Episodes

  • Dillon Okner - Streamlining Retail & Franchise Expansion
    Jul 16 2026

    How has studying graphic design influenced Dillon's career? What led Dillon to land his initial role working in an Apple retail store? How was Dillon able to make the jump to working in Apple's retail development group? What family ties to real estate did Dillon have? Which Microsoft product was Apple using to run its construction projects in the early days of Dillon's career? How is the build process different between an Apple retail store in a mall and one of Apple's flagship stores? Why did Dillon decide to leave Apple and head over to Tesla? How quick were the build times for Tesla's showrooms? How did the Apple Genius Bar influence Tesla's retail showrooms? What was the inspiration for SiteRise? Why did Dillon build SiteRise as a non-user license solution? How is AI being used to make the development process more efficient? What areas of retail and retail adjacent real estate are seeing growth today? Why is retail clustering taking off at the moment? Why is reporting increasingly important for SiteRise?

    Dillon Okner - CEO and founder of SiteRise, joins Proptech Espresso to answer these questions and discuss why customer led development has been the key to SiteRise's success.

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    30 mins
  • Josephine Bromley - Making Profitable Decarbonization Decisions
    Jul 2 2026

    Should we view proptech as how humans transform physical space into something much more valuable and relevant than just the physical space? Why should building owners consider looking at proptech investment across their whole tech stack, rather than focusing only on individual, siloed solutions? How did Josephine use linguistics as a launching point to get into technology localization? What inspired Josephine to work in a startup after starting her career at Google? What was attractive about the built environment compared to other industries Josephine had worked in? How did Josephine's work around sustainability lead her to join the Carbon13 incubator program? Why has accurate, portfolio-wide building energy modeling become a critical need for asset owners? How has MapMortar automated the labor-intensive building energy modeling process? Why is MapMortar looking to engage with banks and utility providers?

    Josephine Bromley - COO & co-founder of MapMortar, joins Proptech Espresso to answer these questions and discuss how her Google onbcaoarding experience instilled a deep sense of personal ownership that she continues to lean on many companies.

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    52 mins
  • Ryan Buckley - Providing the intelligence layer for the built world
    Jun 4 2026

    What was Ryan's first academic love in high school? What opportunity did Ryan uncover by responding to a Craigslist advertisement? Why did Ryan decide to return to his original path after an enjoyable stint in consulting? What attribute of MIT culture appealed to Ryan and convinced him to apply to Sloan for an MBA? What part-time job did Ryan land at MIT that gave him special insight into the campus's eccentricities? How did Ryan end up founding a screen writing software business? How did Ryan pivot this failed idea into a lucrative marketplace business? What hard lesson about unit economics did Ryan learn during this period? How did Ryan connect the dots between data, B2B, and climate policy to start a new tech business? What did Ryan admire about Stripe that he applied to the permit data space with Shovels? Why is collecting and aggregating local building permit data so challenging? What insights has Shovels uncovered around permit activity and different types of climate disasters? What is the permit cloud that Shovel's is uncovering that indicates early signal about a larger infrastructure project? How is Shovels providing insight into available trade resources for intensive projects such as data centers?

    Ryan Buckley - CEO and co-founder of Shovels, joins Proptech Espresso to answer these questions and discuss how his early childhood interest in roller hockey exposed him to the parking lots of seminal internet titans like Netscape and Silicon Graphics.

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    51 mins
  • Etrit Demaj - Scaling The Smart Building Operating System
    May 14 2026

    How has proptech evolved over time from solutions about the business of real estate to the automation and digitization of the physical buildings themselves? What lessons did Etrit take away from the hardships of his family re-establishing their lives in the US? How did entrepreneurship in Kosovo differ from what he experienced after moving to Michigan and integrating with the Albanian community? What learnings about the value of the product you are selling got instilled in Etrit when he was young? What lessons did Etrit take away from his experience in door to door selling laundry services? How did working at Chase during college open Etrit's eyes to how to successfully navigate the professional environment? What insights did Etrit take away from listening to an employee interaction with Jamie Diamond? Why is Etrit always trying to learn faster to do the right thing? Where did the initial interest in real estate originate? Why is customer service such a differentiation for KODE? What does having the GSA as a KODE customer mean to Etrit?

    Etrit Demaj - co-founder of KODE Labs, joins Proptech Espresso to answer these questions and discuss immigrating to the US and the debt of gratitude he has for the opportunities presented to him because of this.

