YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert Reffkin

lines on the record: 93
first: 2021-07-26
most recent: 2021-07-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So at Ren probably on average four hours until the last one. The last one I did everything I possibly could to break three hours. And I crossed the finish line at two hours, 59 minutes, and 31 seconds. By the way, the faster you run, the less pain you're going to deal with, right? Because there's just less time out there.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course. If I wasn't lucky enough to be born to my mom, I wouldn't be where I am. Would I not only just even be, but I wouldn't have been raised to be an entrepreneur. I wouldn't have been raised to bounce back every single time something goes wrong. I wouldn't have been raised to be the kind of person that sees positive in negative. It knows that whenever something bad happens, there must be something good. So how can you find it? And I also, I had a lot of fun knowing that luck is just around the corner. And that I'm going to find it.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought that I was going to get fired the majority of days that I've been working. I worked really, really, really hard, and I would do put in any amount of effort that it would take. But the reason I worked so hard is because I didn't think I was going to be successful. It's almost like if I did think I was going to be successful, maybe I wouldn't have been because I wouldn't have worked as hard.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've been afraid of failing the majority of my life just definitely all of my life then and that was the driving force I wanted to create a better life for this family that I had envisioned that I would build, but I couldn't ever see it. There's the line you can't be what you can't see, but I never saw anyone like me I didn't see like these successful The 90s in high school and middle school. And so the answer is, I never thought that I was going to be successful.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“are negative in mean in a competitive sense, like the brokerage firms that's actually given me an extraordinary amount of energy to work harder. I mean, there was at a big real estate conference, one of the top brokerage firms says, oh, this was like in 2018, I think Compass is going to go out of business in five years. And then the head of the fourth largest brokerage from the country says, oh, I think that's generous. It's not going to last five years. That's kind of what this industry has been about. And so, when I see that kind of stuff out there, whether it's against me, my company, yeah, it makes me want to work harder.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've always been motivated by a mixture of positivity, like big, big dreams and anger. So, you know, you talk about the competitors at Compass. When they say things that are less positive about me or the company gives me energy, there was a woman that came to Compass one of their early top agents, and she told me, hey, Robert, I can't come. The head of my former brokerage firm that she came from, she told me that you were anti-Semitic, anti-gay, and anti-woman, right? And I'm like, what? What are you talking about? I tell her, first of all, I'm Jewish and I'm mitzvah. So then second of all, this is not true. Things like that happen in a weird way. Maybe this real estate industry is so full of people that”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I like to call my mom the chief feedback officer. She's always been the kind of parent that tells me what I should be doing differently. And she's been an agent for over 20 years. One of the things that makes me happiest is that at this point in her career, she's able to work at Compass. I mean, it's such a wonderful thing. And this is one of the few careers where people in their 60s and their 70s are pushed to grow and to get better. A lot of the traditional companies are pushing people out much earlier in age. And so it's a wonderful thing to be able to spend so much time with her, both, of course, personally, but also with Compass.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet we launched during COVID a number of virtual tools like live stream open houses, tours where you as a buyer could stay in your home and the agent would go from property to property into a live stream tour. So a lot of tools to allow agents to work virtually and we believe that will continue. On the real estate side, I think that we have a permanent shift in the demand curve where people will continue to want more space and more multiple home ownership. The hybrid work environment which will continue, it makes space literally more valuable because you're going to be using it more, whether it's a private office in your home or whether it's a second home where you can work two months out of the year and give your family a better quality of life.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet when COVID hit in early 2020, we had closed our offices in early March. And over the following weeks, I really thought, hey, this could all be over. I told my wife Yeah, we are legally not allowed to show property in almost every market we're in, and there's no end in sight. And so we couldn't make any money. And business as a business, we can't make any money. You can go out of business because we still had those costs. We had to go through the really hard work of just trying to survive. Like the goal was we just need to survive. We're talking just two months later, activity started picking up. And market by market by market, not in New York City because they would not let you show property in the buildings, but in the suburbs people started buying at a faster and faster and faster rate. And then over the summer, it became the busiest summer in the history of real estate.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“30 years ago, all of the workflow the agent went through the brokerage firm. The MLS book was on the desks, the client would meet in the office, they would look at the off-market listings on the wall, but over the last 30 years, the workflow the agent has come outside of the brokerage firm. So now it's like half outside and half inside. We're building the modern platform. It's not either or. It's not just, you know, is Amazon a bookstore or a technology company? Is Uber, a tax limousine commissioner, or a technology company? I think these are false dichotomies. Over the next 10 and 20 years, you have to be both. And you have to use software to make everything better. We have overall 850 person technology team. And so we're investing more in technology than the traditional brokerage firm.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that 20 years from now, if you're not a technology company, it's unlikely you're going to exist. These agents are going to be here, right? Just to be very clear. People use agents more now today than they did 10 years ago. Who's going to be the company that helps agents use technology to realize their entrepreneurial potential? Over the last 30 years, every profession has been able to use technology to get better. And that's actually what has made it so difficult.