"Pryzm.io" with Nick LaRovere and Matt Hawkins

Nick LaRovere and Matt Hawkins co-founded Pryzm.io seeking to simplify the process of buying a home via technology.

Highlights:

• Sal Daher Introduces Nick LaRovere and Matt Hawkins

• What Pryzm.io is Solving

• "... Nick and I are both technical co-founders. We love building things, and so we're really excited to actually have our product in the hands of our early agent partners here in Boston..."

• "... We take what is previously only agent-facing tooling, and we flip it around so that the consumer can really take charge of their own transaction. They can be empowered to work autonomously..."

• The Importance of Renter's Insurance

• "... real estate is a very congested space from technology perspective. What Pryzm is really trying to do is be that foundational information layer that the rest of the real estate experience can evolve from..."

• "... at Pryzm we are very much aware of where the opportunity for technology to help automate that space is, to understand documentation, to summarize documentation, to frame it, or repurpose it in useful ways that are understandable by somebody who hasn't read a full mortgage before, and that is very much part of the Pryzm experience..."

• How Pryzm.io Came to Be

• "... To make not just the entire ecosystem, but especially that consumer, that person who's really the core, the crux of the transaction, to have a better experience..."

• Parting Thoughts to the Audience

ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:

• Purdue University entrepreneurship

• Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson

Transcript of, “Pryzm.io”

Guests: Nick LaRovere and Matt Hawkins

Sal Daher: I'm really proud to say that the Angel Invest Boston podcast is sponsored by Purdue University entrepreneurship, and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson. Purdue is exceptional in its support of its faculty of its top five engineering school, in helping them get their technology from the lab out to the market, out to industry, out to the clinic. Peter Fasse is also a great support to entrepreneurs. He is a patent attorney specializing in microfluidics and has been tremendously helpful to some of the startups in which I'm involved, including a startup that came out of Purdue, Savran Technologies.

Sal Daher Introduces Nick LaRovere and Matt Hawkins

I'm proud to have these two sponsors for my podcast. Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting founders and angels. I'm Sal Daher, a host who is really interested in figuring out how to help founders get their technology startup off the ground, and I want to learn along the process. Anyway, today we are very privileged to have Nick LaRovere, the CEO, co-founder of Pryzm.io. Say hi, Nick.

Nick LaRovere: How's it going, Sal?

Sal Daher: Great. We also have his co-founder, Matt Hawkins, COO. Say hi, Matt.

Matt Hawkins: Happy to be here.

Sal Daher: Awesome. The founding team of Pryzm with a Y. P-R-Y-Z-M.io, what problem are you guys solving?

What Pryzm.io is Solving

Nick LaRovere: For the longest time, real estate transactions have been a decentralized, oftentimes fragmented experience spanning multiple stakeholders, taking several months to complete. That logic of the transaction being hyper-local and really living in the mind of agents, and that disparate experience can lead to, for consumers, for agents, for everyone involved, just a cognitive mess of an experience. Something that is overwhelming can lead to mistakes, can lead to delays, and so it's that problem that we're solving with Pryzm via a single central interface that is consumer focused, walks you through the transaction from end to end, and does so in partnership with the leading service providers you might need. Whether that's an agent, whether that's a lawyer, or whoever else you might need, we pull them all together into one place.

Sal Daher: Cool. Very, very interesting. Where do you get paid? What's your economic model?

Nick LaRovere: Certainly. We are technically a B2B2C company. We work with real estate agents who want to be the best in their space, who want to provide a better customer experience, who want to optimize their transactions so that they can do more transactions and ultimately reduce their cost, boost their revenues. We go to real estate agents, they pay us on a B2B SaaS basis. Through the real estate agents, they can then deliver the Pryzm product to the consumers, the clients that they're working with.

Sal Daher: Basically what you're doing is you're taking off a lot of the operational administrative burden that real estate brokers carry, and instead allowing them to be doing the stuff that they do as brokers, which is, interact with people, think about what properties might be of interest to someone, that kind of thing. The human stuff, which machines are not so good at. Very interesting, very good. Where are you right now in this journey?

Nick LaRovere: Matt, you want to take this one?

"... Nick and I are both technical co-founders. We love building things, and so we're really excited to actually have our product in the hands of our early agent partners here in Boston..."

