Adam Neumann: This is How You Build Iconic Companies

He said, Adam, tell me how you're doing. And I jumped straight into my lessons learned and this had an answer. And you were like, oh, you're still in that stage? And we don't know each other, but I was like, well, Mark, please tell me what that stage is. He goes, you know, the stage when you forgot everything you did and believe everything that was written about you. It's a stage that will pass.

What happens when a founder follows a single powerful idea across decades, refining, evolving, and reimagining it at every step? Our guest on The Ben and Mark Show is Adam Neumann. founder and CEO of Flow, and someone whose vision for how we live has remained remarkably consistent. Community, connection, and belonging at scale. In this conversation, Adam shares the personal informative experiences

that have shaped his thinking and why Flow is more than just a real estate company. It's a full stack approach to redesigning residential living. Ben and Mark dig into the origins of their partnership with Adam, the architecture behind Flow's vertically integrated model,

and what it means to build a company where the product is the experience. This episode is about long-term vision, systems thinking, and building for how we actually want to live. Let's get into it. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund.

Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com forward slash disclosures. Adam, welcome to the Ben and Mark show. I'm glad we have another head of hair on the podcast. That's a very brave thing to say. We were just talking at lunch about how some entrepreneurs have many ideas.

But Adam, you have one idea that you've been refining over your life, just getting it better and better and better. So why don't we go back from the beginning and talk about your background and how you can find a thread to how that led to Flow today. I was born in Israel. And my parents got divorced when I was eight. My parents are both doctors. And we moved 13 times in my childhood. So I remember moving from community to community, from place to place. And what generated all the moves?

First of all, I think in Israel, being a doctor, because such a small place, you study in one place, you fill in another, then you go from one thing to the other. So I think that generated about three of them. Then my parents divorced, generated another one. I think my mother could not stand to be in the same country as my dad, at least for two years, which actually pushed us, which not a lot of people know about it. I lived in Indiana, Indianapolis. I was a Hoosier.

For two years, I went to Pacers games and saw the Indy 500 and learned about the three S's. So those were some of the moves. But the other one, my mom, and she's actually comfortable speaking about it, she's bipolar and she's an oncologist and she's very good at her craft.

But being an oncologist and also having the mood swings, she would fight very hard for her patients. And no matter what happened, if you're my mom's patient, she would go to work, including with the head of the hospital, to fight for you. And Israel has this medical basket and not everything is included. And some people could afford things, some people couldn't. And she was always finding a way to get people the best treatments she could.

But because she was such an excellent doctor, whenever one head of hospital had enough with her, there was always two other heads of hospital ready to recruit, which is something we know about great talent. Great talent always finds a home. So I think that led to a lot of those moves. But for me as a kid, I think for kids, moving is a very difficult thing. I think it's good because I think it makes us stronger, but I also think it's difficult.

And when you enter a new community as a new kid, you have no friends, and you always find yourself looking. Who are you going to be with? And I used to be attracted, also they were the only ones who would have me, to the uncool kids. So I was the ones who were a little different.

And so I would get to a new place. I already knew my place. I'd go immediately to the different kids. And my thing in life was I would befriend them. We would become great friends. Then I would make my way into the social structure of whatever community I went to. And I would bring with me... Those kids, that was my big winning moment. The toughest community I ever went to was when I lived in the kibbutz.

And for those of you who don't know, that's also where I live the most. And a kibbutz is where it's almost like a commune. The kids live together. In our kibbutz, they stopped it, but a lot of them live together from age 2 to 18. They go to their parents for dinners and they spend the weekends, but there are more kids than not kids. And they were so tightly put together that I was the hardest group to connect to. But also, I think the place that affected me the most sort of...

shaped me with what I think about community and about together and once you do become part of that community my mom was a doctor she would come home very late at night she would be on call sometimes there was a whole community taking care of my sister and I

Oh, wow. And then, you know, as you grew up and got into the world and so forth, like what did those early experiences teach you about community living, how people... exist together, that led to the vision that started as we work and then is now flow.

So, first of all, I think there are multiple kinds of communities. There are great communities when a group of people gets together to build something greater than themselves. And then there are communities, which we've seen, I think, more and more of.

where there you get to a mob mentality and sometimes that momentality actually balances to the lowest common denominator yeah luckily enough the kibbutz and the communities i was experiencing were actually the kind where people come together to do something greater and It really made me feel that there is more happiness, more fulfillment, more things to do. It's a better way of living.

when you're surrounded by other people. Especially for me, because my childhood was difficult. So I said about my mom, so she would take amazing care of her patients. But I think by 8 p.m., and it was a very long day, and she would come home, and my sister and I, we only had one chore.

We just had to wash the dishes. We never did. We never did one thing. She just wanted us to come. Because I felt, because I used to walk my sister home from school and I would make the meal and I did a lot of other things that were important, but they weren't considered a chore. The chore was you wash the dishes and my mom would come home and the dishes weren't washed and many times those dishes would start flying and a lot of times end on the floor.

Or everywhere, actually, in the house. So that was very extreme as a kid. And I remember the day once my mom, we didn't have a lot of money also growing up, as well as the social medical system. So doctors don't earn a lot at all. So we always, I remember growing up.

it was always either we're at zero or an overdraft. So I grew all my life where you're negative or you can make it back to zero. And when you don't make it back to zero enough times, you get a call from the bank and then you call grandma.

When grandma helps a little bit, and then things go back to zero and down to negative. And I remember one time where my mom bought this new set of dishes. And she comes home, and again, the same fight, and she starts throwing the dishes. But my sister didn't notice. Not the ones you just bought, only the other ones. It started telling us that there was some method to the madness. So it was very difficult back then. And then living in a community always made it better.

And no matter what happened at home, no matter how tough the night was, the next morning everything was okay. And there were neighbors and they heard and things happened. Always people were looking out for us.

I also remember, and we were just at your father's memorial on Sunday, which was very moving. And I learned a lot about him. And you said that Mark Twain quote there, I think you said something like, when I was 14, I thought my... father didn't know anything and by the time i became 21 he learned so much yeah i think for me i could really relate to that because as a kid i always focus about the fact that my mom was so difficult with us but as i got older

I'm married today with six kids and started having my own kids and realized how difficult it is when everything is great and you have access to everything and can get very difficult. I realized that for my mom to be a single mom, a doctor,

Dealing with my personality, which now I see it in my kids, which must have not been easy. It's a lot of personality to deal with. I actually think that in hindsight... what i thought was a challenge was actually exactly what made me who i am today i think as i was building businesses it was never tougher than when i was a kid so there was nothing that could happen that was that bad

And I think sort of, because I do want to make a difference in the world and I do want to make it a better place, I think comes from her and from how she took care of all those patients. And in hindsight, I love the childhood that we had. So all of that led me to the Israeli army.

where I became a Navy officer, where anybody who knew me would have never guessed, because you need a lot of discipline. And I think something nice about going to the Army, it forces discipline. Because either you're going to be disciplined or you're going to be in trouble.

Yeah, so the big punishment in the Israeli army at the beginning is you don't get to go home on the weekend because Israel is so small. As opposed to the U.S., you serve in the Navy, you're serving, you're very far away from home. You come home every three months, every year. In Israel, the furthest you could go is four hours.

My Navy base was an hour from home. So you get to go on the weekends for 24 hours, you go home. It's an amazing thing. And you're supposed to rest, but no one rests. You go out, you party. It's a great 24 hours. And for the first nine months, every week I would get punished. I couldn't make it. I don't know. By the time I gave up, I was like, the week would start, the commander would walk and say, Adam, you have Shabbat, meaning you're not leaving. And then the week would start.

And it took me nine months, actually. Someone told me, a very smart officer told me, he said, look, Adam, I think you're going to do great things when you grow up. But you can't be a great leader if you don't know how to be a soldier. Brother, you know, that's true for CEOs, too. Unless you learn how to be a great employee, like some way, somehow, it's hard to be a great CEO. And I think it's true for partnerships.

Unless you learn, it's the same thing about partnerships, unless you really learn how to be a great partner, then you're never going to make things work. And it really stuck with when he said that Navy officer course in Israel is two years. He said, you only need two, you're not even a soldier, you're a cadet.

You just need to make it for two years. And I did. And I credit a lot of my ability to get things done. No matter how complicated they are. Understand how to work in a team. Understand leadership. But there's natural leadership that we're born with, but there's things we learn. All of that came together and sort of made me who I am. And then I moved to the U.S. four days after I finished the Army.

my sister was a supermodel living in new york city the family said i don't go check on your sister let's see what's happening there because no one knew what she was my younger sister yeah no one knew what was happening there so i flew to new york and we lived together And for the next six years, I lived with Thaddee, but I also, for the first four years, went to CUNY Baruch College, City University of New York.

for me going and i know it's not an ivy league school but for me going to school is very easy because again compared to the army there wasn't any task there that we were going to be given that was so hard and then i think one more thing that sort of shaped me is growing up i am still extremely dyslexic you guys know because i sent my text yeah i'm soon start using ai to send my text but i don't yet so a lot of spelling mistakes yeah and i couldn't read until i was in the third grade

So being dyslexic always throughout my life forced me to learn how to deal with things. Dealing communities really shaped me. And going to the army taught me how to be a soldier and then how to be a leader. And when I brought all of that back and came to the US. things seemed very doable yeah everything was possible and i think what i like about this country so much is i think that's the american dream coming as an immigrant from a different country

A kid that in school couldn't even necessarily read or write and had to always work out a system of how to get something done. And coming here, having an idea, building a business, failing multiple businesses, then building a bigger business. Maybe not succeeding as much as we wanted to, then building another business. And I think that second chance, that concept of anything can happen.

