Today we’d like to introduce you to Avi Tal.
Avi, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I was born and raised in San Diego. It wasn’t until I left for college in Arizona that I realized San Diego was the best place ever. I’ve always had a passion for Entrepreneurship, primarily driven by my fear of not being able to compete in the real world.
My peers in college were always so prepared for real life, doing internships every summer, networking, and setting themselves up for success after college. I did none of that. I’m a very competitive person, and in this case, it meant forging my own path to avoid being at a disadvantage. So I came up with an idea for my own business, and shortly after graduating, I founded Onsite Latin America. The product was simple; make hotel WiFi authentication pages great again, by injecting hyperlocal content onto them.
I got lucky out of the gate, and the product was quickly adopted by the largest hotel chains in Mexico. We became one of the largest WiFi media networks in Latin America. Shortly thereafter, I was approached by a venture-backed startup from the bay area, Interesante.com, and we ended up merging the two companies, with the goal of going after something much bigger. This was my first foray into the “Silicon Valley” world, where I learned about building tech, teams, and raising venture capital.
Around the time that my previous company merged with Interesante.com, my brother, David Tal, was doing really well as a real estate broker, and I became fascinated with how technology could help improve the lives of real estate professionals. My brother was also my best friend and creative inspiration. He was a serial entrepreneur himself, always coming up with new ideas, and I became excited about working together with him. We launched our first business together in 2011, and the rest is history.
Has it been a smooth road?
Raising money is never easy, and it’s a quite humbling experience every time. We’ve raised 3 rounds of venture capital in 3 years. But I would say the biggest challenges we’ve faced has always been right after raising money. When it’s just you, you know what you are doing, and then you have three people and you have to rethink how you are doing everything. But when there are 10 people it’s all going to change again. And when there are 30 people it will change again. Same when you reach 100 people. At every one of those steps everything kind of breaks.
Everything. Your communication systems and your payroll and your accounting and customer support. Everything that you put into place breaks and needs to be rebuilt. The challenge is, rebuilding everything feels like building a new plane in mid-air, while on another plane that’s doomed for a crash landing. We’re now at roughly 140 people at Agentology, and we’re building a brand new plane as we speak. If we don’t, we’ll most certainly crash.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Agentology story. Tell us more about the business.
Agentology is a platform that helps real estate agents spark conversations with their online prospects. We blend technology with people to create a network of on-demand “concierges” that carry on conversations with leads, primarily via SMS. We help real estate agents cut through the noise and identify which prospects they should be spending their time on.
What sets us apart from others is our blend of tech + people. We believe creating authentic human connections is what businesses need to succeed in an ultra-competitive internet landscape. In the past 10 years, real estate went from being completely offline to almost all online. Technology has empowered consumers like never before, but it’s also eroded away the human connection that used to be made much earlier on in the customer journey.
Too much technology can be inauthentic, yet too much human power can be inefficient. By blending the two, our platform enables personalized, authentic connections at scale.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Simply put, technology is making real estate more efficient. There are innovations happening across the board whether it be with business models, Big Data, AI, Blockchain, Fintech, etc.. There is a tech-enabled real estate, and there is real estate enabled tech.
All of these things are unfortunately creating a downward pressure on commissions for real estate agents. We think that in the future, the real estate agents that embrace technology will be able to close far more transactions each. This will result in there being less real estate agents overall, that each can do far more.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.agentology.com
- Phone: (844) 372-3014
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