Matt Hawkins: Absolutely. This has been so much fun. Nick and I are both technical co-founders. We love building things, and so we're really excited to actually have our product in the hands of our early agent partners here in Boston. Focusing on the rental workflows for young folks like us who are tech native, expecting seamless technology experiences. We actually have a product in people's hands right now. It's in live beta, so we're not generating revenue, really trying to get feedback. We've been working on this for about a year. Actually scrapped our first MVP around December timeframe. Completely redesigned the user experience, and we got a lot more positive feedback this time around. Really excited to hopefully see this helping close many deals this summer here in Boston.

Sal Daher: Oh, exciting. Right at the beginning.

Matt Hawkins: Exactly.

Sal Daher: You're hoping to have revenue pretty soon, at least some inkling of revenue.

Matt Hawkins: Yes, exactly right. There's so many transactions that happen in this city, and a lot of them happen in the summertime. When we think about where's the initial value that we can create, there's a lot of agents that are just spinning up a ton of business right now with people like us. We believe that getting this in the hands of the existing agent partners that we have can start proving out that business model, proving that concept that everybody wants to use this central interface. It may not be wildly profitable from the beginning just because of how much of the product we have scoped together and hacked together, but that's the fun part of being a startup, is prove that people want the concept, and then make it more efficient.

Sal Daher: Are you at liberty to disclose some of the partners that you're working with?

Matt Hawkins: Just because we haven't signed those types of agreements yet with them, I would just say that we are spanning the whole spectrum of tech-centric to non-tech native brokerages here in the Boston area, mostly that follow a franchise model. We did hypothesize that some of the more independent brokerages would be good early target candidates, but based on the initial customer profile of younger, more tech-friendly, or tech-centric agents, we're going with the more franchise-type brokerages here in the Boston area.

Sal Daher: Good to know.

Nick LaRovere: I would posture that we are working with leading real estate agents across the Boston area right now. Not getting into specific names, but anyone from agents at a Compass to a Sotheby's to an Engel & Völkers, some of these leading names who are really shaping the Boston real estate ecosystem. Those are some of the early agents that we're working with in beta right now. We are finding great traction with them. Again, similar to what you said earlier Sal, that they are people first, they are connectors, networkers in the space. They want to focus on that side, the real value add aspect of a real estate agent, but the paperwork side of rentals take just as much work as a buy-and-sell workflow. We want to be able to automate a lot of that experience, help walk their consumer through. That's some of the initial results that we're finding from the beta and from the experience that we're having so far.

Sal Daher: Very good, Nick. I'm seeing my daughter and her husband have a place in Somerville. They're right now looking, I think they found a place, but just the mechanics of doing the whole thing, it's just so cumbersome. I see that there's a lot of room for improvement. I'm in the multifamily space myself, and with a partner, I own a few properties, but it's a different clientele. It's perhaps a less tech-intensive clientele. Reasonably young, but not as tech-intensive. Still, I can see potential there for improvements in the whole workflow and everything. Recently, or I should say two years ago, we got onto Buildium to help us manage the buildings. That's been a big, big help. That space, there's a lot to be done there.

Nick LaRovere: Yes.

Sal Daher: Very good. Is there anybody else who's trying to do this in your space?

"... We take what is previously only agent-facing tooling, and we flip it around so that the consumer can really take charge of their own transaction. They can be empowered to work autonomously..."

Nick LaRovere: There's a cornucopia of other players out there. Looking even at some of the elephant in the room, Zillow has their own solution called Dotloop, which is this transaction management solution. Others like Redfin, or other players out there like Brivity are also building these really agent-focused tools. What we found with a lot of that competition out there, whether from these large players in the room to even the upstarts, is that so much of their technology is just focused on the agent. That actually does a disservice to the agent and the consumer in particular because although the agent's workflows might be somewhat optimized, they then need to go back and translate all that information to the consumer.

It doesn't really save them the time that they should. It doesn't really improve the consumer experience like it should. Ultimately, that leads to just an all-round inefficient process. I think one of our big differentiators is that we like to say we flip the screen around. We take what is previously only agent-facing tooling, and we flip it around so that the consumer can really take charge of their own transaction. They can be empowered to work autonomously. Then work with their agent in a much more optimal and efficient way.

Sal Daher: You're seeking to optimize the whole workflow and not just the agent side of things for the user experience. Very interesting.

