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.
00:18:03 · Dan Lifshits, Sebastian Johnson
And I think that we do have a good answer to our specific kind of industry and in our specific case. That's back to my initial point that I'm not as close to the other industries to be able to comment with regards to how long term defensible the long term modes are in the other industries. [00:18:18] S0: Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting. I guess what you're sort of doing is you are buying comp... Because I guess what you're saying is you expect companies to be able to do these types of things themselves and become almost AI native eventually themselves, maybe it takes five or ten years. What you're doing is you're massively accelerating it by buying them, doing it for them and that becomes the moat I guess because then you own these businesses, you know, you own them. Right? And so you own the distribution. You own it all. Correct. That's really interesting. Correct. How are [00:18:44] S2: you And and I would only say that kind of to to to to some extent, right, that the company will be able to do that. Obviously, we're pushing the limits on the frontier. So what is achievable? So I'm not sure that kind of call it, some of the other companies would be able to replicate it to the same extent and degree of what we're achieving, but some fraction of that value would be kind of taken inside by those companies for sure.
00:18:44 · Dan Lifshits, Sebastian Johnson
[00:18:44] S2: you And and I would only say that kind of to to to to some extent, right, that the company will be able to do that. Obviously, we're pushing the limits on the frontier. So what is achievable? So I'm not sure that kind of call it, some of the other companies would be able to replicate it to the same extent and degree of what we're achieving, but some fraction of that value would be kind of taken inside by those companies for sure. [00:19:05] S0: Yeah. Mean, it's really interesting because in other industries, you're almost seeing, that it's a different model, they're selling the AI services, right, as opposed to buying the company and implementing AI. Super interesting. I'm curious, like, how do you think about building Dwelly to be native? Right? I mean, you're turning businesses into AI businesses. How are you building your own to make sure that you are as well equipped as the business can be with AI?
00:19:05 · Sebastian Johnson, Dan Lifshits
[00:19:05] S0: Yeah. Mean, it's really interesting because in other industries, you're almost seeing, that it's a different model, they're selling the AI services, right, as opposed to buying the company and implementing AI. Super interesting. I'm curious, like, how do you think about building Dwelly to be native? Right? I mean, you're turning businesses into AI businesses. How are you building your own to make sure that you are as well equipped as the business can be with AI? [00:19:32] S2: That's an amazing question. I think something that... Another thing that keeps us awake at night, I think that my honest view and probably kind of really I would contribute here, but I think would be that you only can become as AI native as possible by, I think, pushing yourself as the founder and kind of you as an individual to become as AI native as you can. I think that otherwise, it's it's just simply impossible. I think you need to be at the edge of the capabilities yourself. And this way, you'll be able only to drive the whole organization kind of onwards as well. Plus, obviously, you need to have the right kind of skill set and the right people around to kind of... To be able to then disseminate this knowledge. But I think that the amount of time, probably, Ilya Moore or Ilya, but, like, both of us anyways, I think, spend on VoIP coding this day is pretty meaningful. I... Quickly, I think the other day just sitting down and cleaning up all his calendar and saying, okay. Going to the god mode now. Kinda we're gonna build everything.
00:20:29 · Ilia Drozdov, Sebastian Johnson
[00:20:29] S1: No. It's like... Jokes aside, actually, from from the following week, I'll be building myself kind of three days a week. And during these three days, it's only kind of teams that are kind of entrenches with me kind of I will be having meetings with them. For the manager mode, I'll just leaving basically two days because I think if kind of you are not feeling on the finger... Fingertips what actually it means to to to build the product yourself right now. As a nonengineer, you cannot, like, drive the change at the kind of organizational and industry level. And I'm super excited. We are pushing to production, hopefully. The the first product I've built myself, not being an engineer. I spent probably kind of real... Really spent kind of clean time, maybe, like, twelve, fifteen hours on that over the course of last couple of weeks, and it's production sort of ready to to start kind of working with real clients. What it means for the whole organization, I think, is that everyone can follow this path, but it was hard to understand even a month ago what it actually means before walking this journey myself. [00:21:29] S0: And what role do you prefer? You know, do you prefer being, you know, CEO? Do you prefer being product manager?