That concept, I heard it a lot again in the memorial on Sunday, that concept of a country where we are all have the ability to achieve what we can and be we can be. That is for me what the American dream is and that's why I'm so proud to be here.

There are a bunch of super high-profile, very successful people in modern American life who were dyslexic as kids, who really struggled with dyslexia as kids. What connection is there? What is the thing? What is the experience? What's the strength that goes with the difficulty? First, I think…

You get very good at hiding it. So my parents, we said we're both doctors. Second grade, parents getting divorced. Grandmother is taking me out to lunch just because she wants to see how I'm doing. Hands over the menu and says, please order. And takes her exactly 20 seconds to realize the kid can't read. Walk, marches me to the principal's office. She was a lawyer. What kind of school are you building here? My grandson can't read. This is horrible.

and he looks at her and says i actually know your grandson he comes here two to three times a week we know each other well And he's going to be just fine. He's going to have one person reading for him and another person writing for him, and he can do anything he wants. So at the beginning, I think being dyslexic, you learn how to mask it. And you learn you have to use your ears and your listening, especially my dyslexia was both in numbers.

and in letters so on the heavier side of dyslexia and you really learn how to deal with finding solutions you get embarrassed i think a lot at a young age it's very embarrassing when everybody else can read and you can't

You must make friends, because if you don't make friends, who's going to help you study for the test? So I think those are the beginning. It teaches you that there's always a solution, and it 100% teaches you to think outside of the box. Whatever solution everybody else has, it's not going to work for me.

So now let's see what I can do. I think it's changing today. I think something technology is doing. I think it's, I have a lot of dyslexic friends now. Everyone keeps calling me about how they're using AI to write stuff. Because it's just, they're not making mistakes anymore. Because my kind of dyslexia, even when you dictate it to the phone, you still get, especially with my accent, you still get spelling mistakes. And then you can't fix them.

But when you use ChatGDP, you can actually get over that. So it's just another little use case that works very well. I think the other thing having any disability does... It makes you, when you see someone else who is disabled, it doesn't matter what kind of disability, because for one thing, each one of us has something that bothers us. And we think it's big for us, but someone else might think it's not. It makes you care.

Or be very angry. Or a little of both. Or a little of both. Tell us about when you had the thread of the idea that would one day become flow. You were telling us off camera about how at your college you approached a professor. with an idea. So when I went to Baruch College, I joined the entrepreneurship. I thought I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Didn't really know what it is, but I took entrepreneurship and I minored in marketing. And one more thing, nothing with studies.

That's from my father. You'd already done Middle Eastern studies by that point. I did. I did Middle Eastern studies. Applied Middle Eastern studies. I've been applying it ever since. I'm sure we're going to get to it. And there was a competition. And it was the first entrepreneurship competition. First prize, $50,000. And a seed investment into that idea.

And I was sure I was going to win that competition. And I talked in the class and I found the best rider and whoever I thought the best teammates. Again, something from my dyslexia. I was very used to finding the best kids in class. And we said, we're going to win this. And I had a huge idea and it was called Concept Living.

And concept living was going to be a new way of living because I used to live in an apartment building with my sister. I was blown away by the fact that we would go up and down the elevator. This is New York City, 2002 to 2008, right after September 11.

And no one would say hello in the elevators. And I just found that fascinating. And we used to play games at how we're going to say hello to enough people. And I thought I noticed that if you talk to enough people and brought them together, the building's energy change.

And we presented this concept living and everybody except for us made it to the second stage of the competition. Every single, the stupidest ideas you've ever heard. My team was very disappointed in me because I led us into a horrible idea. I marched into the dean of business office, who I knew for other reasons. And I said to him, I get it. I missed it. We're not going to go to the next stage, but you got to tell me why. Because he was on the panel, on the judges. And he said, Adam.

The industry is too big. You are too young. And this is unrealistic. And I think, Ben, you were sharing before. I don't think I'm the only one who has experienced that kind of... Yeah, well, this is the story of Fred Smith. Yeah. Federal Express. Or would he get a C-minus on the paper? Yeah, so Fred Smith, the legendary founder of Federal Express, which is one of the great companies of the 20th century, I think it was...

One of the Ivy business schools. Harvard, Harvard. Harvard is one of those. Yeah, and he had the entrepreneur class. He wrote his paper on the idea for Federal Express, and they gave him a C-. And it was brilliant having the hub in Memphis and how it was working. It wasn't just a C. It's a C minus. It's a C minus.

Just that final little. Yeah, yeah. And because it was completely neat idea, but totally impractical. Yeah, it never worked. Difference in that story, he goes right out and starts it. Yeah. I wait 10 years. And I think there's, I've always had a lesson from that. Like if you're a dean of anything, if you're a teacher and you have a young student full of passion, wanting to do something, tell them how to achieve what it is they're going after, not why it's impossible.

yeah because you never know who you might be speaking to yeah okay so that's so so that started i think then also you said something interesting about that which again for me the partnership with mark and ben is amazing separate from the fact from our business partnership is i learn a lot and i enjoy the partnership and the friendship you shared something about the fact that because people ask you about what ideas adam has it's always been one idea

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Well, it was an earlier conversation where I forgot the question that Eric asked, but I was like, no, Adam's... only had one idea this is how he navigated the idea maze yeah yeah yeah there is no maze this is it like he's he's been following this idea for you know his whole life now and so and and

It's the thing that makes it so powerful in that he and I actually had a conversation with a potential investor the other day, and they're like, well, how come somebody won't be able to replicate the technology? And my answer was, The technology by itself is somewhat interesting, but it's part of an integrated vision that literally one person has. The analogy for me has kind of been Apple where if you look at Apple kind of and what Steve Jobs did in particular when he built the product line.

There was no piece of software. There was no piece of hardware. There was no nothing that wasn't already done. Like, all these ideas were done. It was the integrated... product line that, you know, with a design sensibility, with a usability idea, with the way the technology worked with the person. was the thing that made it so special and so hard to replicate and you know nobody was able to replicate that and i think that you know when you when we get into flow what what i see is

It's a single idea about how people live that's enabled by design and technology and a business model and a culture and a whole set of things. And if you remove any one of them, it's not flow.

um you know it's a windows pc one windows 95 whatever it was you know it's that kind of thing well we'll get deeper into flow but first i want to make sure we cover the the backstory here which is Mark, why don't you talk about how you met Adam, or what you guys saw in Adam, and then let's talk about how this partnership was formed.

Yeah, so we didn't actually, we didn't really, I don't think we'd ever really met, I don't think, prior to. That was the first phone call. When I first called you. And part of it, it was a Hatfield-McCoy thing, because he was with the Hatfields and with the McCoys. He was the best friend of the founder.

Those were the days when we actually had a rivalry. And we're across the street from those guys. That's not our side of the street. So we never really met. But, you know, we followed the whole saga.

you know, all the way up and all the way up and all the way down. And, you know, we noticed a whole bunch of things, you know, kind of went through that. But we did notice right up front basically what Ben just described, which was the integrated vision. And then...

And then I told Adam this early on. I had a conversation with a guy who's one of the top real estate people in the world who is – and this was actually in the middle of it. This is when things were starting to go pear-shaped at the time. And I was like, you know, what do you think of this thing? And he's like, look, he said there's only two people in the world who have ever successfully differentiated, branded and differentiated commercial real estate.

And he said one of them is currently president of the United States. And the other is Adam Newman. We actually thought that was pretty cool. You don't like that? Like, what an achievement. And it was right at the time when every, you know, newspaper was shellacking him and all that kind of thing. But, you know, the thing we couldn't stop thinking about was like, wow, he's...

One of two. Yeah, one of exactly two. And what my friend said was like, look, it's just like this business has been the way it's been forever, for hundreds, for hundreds of years, for as long as there have been commercial buildings. There's been a certain specific way of doing it, and we've all been trained in how to do it, and it's all a very specific way of operating.