Matt Hawkins: I'll just add to that. I think, Sal, what we see is that there has been a ton of investment in these new-age technologies going into real estate, but they've been very specific to a particular stage of that workflow.

Sal Daher: Ah, okay.

Matt Hawkins: You think of what happens with, say, renters insurance. I think Lemonade is a big player in the space that automates the renter's insurance space, but that's just one of many steps that somebody goes through. What we think about with Pryzm is that when you're getting to that stage, if you want to work with a Lemonade, we'll integrate directly with them so that you can seamlessly go into a Lemonade and come back in and work with those types of companies, so that you the consumer, you the agent can see that process all the way through. We really see ourselves as an integration opportunity for all of these major service providers that add a ton of value, but maybe only address a small portion of the consumer experience.

The Importance of Renter's Insurance

Sal Daher: Matt Hawkins, thank you for bringing up renter's insurance. As an example, one of the things that people focus on, it's a little bit of a sore topic for me as a property owner because it's really hard to get tenants to buy a renter's insurance. It's not that expensive. Tenants don't understand that if, for some reason, the landlord is not able to provide occupancy of the property, as has happened with us-- We had a major flood in the building, and the 10 units were put out of service. We couldn't have people occupying them, they were under construction, and so forth.

We placed those 10 tenants in some vacant properties we had elsewhere. Not very convenient for them. They didn't stay long, but at least they had a place to go, but the landlord has no obligation to find a place for replacement if there's a force majeure problem. This is where renter's insurance comes in. Yes, Lemonade is the big name in that. I just wish tenants would understand more easily that when the sun is shining, nobody needs insurance, but when things start dark, it's important. They've certainly done a good job there. There's a lot to be done in the space. Nick, by the way, please give the transcriber the spelling of your name.

Nick LaRovere: Sure, this is Nick N-I-C-K, LaRovere, L-A-R-O-V-E-R-E. Sal, you're absolutely right. That's one thing that we are seeing with Pryzm is that we can actually raise the floor of a transaction experience whether rental, buy or sell. Really, not just suggesting, but enforcing some of these best practices. Directly having, in our guided workflow, a suggestion to get rental insurance. With just a couple of clicks, you can set that up to easily connect a mortgage.

Sal Daher: A very powerful explanation is, if there's a problem with the building, and you can't stay there, your landlord doesn't have an obligation to find another place to stay, you're going to end up in a hotel or something, and you're going to be paying out of your own pocket unless you have insurance.

Nick LaRovere: Definitely.

Sal Daher: We put people in hotels until we could get them to the apartments we paid out of our own pocket, but we were not legally bound to do that. Not every landlord is going to do that.

Nick LaRovere: Thank you for doing that as well, by the way.

Sal Daher: [chuckles] What a mess.

Matt Hawkins: Sal, I'll just leave a breadcrumb for the audience here. When you think about those types of got-you moments, what that could scale to at the national level, what it means for the housing economy, when those types of traps are not visible to the consumer, regardless of their stage of income and what they can afford, what we really believe with Pryzm is eliminating that type of information asymmetry. We fully believe that the real estate in the housing economy can be a lot more transparent and sustainable, I think for the rest of the economy as well.

I'm really glad you brought that up. Obviously, that's a longer conversation, bigger picture vision, but that's really what motivates us here at Pryzm is to solve those types of problems.

Sal Daher: I don't mean to brag. It's not that we have such virtuous landlords. It's, we happen to have properties that were available that we could put people into. This is the middle of COVID, and we had some vacancies. It can happen that someone has an entire building that's not a-- Then it overwhelms them. They don't have the capacity to do it. Don't fool around if you're a tenant. Get your renter's insurance.

Matt Hawkins: [chuckles] Yes.

Sal Daher: Plus it covers stuff in your apartment, which the landlord's policy does not. It's a funny thing. I remember I was on the board of a building here, a condo association, and their policy covered stuff that came into the external walls of the building of your unit. The internal walls and everything inside the walls was all the renter's insurance had to cover that. Anyway, further thoughts on Pryzm.

"... real estate is a very congested space from technology perspective. What Pryzm is really trying to do is be that foundational information layer that the rest of the real estate experience can evolve from..."

