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The “treacherous B” is the put-up or shut-up period for property tech firms, awash in money but lacking a proven business model.
Speaking at The Real Deal‘s 12th annual New York Showcase, MetaProp co-founder Zach Aarons said many prop-tech startups make it to the Series B funding stage because they’ve demonstrated they can raise gobs of money in short windows. But investors have a philosophical struggle: offer them more money and hope they can become the next Facebook, or accept the niche status and essentially pour “gasoline on a fire that’s just puttering,” he said. “And, by the way, could putter on forever and be a great business, but is not going to be a high-growth venture capital business.”
In the conversation with senior reporter E.B. Solomont, Aarons also talked about the collapse of crowdfunding website RealtyShares, why tokenization is for suckers, the infant stage of real estate tech, and how SoftBank’s heft skews the funding conversation.
Check out the entertaining full video interview above.