Earlier in our career, Tiffany and I were dropped in the middle of the “Container Wars,” facing dozens of new entrants to the space every month. We both chose the company because we knew they were part of the movement toward cloud-native microservices . They were well-positioned as an early innovator, and this late stage cloud and data infrastructure startup had raised more than $250 million from top tier VCs like Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures.

Real estate is the world’s largest asset class, estimated to be worth $280 trillion. Yet it invests less than 1% of its revenues into technology or innovation, lagging significantly behind other large industries. By 2019, after years of avoidance and neglect, investment in real estate technology began to accelerate. Commercial real estate (CRE) firms were scrambling to catch up and the world’s largest players were all competing to be the leader in the burgeoning “PropTech” market, estimated to reach $12.11 billion by 2025.

In 2018, I was tasked with building the brand of a $100 million PropTech Venture Fund attached to one of the world’s largest commercial real estate firms, while simultaneously running the marketing advisory for a group of early-stage startups building commercial real estate technology.