521. How AI Is Reshaping Real Estate, When Large Operators Should Build vs. Buy, The Biggest Bottleneck in AI Growth, and Advice You Should Never Take (Zach Aarons)

0:00This episode is brought to you by Ramp, the spend management platform we use here at TFR. They're offering listeners$150 just to take a demo. We've never had an offer quite like this. Claim your$150 before this offer is gone at our partner link, ramp.com slash partners slash TFR. Now on to the episode. Welcome to the podcast about venture capital, where investors and founders alike can learn how VCs make decisions and reach conviction. Your host is Nick Moran, and this is The Full Ratchet. Zach Aarons joins us today from Brooklyn. He's the co-founder and general partner at Metaprop, a seed and growth stage venture firm investing in technology for the built world.

0:49Before Metaprop, He worked in banking, at a.com, in VC for ENIAC, and was a project manager at Millennium Partners. Metaprop has invested in companies including Attentive, Build Ops, Urban, OB, and Toggle Holdings, amongst others. Zach, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Nick. I'm an avid listener, and I'm just absolutely thrilled to be here. Awesome. Well, it's great to have you. I know that you were on your dad's job sites in a hard hat at age eight. Give us the quick story. Corey, when did it become clear that you wanted to commit your career to investing at the intersection of tech and real estate?

1:25It was a long and circuitous journey, not necessarily all deliberate. I grew up my whole life with one foot in the early stage technology world and the the the World Wide Web, as we called it at the time, and one foot on a construction site. And that has sort of continued from a very early age throughout my adult professional career as well. And I can't escape it. You know, just when I try to get out, they suck me right back in. So just for background, yeah, I grew up in New York City. My father was always in the real estate business. He ran what's now NYC EDC on the public side, which we're thrilled to actually have that entity as a limited partner in Metaprop.

2:14So it was kind of a full circle moment for me. But then he went into private real estate development and he's been building buildings around the country ever since then. So I had the joy as an eight-year-old kid to get up in a hoist with a hard hat, had a bunch of the construction workers saying really inappropriate things to me. And so I always sort of fell in love with the physical world, the built environment, the real estate business, the construction business from a very, very young age. But I also had other interests and passions. Keep in mind, this was also the time when people were starting to use platforms like AOL.

2:57And my friends and I were starting to go online for the first time. I had a very active GeoCities page, for example, in the 90s. So I was always very interested in the connectivity and the technological capabilities of the Internet. And growing up in New York City, it's tough to ignore Wall Street. It's tough to ignore the finance industry, right? So, you know, I'd go to my friends' houses and the ones who had the nicest houses, well, what did their parents do? Well, they were traders. They were on Wall Street. They were in private equity. They were in hedge funds. So my friends and I started devouring all this literature that was written, not literature, but nonfiction that was written in the late 80s and early 90s about the industry, you like Liars Poker and Barbarians at the Gate.

3:50And so I always had this sort of trifecta of potential career opportunities I was interested in, whether that be the nascent internet, the built environment, and finance. And I'm lucky enough now to do a job that encapsulates all three of those. At Metaprop, I'm a venture capital investor. So I'm in the finance industry. I work with early stage technology companies primarily. So I'm in the technology industry. And also those companies are servicing the physical world and the players within it. I've kept all of these things sort of consistent over the years. But just to fast forward a little bit on my background, my first internet job was an absolute treat.

4:43I was a summer intern working for a company called fourleaf.com, which got swept up, unfortunately, in the 2000 bubble burst. But it was effectively an earlier version of LinkedIn. It was a great idea. It was a professional networking site. And that's where I sort of caught the professional startup bug. And I was like, wow, this is a really fun environment to be working in. I can learn a lot really quickly. I went to college at Brown University. After college, chasing my Wall Street dreams. I went into investment banking, also learned a lot during those years, but realized it probably wasn't the best fit for me.

5:21So I got an offer to help my friend start a startup in the tech tourism industry called Travel Goat. And I went into that business, ultimately ran that for years. We were putting walking tours on the iPod. Originally, we were recording audio walking tours, putting them in the iPod. Once the iPhone launched, we had our own app for sort of touring virtually. I built up a community of in-person tour guides, became a tour guide myself. I've led over 300 tours of New York City. Very, very passionate, still about it. A couple of times a year, come out of retirement and do tours for startup founders, limited partners of ours as well.