You know, at the simplest level, you know, we build a shell and then we lease it for 15 years and then the tenant does all the work on, you know, deciding what the interior is like, what the experience is like. Actually, it's a digression. I had had another conversation like that with an entertainment industry mogul some years back when the movie theater business started to cave in. The theatrical box office started to collapse, and I was like, well, why don't they upgrade?

all this, why don't they reinvent the movie theater? Like, why doesn't it have, there was this famous movie theater in LA. There was one called the Arclight and it had this incredible experience of, you know, it had ballet parking and it had reserve seating and it had like real food, like real food delivered to you in the seat.

and it had like you know special screenings where there were no kids allowed and then they had other screenings where like kids were definitely allowed you know and fully encouraged to yell and scream And, you know, and I was like, you know, why aren't there more art clients? Like, why hasn't this experience been reinvented? And this guy was CEO of an entertainment company. And he looked at me and he said, because they're all owned by real estate guys.

who have absolutely no interest on what happens inside the building. Like, they literally don't care. Anyway, so back to my discussion with my real estate friend, it was the same thing, which is, he just said, look, Adam completely reinvents our industry. It's always going to be like this going forward. It's never going back.

going to unearth the entire thing and you know we work you know in some way is going to survive this and we'll they'll they'll figure out the specific thing with with the company but he said the industry is getting is getting reimagined um and there's only one guy who's ever been able to do that

I'm in this business. And then you pause for a moment and you kind of think, to your point, about the sheer size of the industry. And as you always remind us, this is one of the biggest industries on earth.

know that matters matters to everybody um and so as ben and i were talking about it more and more kind of as we're watching the whole thing happen it's just like all right like there's you know there's something very special happening here kind of independent of the of the sort of day-to-day blow by blow

aspects of the business and then and then we'll talk more but independent of you know the financial stresses yeah the other thing is you know we we keep very good track of what our portfolio companies use

They're a really good indicator of the best new products because they really care about products. And almost all of them, we were customers. And we thought, wow, that's super interesting. So we always thought he was a really uh interesting guy but you know because he was with benchmark um we couldn't call him okay so what was the first conversation like yeah yeah so i mean you you may remember it better than i do but um yeah i just um i was actually i think it was was it during covid

It was during COVID. I looked it up before the podcast. May 2020. So when the COVID lockdowns hit hard, you know, out here, and I had this, I didn't have a home office really set up because we always worked out of the office. And so I had just, I was at my dining table with a chair. And after about eight hours of Zoom calls, the entire side of my body from my neck all the way down to my ankles.

be basically seized up and in pain. And I was like, I can't live like this. I'm going to die. I'm not going to die of COVID. I'm going to die of crippling whatever this is. And so I started taking three-hour walks every morning. And I went over to the Stanford campus, which was

Stanford campus, May 2020, Stanford campus, completely deserted except for me taking a long walk. And then there was one staff guy who was stationed at the head of the quad area where I would park, and his job was to yell at me for not wearing a mask.

As far as I can tell, that was the only thing he did all day. And I would see him every morning, and he would yell at me for not wearing a mask, and I would wave my mask at him and just keep walking. Anyway, then I would do three hours of calls. And so I actually remember, this is why I remember the calls, because I remember actually standing in the field at one of the fields.

Stanford and actually having the call. And yeah, and it was basically just like, look, we've always really admired what you've done. And we understand what you're going through from the press. But basically, I can't remember if I told this to you, but our philosophy always on this is

Like one of the key ways you evaluate founders is like what difficult challenges have they been through in their lives that they were able to overcome? And the best forecast of being able to overcome a profound challenge in the future, which every entrepreneur deals with, is having. overcome profound challenges in the past. And many of the great founders in history have had significant blow-ups at various points along the way.

Including like Henry Ford. Yeah, exactly. Well, Thomas, there's tons of examples. Thomas Watson, Thomas Watson Sr. who founded IBM, the guy who founded IBM. He founded IBM in his 40s. In his 30s, he was convicted by the federal government of antitrust. He was.

convicted of antitrust violations for running his previous company, NCR. He was basically already, you know, he's already basically been completely taken down by the government at that point and then started IBM. And so there's just this long history of people who have kind of been through these things. And, you know, some people get punched.

the face hard and they never get up again and other people just get punched in the face and they're just like wow it's another opportunity for me to stand back up and And show what I'm capable of. And so we just always felt like it's because somebody goes through something that's very difficult if they're able to, you know, navigate their way through it and kind of demonstrate their character through it. They often have great potential. And, you know.

I don't know if it is reasonable for me to draw the kind of comparison to what you were describing for being dyslexic as a kid or whatever, but being through a fundamental challenge like that, whether it's in childhood or adulthood. Yeah. A couple of things that go with that. One is anybody who's ever had a great success knows that the margin between that and a total failure.

is very, very thin. And the bigger the success, the thinner the margin. So, like, you know, all of us who have been through that go, wow, like, you know, one bad piece of luck and it could have gone completely the other way. And then... You know, we kind of philosophically, very kind of early on in the firm, always felt that what we're looking for is great strength. And like every person has a weakness.

or has weaknesses. And some of them show up in like crazy ways. But that doesn't even matter because everybody's got that. What matters is, are you world-class or best in world? at what you can do, not what you can't do. And he was clearly, like, clearly, clearly, clearly, like, as Mark said, you know, top.

two in one thing there's just very few people on earth that are top two in anything um so you know it was it was one of those things where like we were excited uh to meet him not you know it wasn't Oh, boy, this is, Newman, WeWork got all fucked up. That was never a thing. And then maybe one more thing, just a general observation, which is kind of the old adage of, was it, failure, failure is, success has a thousand bothers, but failure is an orphan is.

There's just, I don't know, actually, I can't remember if I've ever asked you this, but like what a lot of people who go through kind of a big public.

kind of you know take down tear down of some kind you know kind of go through is just like all of a sudden everybody they know and they're just like you know that phone's not ringing right i've heard this from lots of people i don't know if it happened to you but i've heard it happen to lots of people where all of a sudden it's just like you you develop you know you develop

or something and people just don't want to talk to you and it's just this like completely bizarre thing um because it's like all right this is like a person who people had you know super high opinion of and then you know lots of relationships with and then just all of a sudden You know, it's just like poof, vanishing. It's like, you know, what is that? And, you know, every one of those people is probably telling themselves some story about how.

You know, they're making the right call by separating from the person. But what's, of course, what's happening is what Ted Kaczynski, famous philosopher Ted Kaczynski, what's called over-socialization, right? People are too worried about what everybody else thinks.

Right. And so people get too wrapped up in the sort of mob scapegoating cycle of, you know, being able to and sort of this need for this kind of perceived need to kind of for everybody to agree on everything all the time. And that just that has this effect of, I think, too many really promising people being abandoned.

moments anyway i don't know if that happened to you or how much that resonates but i have talked to many other people who've been through this kind of thing um and i know that that happens and so uh you know to be able to talk to somebody in that to be able to talk to somebody in at that time i think is it's it's like a it's a blow against conformity

which I think is always a good thing. And it's a time when people actually could use a call. Yeah. So I think the thing I would add to that is, so I'm not sure we spoke about it, the phone completely. was not ringing when you called and some people are social i think i'm on the i was extra social yeah so my phone was x and i like i'm more of a talker than so really stopped

And it wasn't just that, it was, I say this sometimes, I speak about it, I had a thousand friends a week before, and I went down to ten, and five of them were family members, which I think was part of it. And for me also, I had some of my closest friends working with me, because that's part of our ability.

And there was a moment where even people who knew me, who were there for the story, suddenly believed what they were reading. And I do believe we live in a different world. I think we're talking now 2019 and we're now 2025.

Hopefully the world has changed enough that people know not to believe everything that they read. But I think that was still an end of an era. And we were right place, right time for that. So it definitely stopped ringing. And something that I don't know if I've said it to you, but...

It was greatly appreciated, that phone call. And what's interesting about phone call, there was no business transaction in that phone call. The phone call was just, how are you doing? And tell me what you think. And there is something, I've shared it before, but it's worth it. where you said, Adam, tell me how you're doing. And I jumped straight into my lessons learned, and this had an answer.

And you were like, oh, you're still in that stage. And we don't know each other, but I was like, well, Mark, please tell me what that stage is. He goes, you know, the stage when you forgot everything you did and believe everything that was written about you. It's a stage. It will pass.

And you also told me, and then you told me the same thing, Ben, that you're speaking about. You said, let me tell you what I think about what you did. It was very nice. But you also said at the end of it, you said, Adam, just so you know, and I'm sure we'll talk again. You said, there's only going to be one decision that you need to make moving forward. And that's...

Are you going to get back in the ring? Or are you not? And he goes, I feel, I don't know you, I feel like you're the guy who's going to get back in the ring. And that's where it's ended. And I was still thinking back at it.

today or if i had someone i was mentoring and they would tell me that mark called them i would say well call him back see if there's something you guys could do there's none of that it was just that and the other beautiful thing that you guys did but market was again you about six months later You called me again? Say, hey, I haven't spoken. What's up? What are you working on?

I was starting to actually work on residential because Ben, you know, to your point, there was always one idea. But I thought I was working on residential as an investment. It was COVID, cap rates for those who remember interest rates were literally at zero, cap rates were wide for those who understand real estate.

When Capra is compressed, the value of the real estate goes up. So when Mark called and said, what's up now? I said, look, we're doing this, we're doing that, but nothing that special. Mark's like, okay, let us know if something interesting happens. Between that and the third time that we spoke, I started walking the buildings. This is something amazing about Corona. So much change in the world.

I would love to hear more because I think it's so interesting because we gave a lot of forecasts, you and I, in Corona. What's going to happen to office? What's going to happen to the home? But something that was obvious in Corona is people are not going to give up their homes.