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so he shut it down. And there was a lot of press at the time saying how we failed and it was a failed launch. I never understood that because to me, we just tried. We tried something. It didn't work and you tried something else. And the next month, we tried something called Compass Concierge. We launched it really quickly in less than a month. And it turned out to be one of the best things that we've ever done, where we front-load the cost of home improvement services, like staging and deep cleaning and painting to prepare homes and make them move in ready. And that's been a big success, but you can't be the company that can do that without being the company that also has, that launches something that isn't successful.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had this idea of let's license our technology to a competing brokerage. We announced it in less than a month and there was a complete backlash of our agents and they didn't want us to give any competing company the technology because they didn't want an agent and another company to say, hey, work with me, I have the same technology as that agent from Compass. Right.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The average agent that comes to Compass has grown their business 19% in their first year. And because of that, we have above average industry retention. That's one of the things that I look at the most is if they're staying, that's a good thing. If someone leaves, that's a really bad thing. And we have to make sure that we're building the tools in an offerings and services that help them grow their business so they would never want to leave.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The competitors say a lot of really bad things to try to scare people from wanting to move. But they had their chance. This has been a model for over 100 years where brokerage firms had taken the profits from the agents, split it between the manager, the manager's manager, and the owner, and on balance that owner put in their pocket and they went on vacation. But what they didn't do is what Apple did, what Microsoft did, what Google did. They didn't invest it back in research and development to create a better company for their customer, the agent. And that's what we're doing.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the best things that Compass has the cynicism of our competition. When our competition says, oh, Compass, they're only successful because of A, B, C, D, D, whatever that thing is, it makes them feel okay about not doing anything, about not asking their agents, you know, what can we do to make it so you don't want to go to Compass? The concept that agents just move for money is really offensive to the agent. It doesn't make any sense. They're not going to move their entire business to a company they don't believe in for some economic incentive that's a small percentage of their annual income. Yeah, when I moved from my BlackBerry to my iPhone, yes, I got like $300 off the first phone, but that's not why I moved, but you are right.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In no market were we launched did anyone know who we were in the early years. And so the hardest thing was just getting the meeting. And I tried to talk about my background and what we were doing and the money we raised and investors and say, hey, look, if you can meet, there's no downside. The worst thing that can happen is I'll share with you all the ways that we're helping agents grow their business. And if you don't want to come, we can take those ideas back to your own business. And so that's how I would get the meeting. And I'd have two different conference rooms in a hotel and I'd be back to back meetings from one to another and I'd have someone else on my team being in the meeting when I wasn't there so you'd be back to back from early in the morning to late at night and explain to them we're going to have the marketing, the technology, the culture and the support to help them grow their business.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in the early years, I personally launched all the markets. So I've launched dozens of markets myself. I go out to the market. I would call the top agents and I'd say, hey, I'm Robert Refkin. I'm the CEO of Compass. And they would say, you know, Compass, who? Like Compass the Bank.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We asked our agents, what would be the market that would give the most credibility to you? It was very consistent with how we approach most of what we do at Compass. Just ask the agent. And they'll tell you where to go. So DC was a nation's capital, big brand. Then it was Florida, Miami because New Yorkers moved to Florida and Miami. Then it was Boston and Los Angeles. And so we really followed our agents in where they think we should go next based off of where their clients are moving from into.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh yeah, we would market the Compass brand outside of the offices of our competing firms. And so there was like a phone booth or a billboard or a bus stop outside of our competing firms. That's where we would put the brand so that agents to other companies would say, oh, Compass, people know it. Its names out there on the street. And so we did a lot to try to make our brand bigger so that it would give more credibility to the agents we were trying to hire.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it's not connected to a listing system, and then you have to do the same thing again for your postcard, same thing again, upload again for your social media. But by connecting everything in one place, integration creates the innovation where you only upload things once. You only log in once. Think about it without that integration. You can't get on a mobile app because a mobile app can't connect to 13 different third party tools, which is how many tools the average agent uses. We're building the one thing that they can use. They don't have to log on to thirteen companies. They don't have to use 13 companies that don't speak to each other. We're putting all together in one place.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is the point. Instead of just being this broad, basic software for everyone, we have a CRM that we built for real estate, marketing tools for real estate. Let me give you a simple example. Let's say you want to do a digital newsletter. And there are a lot of these email newsletters You can get third party sites. But then you have to upload the photos from your listing. You have to upload the description. You have to upload the price.