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    45 mins
  • David Stifter - AI-Powered Invoice Coding for Real Estate AP
    Apr 23 2026

    Should proptech be defined as a real estate specific problem to which a technology solution is applied to? Why can new real estate applications not ignore the workstream they are a part of and the ecosystem they must work nicely within? How is it possible for companies to balance encouraging innovation but not concurrently creating shadow IT departments? Why is the build vs buy decision front and center again for CTOs and other innovation leaders in proptech? Why was it a blessing in disguise for David to start off his professional career as a custody fund accountant? What led David to start a business operations group? Why is bottoms up technology adoption much easier than top down mandates? What led Dave to uncover the opportunity in real estate AP coding? What percent of general ledger transactions originate in AP? Who are the different purchasers of PredictAP? What new insights has the deployment of PredictAP within customers surfaced? In the fast changing world of AI, how do companies differentiate between solutions that demo well and give the appearance of solving a problem versus well architected and researched solutions that truly solve the fundamental business problem?

    David Stifter - Founder and CEO of PredictAP, joins Proptech Espresso to answer these questions and discuss how we worked at the first social network in college just prior to the early 2000s dot-bomb crash.

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    56 mins
  • Tyler Pullen - Pathways for Scaling Innovative Construction
    Apr 2 2026

    What has lead to the increase in 'better' companies succeeding in the proptech space? How did an early interest in climate change lead to a journey within the built environment? What did Tyler discover about real estate development that caused him to focus his attention on this space? How did the USC undergraduate experience prove challenging for a first in his family college student from the suburbs of New Jersey? Why did Tyler not end up finishing his PhD at UC Berkeley? How have many of the most vulnerable members of society ended up with housing in areas of cities with the greatest exposure to climate change risk? What was the premise behind establishing UC Berkeley's Terner Center? Why did Terner Labs decide to spin out of UC Berkeley's Terner Center? Why is there so much friction between housing innovation companies and affordable housing developers? What problems having engineering focused housing innovation companies encountered when trying to bring solutions to market? How have CA state legislatures engaged Terner Labs to understand the levers the state may be able to effect in order to reduce housing costs and increase housing production speed?

    Tyler Pullen - Head of Building Innovation at Terner Labs, joins Proptech Espresso to answer these questions and discuss how his unique professional background enables him to act as a translator amongst the different parties looking to advance industrialized construction.

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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • James Holbrook - Eliminating Industrial Real Estate Inefficiencies
    Mar 19 2026

    Why has proptech recently begun to succeed at the operational layer of real estate? How is proptech progressing in solving the industry's more complex inefficiencies? Why did the city of New York call out to James as an undergraduate? How did James develop a passion for real estate while in college? How did navigating the real estate market's cyclical expansion and contraction during the 2000's provide James a unique opportunity to develop predictive insights on how markets move? Why was James attracted to the complexity of the real estate system? How is human interaction with the physical asset of real estate behind James's desire to study psychology at Harvard? What was the level of technology adoption when James first started in commercial real estate? Why are stakeholder incentives so important to understand in technology adoption, both in real estate and beyond? What gave James the confidence to spinout Warehub from his commercial real estate business? Why are modern supply chains rapidly changing the industrial real estate sector? What insights did James and his team uncover during the early days of building their internal tool that have been transformational for the Warehub marketplace? Why was Warehub built to be AI-enabled rather than AI-native?

    James Holbrook - Founder and Executive Chairman of Warehub, joins Proptech Espresso to answer these questions and discuss how his love for finance, operations, infrastructure, and human behavior led to his fascination with the built environment.

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    44 mins
  • Marco Nobel - Revolutionizing European Student Housing
    Mar 5 2026

    What were the entrepreneurial businesses that Marco dabbled in during high school which set the stage for his subsequent tech founder roles? Why did Marco's entrepreneurial sprint wane initially in college? How did studying abroad in South Korea rekindle Marco's sense of entrepreneurship? What viral marketing tactics did Marco use to grow Socials? How was Marco able to bootstrap the development of Socials and grow it into an organization serving over 200 international communities? What changing social media platform preferences among different generations of international university students require Socials to evolve its platform? How did the revenue growth challenges for Socials as it matured provide Marco the opportunity to hand over the leadership reigns? What is the number one concern for international students throughout their program stay? Why are student housing amenities less important for the solution Fuse is providing? How does the location of European student housing differ from US student housing? Has the makeup of offline student events changed since Marco launched Socials to those that are now of highest interest to Fuse clients? How is Fuse gamifying engagement to help build student housing communities?

    Marco Nobel - CEO and founder of Fuse, joins Proptech Espresso to answer these questions and discuss how his passion for electronic music continues to burn within him, including plans for a US tour in 2027.

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    41 mins