mean, obviously the largest institutions in the world were involved in it from a real estate perspective. Don't get any better than that. Yeah, it's a great investment play. Yes, they want to make money. Yes, they have investors that expect returns. All of those are great things. But there's something about the fundamentals that enables them to think that, hey, this is a really good long term investment for our firm.
What was Dottid’s go-to-market strategy?
Alex:
All right. So moving on to the next question, what was your go-to-market strategy in such a large and complex industry and how has it changed over time?
Kyle:
Sure. So pretty simple. We woke up and once we knew we were going to have a product that we knew we were going to build, we wanted to make sure that, as I had spoken to earlier, commercial rela estate has a history of being slow and antiquated. So we're not going to have a go-to-market strategy that takes out all the big gorillas all one time, because that would make no sense.
I don't think I could raise enough capital for that. So start with smaller operators, regional players in the real estate ownership side. What Dottid is solving for is lease transaction inefficiency, and thus you need to go target people on the equity side of the business: the regional owners, the fund managers, etc. And we went to them. Smaller groups, groups that could change, groups that wanted to have say into our product, groups that wanted to not just be kind of “hearers” of what we are doing, but also “doers” with us in the trenches.
And that was it. So we targeted groups under 10 million square feet of owned square footage, and that's who we started talking to. There was no like… there's no real science behind it other than you start making phone calls, and you start seeing who's interested and not interested. It's, again to an earlier point, commercial real estate is relational and started where we had relationships, started where we thought we had play, and started where we thought we could go win, and that proved to be very successful.
What’s the next step of Dottid’s evolution?
Alex:
Hmm. That's really interesting. I mean, go-to-market is a term that exists across industries. But seeing how that plays out in such a young industry like yours is interesting to hear. So, what's next? I mean, Dottid as we've always talked about optimization, we've talked about the evolution of your industry and not changing but improving the efficiency of real estate in general.
What are you building toward now? What is ultimately the next step in your growth? And where do you see yourself reaching that final evolution of your current product, moving toward, “alright, here's what we set out to do and we've done it. How can we make it better after that?”
Kyle:
Yes, I'll give a really general first answer and then I'll take you into more specifics. I learned years ago through a couple of our investors and kind of wiser, older men in my life that if you can ever convince someone to pay you for something that you've built—so either a product or service technically—you want to continue to align what you're building or serving with their needs.
And that may sound so simple, but, you know, I'm a simple guy. And I wanted to make sure that as we build Dottid, we started from that simple fact of, are we building something that somebody wants, and are we solving a problem in the midst of it? When that became yes, that became a “hey, how do we then go repeat it?”
And so where we think our business is now is, we're at definitely the repeatability stage and now the scalability stage. And so, as Dottid matures, as Dottid evolves, as Dottid continues to build and grow and serve customers, It's frankly, Alex, it's pretty simple. We're going to go align ourselves with every process that a commercial real estate owner is going to do.
I want to be about their business. If our product is not about our customer's business, then we've missed the mark. I don't want to go and do things that, you know, would take them out of what they'd typically do on a day-in, day-out basis. Look at commercial real estate owners and our clients as honestly, thankfully for us, having a lot of symmetry.
Yes, there's a lot of uniqueness with each customer and how they do it, how they think about it is great. But from a product perspective, I can't build to every little nuance and uniqueness. I need to be building for what are the main problems that our customers and our users and their kind of day-in, day-out work journey... What are they solving for first, and then how does Dottid come alongside that to enable and optimize and engage them? And so yeah, so Dottid started out as a leasing tool. Dottid is now moving into definitely more of an asset management focus. That asset management focus, leasing is part of it and there's all sorts of other parts of it.
If I think about building operations, if I think about capital projects, if I think about building development, if I think about, you know, just the cycle of how real estate happens. As Dottid continues to grow, we're going to just keep doing our best to build a product that enables our customers to not have to leave Dottid.
And that's going to take time. It's going to be in small increments. It's not in big bites, and the hope is, is that as our users go through their user journey on our product, they're able to do more and more and more of what they do every single day inside of one place.
Just for fun: what’s your hottest take on any topic?
Alex:
Wow. I mean, I love that philosophy of finding a customer and filling their needs, that's ultimately what any business is, right? You're filling the need of someone that you're serving. Moving on to our final question here, always gives the best answers. What is your hottest take or most controversial opinion? Not necessarily related to anything. We've discussed something funny.
We've heard pineapple on pizza, a million times. What do you got for me Kyle?
Kyle:
A hottest take... A hottest take is actually, gosh, I'm an MJ over a LeBron fan, and I'm so sorry to you LeBron people. Um, that's more um… Yeah, just MJ. MJ was the guy. Don't know what to tell you. And also other hottest take is LIV golf. Don't know… not really a fan of LIV golf. Very pro PGA, tour very pro the history and tradition of the PGA Tour.
Call me an old school, old soul. Um, but yeah, I think, I think LIV golf has missed the mark. And we're hopeful that the PGA Tour can figure out how to engage the players and do the thing.
Thanks for listening!
Alex:
Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to contact us, find us on Twitter or Instagram at Harvard_Ventures or email us at hello@harvardventures.org