Florian Hagenbuch and Mate Pencz - Everything Will Be Bought Online – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 37]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. Founder's Field Guide is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all of our podcasts including edited transcripts, show notes and resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:41)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Oshanose Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:06)
My guests today are Florian Hagenbuch and Mate Pencz, co-founders of Loft. Based in São Paulo, Brazil, Loft is a digital platform designed to bring Latin American real estate into the e-commerce age. The three-year-old startup scaled to over 150 million in annualized revenue in 2020 and is on track for multiples higher this year. We dive into the market opportunity in Brazilian real estate and how that differs from the US market, the value proposition for iBuying across the US and Latin American ecosystems, and touch on the potentials for Loft to expand from real estate into adjacent services such as mortgages.
Florian and Mate are second-time founders and have some great lessons shared throughout the episode. Please enjoy this great conversation with the founders of Loft.
So Florian and Mate, I'm so excited to talk about what you're building at Loft, but before we get into the company specifically, I think it's important to set the stage on a little background on the market in which you're operating and building. Florian, maybe you could begin by describing to me as you have elegantly before, why Latin America represents such an interesting market right now for this kind of company, for sort of technology modern companies more generally speaking, and that'll be great place to jump into what Loft is building and doing.

**Florian Hagenbuch** (3:21)
Yeah, likewise, Patrick, we're very excited to have the opportunity to chat with you, big fans of your work. I would set the stage by saying, Mati and I, we've been entrepreneurs in the region for about 10 years now.
The one thing that's attracted us here, and quite frankly, the second time around kept us in the region, was just this opportunity of building really potentially massive companies within the industries that we operate in. And so in our case, we're currently in the real estate industry. But due to some very interesting market dynamics, and among those, like a lower set of competitors, less VC funding in the spaces that technology companies operate in, we just believe a lot of the markets are still very much unoccupied by large incumbents, differently from the United States, where almost everywhere you look in every category, there's a clear and large leader.
And many times we feel US technology companies almost get forced into a niche of which they grow off of. It just happens that due to the US market structure and just sheer size, a lot of these niches very frequently are massive. So many times you don't even have to look much elsewhere. Whereas in Latin America, we feel there's just a like blue deep ocean of space for technology companies to explore. And in many ways, that's what's attracted us to the region and kept us here still.