It’s been more than a dozen years since I left Rent.com. Needless to say, I didn’t expect to jump back in to the multifamily space.
But after working pretty closely as an advisor with the team at ABODO, I’m excited to be joining their team as the VP, Marketing. The company is still quite early stage, but it has strong growth potential. Most of all, I’m looking forward to working the very scrappy and capable team.
After a almost a year of product development, marketing and customer development, I’m excited to be launching CrowdStreet, a commercial real estate crowdfunding platform.
The $254 billion commercial real estate financing market is ripe for disruption. CrowdStreet is a fundraising platform connecting accredited investors with high-quality, professionally-managed real estate investments. Investors get direct access to income producing investments and have the opportunity to build a custom investment portfolio. Operators now have access to a new source of capital at competitive rates and flexible terms.
Last month, we quietly launched Cinephiled.com, a new film and pop culture site that delivers a mixture of commentary, community, creativity and conversation for people who love film and pop culture. Cinephiled features a staff of writers who have previously contributed to publications as diverse and distinguished as The Village Voice, RogerEbert.com, Film Comment, Salon, L.A. Weekly, The New York Times, The Guardian UK, Premiere, MSN Movies and many more.
Congrats to the team at Abodo for closing their seed round! After so many years away from the apartment listing realm, it’s impressive to see a group of founders innovating in this space.
It’s a real pleasure to work with them and I’m looking forward to watching them grow!
Udacity recently released a series of videos led by Steve Blank, entitled How to Build a Startup: The Lean Launchpad. This is far and away the most accessible and approachable way to to dig into Customer Development. The class summary says it all:
Learn the key tools and steps to build a successful startup (or at least reduce the risk of failure). An introduction to the basics of Steve Blank’s famous Customer Development process, where entrepreneurs “get out of the building” to gather massive amounts of customer and marketplace feedback, and then use that feedback to continuously iterate and evolve their startup business models, improving the chances of success at every step.
If you’re a startup founder – tech or not – I’d highly recommend that you watch this video series as soon as possible.