6:04It's always a great joy for me. Then after that, I started working for my dad at his real estate company, Millennium Partners. He thought early on, this was about 2010, that we could leverage a lot of new content marketing, social media marketing ideas, and bring those into the real estate development, real estate sales, real estate leasing process. This was considered very avant-garde 15 years ago. Now, social media is ubiquitous within the industry, But but there was a very small community of people doing it back then. So that's how I got the bug for the real estate and construction business.

6:44And then I sort of had a quarter life crisis of sorts. Right. I'm interested in finance. I'm interested in early stage venture and startups. I'm interested in real estate. What do I do with my life? How do I actually translate that into a career that makes sense? So I went to Columbia Business School. My goal was I'm going to figure it out. And I was lucky enough to have a professor there, Stu Ellman, who taught the Venture Seminar. He's a VC founded RRE Ventures, which is one of the oldest and most sort of august firms we have here in New York, still remains a close friend and mentor of mine.

7:21And I was in his class and he suggested that I focus on this intersection. He said there was going to be tremendous growth in the industry. And he had looked at my background and he said, you know, you work at a real estate company, you've worked in tech, you're doing this venture work for ENIAC. You actually have a chance to distinguish yourself from the rest of the sort of broader general venture community if you focus on this and you really thoughtfully put your mind to aggressively growing your reputation here. And that's what I did. I worked in real estate. I was an angel investor in a lot of companies that look similar to what we're investing in today.

7:59At Metaprop, I was a rabid user pilot tester of all these technologies. And that ultimately led to meeting my partners and launching Metaprop in 2015. This was at a time in New York City. We had Deputy Mayor Alicia Glenn. She coined the hyphen tech economy. New York wanted to be the center of fintech. We wanted to be the center of marketing tech. We wanted to be the center of ed tech. And there was really nothing in New York specifically for these sectors, for prop tech, real estate tech, the built environment, whatever one calls it. So we decided to try to fill that void and ultimately started Metaprofit in 2015.

8:39So if you were just a real estate investor, what's the next big neighborhood or area in New York that you think is going to be hot? The next big New York neighborhood? Yeah. We've had quite a run up in many neighborhoods hitness over the last decade. I'm going to go with Mott Haven in the Bronx. Been a tremendous amount of development there. I was up there. My son had a soccer game up there about a year ago. And I went around and I saw all of the indicators of a burgeoning, cool neighborhood. Art galleries, coffee shops, lots of pedestrian traffic, lots of cool independent boutiques. And development started there.

9:21There's lots of affordable housing there. There's lots of market rate rental housing there in high quality buildings. It has unbelievably abundant subway access. You can be, if you work in near Grand Central, you can be there in 15 minutes, door to door. The next neighborhood. You heard it here first from Zach. You know, there's a guy running around Chicago that he's been early to like every real estate trend. He's made a lot of money. And I asked him years ago, I'm like, how do you know what's coming next? And he said, I just find where the artists, musicians, and entrepreneurs are hanging out.

9:55And that's where I invest. And that's usually what draws a lot of other people in. But back to Metaprop. So you started Metaprop. The bet was that real estate software moves to the cloud. What's the bet now? Yeah, we had migration from on-prem to cloud. We had an explosion of data. Now it's taking all that data and taking all the cloud solutions that house all that data and building AI applications on top of it all that give the customer unprecedented power, efficiency, and control. I think I've heard it on many podcasts, including this one, the difference between static SaaS and AI is that AI gives the end customer, in our case, that could be a property manager, that could be a construction scheduler, that could be an insurance underwriter.

10:45It gives them control of their own product and their own workflow. And this is truly unprecedented. unprecedented. So we're investing primarily at the application layer as it relates to these technologies. We're seeing rapid customer adoption. The companies we deal with are limited partner base. They are rabid for new technology that can increase efficiency and throughput. And I know there's an article every day about how everybody's adopting, but no one's seeing efficiency gains. I'd love to talk to those people because everybody I talk to, while they're certainly frustrated that they're not moving faster, maybe their competitor is doing something they deem as cooler.

11:28Every single person I talk to in the industries we cover, insurance, finance, real estate, construction, they are seeing tremendous amount of efficiency gain from deploying some of these new generative AI tools. Let's talk about some of the incumbent been operators, right? There's a lot of people that think large companies are going to be writing their own software in a few years, you know, with the help of models. Where do you stand on this? You know, the startups, the techs, the tech companies, the up and comers versus the established businesses that have data sets that in theory could do this themselves.

