Hit by Covid in New York: Pulsd CEO Mareza Larizadeh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about the genesis of the new company. 

Mareza Larizadeh: I’ve been coming to New York for a couple of decades now. When I graduated school, I spent a lot of time here for my job in early 2000’s. I was here a lot in the late 2000’s for my old company. I love the city and I wanted to do something that was based here. It was closer to London as well.

Hit by Covid in New York: Pulsd CEO Mareza Larizadeh (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did that grow?

Mareza Larizadeh: It went surprisingly well. We turned the shift around overnight. We had a lot of opportunities on the platform. We went ahead and built something that had 80% of the job description without giving away which company was recruiting.

Hit by Covid in New York: Pulsd CEO Mareza Larizadeh (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did you reach those people?

Mareza Larizadeh: Andy and Mark served on my board for a few years. I met them at Stanford business school.

Sramana Mitra: They were teachers?

Mareza Larizadeh: They were lecturers there. 

Hit by Covid in New York: Pulsd CEO Mareza Larizadeh (Part 1)

Covid has come as a nightmare for many entrepreneurs. Here’s a story of one in New York, coping with the perfect storm of being in the epicenter of the pandemic and in the hospitality business, the worst hit sector of the economy.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start from the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born? What kind of background did you have?

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey in Real Estate Tech: Cloud CMA CEO Greg Robertson (Part 7)

Greg Robertson: We usually sell about the seven-year mark. We had a hit product called Cloud CMA, our flagship product. There are about 1.3 million realtors in the United States. We have site license of about 500,000. Those subscribers trade over 260,000 CMAs a month.

To put that in perspective, about 5.5 million homes are sold in the country every year and so far they’ve generated close to 16 million reports. It’s been a great ride. At seven years, we kept going and now we’re at this different phase than where we started .

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey in Real Estate Tech: Cloud CMA CEO Greg Robertson (Part 6)

Greg Robertson: We left our jobs and rented some cubicles at the architect’s office. After all, he didn’t have architects working because nobody was doing anything in real estate. One of the premises was that we threw away our PC and we both bought Macbooks.

We were very inspired by a group in Chicago called 37signals which is now called Basecamp. There is this whole vision of Web 2.0 of using Rails and making these simple online apps. We thought that was perfect for real estate.

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey in Real Estate Tech: Cloud CMA CEO Greg Robertson (Part 5)

Greg Robertson: Dan and I stayed there for a couple years, but it was brutal. We then got a call from a friend of ours who was restarting a company that he had sold again to another company. They had given it back because they got caught up in shenanigans. He was restarting that company. It was called E-neighborhoods. He wanted to approach Dan and me about joining him in restarting it. He was going to give us a piece of the equity back. The only problem was it was in Florida. It was in Boca Raton, Florida and we’re here in Southern California. We like it here and our families are here.

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey in Real Estate Tech: Cloud CMA CEO Greg Robertson (Part 4)

Greg Robertson: We began working with this company called J. Williams and the owner of the company is John Morris. He’s an eccentric character. He had this great CMA program, but it didn’t really have great MOS access capabilities.

One of my co-founders, Dan the programmer, had figured out how to not only bring data from the MOS system but also the photos. We had a marriage so to speak.