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Aiming to Dominate Real Estate Brokerage: Robert Reffkin, CEO of Urban Compass (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get it off the ground? Was Ori someone you knew or did you meet him after you decided to do this project?

Robert Reffkin: I met Ori when I was working in the White House. I was an advisor on the company that he sold to Twitter. A year after selling, we got together and thought about doing something together? We sat down and said, “Where can we bring technology to a space that didn’t have it?”

Sramana Mitra: Ori was part of the selection process of what problem you were going to focus on?

Robert Reffkin: Absolutely. We’re co-founders.
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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Warren Barkley, CTO of SMART Technologies (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You are bringing in students from different countries together, and you have some sort of a social media element to your platform. You have teachers and experts from different domains on that platform who can operate across the school boundaries.

Warren Barkley: It’s not quite like that. Basically, as a teacher, I have a class. I have this big virtual space. I can split it up in a lot of different ways. I can posit questions into it. It does have a social media piece to it. I wouldn’t say it’s a rendezvous to Discovery Point. It would be two teachers who knew each other on Twitter saying, “Let’s get our classes to work together on this stuff.” >>>

Building an Exciting Healthcare IT Company From Chicago: LaunchPoint CEO Terry Ryan (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So about 2008, you were done with HP?

Terry Ryan: That’s when I started the current business I’m running. I had successful exits in the 90s with companies in which I was an early employee but I wasn’t a founder of those companies. I had some nice exits in three or four cases before I started Knightsbridge. Fast forward to 2008, I sat down with HP management and said, “I think if I point my guns in one direction for the next decade, I can move this battleship and make a difference. At the same time, I think I can make a bigger difference going out and building my next company.” I politely gave them all the time they wanted. I decided I was going to take six months off and think real hard about what I wanted to do next. I wanted to build on what we did in the Knightsbridge days, which was build world-class data warehouses that solved business problems. I wanted to take the next step, which was not only to do that, but also to own and build the software and solution set that provided great business value for the clients.

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Aiming to Dominate Real Estate Brokerage: Robert Reffkin, CEO of Urban Compass (Part 1)

Urban Compass is trying to disrupt the real estate industry with a tech-savvy brokerage model. They have raised $70 million and are currently valued at $360 million based on the last funding round. Listen to Robert Reffkin explain why he thinks the company will dominate the industry.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised, and in what kind of background?

Robert Reffkin: I’m from Berkeley, California. My mom is an Israeli and my father was African-American. I grew up in a mixed race household with a single mother. When I was younger, I went to an entrepreneurship program called the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship. It helped me create a disk jockey business in high school. I was actually a DJ in high school and college, which paid for school. It was the foundation of a lot of the entrepreneurial drive that has carried me since I graduated from college.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Warren Barkley, CTO of SMART Technologies (Part 2)

Warren Barkley: One of the things we’ve seen worldwide is this movement in the pedagogy where teachers want to have very small bites of information which have project work attached to it. Then they let the kids work on that project inside or outside the classroom. A lot of teachers want that kind of learning to continue outside of the classroom when they go home. In providing that virtual learning space, it allows kids to work with whatever media they want and they can do their homework all together at the same time. It’s something that we see in many different countries.

Sramana Mitra: We are seeing this as well. Everything that you said are trends we are seeing as well. One thing that I picked up in your answer that I want to double-click down on is I imagine you work with K-12 mostly, right?

Warren Barkley: That’s right. We do have a little bit of higher ed, but almost 90% is K-12.
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Building an Exciting Healthcare IT Company From Chicago: LaunchPoint CEO Terry Ryan (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: They were very heavy. I’m a very small woman having to carry this heavy laptop. It was no fun at all. What was the first company?

Terry Ryan: It was called Knightsbridge. It was a company that was focused on Big Data architectures. This was in the early 90s before it was cool like it is today. It was focused around data warehousing, business analytics, and information management. I built a consultancy that was about 750 people with a global client base headquartered in Chicago. I did that with three partners. It had a lot to do with my background and focus. We were in most industries. We really focused on doing the most high-end data warehousing and analytics build out there in the industry.

Sramana Mitra: You built a contract software company around the data warehousing area?

Terry Ryan: We call it more of a management consulting. Our average bill rates were around $235 an hour across 750 people. It wasn’t a body shop.
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Building a Secondary Ticketing Business From Spain: Ander Michelena, CEO of Ticketbis (Part 5)

Ander Michelena: In 2012, Ticketbis was growing strongly and very fast with very good margin. The other business was growing but it was something that was stopping us from concentrating on one thing. We decided to close it. The learning we got out of that is if something is working very well, don’t try to do other things. Don’t deviate and start doing other projects. Just concentrate on what is working and grow it very fast. That’s the learning we got out of that. If I could go back, I would never have launched that. >>>

Building an Exciting Healthcare IT Company From Chicago: LaunchPoint CEO Terry Ryan (Part 1)

At the cusp of three major trends, Big Data, Cloud Computing, and Healthcare IT, Terry Ryan is building a very interesting company from Chicago. The company is profitable, already of substantial scale, and at a very exciting juncture.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journeys. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Give us some back story.

Terry Ryan: I was born and raised in the Midwest in the suburbs of Chicago. I spent most of my time in the Midwest, but I’ve also lived around the world including Europe. I’ve done business across most of the continents, but Chicago is home.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do for college? What’s your educational background?
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