12:07Yeah, I think there will be a few very large players and then a few fast moving startup players that are actually vibe coding their own full-blown software solutions vibe coding their own CRNL vibe coding their own ERP equivalent it's very easy to vibe code something with today's technology it's very challenging to vibe maintain something that's right or optimize we saw it just uh just the other day We've spun up a subsidiary called Metaprop Labs. That's an AI enablement and deployment company for the industry. We see all the time a new package gets shipped, an API changes, and the whole thing breaks down.

12:50And these folks at the incumbent firms and the mid-market firms, they don't have the internal teams that are knowledgeable enough and capable enough and have enough time on their hands, frankly, to maintain maintenance. So a couple of trends we saw early 2026 that we've already seen mean reversion from. One of them is that everybody's going to vibe code their own thing. No, sorry. These firms that have been around for 20 years are agentifying or they're dying. And once they agentify, the customer is going to rather use the agentic version of that platform that has maybe an MCP server, has all the APIs linked up than they are to vibe code their own.

13:28The other thing we saw, right, was unbridled token spend. So CFOs finally got the token bill. I think it hit sometime this summer. And they said, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is supposed to be cheaper than humans. Otherwise, let me just hire a bunch of humans. Maybe they'll do it slower. The cost ran out of control. So we're seeing now a radical, and I think this is great for the industry, a radical sophistication shift where everybody is now very conscious of compute. They're asking their employees to tell them why they need to go above and beyond and use additional compute. More sophisticated companies are building their own harnesses so they can leverage different models for different tasks.

14:18You don't need mythos to get a recipe for Arctic char, right just don't and so and we're also seeing new models getting built every day for example we're working on incubating commercial mortgage servicing company and i was talking with the entrepreneur and he said i'm thinking of building the entire thing using jeff jeff didn't even exist three months ago but for his purposes in commercial loan servicing he doesn't need the latest and greatest expensive compute model coming out of one of the better known foundation. When you look at these companies that these AI companies that are selling into real estate or construction, how do you get comfortable that it's still going to be around after the next model release, you know, after these things continue to to innovate and evolve?

15:12Well, you can never be totally sure. We don't we don't have necessarily we have friends of the foundation model companies, but we don't really know where their priorities are. Right. So you're ultimately doing a bit of guesswork. However, there are lots of situations, and I'll focus on one area in particular where we've invested tremendous amounts of capital in multiple companies. There are certain areas that require a combination of deterministic and probabilistic. And the deterministic rails rely on very advanced, typically computer vision technology. And in our industries, there's a tremendous amount of documentation.

15:55There are millions of pages of spec sheets, drawing sets coming from multiple different constituencies that never match up. If you throw those million pages, even into the most advanced foundation model, the one that can solve Navier Stokes, the one that can hack into government, you know, infrastructure across the world, they will effectively puke all over these documents or they will deliver something that's roughly 65 to 70 percent accurate compared to a benchmark against a human team. So we've invested in companies like Handoff on the takeoff and estimating front, H2 Corporation in Japan doing takeoffs and estimating, Lighttable, which is doing peer review, which is a company we co-incubated with Primary Ventures.

16:50These folks are at 97 to 98 percent accuracy, and they're almost completely getting rid of human in the loop. When humans look at these, if you give a human a million pages of specs and drawings and you say, look at all the errors, they will usually spot 94 percent of them. And it'll take them, by the way, 20 to 30 times longer than it takes the AI engine. So that's one category where we can feel very confident that we have a significant leg up over the foundation model companies. And there's also tremendous demand from the industry for these solutions right now. Interesting. Talk about on-site applications.

17:36So I'm thinking like real world application, not just software, but robots, world models, you know, those are getting a lot of attention. As we think about job sites or, you know, inside a building, where do you expect robotics and physical applications to show up first? They're already showing up on many different job sites, most notably solar farm. When you have a solar farm, you have a basically flat plane and you have a very repeatable process for mounting solar arrays. So we've looked a lot. We've actually bid on a couple rounds of companies that are looking to deploy autonomous or semi-autonomous robots mounting solar arrays.

18:27But we're seeing it everywhere. Robots are now laying bricks, drywall. There are robotic crane operators, robotic excavators. I think one thing people get wrong in their assumption about this is that it's going from zero to full autonomy tomorrow. That's not how it works. You mean figures not going to be running around job sites doing everything? Well, figures are different. I can get to that, but figures are a little different. I'm talking just about construction robotics. The vast majority of the companies right now are teleoperated. If you think about Waymo, they have a call center in the Philippines.

