Podbit · The a16z Show
Legacy real estate software treats human beings as attributes of a building — a bill, an apartment number. Flow's CTO Scott built the entire stack around the resident, not the property, making it possible to run multifamily, hotel, short-stay, furnished, and corporate housing on a single platform with the press of a button.
Where this was said
At 52:55 · chapter starts 47:50
The technology underneath Flow is Ben Horowitz's favourite part of the story, and he has the framework to explain why it matters. Every legacy real estate software platform — and there is one company that dominates the industry, though he won't name it — models the world the same way: a building has units, units have tenants, tenants pay bills. A human being is an attribute of a building [1] — Ben Horowitz "Legacy real estate software treats human beings as attributes of a building — a bill, an apartment number. Flow's CTO Scott built the entir…" 52:55 . Flow's CTO Scott completely inverted this. The platform is architected around the citizen, the person who lives in the community. Every service, every piece of information, every feature flows from who that person is and what they need. Because the data is structured this way, Horowitz explains, a yoga instructor in the building can publish her class schedule, let residents book and pay, and build an entire client base without leaving her front door. The platform can shift a building from multifamily to hotel to furnished to short-stay to corporate housing with the press of a button — something that would require four separate software platforms from every other vendor in the market. Horowitz is emphatic: this architecture would not have been built without the partnership, because it required someone who understood the vision at the deepest level and had the authority to demand that optionality from day one.
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