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that everyone that I know, whenever they're thinking about buying or selling a home, they think of me. I want transaction management so I can have all the transaction documents and closing documents in one place. And so there are so many things, and that's just a small portion of what real estate agents do that people are all focused on the wrong thing. They're all focused on this consumer search. Remember, all those consumer searches, they just go back to the agent because you click the button and then the agent gets it. And no one was focused on the person that's actually doing the work”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was clear to us that there was a real misunderstanding of real estate and what the business of an agent was. Everyone thought that real estate was like searching listings, what aggregators do. That's probably less than 5% of what an agent's business is. The agent business we started to realize when you ask agents what you want, none of them come back and say, I want a better consumer search. What they're saying is I want better marketing tools to market my listings. I want better marketing tools to market myself. I want a CRM so I can stay top of mind with my sphere of influence.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In agents are the ones that pay brokerage firms. They split a percentage of what they make with you. And so that clarity, which took us years to get. But that clarity helped us be very focused on creating value for the person that's paying us for agents, just asking them, tell us what you need to make you more successful, whether it's marketing, whether it's technology, what are the things that will help you either grow your business or have more time. Those are the two things that agents care the most about. More money or more time.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At first when he pivoted we were doing a little for the client and a little bit for the agent, but we realized at a certain point you have to choose a customer. You can't work for everyone. And who's your customer? Your customer is the person that pays you. Buyers and sellers don't pay brokerage firms. They pay agents.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He came on as our president at the time And we start off with one meeting, it was like a 15 minute meeting, and then we call him back and he brings for our second meeting his partner on his team. But the reason why I believe we were able to get him to come is he really wanted to create a better industry. The best people in the world don't move just for money. They move out of passion. He felt that real estate agents don't get the respect that they deserve and they don't get the investment that they deserve from their companies.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We convince him not with money. I mean, money is always part of it, but we convince him with vision, a vision of the impact that he could have on his industry, and that he would allow us to build a better company for agents that are coming after him. And so we knew that if he came, then other people would come that would give them the credibility with their clients. He did say yes, and he's really transformed the company since.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was working for another brokerage and I just literally called him out of the blue because every agent's phone numbers on the internet. And I said, hey, Leonard, my name is Robert Refkin. Would you be open to meeting with us and talking about coming on as a leader in the company we're building He said he was willing to meet. But then when he met, he said, like, absolutely not because we had no experience in real estate.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The biggest no at the time was there's no top agents there. And you need to have a top agent, or else your firm will never have credibility. I then asked all the agents that had told me, no, give me three names of the top agents that you respect the most. And there was only one person that every agent said that one of the top three most respected agents. It was a guy named Leonard Steinberg. Leonard was the number one agent in New York the prior year, having sold or put in contract $500 million in listings. And I knew that he was, if he came to Compass, then other agents would come.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we started by trying to hire rental agents, and I said we have all these engineers, we can build any technology that you want, come here and let's build this. We'll build the future of real estate together. And they basically told me in their nose what they wanted. And so whenever someone rejected us, they would tell us why. And then that why was what we know what I knew we had to do in order to get to a yes next time.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, people they had a vision for me I had a lot of empathy for their position. No, yeah. And these were friends. I love some of these people to this day. I don't take any of that personally.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over a third of the team left. It was really hard. And people wanted to change the world. And I was telling them, let's not reinvent the wheel, let's just make the wheel better. And that didn't align with a lot of people's dreams.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I came to the conclusion that real estate agents are central to the transaction and that real estate agents are not going away. There are two million of them in the country and that there's no great company that's working for them to help them realize more success. And it was a really large industry with $100 billion of revenue that agents produce every year where the incumbents, the brokerage firms aren't investing in research and development. to get better. And so it just felt like they're the customer, the agent is the most underserved customer out there. I kind of saw the lane and the opportunity to build for this huge customer base that no one else was building for.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're always going to be able to hire really talented people from outside the industry, great business people, great engineers, and we were able to raise a good amount of money. If we can just use those resources to help agents be more successful, won't we be successful? I said, yeah, absolutely. If we can just make agents more money, we'll make more money. And ever since, we just hired a bunch of traditional agents and ask them what they wanted to help them grow their business, realize their entrepreneurial potential, and that allowed us to be more successful by making them more successful.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they were very unhappy with me. One morning Ori was invited to a breakfast by one of the senior members of the team. He goes to breakfast and everyone is there on the senior team except me. And they basically tell him that they want to fire me. And Ori later on he takes me on a walk and he tells me what happened. He said, hey, let's think about this throughout the day. Let's have dinner tonight. I go home to my wife. I tell her, I think it's all over. They don't want me at the company anymore. And we talk for about an hour. At the end of it, she just tells me, bounce back, tell Ori why you have conviction in this new strategy. The new strategy was building for regular agents that are experienced and know what they're doing. And so we have dinner that night and I make the case. He says,”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I tell everyone that this isn't working and they didn't agree with me. They were saying things like, hey, don't give up on the vision. We could transform the industry. And I was never motivated just to transform the industry. I want to make things better. I didn't want to innovate and disrupt just for disruption's sake.