Matt Hawkins: Sorry, Nick. I'll go first on that. Just to continue what I was saying earlier, real estate is a very congested space from technology perspective. What Pryzm is really trying to do is be that foundational information layer that the rest of the real estate experience can evolve from. As we go through this launch here in Boston, folks can feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn. We'll get that information out to you, but we want a partner. We recognize that we can't build in a vacuum. We can't capture the value of the consumer experience in a vacuum.

We want a partner. There are so many areas where this process can be more optimized in the future. That's why Nick and I are really excited to both be on this podcast and be building. Nick, did you also have something you wanted to add?

Nick LaRovere: Yes. I think one other point of conversation that's interesting to bring up is how regulation will continue to shape real estate. One thing that we've been keenly aware of is some of the class action lawsuits that could really change the real estate commission space. One of them, for example, it's challenging that, to backtrack for a moment, in real estate today on a buy or sell transaction, the seller actually pays the commission of both their agent; the seller's agent, and the buyer's agent. For a long time, that has been the way it has.

It has hidden the cost of that agent fee from the buyer, but this class action lawsuit is challenging that. It has some real momentum, and with that, that could start to shift the commission space such that the buyer is now responsible for paying their own agent fee. You're going to have a lot of buyers that are already making these huge downpayments, really putting their life savings on the line to make the largest transaction of their life, having to then shell out or payout for a real estate agent as well. In that type of scenario, the differentiation between agents is going to get greater and greater.

If a buyer is going to select an agent and pay that, in addition to their down payment, they're going to really want the best agent. We see that as an opportunity for agents to partner with someone like a Pryzm to really provide, for a first-time home buyer, this guided, heavily positive experience to make sure that they're getting every cent's worth of what they're paying for. We're just excited to continue to watch that and support our clients, our customers, the consumers through that transition.

Sal Daher: Yes, I think there's a lot of room for a platform that informs the buyer and the seller better, has better coordination because right now the workflow is basically dominated by lawyers. You get these enormous forms that you have to sign. Then they have to add the thing up, and then you've got to sign another one. Then there's this disclosure, and so forth. I was present when my parents got a mortgage back circa 1967. I swear. They were four pages, five pages, it was the mortgage. Then there was a form for the deed, and it was five pages.

Then years later, they refinanced the mortgage. This is maybe like 20 years later, and so this is like '87 or '90. It was already a pretty thick stack like 50 pages, 100 pages. Then more recently, I've seen my daughter, which it's like a whole pile of paper, and it just keeps going and going and going. It's there's no end, and so it's really hard for the consumer to understand what's going on, what the heck is all this paper. I think there's a lot of room to apply UX, UI here and just polish that to make it understandable and make it work easily. Tremendous. Do you have any other thoughts that you want to address this audience on Pryzm?

"... at Pryzm we are very much aware of where the opportunity for technology to help automate that space is, to understand documentation, to summarize documentation, to frame it, or repurpose it in useful ways that are understandable by somebody who hasn't read a full mortgage before, and that is very much part of the Pryzm experience..."

Matt Hawkins: I got a quick one, Nick, while you think yours out. I saw you talk about these mountains of paperwork and trying to clean up the valuable information. I'll just say that at Pryzm we are very much aware of where the opportunity for technology to help automate that space is, to understand documentation, to summarize documentation, to frame it, or repurpose it in useful ways that are understandable by somebody who hasn't read a full mortgage before, and that is very much part of the Pryzm experience.

Sal Daher: Here's an idea, you take some massive, massive disclosure, and then you say, "Would you like to have GPT-4 interpret this for you?" Why GPT-4, not your own? Because then you're pushing the liability off on GPT-4. You're providing this facility that will send this text to GPT-4, it'll come back to you with a one-paragraph explanation of what this thing says. Imagine that.

Matt Hawkins: We asked that question a lot, so we'll just nod our heads to that point.

Sal Daher: Yes. Nick.

Nick LaRovere: Yes, no, I would just echo that. First, I would echo that we've explored that API, the GPT API, and are very excited about the potential for large language models in this space and in spaces, in general. A little side note, I'm also a songwriter. I grew up playing music, [laughter] and I've been impressed with GPT's ability to even write song lyrics about Pryzm and about our team with just a short little prompt.

Sal Daher: I have a friend whose name will not be mentioned here. He's a founding member of artificial intelligence, and he is so excited about these large language models that he's always sending me stuff. He's got a chat thread going, and he's always sending me some poem that's been created by GPT-4. We have regular exchanges about this because it's so fascinating.