And where your home is is where your heart is. And you get back home and you need... some version of community and people back then were so connected digitally more than ever before and no one to talk to and especially with the mask if you really want to make it hard add that barrier then tell people they're not allowed to be in the same physical space

And you got yourself an anti-kibbutz moment. And the peak anti-kibbutz moment was somewhere in the middle of Corona. And me and my team, we were like, hey, let's go buy some real estate. And my head of real estate goes, his name is Mark.

He goes, Adam, how am I going to buy this real estate? We only know how to buy by talking to the landlords because we don't use brokers. We want the deal. So we want to find the seller that really needs to sell and we need a reason to buy. And I said, go meet them. He said, they won't meet me. I said, meet them outside.

put them over across the table make sure they have a beer over there you have a beer over there yeah and scream to each other and he goes no one will do it i said everyone will do it no one's calling them and everyone did it and our first five acquisitions who turned out to be amazing acquisitions

who we're going to get to talk about afterwards, but all have amazing bases. And we're done like that. And sometimes all you need to do is call the guy or show up. And in Corona, you didn't have to do that much to be very different.

So how did it change from making some investments to we're going to take a massive swing on residential? So two ways. One, I think real entrepreneurs can't help themselves, actually. I think another test, you said one, what did they go through? I love that. And how did they deal with challenges? And also, can they help themselves? Is this a problem they must solve? Or do you think it sounds good?

If they think it sounds good or they want to be founder because they saw Social Network, the movie, well, that's not going to be a good reason. Great movie, by the way. That's not going to be a good reason, but if it's burning from the inside. And no matter how many people say they have to do it. What happened is I started walking the buildings and it was lonely. It was soulless.

it was depressing and we're talking when i say buildings the buildings we bought this is 400 to 600 apartments these are shared gyms that look as nice as equinox and swimming pools and kitchens and all these rooms that were designed by people assuming people are going to get together

And not only is no one there, even when people are there, they're not talking to each other. And I just looked at it. I was like, I could do so much better than this. And step one was just like, let's just find a little bit of technology. So we found a company that already existed and we bought it and said, let's just connect them a little bit, not with big intentions. And step two is, let's find a great property manager.

So we had five assets, so we hired five different property managers. One of them is going to be great, and then we'll tell them what to do as asset managers. So in real estate, you have the property manager that runs it, and the asset manager that is the person like the Blackstones and Blackrocks of the world that deploy the cash.

And they have a relationship between them. And then we used these different property managers and they were all sort of the same. They all had the same problems. They all told us the same story. They all had the same pitch. And their occupancy was completely controlled by supply and demand.

And so at that point, we started working and we started doing it and immediately we started seeing positive results. So we were like, okay, this is a good direction and we're going to keep doing this. And that was sort of that.

And by the third time that Mark and I spoke, Mark read an article in the Wall Street Journal. And today we try very hard not to have any articles about us, but that one slipped. So Mark called and said, hey, I read in the Wall Street Journal about a billion dollars. You're not telling me you're starting a business.

And I said, no, it's actually more us. We are starting a business. And he said, do you have an idea for a brand? I said, I do. But we're doing it just us and we're taking our time. Mark said, sounds awesome. Maybe you guys can come and share it with us. And I said, I would love to, without really expecting, again, no expectation. I think the thing about this relationship is it formed organically. It took time. There was no rush to do anything.

And that's what made it so real. And then we went to dinner at Nobu. Mark hosted us. Ben was actually not in the first land. DG was there. He runs Growth. And Chris Dixon was there, who runs Crypto. And we had...

And we had this very nice dinner. And I remember coming to the dinner and we sit down and Mark goes, so tell us about this new idea. And I said, well, I actually want to start by talking about lessons learned from WeWork.

And Mark said, Adam, we wouldn't have invited you here if that's what we need to talk about. We've done. We know a lot about you. Don't worry. We might know more about some of your mistakes. The good news of WeWork is it was very well documented. We read the book. We watched the miniseries.

They had a lot of employees. He said, not only have we read them, but you said, not only have we read everything. I know your board members. I actually know, I know all of them. I know them. I spoke to them. And you're here because we want you to come. Let's talk about the idea. And I said, I really appreciate that, but I actually want to learn. I'm sure you have a different take than me. Let me share. And then, and this is for those of you who don't know Mark, once you get...

You let Mark go. He has a lot to say. So I started. And within minutes, you gave me, until today, I remember you said a few things there that I couldn't believe I never noticed. And one of the things Mark said that was so obvious was, what research did you do?

about what investors you took? What did you know about their history? What research did you do about what employees you took? What did you know about your tech leaders? He said, I get it, Adam, you move really fast and you're passionate and you make things happen, but how much diligence did you actually do? And the answer was...

actually none for my first investors. They came to me. I didn't know anything. I didn't know any better. Didn't know what else existed. But if I did, maybe I would have come. Maybe I would have come here and we would have been in a different place.

But you know, Ben, you've said it to me. We talked about it. We talk about it sometimes. No, no, I believe in a bigger picture. But separate than the fact that I believe in something greater than myself, I genuinely believe that we go to the place that we need to be.

As long as we're willing to learn lessons and change, I know that today I'm exactly where I need to be. This partnership, this discussion we're having now wouldn't have happened. So we had that dinner and it was excellent. And then we started talking about the future of living.

And we talked about a pure vision and really what we see. And I explained what we already have and explained why we could already start leveraging what we have to then take it to the next level. And then we actually went, but then Mark then said, so what do you think? You think maybe we should explore something? I said, look.

I don't know you. You don't know me. I was a little burned in the past. We're using all of our own money for this. And then Marcus said to me, how about you take time and get to know us? We'll get to know you.

And let's see what happens. And it took six months from that point. A lot of people think that this happened fast. It didn't. It took six months from that point to the actual investment, which in this August will be three years. Wow. One thing I just want to say that's so remarkable is You not only got back in the ring again after you already built an iconic company, you already made more money than you know what to do with, but you also put a large chunk of that liquidity.

back into the company, sort of a triple down in a way that it seems like Elon is the only person who continuously does that. So I think that one, I give a lot of credit to Mark and Ben. And so when they came, when we started Mark, I wonder if you remember this discussion.

So we're starting to talk about the business and I immediately was leaning into asset light because we should be asset light. Why? Because I heard so many times because WeWork was an asset light for all the wrong reasons. I said, we need to be asset light.

And Mark, you flew, and now I know, but you traveled down to Miami multiple times. And again, this was before the famous dinner. And we were sitting in the car, and we were talking about real estate, and you actually talked about your father-in-law. And you shared with me a lot of things that you learned from him over time. And I didn't meet him either, but he sounds like an amazing person. He's done a lot for the Valley and for California.

You said to me, Adam, forget what your team and my team is talking about for a second, not because we don't respect them. We respect everybody and we're going to hear everybody's opinions. But I just want to know what you think. If I wanted you to build the largest, really disruptive industry and imagine it the way you imagine it.

Would you need to own real estate? And I said at the beginning, I would. And you asked me why. And I said, because I want to be allowed to do whatever I want. I want to try everything. I want to fail fast. I want to fix fast. And I want to deploy fast. And I said, I want to change everything. I want to change the technology of how it's run. I want to change the operating people of what they do. I want to change the design. I want to change the smell. I want to change the uniforms.

I want to change everything about it until it gets to something that I know is right. And you asked me, how would you know when it's right? And I told you, it's a feeling. And you said, great. And then you said, I have a suggestion for you. It's not traditional. You have this large portfolio. Take out of this portfolio whatever you don't think is a fit for flow. Sell it. But the rest, what you think is your best stuff, put it with us, aligned, on the top together, and we're with you.

We go up, we go down, whatever you do, we do. And it took me a second. And in the beginning, I thought this was some negotiations, some fancy negotiation tactic, because it ended up being one of the smartest things we've done.

I genuinely believe that the reason Flow today, and we're going to talk about it more, is where it is, was because of that decision. But I think, Mark, I've asked you this before, I think you actually had a simple reason for that decision, that was alignment. Something that I think A16Z is really good at.

Yeah, in part that was based on actually watching WeWork, which is by the time you get in a situation where you're fighting with your investors, like things just do not end well. And we've just, we've seen that across many companies. And so, yeah, if we just, building a business is so hard if everybody's aligned. is not aligned like it becomes punishingly difficult well i'll push you though on it a little bit because yes but for venture capital saying let's go own real estate not obvious

So let's talk about that for a moment because this also goes into what Flow is doing. So basically the way I think about this is there's sort of two iconic business models that are kind of held out in Silicon Valley as kind of the best in class, like best business models ever made. And one of them is Microsoft.

lesson of Microsoft was you build a horizontal layer of technology, software operating systems and applications, and then you basically run across thousands of different hardware implementations, thousands of different computer makers and chips and so forth. So you build a horizontal. layer. And you never, ever vertically integrate because you want to basically run on everything.

So that's lesson number one. Then lesson number two is Apple, where the lesson is you 100% always want to vertically integrate. You never want to be a horizontal layer because you don't have nearly enough control over the user experience. You have to, you know, the old Steve Jobs line is people who, you know.

love software, need to build their own hardware. You need to actually control the entire thing. You need to be completely vertically integrated because if you're not vertically integrated, you can't control the user experience. And if you can't control the user experience, you can't deliver the thing, you can't deliver against the vision. And of course, as is true in so much in business and life, those lessons are diametrically opposed.