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were giving the landlords guarantees in rent to get exclusive listings. And what we said is if we can't rent your property within 30 days, we'll pay the rent because we're so confident we're going to be able to rent it. And so we're going above and beyond for the landlords. And then for the renters, we were charging half off and even giving such extraordinary offerings on both the landlord side and on the renter side. Renters were not happy. When you really looked at the feedback and you look at the comments and the emails, you can see there is too much frustration. The way I knew that it wasn't working is I was listening to the customer. And the most consistent feedback is it was more complex and it took more work on their part than it would have otherwise.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So within about a year, just a little less than a year, I go to the team and I say this isn't going to work. And I felt it was the same thing from so many times before where you're going home every night and I'm just saying this isn't going to work. This isn't going to work. That same feeling I had at Goldman, the same feeling I had at McKinsey. This is all going to not work. What are we going to do?”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I would literally go to restaurants, try to find the nicest waiters and ask them if they would become neighbors specialists. And I'd go to the doormen and door woman at hotels and I'd say, hey, would you want to be a neighbor specialist?”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People that are best at doing that I could see were agents who had been doing it for ten years, not people that we hired from restaurants or hotels that were really, really nice and trying to train them to meet someone on a corner and show them property.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we raised $8 million, which was the largest seed financing round that year. And we raised it from three groups of people. Venture capital firms, real estate investors, and CEOs. We could see that each group was bringing more credibility to the other. So like the investors liked that the real estate developers were there because they made it feel like we knew what we were doing. The real estate developers liked that the technology investors were there because they felt like that meant that we were going to actually be able to build the technology that will transform the industry. The bad thing was we had no clarity of what the single thing we were trying to do was we're going to hire really talented people and make things better. And so everyone was going in different directions, better for some people meant bringing down price, better for other people meant creating scheduling software, better for other people meant having really, really nice neighborhood specialists that are trained on customer service. And we realize people they're looking to find an apartment that meets all their needs.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Knew my mom was an agent and I had worked through a little bit when I was younger. We didn't understand the way real estate worked. We didn't even know how much the commission really was. We didn't know anything. We were two complete outsiders and the idea was just let's make things better.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I saw this guy who had sold one company at Google, another company in Twitter, and I was like, this guy is a magician. I said, I need to work with him. If I ever do anything, I need to work with him. And he gave credibility to everything we're doing on the tech side. I knew I could hire the business people, but he would be able to hire the technology people.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I met Ori alone when I was a White House fellow at a conference called Academy of Achievement. He had just sold his first company to Google, and we just sat next to each other and we really connected and I sent him holiday cards every year afterwards and we stayed in touch.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we didn't know that it was an outlier at the time. The idea was no one liked any part of the process. It was too hard to find the home, it cost too much. And I sent out an email to everyone in my network and I said, quick question for a tech friend. If there was a problem that technology could solve, what would you want to solve? And maybe it was just my peer group, but the number one thing was finding an apartment in New York.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea was that we would focus on rentals in New York City. Our big, big dream at the time was we are going to make the process of renting a home wonderful for everybody. Pay them on salary not commissioned.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so then I go back to bio. I have this 10 page plan. I say, hey, bio, here's the plan. What do you think? It's a good plan. What do you think about me working for you? And he said, well, why don't you go do the plan? Want to create the company? I was like, Bio, I only did this so that I can work for you. You told me that as part of the interview process. And then he says, well, I think it's a good idea. And I told him, look, I can't do it. I'm getting married in a couple months. I'm going to have a kid. I can't afford to not have a real income. He said, how about this? I'll be your first investor. I'll give you $500,000. And if you fail in a year, I'll hire you. And just said, yeah, that's why I said, wow.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He says, Look, if you were my son, I would tell you to go start something. He says, How about this? You go, think of a really good business idea. Put a lot of effort into it. And I'll use that to evaluate how good you could be in this job. And it'll be part of the interview process. And so I go out and I put a lot of effort into this business plan. I had a friend named Ori alone who had sold a company to Google in another company to Twitter. And we just started talking about it. And the idea was what's an industry that's really, really big that the big companies, Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft aren't competing with. And it really came down to real estate and healthcare. And my mom's an agent. In real estate, so I was like, hey, let's do that.”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I call this donor up. His name's Bayo. He is the biggest donor to New York Needs You. And he had a big private equity fund called Global Infrastructure Partners. He said he was willing to meet with me, and as I sat down with him, and I told him I really wanted to work for him, and would he be open to interviewing me?”
2021-07-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Robert Reffkin: Compass · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT