Ramtin Motahar with Joulea

Intro: [00:00:07] Coming to you live from Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for another episode of Tech Talk with your host, Joey Kline.

Joey Kline: [00:00:18] Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to another episode of Tech Talk. This is going to be a trend that we’ve continued. We’ve we’ve done a little bit less of kind of the 2 to 3 round person conversations and really focused on kind of one company for our last couple of interviews. And this one is no different. We’ve got the founder and CEO of Joulea, Ramtin Motahar with us.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:00:40] Hello. How are you?

Joey Kline: [00:00:41] Good, good. Thanks for coming out today. So there’s a there’s a lot to talk about here. And obviously, where we have we do not specifically talk about real estate on this podcast, but the product and technology that we’re going to be talking about has a lot of overlap. And so this is near and dear to my heart, but just, you know, high level. Tell the audience a little bit about what Julia is, what you strive to be and kind of where it fits into the market.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:01:07] Sure. So what we do at Joulea is that we help a building owner, commercial building owners for now make their buildings energy efficient. How we do that is we assess where they are today and then what things they can do tomorrow to hit their performance goals that they want. All the national asset managers have some type of performance goals that they are trying to hit. Either it be net zero by a certain year, some percentage difference by 2030, whatever their whatever their goal is. We take that goal and we essentially figure out how they can change their aspects of building management within their buildings to hit those goals.

Joey Kline: [00:01:49] Okay. And are we talking about all across the different real estate, food groups, office, industrial, multifamily, retail, or is there a focus on 1 or 2 of those for the initial launch?

Ramtin Motahar: [00:02:00] So the initial launch is office. We’re working with building owners who have building automation systems because that’s a part of our product and we can also work on other buildings that have automation systems. So if it’s a warehouse that’s refrigerated, that has an automation system and they want to optimize their energy levels and energy usage, we can help them as well. Hospitals, we can help there.

Joey Kline: [00:02:24] Okay. And so is the focus on that type of property, just that if you’re looking at the type of property that would be the lowest hanging fruit just based on amount of emissions that it’s putting out there and size and scope, does the high rise multi-tenant office building just fit that better than a warehouse or maybe a strip center does?

Ramtin Motahar: [00:02:45] So the great thing about office buildings, Class A office buildings that have it could be Class B office buildings as long as they have a Bas. What helps us with the Bas is the building automation system. Bas What helps us with that is that it gives us more data that we can help the building owner even further. So that’s why we’re focusing on that, not necessarily that, you know, they they produce more emissions, it’s just that we’re trying to focus with them so that we have that additional layer of data.

Joey Kline: [00:03:15] Okay. So so your target right now are the national asset managers of large real estate investment trusts, you know, maybe more local or regional players, but essentially anyone that owns, you know, it sounds like multi-story office buildings, hospitals, but anything with a automation system is where your technology fits in the best, correct?

Ramtin Motahar: [00:03:40] Correct. So the automation system aspect is not the only part that we do. It’s just it’s one of the things that we’re looking to help building owners on.

Joey Kline: [00:03:48] And so our building owners going through a process that necessitates your technology because they’re looking to sustainability to reduce operating expenses, are they doing it because their shareholders are asking them for it? Is it all of the above? Like what are the motivations? Sure.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:04:06] I think, you know, post-COVID a lot of building owners across the US national asset management companies, those are the larger companies. They essentially started pushing more for reducing their emissions for us, if it’s reducing their emissions or reducing their costs that they actually pay to their local utilities, we can help them with both. So what we’re seeing is that they’re trying to really reduce their emissions, But how you do that is you have to assess where you are today. A lot of the low hanging fruit can be taken advantage of very quickly. But if you are trying to, let’s say, hit 30% energy efficiency by 2030 as a portfolio and you use I’m just, you know, giving an example, if you use 2015 numbers as the benchmark or if you use 2020 numbers as the benchmark of how much your entire portfolio of buildings were using getting to that 2030, there are some things that, you know, we all know to do post that it takes a very granular understanding of how the building is functioning, both inside the building, within how people are using the building. Which has nothing to do with the building automation system per se. How tenants are using the building, then how the building is performing on the outside, the skin of the building. You know, the skin of the building is probably the envelope of the building is the it’s the largest system within a building, but typically it doesn’t necessarily go neglected. It’s just hard to assess. But with our platform, we’re able to assess the envelope of the building as well.