Right. They're irreconcilable. Like they're directly opposed. And there have been great tech companies built with the Microsoft model and there have been great tech companies built with the Apple model. So, you know, the moral of the story is like it really depends. Specifically, though, if you.

want to control the actual customer experience end-to-end, you have to vertically integrate. It's the only way to actually do it because otherwise you're in the role of having to kind of cajole, especially early on. You're in the realm of having to cajole people who don't share your vision into doing the things that are required.

Now, having said that, as we talk about all the time, there is an extraordinarily large number of properties out there that could benefit from the brand, the vision, the technology, the platform. And so one of the very interesting kind of things at the heart of the business model for...

flow as to what extent, like in the long run, should it be vertically integrated and to what extent should be, you know, where we own our own real estate and to what extent should it actually run on across all real estate. And I think for that, we can learn a lot from hotels, because hotels have gone through their process. You take Hilton and Marriott, where they started by owning a lot of it, and today, if I'm not mistaken, less than we're talking about.

thousands of properties less than one percent owned so no matter how much money you could raise and how big and when we talk about raising money by the way we talk about raising money for real estate funds we're not talking about raising money for flow parent company that that door is closed But no matter how much you would raise, it would always be tiny compared to how big the asset lasts. And you talked about one of the largest.

Real estate is so large, just for people to understand that we're talking about a $250 trillion asset class. But to try to put it in numbers, a normal building, these multifamily buildings, is $200 million a building. You buy 10. you're 2 billion and 100 you're 20 billion and 100 is not a big number

It's just, you could sit, we're in downtown Miami, you could stand on our roof and point to 100 buildings that could be floor buildings. And there's five different neighborhoods like that in South Florida, and that's just one area. Then you could go to New York and you could start going all over the planet.

So I think, but I do think that that decision allowed us to be who we are. And also when the time does come out, so we have two choices, but we also can do the flag business. Or we come to a person who owns this multifamily. or the other things, the other services that we deliver and put our flag, just like the Four Seasons puts our flag, and actually do a management deal where it's our brand, our technology, our experience, but the expenses are on the landlord.

Some of what's nice also about our alignment is we don't have to make that decision yet today. Right now, we have to build the best product. Can we share more about the thesis underlying our bet into Flow in terms of how we saw the... Why was this going to be one of the biggest companies in the world? I think it starts with, as we got into it, it really came down to, okay, who is Adam? Forget Adam the entrepreneur. Who's Adam the person?

You know, what is he good at? What is he not as good at? What are we good at? Can we get along? You know, it was that kind of thing. We had, I think, a seven-hour dinner. Oh, yeah. Talk about that dinner. What was so remarkable about that day? Well, I mean, you know, we really got into it. Mark, remember how it started? Mark called me. I saw Mark twice already. Yeah, I didn't know. Now I know Mark. I didn't know back then that Mark...

I wasn't traveling as much. I knew that Mark jumps on the plane, he comes, he sees you. But Mark calls and goes, hey, I know we hung out twice. We need one more time. I said, what's up? He goes, well, my partner, Ben, you haven't met him. He wants to come hang also. I was like, great, we'll have dinner. That turned out to be a seven-hour dinner. Yeah, it's a long dinner. You know, a lot of how you get to know someone is kind of get into the things that, you know.

you shouldn't even talk about right like they're they're not polite they're not yeah that kinds of things and so i think adam asked me he's like well you know like looking at me What do you worry about? Like, what are you really worried about? Like, what do you need to think about? And I can't remember exactly what I said. It was something like, Adam, like, people look at you. And, you know, I watched the show. And in the show,

The great moment for you was being on the cover of some magazine, Fortune, whatever. I was like, I could see you didn't even care about that. That was nothing. The great moment for you was when the company went to the brink and you saved it. And what I need to know is, like, I don't want you to chase that fucking feeling because that will cause you to take chances. There are chances that you have to take, and then there's chances you don't have to take.

And I don't want you taking the chances you don't have to take because, you know, your vision is so incredible. Like, it would be horrible to put it at risk for a non-valid reason. And so, like, we kind of got into... that and i said look i know the feeling because like you did it too i yeah i've been in because i've saved the company like that like i know exactly what that like you never can feel that good as walking back into the building when everybody thought the company was over

and you saved it you just pulled it out of like the fire that's the most unbelievable thing in the world but You don't want to be in that position. Well, and it is worth saying. There are founders who will, if they do not have a crisis, they will create one. Yeah. They will absolutely seek out disaster. Yes. Yes, and look, we all like, there's a bit of it in everyone. And, you know, if you look at Elon, he takes very aggressive chances.

And he's not afraid of it, and he calculates risk, but the chances have big payoffs. And the danger is always when you take the chance and it doesn't pay out, but you could lose the company over it. I would just say the thing I remember about that was it was a very honest conversation. It's very hard to have an honest conversation about something like that. It's almost like...

People don't really want to look at themselves like that. And I was impressed with how introspective and honest Adam could be on a number of topics like that. So my conclusion is, look, I think that this is somebody that we can work with. The things he wasn't good at at WeWork, like we're very good at putting together a tech team, you know. understanding which of the six ideas are good and which ones we should probably wait on or not do and that kind of thing. That's the strength of us.

It's been a few years. You've been on the board. You've tracked the company. Why don't we talk about how the company's progressed and sort of where we're at? Because you haven't been... Super public about it, and there's some exciting things happening. So why don't you share from your perspective? Well, it's often an amazing start. I mean, so first of all, the thesis of the value of the community, the technology.

Everything that Adam's talked about, the design, has proven out. Like before, you know, the product is maybe 5% done, but it's already... able to kind of generate, you know, kind of much higher demand resulting in people willing to pay much higher rent for the exact same space and exact same location as other places, which has resulted in. returns on the buildings that are unprecedented. We've also, the company had the foresight to expand into Saudi Arabia.

which is not something that most entrepreneurs would think of. So we will finish selling them 24 months from when we started? But yes, initial, and we're going to sell our first asset. We closed last August. We will sell our five buildings. We will sell our first asset in a month, and we'll keep a management deal for the...

unforeseeable future and then the other thing is we've built a strategic technological advantage um the so you know real estate software has been hampered by old, I would just say very crafty technology. I won't name the company, but everybody in real estate knows the company. And the flow team has basically reimagined

what living means. So rather than orienting around a building, the software is extremely flexible and can... organize itself around the citizens, the people who live in the buildings, in the communities, you know, in the world, and meet their needs where they are.

in the kind of best way possible, the most usable way. Just even like signing up for a building, it's going to take you 100x less time. You know, it's something that... kind of obvious and simple but because of the way these other things are architected it's very difficult for them and that's just the beginning because what's possible technically you know particularly in a

connected world and an AI world is just unbelievable if you have the right architecture. And so you've got the technological advantage. You've got the community idea working fully. The business is working. So it's definitely way exceeded our expectations. And, I mean, look, we're looking forward to building a great company. But, I mean, our expectations were high, we thought.

We put a lot of money into this. The time was the biggest investment we ever made. Yeah. Real estate hasn't had a ton of tech innovation. What exactly is happening here? What's really interesting? What's the opportunity? Well, there's so many things in the architecture, but it kind of starts with, like, how do you model what's going on? And there's all sorts of components that basically...

in a normal real estate world, get completely ignored. So you really, as a customer, care about everything from your neighbors to... the building to your furniture to how you get your mail to how the parking lot works to how security works. And you not only care about it, but you really don't want a system.

keeping your information about you. You'd like that to be on your phone and the system to be able to query it but not store it so it doesn't get stolen and these kinds of things. And then if you had that... then you'd be comfortable with a lot more about yourself kind of accessible. And then you can publish what you want to publish, you know, and the way that...

The company's already taken advantage of that is incredible. So for example, let's say I'm a yoga instructor. Maybe I want everybody in my building to know that. And maybe. You know, they really want to know that I can do that because wouldn't it be great to take yoga lessons without leaving my apartment building?

And so what's happened already in Flow is not only has the commerce between residents, accountants, yoga instructors, personal trainers, everything you can think of completely flourished. There are people.

many people who all of their clients for their business live in the building that they live in. And so this kind of incredible technological flexibility where you have a single platform where... that knows everything about its citizens while keeping things private, having every service not only that Flow provides, but that every other person...

provides all in one place, it's just it changes the whole way you live. And it changes what's possible. And as I said, I think we're at the beginning of that.

you know, no other system. I mean, we started with the other systems, and they're just, like, they're ridiculous by nature, or, you know, in terms of... They don't even, you know, people are an attribute of a building. It's how that works. So think about that. Like, I, as a human being, am an attribute of a building to a real estate piece of software. It's insane.

But this has been completely re-architected. The chief technology officer of Flow is an architectural genius. The way he's designed it has enabled not only everything.