19:09If things get really bad with the autonomous vehicle, a human can intervene. We're seeing the same thing deployed onto the job sites. Companies like Figure represent a very interesting opportunity to put robots in everybody's home. Now, that's going to be a wave that follows. We had robots in manufacturing and warehousing logistics. That's almost ubiquitous at this point. Now we're going to have robots on a job site. Then we're going to have robots in the home. Concierge at the hotel is going to be a robot. One of my favorite things about Figures specifically is that, and ties into world models, they're building their own world model.

19:57and they don't have enough data to train the robot to do the household tasks because almost every household is different and the configurations are unique so they're actually they've launched an app and a device where they'll come to your house and video you washing dishes and pay you i don't know if you've seen this uh no but yeah figure i'm still on the wait list figure will pay you to wash dishes, fold laundry, sweep the floor, because they want to get a sense of how to train their robots. And you've seen a lot of interesting, the training is the most interesting component to me, right? We saw the AMD World Labs acquisition.

20:36Companies like Generalist are super interesting, where you have robots sort of training other robots through video interface. This is all brand new territory. It's an area we're excited to figure out how Metaprop invests, We're not necessarily going to put$200 million out of a$100 million fund into a WorldLab company, but we want exposure. Let me double click on this. So I have to admit I'm a little bearish on figure near term. I think long term, you know, it can be fantastic. But I think the applications are really difficult. And I think they're varied. And I think there's a number of them. But if we look at figure and it's trying to address washing dishes or folding laundry, I think that that problem is actually in a more controlled environment and a little bit more repeatable than like a job site.

21:26I've been to some job sites, not as many as you, but it can be chaos and there's surprises, right? You dig up the ground, you find something you didn't expect, or there's weather, or the wrong sub showed up at the wrong time, right? And all of a sudden, that crashed schedule that you had and that critical path is completely blown up because you can't do these things in serial. So help us understand how robotics relate to a site that's very unpredictable. In the construction context, the robots do one specific task over and over again, supervised by a human in a controlled environment. The leverage is that one human can supervise five robots, and that job will be done theoretically more accurately and much faster.

22:19So there's an actual labor savings. The problem with construction robots, there have been construction robots since we started Metaprop. The problem in the past is that ratio has been off. No one's been able to deploy enough robots to really make it worth anybody's while. But that is what's now changing. The capabilities of the robots are getting better. They're getting more reliable. They're getting cheaper and easier to produce. But you're not going to see a robotic foreman on a job site for a very long time. The issues that pop up, yes, those for a while are going to be handled by humans. Absolutely.

23:00So Zach, you wrote the summer that AI's real constraint is no longer the chip. What is the new constraint? The biggest constraint is power. We really don't have enough grid power for all these data centers. There's a big promise with geothermal. There's a big promise with solar. There's a big promise with nuclear. Co-located natural gas. Natural gas as well. Like Bloom is, I think Bloom is actually. Hydrogen, yeah. So if you look at. The sponsor of the Knicks now, right? Bloom has had its stock price run up massively. We don't know if all those are going to functionally get delivered to the job site in time.

23:37The buildout is scheduled to peak in 2028. How ready is an SMR company going to be? Geothermal lives or dies by this specific project. You have a geothermal site. If that data center is delayed, that geothermal company risks a cash crunch, right? So you have all of these factors, and then you also have increasing

24:07political pushback against some of these large AI infrastructure buildouts. And you have the promise of Orbital and Oceanic data centers. But with Orbital, we're still a few years out from that, from the cost compressing enough to make it really worthwhile. And for the big training, we really need terrestrial data centers. We're not going to put that infrastructure necessarily up in space. And so I view that by far as the biggest constraint. I know everyone says there's this, you know, there is a huge adoption gap. I think that's going to be the fastest to close. I think the one of the things we saw in 26 was people getting a lot smarter about deployment and enablement.

24:55And you solve these consultancies, private equity firms popping up saying, we're going to put forward deployed engineers on your site. You're going to get it. You're going to get all the capability, right? We're going to make sure you get it before we leave. Or they're going to stay with you forever. The biggest bottleneck is definitely energy and will remain so. I know that there's lots of forms of energy and a lot of people are saying we need to make it up in the aggregate. Is there one form that you feel like has enough speed, modularity, et cetera, that it's going to become sort of a dominant player in the data center in AI buildup?