Joey Kline: [00:05:41] Okay. So let’s go through this actually works and let’s just use the building that we’re sitting in right now. Okay? So, you know, three buildings and make up North Park, you know, north of 1,000,000ft². So owner of this property comes to you and says, I want to understand what we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong and how to get better. What happens next? Sure.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:06:00] So what we do then is we create an energy model of their building. Energy model essentially is the physics of their building. What is the envelope made of? What are the what is the roof made of? If it’s multiple roofs, what are they all made of? How many people are coming and going in the building? What is their occupancy look like? What kind of mechanical systems do they have? What kind of lighting systems is it on Led? Is it on? Is there a lighting control system, orientation of the building to the sun temperate zone where it’s located? So here we’re in Atlanta, we’re in Sandy Springs. So that temperate zone temperature aspect of what the building experience is on a daily basis, 365, we can we have that information. That information is out there. So we make this energy model. Then we take their utility bills and we put it into the model. Now we have a what? Asher. Asher is kind of our FAA in our world, what Asher calls a calibrated energy model. Upon having this calibrated energy model figured out, we then take just a small, you know, palm sized computer the size of two iPhones, add it to their building automation system, and we’re getting all the information from their building automation system, the same info that will go to the manager’s office, the chief engineer’s office at the terminal that the automation system is sitting in. We get all that wirelessly. So now we have a continuously calibrated building energy model.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:07:20] While we’re doing all this in parallel, we’re also flying drones fully autonomously around the building. So we’re trying to capture any anomalies, if there is any heat or cooling anomalies, if essentially conditioned air is coming out or if there are water leakages, which is a byproduct within that process, we can also find structural anomalies, but we’re mainly looking for air leakages. So we add that information if we find any into the building automation system, I’m sorry, into our building energy model and our building energy model at that time can calibrate how much is attributing for that leak or that air flow that’s coming out of the building. So as we do all this, we then take this model that is now pretty accurate. Asher says If you have a predictive model, 15% error rate or below, we’re trying to be below that. Okay? So we take our model that are fairly accurate, and then we put it into our OpEx and CapEx planners. These essentially help the building owner how to optimize their operational expenditures as well as optimize their capital expenditures so that they can get to their goal and they see every little dial that they turn or whatnot or every piece of equipment that they want to upgrade or whatnot. How much that gets them closer to their 2030 goal, to their net zero goal to whatever goal it is that they have.

Joey Kline: [00:08:48] So so you’re able to track those metrics, I guess, one against sustainability goals, but two, you could say, you know, let’s say this building, I don’t know, the operating expenses make up about $14. Okay? You look at their breakdown and you see that their utilities are, let’s call it a buck two, a buck 50 or so. So you can look at that and say, okay, by doing X, Y and Z, we think that you can decrease that to $0.90 instead of a buck ten. Correct.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:09:16] So we can actually help them with their operating expense expenditures so that essentially at the end of the day, their NOI gets better. So that’s a byproduct of what we’re doing as well. So but if that’s what the building owner is primarily interested in, then that becomes the objective of the goal for them. So all our mathematics essentially then starts from there. Gotcha. But if emissions is there, is what they’re looking for. All our mathematics starts with emissions. If they want a portfolio of, I don’t know, I’m just making up something. Average Energy Star score of 87 and above across the entire portfolio. That becomes essentially their goal that we help them mathematically get to.

Joey Kline: [00:09:52] Okay. For those uninitiated, NOI stands for net operating income, essentially measure of profitability of a multi-tenant building. Interesting. Okay. So look, office landlords are in the news today for a whole lot of reasons. And not all buildings are created equally, both in terms of location as well as just amenities and market. Ability also in terms of how efficient they are. You know what you’re studying. I am curious in what has become as a guy who represents tenants. Right. It has become a very favorable market. You know, landlords are just competing far more than they used to have to for a tenant’s business. Are there landlords that you are interacting with across the country that are using your services or just sustainability in general as a differentiator to try and go out there and attract a tenant, whereas a different building might not be able to based on that tenant sustainability goals or mostly of what you’re hearing of, Look, we we need to get more efficient. We need to hit certain goals. It’s not so much around. We think this will make us more marketable to tenants.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:11:05] I think it’s both ways. I think they’re thinking about their prospective tenants as well as they’re thinking about their investors, their investors they kind of have to live with because they’ve been there. They’re going to be there. Whereas the tenant, they’re essentially seeing it’s a snapshot of what that company is doing or what that landlord is doing at that point. So I think it’s already the conversation has already started for the larger companies. And so they’re really as a byproduct of having their investors happy with what they’re doing there. It’s the byproduct is there for the tenants to also see that they are really pushing the envelope or really trying to push the envelope in in in the ability to be transparent with their energy reductions.