Nick LaRovere: Absolutely.

Sal Daher: One of these days we'll actually do an informed conversation with a couple of experts in AI about this. Very good. Perhaps what I can do is, right now, I'd like to do a brief promo for this particular podcast. Then let's get into your individual journeys to becoming founders and how Pryzm.io came to be.

Nick LaRovere: Would love that.

Sal Daher: Let's do that. Now, the promo for the podcast is important. It's just basically a talk about algorithms. We live by the algorithm of the podcast platform. They show people the content that they think might be of interest to them. A way of getting the algorithm to catch attention is very simple. It's just to do a rating, we like five-star ratings, and also to do a written review. It doesn't have to be very long, a few lines. It doesn't have to be effusive praise. It could be criticism, it could be suggestions, or whatever, but that someone took the time to write something, and that they did a five-star rating, that promotes the particular podcast.

A podcast launches on a Wednesday at 1:30 in the morning. If a review shows up a day later, because they're always like 24 hours after you do a review, that's when it shows up, that episode gets a lot more views. The back book also gets more views. That podcast gets featured because the algorithm also privileges the most recent podcast. My podcast is not a timely podcast. It's not about the news. It's about stuff that, two years from now, this could be an interesting conversation still. Anyway, that's how the algorithm is rigged. You guys, when the podcast launches in August, you should do the same. Anyway, let's turn this conversation here as to how you guys got to become founders. Nick, explain your journey to founding Pryzm.io.

How Pryzm.io Came to Be

Nick LaRovere: Sure. There's two tracks that I want to go down here. The first is my experience with real estate, and then the second is my experience working with Matt and our other teammate, Justin. The first point I'll make is just on real estate. I grew up in a Boston-based family, the LaRovere family, and my dad really worked his way through the real estate world. He started as a laborer on the ground really building homes, doing public works. He's been just an entrepreneurial inspiration for me, how he has taken that start and built it into this real estate contractor in the greater Boston area.

I grew up around that. I grew up around an entrepreneur's DNA, a real estate DNA, seeing the ins and outs of real estate construction, investment, property management. It was through his push that I became a licensed real estate salesperson in Massachusetts. I got that in college on a weekend, on a whim, and really just found it fascinating, all of the space, how real estate development can completely rework and reshape an area. Through that I just followed, this is one of my big things in life, just followed the hunch, followed the intuition, so I just kept going deeper.

I did an internship at CBRE. I worked for a couple different prop-tech companies. I actually ended up getting a little frustrated, I think, with the status quo of how real estate was done today. Some of the same inefficiencies that we found with Pryzm, and so I delved even deeper on the technology side. I, long story short, pivoted, moved to become a software engineer. I was a software engineer at Palantir Technologies for three years, who recently IPOed.

Sal Daher: Oh.

Nick LaRovere: I kept coming back to real estate. I kept hitting these pain points, especially as a renter. Then like a lot of people over COVID, I bought a home. I had a great real estate agent, one of the leading agents in his area, but the process was still painful. It was like another full-time job. I was pulling my hair out. I was staying up late. I was stressing out about it to Matt and everyone I could talk to. That was my experience buying, selling. I hit the same pain point. Where that comes to with Pryzm is, Matt and Justin and I, we all went to Colby College together up in Maine, and we'd been building projects together ever since then. I think Matt and I, our first entrepreneurial endeavor was a pillow fight on campus that we organized, like a 200-person pillow fight for finals week, just to relieve stress.

[laughter] We've been building, we've been hashing on ideas ever since then. These are guys that I trust to the bone. We've just been building for so long together that, long story short, Matt and I were on a ski trip last March up at Killington, Vermont. It was there that I was selling my home at the time, and it was continuing to hit so many of these pain points and was actually having to take calls to a plumber and to my real estate agent from the chairlift. I've been deep in work, I've been super stressed out, and here I am on a vacation still trying to manage this process, like a full-time job.

Sal Daher: It is absolutely endless, yes, I can imagine. [laughs]

"... To make not just the entire ecosystem, but especially that consumer, that person who's really the core, the crux of the transaction, to have a better experience..."