25:34We've seen a tremendous compression of cost for solar. Solar is abundant, right? People talk about nuclear, but solar is nuclear, right? The sun is a gigantic nuclear weapon that is giving energy to this planet. And so I think solar doesn't have political opposition in the same way that natural gas turbines have or electricity that's from the grid that's coming from a coal plant. right um doesn't necessarily have the same risks as fission fusion on the nuclear side um and isn't bound to any specific underground location like geothermal so i think fundamentally i think solar is going to power the bulk of the ai build out going forward i mean if you look at if you look at especially china like all of china's just ripping so many solar panels off these gigantic factories.

26:41They have factories the size of cities just cranking these things out. And all of their AI infrastructure is ultimately going to be powered by solar. Interesting. So switching gears here, Fannie and Freddie just opened mortgage underwriting to VantageScore after decades of using FICO only. What does that change for the companies you look at in housing? We have a number of investments in companies that have developed their own AI underwriting tools that we think outperform the FICO score. So SplitPay, which is one of our fastest growing companies we've ever backed, that company's developed a platform called Lens AI, which can underwrite much faster, very, very accurate, much less, much easier to catch fraud.

27:29And we think that Fannie Freddie and a number of other government agencies are going to open up beyond the now two approved parties that within a few years, they'll probably be 15 to 20 that an underwriter. And that has applications, we think, well beyond just just mortgages, also in renting apartment, also in the insurance business, also in the auto business. So we're very excited to see that the FICO sort of monopoly is potentially cracking a little bit because we do believe there are new agentic ways to better underwrite credit quality than what's currently off. What signals are they looking at?

28:22What are the underlying data sets that they're pulling that FICO is missing? They're mainly looking at your ability to pay cash inflows and cash outflows. They're less looking when you look at a FICO score, somebody can have a relatively good FICO score because they've had really good credit repayment in the past, but be on the verge of personal insolvency just from a cash perspective. So it really boils down to that. Are you still managing expenses with outdated apps and spreadsheets? If so, it's time for Ramp, the leading U.S. spend management platform covering corporate cards, travel, AP, and more.

29:01All built to save time and extend runway. We use Ramp at TFR and it's been a game changer. As our preferred partner, they're offering listeners$150 just to take a demo. No need to sign up. Head to ramp.com slash partners slash TFR to claim your$150 before the offer expires. Now back to the interview. Where do you think technology can kind of move the needle on affordability when it comes to owning a home and, you know, living situations? Yeah, I think fundamentally the biggest impact we can have is through material sciences. So if we can really, because if you look at the cost of lumber, cost of steel inputs that go into that, we just had runaway inflation for a very, very long time.

29:54And that is ultimately squeezing affordability tremendously. We still have a massive amount of housing that needs to be built in this country, roughly a million units. but if we don't have better, cheaper, and faster building materials than we currently have, where there's really been very limited innovation, graphene, I don't know if you ever looked into graphene, that was supposed to be our savior. Yeah. You didn't even know about it. It totally petered out, right? But one of the benefits now of having an AI model that can solve Navier Stokes is you can have an AI model come up with material composites that we've never seen before.

30:42So we have a material science and 3D printing company in Chattanooga, Tennessee called Branch Technologies. They're working with, they're trying to manufacture ultimately what's going to go up when we have housing in space, right? What is that going to look like working with complex polymers? They are playing with the foundation model tools to see, okay, how do we really push the envelope and develop materials that were sort of beyond the capabilities of the human mind to even ideate on. A question I keep getting from folks is with the pace of innovation, with how rapid companies can move, like you're looking, you've invested in a company that's looking at, you know, building materials for space domiciles.

31:28Like that's wild to me. But the question I keep getting is because of the pace of innovation and how much that can speed up with AI and the lower demand on talent and cost and some other things that were embedded maybe in previous super cycles, should we expect a much faster ramp of these companies? I mean, we're already seeing growth rates that are unprecedented, but will that compress venture fund cycles, will that speed up DPI? I mean, I don't want to make any promises to my LPs, but it's a very reasonable question. I think it should compress venture cycles. However, the pushback I would give you on that is while those dynamics are happening, right?