Joey Kline: [00:11:51] Sure. I mean, in the last decade, typically the only tenants that I saw that were really serious, you know, it wasn’t just like a, you know, performative check the box where the European companies that had you know, when they said we have to find a sustainable building, they actually meant it, right? It didn’t go out the window towards the end of the deal cycle. This decade, I think, is going to be very different in that you are going to actually finally see American companies not just pay lip service to that, but actually have it as a real need of any building they’re going to be in.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:12:28] Yes, I agree. I very much agree. I think two things are happening as of right now. You’re building you either have to have amenities in your building so that the tenant feels good about, you know, leasing this building in order to bring their employees back because there are these fun things and these thoughtful things and, you know, that you can do as a as an employee of the tenant inside this building. But they also are looking for buildings that have less emissions so that they report less emissions just from their general the tenant reports less emissions from their general business operations. As far as what they are doing and how what they’re doing, how much it’s emitting.

Joey Kline: [00:13:09] Well, and as the SEC looks to sort of formalize, finalize some of these rules, that seems like they’re on the horizon. I mean, look, this is what’s going to always happens, right? It starts with the public companies, then it trickles down.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:13:21] Yeah, Yeah, exactly. And I think as that formalizes, people want to be able to. Okay, well, I didn’t do it exactly the way that the SEC has now formalized it, but at least we’re doing something now. We can just figure out how what we have been doing fits into the metrics of what the SEC has put out there. Sure, it’s easier. It’s easier to get there when you’ve already been trying to do something than to just start from scratch.

Joey Kline: [00:13:46] That’s right. And look, as much as, okay, you could take a building owner and say, well, they know they’re building the best. And I guess you can make that argument. But you’ve got people internally there that are focused on so many other pieces of the business that I mean, I just imagine it’d be very hard for someone internally to deploy these solutions, especially absent the technology you have. That probably makes it a much more efficient and accurate process.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:14:14] Yeah, we try to really be comprehensive in how we’re assessing this because of not just how much the building industry residential commercial altogether emits as far as carbon, but there’s a lot of moving parts. So with there being a lot of moving parts you really want to capture as most of those moving parts that are contributing to the uncertainty as much as possible so that you really grasp how you can help this building owner. It’s essentially like, you know, I’ll give you an example. We we see we at Julius see the building, the buildings that we work with. I mean, these are all, you know, top notch buildings. We see them essentially as top notch athletes that are really trying to push the envelope on how good they get from how they how good they were yesterday. And when it comes to a professional athlete either in the NBA or Major League Baseball or whatnot, they essentially really check metrics against how well they’re doing today in this one aspect so that they can get better on it later on. On today for tomorrow. So we’re really trying to assess where the building is today. So essentially saying, okay, this is the athlete and this is where the athlete is today. How can we help this athlete become the best in the league or the best in their conference or whatever? We try to do the same way with the buildings, but you can’t get there if you don’t really assess where you are today.

Joey Kline: [00:15:36] Sure. I mean, this is look, I think with anything in life, you know, anything, anything that can be improved needs to be measured. Right. Without that, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Yeah. All right. So so let’s back up a little bit. What is your background and how do you come to this convergence of real estate, engineering and technology?

