In 2011, without any real estate experience, Caren Maio co-founded Funnel and scaled it to become one of the leading multifamily marketing platforms in the real estate ecosystem today. Since then, she’s been an entrepreneur-in-residence at Camber Creek and President at Moved. She’s dedicated herself throughout her career to mentoring other proptech startups and is now a highly sought-after advisor in the space.

Caren brings a unique perspective to the Thesis Driven Leader Series. She has been in proptech for about as long as there’s been a thing called proptech. But much has changed since she got her start over a decade ago; for example, many of the most sophisticated real estate owners have teams dedicated to sourcing and identifying great tech. But that makes it more important than ever that founders differentiate their startups from other offerings in the problem they’re solving, their product execution, marketing / sales and customer experience.

Caren also discusses the biggest mistakes she sees real estate tech companies make, including advice for proptech entrepreneurs just getting started. We talk about the fundraising environment as well as the pitfalls of starting a company in New York City.

Caren is clearly a product person at heart and, along with real estate operators and entrepreneurs, product leaders at any tech start will find her insights practical, valuable and probably inspiring, too.

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