That Adam envisioned, but so many things beyond that, where every time an opportunity comes up, it's there. The other kind of capability of the software that's amazing is because it's so flexible, yes, this could be...

multi-family living or this could be condos or this could be a hotel or this could be office space and it can change literally with the press of a button which is you know all those are separate completely separate software packages everywhere else in the world so to add to what ben just said Once you're able to use that architecture, which again is something that I do not believe would have been built with other partners, so I think it's another benefit of this partnership.

Once you're able to do that, you take that multifamily, and it really came out of need. We had a multifamily, and I just walked in one day and said, hey, furnished apartments. Everyone's doing it in Europe. Why wouldn't the young generation want that? I'm 22. I finished college. I can't buy my furniture. It never looks right.

Give me a furnished apartment for an extra $300 a month. And the team literally said, no, no, the system can't do it. And I said, we were using one of the traditional systems. I said, what do you mean it can't? I said, it can't. It physically can't. I said, well, I want to do it. So they replicated the building. So we had two buildings.

And then I said, okay, no more 12-month leases. We want to give shorter term. Some people only want it for eight months. Other people want it for 20 months. Oh, no, we can't do that. And I said, well, how about short-term stay? What if some people want actually...

And I said, well, we have this dream day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, year-to-year. Oh, no, that you're going to need four different systems. So you take that architecture, you take that system, you build it in the back end. You build a system in the front end. You have one brand.

and you train one team to be able to operate all of that, and the result will be higher NOI. Higher buildings are more profitable. And just to use little numbers for that, our building in Fort Lauderdale NOI net operating income is 30% higher than when we took over it. wow it's 95 full today it was 95 for women to cover it it's not higher occupancy it's lower churn higher rent obviously better experience and another interesting thing which brand does

80% of most leases in South Florida come from brokers. 90% of all inbound into flow is direct to us, direct to the website. Now, our brand is still young, but even a young brand, and we didn't say this, but 40% of...

Sorry, 70% of 40-year-olds and younger in the United States are renters. They spend a third of their wallet, a third of their pocket on that rent. There's not one brand. You have them in hotels, you have them in condos, not one brand. There wasn't one in office before we did that also. And by the way, one of the things that is so exciting about this business, we work got to where it got with no such... technological platform just the brand just the brand

This also goes to conversation we had early on about the sort of changing nature of housing in the U.S., right, which we've talked a lot about since. And I think a lot about, which is basically there's a bifurcated housing market in the U.S., the way I think about it. Basically, there's plentiful cheap housing out to places that don't have great jobs.

where people don't really want to live. And then there's basically like impossible bottlenecks on housing stock in especially the cities and especially the cities where lots of young people want to live and especially where the really great jobs are and where the economic growth is.

And so just as like a young person starting out in life, like you have a very- It's an assault on young people. It's an absolute attack on young people. And I mean, it actually becomes, it's actually hard to even discuss this without getting enraged because we're sitting here in California where they have the infamous Prop 13, you know, which was this- very explicit handout to boomers at the expense of basically the entire young generation coming up now.

Um, but basically like if you want to live and work as a young person in a place where you're going to have access to top flight economic opportunity and all these growth industries and you want to work in tech or work in design or entertainment or, you know, any of these, any of these, you know, finance or any of these, you know, kind of growth industries.

Number one, you're not going to own a house. Owning a house is going to be completely unaffordable. And so you're going to be in some sort of multifamily, some sort of rental situation. And then the other thing is like there's a really fundamental kind of stress point. And I think this is coming fast now for Gen Z, which is like, all right, are you ever going to be able to get married and have a family? And what is that going to be like? Because can you really do that like in a small apartment?

And, you know, all the data, of course, indicates that in all these cities, by the way, all over the world, you know, birth rates are crashing. You know, population, you know, populations are declining. You know, people are not even reproducing at reproduction levels.

And so there's this like fundamental social, political, cultural, economic vice that young people are in. And in the absence of something like flow, in the absence of a thoughtful approach, where you could actually imagine having a positive experience.

and being able to actually have a fulfilling life and a fulfilling experience. I think young people are really in trouble. Well, let's add two thoughts. First of all, I think this is, and Mark, we talked not today about politics, but in general a lot about politics. I think it's a main issue. And sometimes a lot of other issues become louder.

but might be the biggest one. Because if a person doesn't have a home, a shelter, something that they feel that's theirs, how do you expect them to treat other people the way they want to be treated? How are you even going to ask them to go to that next level of behavior that we expect from all of us?

if they can't afford a house. And so I think that's probably the worst deal. A young person can have paying rent. Traditionally, at the end of every month, you pay that rent, and the only feeling you have is, I just threw the money away.

and it actually this goes a thousand years back this word landlord yeah where these lords and you had to and you would get a piece of the land you'd work the land for the lord yeah and then you'd give that piece whatever this if you're lucky yeah you got to keep a little bit yeah and it was all up to them The entire concept of real estate is the haves and the haves not. But in a much bigger topic, we hear a lot of noise about a lot of haves and haves not.

this is where it's really playing out so i think with a reality like flow that we're dreaming of and we started multi-family but so we said you could take a multi-family now it's now it's rental furnished unfurnished short term long term we didn't talk about condos but flow launched a condo project five months ago so you can own you can buy you can you can rent you can do anything between but that's when you're living in these towers

flow sees a future there are a lot of single family also which is another huge part of more single family than multi-family another big part of it so another part of where flow can come in and offer all these services and if you

can prove, which you can already see with the numbers in flow, that the returns on the real estate are actually higher, then landlords and investors all over the world will be very happy to deploy their cash that way. And now they're deploying, and we like to call it a win-win-win. The investor can win. Flow can win as running it, and the user can win. And if everybody can feel like they're a winner and they're getting something much better, then you really have a new solution.

Now, there's a lot of, not for today, but to complete that solution, you would have to at some point tackle that word of ownership. But as we said, Ben, you said we're 5% into the journey, maybe even 3% into the journey. but we're just starting. And the other interesting thing is, so you're seeing the properties in Miami already delivering, both on top revenue and profitability. And the reason profitability is such an important metric for us, if we just spent more and made more,

that's not gonna that's not gonna do anything you're not gonna encourage any investment we need to spend the same and make more or spend less and make more and that's why noi your net operating income is such a good metric in in these buildings but then to ben's point

And then they're starting to do business with themselves. So you spoke about the people who don't have any other business. The way we like to talk about it a lot is how many classes does a yoga teacher need to close the month just to pay rent?

And the answer is not as much as about five classes a week. Every week is enough if it's one-on-ones and then they can do group classes. And that's just one example. Also, you talked about it as a citizenship. Once you become part of the Flow community, so we do billing, for example.

We're completely vertically integrated. We built every single piece, and the pieces we haven't built yet, we're building. It doesn't mean we can't use third-party software, let's say, on video cameras or different things they need for security or parking lots there. We don't have to invent everything. But we do have to have it all connected. And when you do that, and you do it on the right architecture, you're able to see things. I'll give you another example. Events. 60% of our residents...

60% of the events in Flow are run by residents. And because of the tech, they created it, they published it, they invited people, people registered. If they wanted to bill people, they can bill people. And it all happens. And 60% is now when we're early.

that number is going to go up to 90%. And great communities, respectable communities, run themselves. So one sign, and I know it used to exist in schools, still exists in schools, when you go to a tour university, hopefully a student that's really proud of the school they go to is the one touring you. it's not the salesperson trying to pitch you the same thing and same thing in the buildings if the community when someone tours the building

One of our great, and we're trying to let everyone, there's no more just leasing agents. Everyone can be a leasing agent because, again, if you're holding the app and that piece is called the host app, you can make a lease, as Ben said, very quickly and everybody has the same information.

As you walk around, you just introduce the person touring to residents and everybody's excited to talk about. And I think this is a good segue into, so if we didn't make it clear enough, Flow is a vertically integrated real estate company that started in... long-term rentals, then introduced all the other aspects of everything you can do in a building, including condo and office.

and then we started offering services that put the resident in the front and allowing them to work with each other our technology our brand and our operations coming together yield this experience which is already proven that it's doing a higher

return for the owners of the buildings. But before we talk even about that, I think the going to Saudi was a very interesting thing. First of all, again, interesting about our dynamics, because think of that board meeting. So you have a few buildings in Miami, they're going great. And now you're coming to the board to say, okay, so our third billing is going to be, and let me guess, New York City. No, Austin, Texas. No, very nice place, but no. And then you say, Riyadh.

And I think that's just not, I think that's not your obvious thing. But again, and this is something else, you talked about success, the division of success and failure being so small. Again, I believe in God. So for me, it's this. Mark and I have a different discussion. We define God differently, but we believe in something greater than ourselves. After the investment was made, you guys got quite a lot of phone calls from your LPs.

And you reached out to me and you said, I think you might have told me from every single one of them. You have a lot, so that's a lot of fun calls. And I remember you asked me, Ben, hey, Adam, do you mind coming with me to the Middle East? I'm going anyway. And let's share with not everyone, but top 10, 12 LPs. Tell them what flow is. And I'm sure it will be great for you in the long run. And it's great to do. You'll meet great people.