Nick LaRovere: Yes. It was actually there, over a Italian chicken parm dinner, that Matt and I really first sketched out, on a notebook, the concept for Pryzm. It's now a year later, we've continued to hash on this, iterate on this, really talk to people to see if their experience is the same. Now, yes, we are Pryzm, we have a product in market, we're raising our next round of financing, and we're just absolutely still enthralled by this problem that I've been seeing my entire life and continually motivated to solve. To make not just the entire ecosystem, but especially that consumer, that person who's really the core, the crux of the transaction, to have a better experience.

Sal Daher: Yes, this is a space that is so vast, and so dysfunctional that three smart co-founders, you're going to figure out some way to create something that makes it better. I'm very optimistic that if you guys work at it long enough-- Basically, the reason most startups fail is that people give up. If you're really, really committed to making the thing work, you can find the exact pain point and then you do enough iterations, and then you find it. Believe me, it's for the young because old people cannot do the contortions like the cat jump. They can't do what cats do.

They go up in the air and they turn around, and they land on their feet. Old people will land on their backs and then they break the backs, and then they are lame. [laughter] This weekend, I was at a friend's house, and a couple of these Brazilian guys who are trying to get into the real estate development business, they're successful handymen who bought a few properties. They're very good on the construction side of things. They know how to do that, and they're up in New Hampshire. I'm telling them, "Look, stay close to what you know.

Don't try to go in development. Try to redevelop a property that might have been run down, and then you fix it, and you stabilize it, and then you rent it out." It's a mature industry. The developers, the people who are buying land, they know exactly, exactly how to make it. How much they can pay, how much of a hassle they're going to have with approvals, and all this stuff. It is skewed in favor of older people with experience. It's skewed in favor of gray hair. If this were a technology venture, young guys like them, then you had got all the advantage because you can do the iteration's iteration.

You can try this and try that. Then you're going to stumble on the solution that actually works. My friend and mentor in angel investing, who's invested in hundreds and hundreds of startups, Michael Mark, he's the first person that I interviewed for the podcast.

Nick LaRovere: Wow.

Sal Daher: [laughs] You're not going to find him anywhere else on the internet except on the podcast because he's publicity's shy. He's a wealthy man. He doesn't need the exposure, but he did a favor for me to be on the podcast. At that point, he'd invested in 200 startups. I asked him, "Michael, of those 200, how many actually went according to their original business plan?" Thought about it, "None." Then he said, "Oh, no, no, no, one. There was 1 out of 200 actually went according to the business plan. Everybody else had to pivot and pivot and figure out." You guys are exactly in a great space with a great background. Matt, tell me your vision of the elephant.

Matt Hawkins: Sure.

Sal Daher: Touching this large thing there, so describe the elephant for me.

Matt Hawkins: I first got trampled by the elephant when my parents were trying to sell their home during the height of COVID. They have a very strong relationship, but I have never seen it at a more tense point than when they were trying to coordinate the sale of a house. Not just from a, who's going to take this task, who's going to go to the bank, who's going to get the lawyer on board? It was also the negotiation process was very emotional too. Our agent, thankfully, was able to provide that emotional support as well as transaction management support.

Sal Daher: Oh. Oh.

Matt Hawkins: I got a taste for that and I was like, "I don't want to do this again." Okay, cool, we got some capital gains on the home, but was it worth it? We'll let that play out, but at the time, I was working in the defense industry actually. My background is mechanical engineering. I'd always geeked out around airplanes and was really enthralled by the experience of flight. I thought it was a really cool human experience and really dug into that. I actually found my way into working into the defense space, working in national security, working with the Department of Defense. You talk about industries that are very bureaucratic and very set in that way.

Sal Daher: Ossified, yes.

Matt Hawkins: Right. I got to see where the opportunities for innovation emerged in that space. It really forced me to take a systems mindset in the products that we were building, in the networks we were building, both human and technological. Then, like Nick said, when we were on the ski trip, I've hit this point where I was like, "Wait, there's a systems approach to this that has not been taken yet to think about where's the value that needs to be added, who are the players involved, and what's the technological solution? Let's put that together."

It just so happened that at the time I was working in a technological concept that was sort of similar; taking operators who are not necessarily on the same team, not necessarily collecting the same data, but needing to share that in a common space so they could have an optimal mission and run it through completion in a timely manner with shared information and shared intelligence. I thought, okay, that's a bit of a stretch but that applies to real estate too because the lawyers-

Sal Daher: Oh, yes, sure.

