00:11:22 · Ilia Drozdov, Sebastian Johnson
[00:11:22] S1: Spot on actually, amazing question. The answer will be we don't yet have kind of a very kind of clear culture that you can formulate in a set of a few kind of principles. And there is a reason to that. The reason to that is that previously no tech company was buying so many traditional businesses. And the collab kind of... No. The friction between tech first mindset, which kind of we have here in the HQ, and property kind of mindset that comes with the companies that joined Valley family. Like, there is no playbook how to address that, but we appreciate and where we are moving to. We are moving to the kind of environment in which these worlds can coexist and they understand why actually they coexist and which kind of impact is driven by either property mindset or tech mindset. And we're already doing quite kind of good steps towards kind of that alignment, but this is the road we have to kind of probably drive for the next couple of years to figure out actually how it looks like. [00:12:22] S0: And both of you, you know, not being from The UK, why was The UK where you decided that this was the right place to build your business?
00:12:22 · Sebastian Johnson, Dan Lifshits
[00:12:22] S0: And both of you, you know, not being from The UK, why was The UK where you decided that this was the right place to build your business? [00:12:30] S2: I think there were a bunch of reasons. It was both across personal and across professional. Think I across personal, we actually were living here already, and I think it's obviously kind of easier to build something when you base here. You feel the empathy. I think we all experience the process of rentals, how fragmented and how kind of effectively outdated sometimes it is and how it can be improved. Kind of you you feel empathy as a customer. And then professionally, UK, if you talk about all of the countries in Europe for sure, and even The US is effectively the market where the kind of the cut of an agency that they create or that they charge from the rents is one of the highest, meaning that effective proving some of the first thesis points potentially is, like, just one of the easiest in The UK. Doesn't mean that our plan is to kind of stay in The UK forever. Even the opposite, there is definitely a plan to go beyond UK at some point of time when we're ready for that. But UK is like definitely big enough market to build a pretty iconic business in The UK alone.
00:12:30 · Dan Lifshits, Sebastian Johnson
[00:12:30] S2: I think there were a bunch of reasons. It was both across personal and across professional. Think I across personal, we actually were living here already, and I think it's obviously kind of easier to build something when you base here. You feel the empathy. I think we all experience the process of rentals, how fragmented and how kind of effectively outdated sometimes it is and how it can be improved. Kind of you you feel empathy as a customer. And then professionally, UK, if you talk about all of the countries in Europe for sure, and even The US is effectively the market where the kind of the cut of an agency that they create or that they charge from the rents is one of the highest, meaning that effective proving some of the first thesis points potentially is, like, just one of the easiest in The UK. Doesn't mean that our plan is to kind of stay in The UK forever. Even the opposite, there is definitely a plan to go beyond UK at some point of time when we're ready for that. But UK is like definitely big enough market to build a pretty iconic business in The UK alone. [00:13:26] S0: And so right now you're focusing on London, I guess. Is this like a part of a stage transition of like, you know, you've been focused kind of in the North and in the regions. Now you've started to go into London once you kind of nail London or you kind of capture it off ground there then will you start thinking about international? What does that roadmap look like I guess for as you expand geographically?
00:13:26 · Sebastian Johnson, Ilia Drozdov
[00:13:26] S0: And so right now you're focusing on London, I guess. Is this like a part of a stage transition of like, you know, you've been focused kind of in the North and in the regions. Now you've started to go into London once you kind of nail London or you kind of capture it off ground there then will you start thinking about international? What does that roadmap look like I guess for as you expand geographically? [00:13:47] S1: I think kind of the way we look at this is as London being almost half kind of of the industry size in The UK in terms of the rent roll combined for us is just like a definite acceleration of The UK growth. We will continue growing in regions obviously But UK... The London opens up the second half of The UK market effectively for us. The way we look at the international expansion is less kind of stage through regions to London to international, but more in terms of how stable and predictable kind of the growth of our business here in The UK. But in terms of sequencing, it's probably gonna be... Gonna look as you you you mentioned. Now we double down London, we double down regions, we go to kind of certain scale, we make sure our service is extremely reliable, and then we can go after kind of following European markets as well and maybe US. [00:14:42] S0: And what would success in London look like?
00:14:42 · Sebastian Johnson, Ilia Drozdov
[00:14:42] S0: And what would success in London look like? [00:14:47] S1: Success in London look like... I think for us success in London and everywhere looks for me as well, for the first... Sorry, kind of for me, kind of the success looks like I look at the success on the level of the individual customer, I would say. For me, when landlord and tenants say that the experience they got through Valley is by far much better than with the traditional agency when they constantly repeat that feedback, this is the success. No matter whether it's how, no matter whether it's London, Birmingham, or like Paris, or New York, I think this is how we look at the success. But in terms of the size, I think we want to be, like, something that people from the outside can can look at us and say, look. Yeah. Vale is successful to become number one agency in London. Currently, number one agency is Dexter's, and they think they have, I think, around 30,000 properties or so, 35,000 properties. So we need to bypass them and hopefully within just a year, two years. [00:15:48] S0: And the broader AI roll up market seems to be doing there seems to be a lot of opportunities in property, right? That's where we're seeing a lot of the players raise a lot of money. Where are the other industries where you think this model could work?
00:15:59 · Dan Lifshits
[00:15:59] S2: I think that honestly, we're probably a bit of a bad people to comment on that because like we're not investors and I think know much more about our industry specifically than about others. What we do see, obviously, investors investing a lot into is effectively all of the businesses and industries that describe by the same fundamentals, such as highly sticky revenue, worry admin kind of people centric or effectively kind of costs driving the kind of service delivery, where a lot of it, especially if communication centric, can be automated. And I think that the level of service as a result improved pretty significantly. And hence, I think that kind of even talking about general catalyst portfolio and some other guys, Lightspeed and the others, I think it's accounting, it's law firms, it's IT MSPs, I think come up pretty often. Right? It's recruitment kind of agencies, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But I think that to me personally, one of the thinking that at least I think we think about here day and night is kind of AI automation and increase the level of service in some of the traditional service industries. I mean, genie is out. Right? You will not put the genie into the bottle. I think everyone would be doing it from different angles. Private equity guys will start adopting some technology. There would be AI native companies growing organically, starting to do that. Some of the companies would be trying to effectively transform them inside out. I think the bigger question to me is what is the long term moat and what is the long term defensibility of all these models? Because I think the fact that five years from or ten year from now, I don't know the specific date, but, like, in some point in pretty close future, definitely would be the case where kind of AI would be so easy to use that every single kind of household and every single person would be able to tap into that and automate some of their own workflows. And I think the opening question would be is like, if today you are pretty unique position to kind of to use that, that would disappear in kind of five years from now, then kind of what is your long term mode? Kind of how do you stay competitive at the age of the other companies doing the same thing that effectively would keep you defensibility. That's what kind of keeps me awake at night all the time.