32:18We have companies growing from zero to a hundred million in 12 to 18 months, and we've seen it even with our own portfolio, those companies are also still staying private for longer. There's still scarcity in the market. So those companies' valuations are getting massively pushed up to multiples that are now decoupled from similar companies in the public equity markets. Yes. So while the growth and the speed and the velocity should help the venture ecosystem, I think all of those other things are pressing against that growth and it might sort of even out over the next few years. I think the benefit is companies, yes, are saying private longer and longer, maybe seeking M &A less and less, but there's a much more active secondary market.

33:15So if you're running a venture fund, there are many, many more opportunities for liquidity on the secondary market than there were 10 years ago when we started the firm. I wanted your quick take on insurance too. I know that Baldwin bought OB in January and now Baldwin itself is going public in a$7 billion deal. Going private. Or sorry, going private. I'm reading too fast here. But what did you learn about that series of events about kind of how insurance businesses are being valued. If you look at very, very large markets that have been traditionally analog, where there's a very obvious application for agentic solutions, insurance is like a triple bullseye.

34:00Accounting, right? If you look at from like Thrive Holdings, going buying up accounting firms and like accounting, also a triple bullseye also highly regulated and per your question earlier relatively safe if you control the distribution like an obi or baldwin control the licenses you are not necessarily as easily disrupted by an upstart as you might if you were building agents for those businesses. So I think that's behind the motivation. I think Baldwin saw what Obi was doing on the AI front, wanted exposure to that, wanted to disseminate some of that AI sprinkle magic into their other subsidiaries.

34:48And then I think what Sequence saw taking it private again was this company's trading at a depressed multiple. The market doesn't understand this. we can further agentify this business and we can grow our EBITDA margin by 20 % over the next five years. Wow. Big impacts coming for insurance. Yeah, we're still very, very active in insure tech. Always been a big focus for us, but we see tremendous opportunity there. You know, I know you're writing C checks. You're also writing series C checks. Like help me understand the barbell here, you know, why you're entering so early and later. We enter early.

35:25We think our team is really good at working with early stage entrepreneurs to find product market fit. We think seed and pre-seed are less competitive than Series A. By the time the companies have grown to that stage and we're not being Series B and C's like we would a seed, in many cases, we have six, seven years experience with these companies. And so we can become comfortable writing the growth check. Whereas Series A, to lead it, very competitive, still a lot of risk. So I think we've focused on this barbell strategy. to drive significant alpha at the C level and then reduce risk once we have our long-term relationship, can see metrics going for years and have the access because we've now been in the industry so long and know so many of these entrepreneurs.

36:13How is your thought process and your frame on underwriting at Series C? How has that impacted the way you think about seed deals? If there's no downstream capital available to you and you're a seed investor, It doesn't matter how good the business is performing. It's really hard to do that though, because it's like, will there be downstream capital in three years or four years or whenever it is? But that's the fundamental question I would say we ask at Seed every time now since having a growth vehicle that we didn't ask at Investment Committee 10 years ago. Zach, give me your boldest non-consensus prediction about real estate five years from now.

36:55My boldest non-consensus prediction about real estate is I think that we are going to see a huge rebound in office. We've already started to see it. It's only really impacted the top tier office in the top tier cities. I think as we leverage AI, we are going to find adaptive reuse capabilities for even laggard office buildings that we couldn't even think of before. I think we're going to be able to transform office buildings much quicker into assets like data centers, into things like vertical warehouse and logistics facilities, into self-driving car garages. And these buildings will ultimately be worth much more than people think they're worth today.

37:54We've already seen the explosion with some successes, some failures of office to residential conversion. I think we'll continue to see that, but we're going to see a lot of activity. Office to better office, office to logistics, office to hospitality, office to data center. We just need the political will to get behind that. And we need the technology to advance more so that these things can be economically viable. But I legitimately think we're five years away from that. Zach, who are your favorite old school VCs and why? Probably Don Valentine. I mean, he wrote the seed check to Apple and NVIDIA.

38:38so that is 10 trillion in market cap that is attributed to one person so I would have to go I would have to go with him I just I just think he must have had a tremendous vision and he also had great access to great entrepreneurs and he had operating experience too what's the worst advice you've ever gotten, did you take it? I did. What was it? So when I was like interviewing for jobs, when I was a senior in college, I got advice from a mentor that was like, just tell them you want to get your foot in the door. You don't care what you're going to do. You're going to scrub the floors with a toothbrush and they just value hard work and that turned out to be completely wrong advice.