And that's what we did. And we walked around and there were two very funny things that happened. One, we would walk in. No matter what meeting you take with Ben at the end of the meeting, forget Flo. Ben gets offered money. It happened to us again last week. It's an interesting... That was a real estate investor. It's an interesting experience to go with Ben. So people think I'm great at raising money. I'm a beginner.

So we would go to these meetings and we told them about Flow. And Flow was only in Miami at the time. And what was interesting is without fail. Every one of these LPs, they're all from the Middle East, said, we think this concept would be great for the Middle East, specifically Saudi Arabia for Riyadh. And even in Abu Dhabi, they said the same. And in Dubai, they said the same for a variety of reasons. And once I heard it for the 10th time.

Ben was like, hey, maybe we should check it out. And we did. And I went to Saudi. And I think what's interesting when we went, first of all, Saudi is phenomenal for those of you who haven't had a chance to go there. What I get excited about Saudi, the optimism, the vision. Ben, I think, might have coined the term a founder-led country. So there's a vision. It's very clearly articulated. It's Vision 2030, but there's also now visions for 2034 and further.

And as part of that vision, you're taking an entire economy that used to depend on oil and you're diversifying it. And 70% of Saudis are 40-year-old or younger. And so it's a very young population.

And a lot of them are educated in the West. English is spoken everywhere. And MBS, the leader, has, not even slowly, quite fast. changed a lot of rules that have made foreigners and foreign investors and changed rules internally and externally, inviting a lot of people in. And I think last week, a lot of us saw Trump there and a lot of people were talking about it, but we've been going there for some time.

Choosing to go to Saudi was a very big choice for us as a company. And in hindsight, it worked extremely well, but it was also very difficult because there were a lot of challenges that were happening as we were there. But we got to deploy everything we did. So we went to Saudi. We still want to be vertically integrated. So we chose five buildings that were going to be condos, which means they were going to sell them. We bought them from the developer. We changed the condos into rentals.

And we started deploying the brand. We put our design from the outside. We bought our furniture. We launched it on our tech. It was also the first time we got to launch it on our back-end system, not just our front-end system. So it was a very good opportunity for us. our team, our uniforms, our smell, our music, our art, everything that we do but also very localized.

And because of my past, I have a lot of experience entering into new countries. So it's not something that I haven't done before, but it was definitely different. And the way we wanted to do it is not just use our own money. We were going to raise a local fund. Because the theory was, and we're only going to raise it from local investors, not...

go to the big investors that run Saudi, but local families. Because I've learned many times, if the local families of a country want to support you, they know what's going on in the country. If you go to all the local families and no one wants to invest, maybe your idea is not as good as you thought. And that's what we did.

We raised it from actually 33 different investors. We put it on equity. We got debt from the local bank. We bought these five properties. It was about a billion SAR, which is about $300 million fund. And we started, and that was in August. And then we started operating. We opened our first building in January. We achieved over 90% occupancy within 60 days. We opened our second building right after.

And we opened our third building last month. And our fourth and fifth building, we've already pre-leased to an enterprise that's going to release it for the next five years. So the entire portfolio is going to be stabilized over the next 90 days. That's when you opened in January. And it took six months to become NOI positive. And for those real estate people that are listening to this, that's extremely fast for buildings that were at zero.

We also have to do everything that you do when you go to a new country, which is hire a local team. We're very lucky with a local leader named Fawaz that came from government and was a CEO himself and did a lot of things. But we're very lucky having a local team and something beautiful that happens in Flow whenever anyone needs to go to Saudi.

You too many people volunteer. And if Flo right now said, who wants to move to Saudi, you're getting half the employees in the company raising their hands. Because in Saudi and in Riyadh, we get to take all these visions that we have. but we're the only ones doing it. And as good as our product market fit is in South Florida, and it really is excellent, it's phenomenal in Saudi. How amazing is that, that everybody wants to move to Saudi? I mean, just...

If you went back 12 years, the people in Saudi wanted to move out of Saudi. It's completely turned around. I really think it is. And it also, for us as a company, forced us to do us launching the technology even before we were fully ready.

forced us to see what's working what's not it also shows you the power of the platform it's back to that agility yeah in saudi you have to be connected to the government for the rent for variety of reasons actually allows you to to take people out who don't pay rent there's a lot of reasons for the workout really well

Our team did it in four days. We didn't think it was a big deal. We talked to people because the system is built to be flexible. It's built to need to connect to external things if it needs to. And because our architect, Scott, who is our CTO, knew that he needs optionality.

both because he knew how I operate as a leader, but also because he knew that we just don't know yet what we don't know. And when we meet people and say, so when are you going to connect to...

the system they're interested. What are you talking about? We're already connected. Then other people ask us, say, when are you going to become a Saudi company? We heard that takes two years. It's like, I don't know. We have Fawaz and it took us exactly 60 days. So not only are we operating in Saudi, we're operating as a Saudi company.

which I think is very important. And without comparing, but the experience that we're delivering right now in Saudi is not just second to none, but it even competes with our local experience in South Florida. wow talk more about the real estate fund because i know the one in saudi did tremendously well um but is this a model that you're planning to roll out uh across regions talk more about how that's going to work

So let's start with the real estate fund in Saudi. It was launched and closed and actually got oversubscribed, mainly because not only are they really up, it's also great to send to your investors back money. We're very excited to do that. We're planning to send the first check soon. So that's very exciting. Also, when we sold it, the people are buying, they want flow to manage it.

which is the beginning of the business model that it's going to become. That is the flag model. So at the beginning, I think you have to be vertically integrated because you have to prove it on yourself. You have to put your own money there. But after it's proven... There are a lot of real estate investors that would like to invest in an above market offer.

And connecting it to what Ben said about why is the technology lying to us. The moment you have technology that allows you not just to deliver a better service in the building, that creates more loyalty, that lowers churn, that increases rents. that connects the community internally, that allows all these things to happen. By allowing yourself to move from a multifamily to a hotel, extended stay, furnished apartments, corporate housing, it gives you so much flexibility.

So Saudi, for example, a lot of expats are moving in. We learned very quickly that these expats are getting one month from the company that hired them. So some numbers for everyone about Saudi, Riyadh. has 7.8 million citizens, is growing to almost 10 million by 2030. So over the next five years, about 5 million expats, big numbers. They get hired by these local companies, a lot of them.

They get one month that the company pays them and then they're supposed to find their own to get paid well. They're supposed to find their own place to live. So we said, okay, great. Let's give one month because that's what fits them. And then we'll see how many of them stay.

The conversion rate has been phenomenal. 90-something percent of anybody who took the month is able to stay. But if you're any other landlord, and you're the great building manager, and that building manager said, hey, I want to sell this new offering. I'll give a month, then I'll give them a lease.

The system wouldn't be, I know it sounds crazy, the system wouldn't be able to, you'd find a way to do it if you're very savvy, pen and paper, do a deal, call someone, you do something, but it's not scalable. And I think the other thing about our system that maybe we didn't say enough, we're building it for scale.

If we were building this for just multifamily, you don't have to go as deep as we went into architecture. If we were building this for just one country, for just one use case, I think a lesson for me from the past, I have zero fear that we're going to grow to be very big. The time, and when the time comes, when it's time to put fun, I enjoy it. It's my favorite part probably. Taking our time now to build a product that's actually scalable. Learning from our mistakes.

taking the time to make these decisions, building. I wanted to recruit tech engineers faster than Ben and Mark thought was correct. So we made it harder to recruit and recruit them in the right speed. I had visions of a huge number of teams that we needed.

Mark's very big on great products are built with small teams. That was before AI came. Now that AI came, actually, I think a lot of people are starting to understand that. So when you put all those things together, you start seeing a very good offering for...

to raise funds against. That's in Saudi. In the US, we actually bought 30% of a publicly traded company in Israel. We're non-controlling shareholders. That company has access to retail investors and institutional investors and with partnership with that company we have bought two developments in

Miami, South Florida. One in Aventura and one in a place called El Portal. And again, now you're thinking of flow not just as we're going to run the building, but actually how are you going to run the entire neighborhood? And all those themes that we just said that work so well for the single buildings will work even better in a neighborhood. So those two fund structures exist. And because we have all this flexibility built into it.

We've already proven that we deliver above market returns. So the people who are going to want to invest in our fund are going to understand that by getting access to Flow, to Flow's technology, to Flow's brand, they're going to get access actually to above market returns, which at the end of the day in real estate...

As you said, Mark, only two people did that. But I think the one thing in real estate that's very consistent, if you can deliver the highest returns in real estate for a certain asset class, you're going to attract the kind of money that's interested in investing in that asset class. If you can move between asset classes...

You might attract the kind of money that in the past felt uncomfortable with real estate. Because even though it's a safe return, we learned something in the past 10 years. Before Corona, office was great. And it went to zero. Hotel. In apartments, everybody wanted one and then it changed. So it's actually not just the largest asset class in the world, it's changing. The thing that the funds give us...

Or it's really two-fold. And I didn't realize this before. So the first thing that's obvious is just scale. So as Adam said, there's a lot of real estate out there. There are a lot of people who would love. to live in a flow community with kind of, you know, be part of something bigger. And we, you know, doing that kind of just through the flow balance sheet would be insane.