Matt Hawkins: -need to know what data the agent is looking at, and the consumer needs to know what the agent is going to [crosstalk]

Sal Daher: Every transaction is like a mission.

Matt Hawkins: Exactly. Right?

Sal Daher: Yes.

Matt Hawkins: Then I was like, "Why Matt? Why that problem?" Nick and I had talked about business ideas for 10 years, why this problem? What it came back to was the mission. I got really enthralled with national-scale problems in working for the defense industry. Then when I looked at the solution space, I fully trust the company that I was working with, with that space to innovate in the direction they need to go, but as I think we can all agree, the home front is also struggling with a lot of problems. I looked at the housing economy and the sense of-

Sal Daher: Oh, no doubt.

Matt Hawkins: -anxiety that my generation has, and I thought, "Hey, maybe there's an opportunity to go solve some problems here that can be solved right now." That's how I emotionally came around to this idea. Then I'll say, Nick told the story of how we got to the idea, but how we decided to go on this as a founding team was, the co-founder relationship is a lot like a marriage. As part of that ski trip, what Nick omitted was that it was a powder day. We got a late start to the mountain. I'm a powder guy, so I missed out on the powder. About halfway up the chair, Nick was like, "Hey, Matt, I know, I can tell you're a little tense. Let's talk this out." Of course, it's like with a marriage, communication is key. I realized if Nick and I can have this conversation, we can run a company. We can do anything together. That was it for us, and ever since it's been an incredible journey.

Sal Daher: Solving those problems.

Matt Hawkins: Yes, exactly. From big to small. Tons of fun. That's my story.

Sal Daher: [laughs] That's amazing. Talking about how ossified the aerospace and the defense industry is, it brings to mind an investment that I made years ago. It was really interesting technology. Could have helped in the jet engine business. It's like one little aspect of jet engines. Then at a crucial point that this company's technology could have been really helpful, they were basically going to be creating a form for a part and so forth. They ran into an obstacle that they needed to have a surety bond for $500 million.

Matt Hawkins: Oh, wow.

Sal Daher: It was, how's a startup going to come up with a surety bond for $500 million? The whole system is so-- Because of the stakes, I can understand if a part fails, an airline is going to crash. It's very, very high consequence. Those are areas where innovation is extremely slow. It's a wonder that innovation breaks through at all. [laughs] You describe yourself as a process engineer, right, Matt?

Matt Hawkins: Yes. Systems architect, process engineer, all runs through the same challenges.

Sal Daher: I have a son-in-law who does that but in the life sciences in the pharmaceutical industry.

Matt Hawkins: Oh, awesome. Big problems to solve there too.

Sal Daher: Tell us about your third co-founder.

Nick LaRovere: Sure. Justin is another mule, that's the mascot of Colby. He's not only one of our best friends, but just a brilliant, brilliant mind. Justin is bringing expertise from both the finance and the venture capital space. He was a banker at Citibank for I think about five years. He got his MBA. He was working for a venture capital firm for a while as both someone on their investment committee as well as an operator. I think he's someone who has worked very closely with startups and understands a lot of the ins and outs of both financing and more of that numbers side of the business.

He's really helped, I think, accelerate our abilities there. He's also just a great strategic mind for us to bounce ideas off of for us to continue to shape this product moving forward. Like Matt was saying with the marriage side of this, he's undoubtedly someone that we trust, we love, and are so excited to keep building with.

Sal Daher: That is awesome, to have a team that you can-- The single most well-supported result from a study of entrepreneurship is that more founders better.

Matt Hawkins: That's interesting

Sal Daher: I have those records from the mouth of Ed Roberts, and his PhD student, Chuck Eesley, who was a professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford. Ed is Emeritus at MIT Sloan. They say that statistically significant improvement in chances of success up to the third founder, it's important that the founders be on the same wavelength in terms of workstyle, ethics, and all that, but be complementary in personalities, skills. They shouldn't be all really great salespeople. [laughs] Three co-founders who are brilliant salespeople altogether, and there's nobody who can do anything technical, or three technical guys and three technical women who are tremendous in the lab but can't do anything outside the lab. It has to be some complementarity of skills, but commonality of values, shared values.