39:33So what I tell my students when they ask for career advice and recruiting advice is you need to have a perspective and a point of view that makes the interviewer interested in you and want to bring you on to their team. It doesn't have to be directly even related to what they do. You need to show you understand what they do, but they also want you to have a perspective because why else are they hiring you. And instead of just saying you'll scrub the floors of the toothbrush, which makes you sound pathetic and desperate, you need to communicate an intense and hard work ethic, maybe through telling a story of something you worked on, rather than sort of saying you'll do anything just to get a job.

40:14Zach, if we could feature anyone here on the show, who do you think we should interview and what topic would you like to hear them speak about? I would love to hear from Molly Fowler. Have you had Molly on the podcast yet? I have not, no. She runs Dorm Room Funds and she's built this whole infrastructure and very successful investment career out of funding, not just funding, but creating community of college students who are interested in starting companies, being in venture. And she's very, very focused on the community and less on the sort of specific ideas necessarily coming out of it. But she's been extraordinarily successful and has built a model that no one else has been able to replicate, has even maybe tried to, people have tried in pockets to replicate it, but it's now ubiquitous.

41:05They're at all these colleges, they're cranking out founders at a record clip. Love that. Zach, what book, article, or video would you recommend to listeners? I mentioned them earlier, but I love these old Wall Street books. I love Barbarians at the Gate, den of thieves um liars liars poker you mentioned yeah so all these 80s 9 80s wall street uh that was really the the the peak of exuberance and craziness on wall street will never be replicated again um it was a a window into a different time um and fundamentally while there's a lot of bad behavior in those books, which is entertaining. There's also a lot of interesting financial information that could be, uh, gleaned from reading those.

41:58Some of the best, uh, Zach, do you have any habits or behaviors that are a secret weapon? Wow. I would have to say I play a lot of tennis and that is a secret weapon because I can always invite maybe a founder an lp that plays um and i always have something if someone else is interested in tennis i can i always have something to fall back on that's not just uh that's not just business who's your favorite tennis player right now my favorite player right now yeah yeah i really like this guy zach vita he's kind of young up and coming american on the tour um he's my height we are not tall i know you can't tell sort of how tall i am um but he can still serve it 140 miles an hour whoa and uh he's got a really really interesting game look out for him uh on the tour in in in the years to come but um historically my favorite player is michael chan michael chan And I got, we do a lot of business in Japan.

43:07We actually have an IPO coming up there at the end of this month with a lot of limited partners over there. And when I just went over there, I had the privilege to go to the tennis tournament in Tokyo. I saw Alcaraz playing Yuri Lehechka. I got to see Kei Nishikori's career celebration. That was his last tournament ever. He's the greatest Japanese tennis player of all time. and Michael Chang used to be his coach stood up and gave a speech and that was so cool unbelievable experience for me because I wasn't even even put it together that he might uh be there in attendance so very quickly why is the company going public in Japan instead of here it's a Japanese company

43:55okay all right there you go um and finally here Zach what is the best way for listeners to connect with you and follow along with Metaprop? You can go to our website, metaprop.com. You should listen, subscribe to my podcast. It's called Between Zach and Aaron with Zach Aarons because I have a partner named Zach and a partner named Aaron, and my name is Zach Aarons. So we sort of took advantage of that, ripped off Between Two Ferns a little bit. If you've seen that, excellent. Also by Zach, Zach Galifianakis. You can connect with us on LinkedIn. as well under the Metaprop handle, or you can come to one of the many community events that we host.

44:38For example, this week, week of October 19th, we're hosting New York City Real Estate Week. Tons of different activities will be at all of them, CRE Tech, Commercial Observer, Power 100 event. So we try to sort of continue to maintain an active community presence. Love it. Staying busy in the community, hosting a podcast and joining us today. The one and only Zach Aarons of Metaprop. Zach, thanks so much. I loved it. Thank you for the insights and congrats on all the success. Thank you. Appreciate you having me on, Dave.

45:18All right. That'll wrap up today's interview. If you enjoyed the episode or a previous one, let the guests know about it. Share your thoughts on social or shoot them an email. Let them know what particularly resonated with you. I can't tell you how much I appreciate that some of the smartest folks in venture are willing to take the time and share their insights with us. If you feel the same, a compliment goes a long way. Okay, that's a wrap for today. Until next time, remember to over-prepare, choose carefully, and invest confidently. Thanks so much for listening.

45:54Thank you.