So it gives us a lot of scale. But the other thing that it does is the people we've partnered with are real geniuses in evaluating real estate and kind of getting the right... buildings for the right deal in the right locations. And that's been really amazing to watch, you know, how these people think about how they do that and how it works.

And we have lots of demand. We're trying to figure out what to do with all the demand. Ben, we're talking to engineers all the time who are pursuing AI ideas, who are pursuing crypto ideas. There hasn't been that many amazing real estate opportunities.

for you know the most brilliant technical minds to sink their teeth into why is this an opportunity you know like as an engineer you want to build things that really impact people's lives and make their lives better i mean there's many many things that you can do that have small impact or questionable impact but this is something where you know you're building an environment where

For young people, as Mark kind of alluded to, it's been much worse than what their parents' opportunity was and even what their parents' opportunity was, which is a new phenomenon.

And this is a chance to make it much better, much better than how their parents lived. And there's not more meaningful work than that. And then it's an extremely complex technological problem, particularly kind of coming out of legacy world and all these, you have to basically start from complete first principles because you're starting with who's living there. And the software has to be oriented around them, not buildings or apartments or, you know.

bill. Those are features of the person, not vice versa. Let's close this conversation on some big ideas around the future of living. Mark, in your... great blog post about the flow investment and just in our conversations in general around COVID, you'd sort of been struck by how the COVID enabled some unique opportunities for us to rethink how we think about sort of the future of cities, of remote work.

uh, sort of, you know, in office, et cetera. And I know you guys have had some, some, some back and forth on that. Um, why don't you sort of reflect on, you know, there were some things that played out. There were some things that sort of didn't play out exactly as we thought, some things reversed.

You know, a few years later, what are your broad reflections? What have we learned? So I feel like COVID threw almost every aspect of how, at least in the U.S., how we live and work sort of up in the air, right? And some of those pieces have landed a little bit, but some of those pieces still feel like they're quite high up in the air.

Yep. So just a bunch of observations. So one has looked like there had been a 60-year history of video conferencing not being a thing and not working. The first video conferencing system was rolled out in 1965. It was AT&T picture phone.

completely flopped. There were 50, 60 years. And there's a whole theory about people didn't want to be seen when they were talking on the phone. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's the same kind of theory so that you wouldn't want to see actors talk in motion pictures of sound. Yeah, exactly. So there's all these arguments.

Striction movie had video conferencing, but the real world never had it. And then all of a sudden, just like, boom, COVID, it actually happened. And that stuck. That's now a standard technology everybody's used to. That really opened up the aperture. So that stuck. Then there was the idea that basically all work becomes remote, or at least all knowledge work becomes remote. And I would say that has not stuck that well. It stuck somewhat, and I would say it stuck somewhat in two seconds.

circumstances. One is a lot of CEOs are really struggling even when they want to get everybody back in the office or having a very hard time doing it. And again, this kind of brings up this issue of like, where and how do people live? Because if you could have a much better lifestyle living and working remotely, then it's harder for you to come back in the office, but you as a human being are much happier and more satisfied. And so a lot of CEOs...

found that many of their best people had actually left the vicinity of the office by the time COVID came back. And they have this very difficult choice of trying to kind of coerce them into coming back or coming back two days a week or three days a week. And so that's going poorly. So that's a real struggle. Another thing that happened, which I think was kind of a big net negative, which I think hasn't really been fixed yet, which is new people entering the workforce had a much worse experience.

Right. And so COVID was sort of a, there was this sort of dichotomous experience where if you were like a 20 or 30 year veteran of a company and like a high ranking official, it was absolutely fantastic to work remotely because you got to go to your beach house and, you know, be with your kids or your grandkids and like be on the golf course. It was just like this amazing thing.

But you put yourself in the, in the, in the, in the shoes of a newly graduated, you know, college grad who's, you know, 22 or whatever, you know, stuck in some box apartment somewhere. And then, you know, basically like, you know, the whole idea of mentorship is just straight out the window because you can't get mentored by a, you know, a face in a, in a, in a.

in a Zoom panel. And so there's this sort of failure to launch problem with young kids and their careers. And I think that that hasn't been solved.

But then finally, I would just say it's not like everybody's just going to go back to work in the office. And the reason for that is because there is this massive shift that happened that I think is still underestimated, which is... I describe as following, which is it used to be the case that to have access to the best job opportunities, you had to be in very specific places.

And so there was this old adage that the thing that made Silicon Valley so special is that if you lived and worked in Silicon Valley, you could get 20 other job offers as a database administrator or as a Java programmer without changing your parking spot, right? Because the employers were clustered. And by the way, that's still true. That's still the case.

but if you're remote you can have 20 000 job offers from companies that are dying for people with your skill set right there are many of which are not located in silicon valley and they're all available on video and you can just do that and there are lots of people now who just like work remotely because they you know they can they can do that.

And then, by the way, there's this incredible book called Job Stacking that I always recommend, which is sort of this how-to manual to how to hold down two jobs. I was just going to say something about multiple, yeah. Remotely, without letting them. Over-employed. It's a very careful how-to guide and make sure each employer doesn't realize that you have the other job. And then there's another. chapter which is how to do it with three jobs simultaneously.

There's a whole subreddit dedicated to this. There's a whole subreddit, and now there's the AI version of it, which is why you can have, you know, ChatGPT do your job anyway, so you might as, you know, it's very helpful to be remotely because it's easier to do that. And so, you know, the remote thing, like, you know, continues to stick.

And so anyway, this is all just, I think a lot of this is just still up in the air, right? And we talked to a lot of Fortune 500 CEOs, and I would say that they're all struggling with this. They actually don't know how to recover the in-office experience that they used to have, and they don't know if it's possible to do that.

And they're literally, you know, they're still, it's the point where they're issuing like threats and orders to people of like, you know, we're going to watch your bad, you know, you pay somebody like, I don't know, a half million dollars a year to be like a, you know, senior engineer or something. And you tell them you're going to watch their bad, their badge reading in and out to like.

their motions and then somehow figure out you're going to penalize them. Right. Everybody ends up in a punch card world again. And so I think this is all just still up in the air. And then we talked earlier about what this means, especially for younger people in this question of economic opportunity and then family formation and then ability to have and raise kids.

And I think the whole concept of how people live and work, I think it's been upended, and I don't think it's landed again. And I think there's interesting questions on every single topic. uh that i discovered there are all these concepts of in the past you would have people live work go to school do all those things at the same place i think part of flow reimagining the future it also i think corona actually helped us in a big way

Because let's take Flo, for example, to build a company of the magnitude that Ben and Mark were talking about, very hard for us to do things remotely. So let's say our engineers, we hire engineers that want to be in the office and the ones we hired before who weren't.

We let them be wherever they were because when they were hired, that was the deal that was made with them. But we're finding a lot of people who want to be in office because that's what they want, but we're looking for them. But to create a holistic product, the reason you need sometimes people all in the same room, especially in our world. If the team doing the brand

the team doing the development, the team doing the engineering, the team doing the product, if they don't interact with each other, they just don't know the things that motivate each other. And you can't get that consistent, perfect experience. So for a company like Flow, it's even more important.

Now let's think about enterprise sales. You go to an enterprise in the past, you'd say, I'll get you Office. I'll build for you. We used to do WeWork. We're very good at enterprise. We created Office. But maybe Office is not enough for a solution. What if I can give you the... rental apartments certain number of nights in a hotel a school for your kids in the in the development or outside of the development

and the office and experiences all around and the retail. And before you know it, you're creating something very unique. Now, a lot of times when developers have tried to do it in a way that was like Disneyland, it's soulless. If you can then do it in a soulful way.

That really makes people, and Flo's mission is to connect people to themselves, their neighbors, and their natural world. If you could do those three things, leveraging technology, leveraging operations, leveraging everything, and make people feel that way. I think for today's world, it is more relevant and more important than ever before. And as we said before, people are so connected digitally. They've, I think, never been so disconnected and not for everyone.

But for a lot of us, that connection is so important. Mark was talking even about the birth rate that's going down, all the different stuff. We need physical interactions. And those physical interactions need to be meaningful. And imagine if an enterprise could not just give you a great job with a great salary, but could actually give you directionally a community that you would want to be part of.

suddenly here's what I do with my family and here's what I do with my kids. And there is, I think, a solution that gives a little bit of the good things about working remotely, but also solves the bad things, which is there's a limit to how often we don't want to have. social interaction and i think the future of flow is uh has a tremendous amount of potential i think we need to keep taking it one step at a time

I think we need to deliver on all the different aspects of the business. So now you heard us talking about funds and raising capital to deploy to people. But only people understand why flow delivers a higher value and how it's going to give them a higher return. Keep focusing on the resident.

as it grows to be a citizen as ben likes to call it commit to the architecture and keep building the right architecture both in the back and in the front end and create a culture of service and hospitality of people that are excited to be part of delivering this version of the future that we see. I think it's great for the US. We know it's great for Saudi. I think it's a global challenge and a global solution.

And I couldn't be more excited to tackle this with our two partners, with a great team that we've assembled. Adam, thank you so much for coming on the show.