Zach Aarons, MetaProp Co-Founder & GP on PropTech Investment

**Grace Gong** (0:02)
We are live. Hi, Zach. Welcome to Venture with Grace.

**Zach Aarons** (0:06)
Great to be on. Thanks for having me.

**Grace Gong** (0:08)
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I want to start with, I saw that you were the OG Senior Associate at ENIAC Ventures.
We have one of the founders on our pod before, so I feel like that's leading New York VC brand. Later on, you have worked at multiple different investing firms before co-funding your own MetaProp. Why don't we start with what were some core lessons that you've learned early on your career shaping into who you are today?

**Zach Aarons** (1:09)
Yeah. I think what I learned, I sought out the ENIAC team because at the time, they were doing vertical specific venture capital.
The vertical they were specializing in, and it's really interesting thinking about where we have come since then. This was about 2011
They were a mobile focused fund, and they had to pivot their messaging away from that because now everything is mobile. What does it mean to have a mobile? Over time, they've evolved their messaging, I think very successfully to be really one of the most impactful really early stage, mainly New York based, although they've always had a presence in San Francisco too, firms. And so I was in business school at the time, at Columbia Business School, which is where I met one of my partners, Zach Shorsman. And I really wanted to pursue this idea of investing in a particular category. And I was also working actively in the real estate development and property management business. I hadn't quite put together those pieces yet, but I knew I was intellectually curious about verticalized venture capital. And so, I sought them out. And, you know, it was a very, very small fund at the time. They didn't really have junior staff. I was one of two interns at ENIAC at the time. I was at Columbia Business School. And our friend Brian Long, who went on to start TapCommerce and Attentive Mobile, and now Adaptive Security. So he's become like a kind of legendary entrepreneur. He was the other sort of MBA associate intern at the time. And it was just the four founding ENIAC partners. And they all had sort of other gigs. They were really scrappy, you know.
So, it was a fantastic experience getting to do that at that time.

**Grace Gong** (3:42)
For sure.
I wonder, since you guys started the, I guess, investing journey from 10 years ago, why don't we talk about when you first started MetaProp, what kind of opportunity did you see? And obviously, you guys are primarily focusing on property tech. And then I also saw you guys invest in, for example, Attentive, which is a marketing company, or Acorn Finance, or the Showerhead Company as well. So, maybe we could talk about the thesis behind the firm, and what do you think is, in the early stage, you guys invest in Pre-C to Series A, maybe we could talk about the portfolio of construction as well, since I feel like property tech, whenever people think about it, it's related to whether it's warehouses, or Airmen B, or even construction tech. Maybe we could talk about the definition for you in terms of the word property tech.

**Zach Aarons** (4:42)
Yeah. I mean, we invest in companies that are financing, how the physical world gets built, ensuring, powering, designing, building. Everything that sits at those intelligence layers for real assets, that's what we're investing in.
What I love about what we do is, while it's, we call ourselves a verticalized, focused fund, we consider ourselves, and because of the network we built within, with limited partners and startups that operate within the built environment, whether it's real estate investors, developers, construction companies, building material supply, manufacturers and distributors, banks, and insurance companies, we have a differentiated value prop to our limited partners and also to the entrepreneurs we work with, where we can sort of connect the dots between the people who are working at the physical assets in some capacity. They could be a loan originator. They could be an insurance underwriter. They could be a property manager. They could be a plumber or an HVAC technician. We have unique insights into how that ecosystem has changed historically since we started the firm 10 years ago, and then how it's also going to change going forward.