That is the secret of success because founding startups is extremely hard. Previous interview that I did to this, though it's not necessarily the one I was going to launch right before this, is with Gloria Kolb. She founded her startup, Elidah, with her husband, who she met at Johnson & Johnson. You compare this to a marriage, but in reality, the investing world really frowns on husband and wife teams. They don't like husbands because they think, "Oh, it's too easy for them to fall out, and then it becomes a mess, and so forth." I've seen two tremendously successful husband and wife teams.

One is Gloria, and the other one is Dave of Voice.com. He and his wife are married co-founders. The idea that you can have disagreements, you can work over problems, like missing out on the powder, and then not being able to handle that like civilized people and not throwing a temperature, that gives some hints that you can overcome, although you're going to have slightly bigger problems than missing out on powder.

[laughter]

Matt Hawkins: Yes, it was the communication style that worked. It was the proof that we could talk it out.

Sal Daher: For people not in New England, powder is freshly fallen snow that's dry and not wet. It's greatly priced here because we get it so seldomly. In New England, it's pronounced powder. The problem in New England is that it gets extremely cold, but it also sometimes thaws out. There's a January thaw and this, and then you get ice. It's, you get snow and then you get ice. Most of New England skiing is about being on edge with ice so that when you get a fresh powder day you can't miss it. I understand you guys. It's not like in the West we have powder all the time high enough to do with skiing.

Good. All right. As we think about wrapping up this podcast, think about what parting thoughts you want to leave with this audience of, I would say one-third of the number are angel investors because angels are fewer. The other two-thirds are founders and people who are thinking about starting companies. What thoughts would you like to leave with our audience? Nick. Go ahead, Nick.

Parting Thoughts to the Audience

Nick LaRovere: One parting thought that we have for others thinking about this space is a call to arms. We want to galvanize other founders or folks who want to, whether it's joining Pryzm, as a new teammate, or as an investor who wants to be involved with this, we see this problem of housing and finding housing as something that is affecting every demographic, every race, everyone across this country and across the world, whether it is housing supply, or not feeling like you have control over your life or your transactions. This is something that is an international cause.

We are early right now, we are a founding team looking to grow, and so if you are a founder, an investor, a teammate, someone who wants to get involved, definitely reach out. You can find us on LinkedIn, Twitter. Just reach out and don't sit back. It's, I think we as a country, as a society, we have an opportunity to really take action and shape the future the way that we want to. That's been one of my biggest joys as a founder has been what feels like stepping from the sidelines into the arena to actually make change, so, take action.

Sal Daher: Tremendous. Any thoughts, Matt?

Matt Hawkins: I do. I have lots of thoughts. This has been such an awesome conversation. I just want to loop this into the broader perspective of where technology is in the world, what the value add is to the human experience. There's a lot of companies out there that are saying, "Hey, work with us. We're going to optimize your email time management," or, "We're going to help you optimize your calendar." Things that are nice and helpful for some, but we really want to be a part of the conversation of, what is the housing experience. We know that everybody feels great when they finally get to sit back on their couch and say, "Wow, I'm glad we got through that."

I think right now most people say, "Jeez, that was a doozy. I don't want to do that again for a while." We want that narrative to be different. I also think when it comes to building technology, in today's day and age, one, we're in an interesting spot with the economy coming out of COVID in terms of what we've been able to automate, what we've been able to take remotely, but also with this boom, that's happening in artificial intelligence in the social sector. Technologically, it's been around for a bit, but it's really hitting mainstream. People are asking, "Am I going to lose my job?

What's going to be the human experience? What's going to be the future of human interaction?" When we think about what Pryzm can do, we want to augment the human experience. We want to take away that paper pushing, we want to take away that confusion with documentation, with process logic, and really be able to emphasize the emotional side of this, the success when you feel like you've completed a deal for your client, the relief when you finally get your home sold or you get to sit in your new living room. We want to make beneficial technology for that movement. We don't want to just replace jobs. Nick, and I want Pryzm to be a part of that conversation as beneficial technology for a much brighter future from where we are today. That's my final thought.

Sal Daher: Tremendous. Gentlemen, I thank you very much for being on the Angel Invest Boston podcast. Nick LaRovere, thank you. CEO, co-founder. Matt Hawkins, COO and co-founder. Thanks for being on the Angel Invest Boston podcast.

Nick LaRovere: Thank you, Sal. It's been our honor and looking forward to keeping the conversation going.

Matt Hawkins: Thank you, Sal.

Sal Daher: Tremendous. Thanks for listening. This is Sal Daher.

I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.

[music]