Ramtin Motahar: [00:15:58] Sure. So my background I went to Georgia Tech undergrad, studied economics and industrial engineering. After graduating, went into the world of just commercial real estate development offices and such and started seeing buildings could be built better. After some time after, you know, just being in the industry. Started seeing buildings could be built better. And I started reading academic journals, trade publications, and try to see, you know, how can I learn more about how can they be built better and why is it that they need to be built better? And as I was reading all that, I started noticing that they can actually be designed better as well. But I wasn’t an I wasn’t a design engineer, nor was I an architect. So I started thinking to myself, you know, what industry thinks about their product when they’re thinking about designing it. They’re thinking about the best way to make it as well as the best way to use it and take care of it after it’s fabricated. Aerospace came to mind. So when to to back to Georgia Tech, talk to a professor. I was like, you know, I have this idea. I think, you know, in a more collaborative or more integrative way, make commercial real estate or just real estate more energy efficient. And was like, Yeah, no, this is great because we’re actually the lab on campus that is helping all of the buildings on the Georgia Tech campus on getting their energy. But we don’t necessarily know how to optimize the energy at that time. That was the case. Now they’re working on it, how the buildings can optimize their usage.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:17:29] So they had the entire grid on the Georgia Tech campus as far as how the buildings are getting their electricity, he was like, okay, so I think this is very collaborative. I was like, okay, that sounds great. How do we collaborate? He was like, No, there’s no collaboration. You have to become a student. I’m like, I’m working. I got kids. What do you mean? Was like, No, it’s the only way. So I applied. I got in to the master’s program at at Georgia Tech for aerospace engineering. And one thing he told me he was like for two semesters, just forget about don’t forget what you’re why you’re here, but just forget about trying to interject and just see how we do things. So here I am with my background in industrial engineering and economics, and I’m in these aerospace classes trying to figure out how I can get gleanings from them in order to make the world of real estate better. Eventually, just sitting in there, I started noticing it. I was like, okay, this thing is called the integrated product management method of aerospace. Literally, when let’s say Lockheed Martin wins the F-22 contract, they’re essentially thinking about the best way to design it so that not only does it hit all the missions that are needed for the Air Force, but when it leaves their hangar, you know, it hits the company’s goals as well to, you know, to make some funds, but also how they take care of it, how the Air Force takes care of it, post use so that if the Air Force has an idea, then they’re like, hey, you know, if you move the pilot’s chair forward by two inches, there’s enough leg room and everything else is going to be okay.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:19:03] I have better access, let’s say, to the access panel that’s below it. This this way I don’t have to remove the chair in order to remove the access panel. I can actually just get to the access panel. So it’s this very in. It’s almost like a very collaborative internal system that they use in order to be able to make better products the next time. And so it’s very it’s very cyclical. Whereas in our world of real estate, it’s kind of siloed a little bit. So trying to bring that cyclicality of the aerospace industry as well as the robustness of how to think about things comprehensively so that there’s not the important leaves aren’t left turned, you know, So you actually turn everything that’s very important so that you can reduce the uncertainty. So that was like, you know, all this uncertainty that we face in the world of commercial real estate, if you put that thinking to it from the aerospace world, then you can really hopefully make a dent. And so that’s where we are today. We’re now working not in design, not in construction inspections, we’re working in post occupancy. So we’re working with building owners and post occupancy on how their buildings, you know, how their buildings are using energy in order to create those models that we talked about and then how to take them to the next level of wherever they want their goals to be.

Joey Kline: [00:20:25] Would you also work with look, we have adaptive reuse is obviously become a huge part of real estate, not just in Atlanta, but all over the country. I think for very, very good reasons, both, you know, economical, cultural and esthetically. Let’s say that someone picks up a property that they’re trying to figure out how to properly retrofit. Right. This is a building that exists, but really it’s changing. It’s not occupied yet. Is that something that you guys would be able to come into as someone is envisioning how they construct this new building properly?

Ramtin Motahar: [00:21:00] Yes. So we can help them. If there is like let’s say somebody picks up a building and they want to retrofit it to multifamily or something. We can help them in that process. In the process of going from a building, let’s say an office building that has a central plant and then figuring out the best way to go to multifamily on the Hvac system, the lighting system, so we can help them with that.

Joey Kline: [00:21:21] I love I’m curious to get your opinion on this because obviously we see all of these news articles, some of which, you know, I look at at them and I think, did they consult anyone who’s actually in commercial real estate before they went and, you know, kind of spewed their uneducated opinions on what it takes to convert office buildings to residential buildings. And while that is, I think, a very laudable goal for which some buildings make a lot of sense, the problem that I think we have with that is that you’ve got there’s two very different uses. And part of the issue is that the floorplate of an office building is typically not terribly conducive, at least a modern floorplate. You know, look, if you look at buildings that were maybe built earlier in the last century where it’s a 10 to 15,000 foot floorplate, maybe that works. But but I am curious if you’ve got a lot of people that are coming to you with that task in mind.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:22:19] So not necessarily, but I’ve been reading about about it as well, where you’re right, you have to figure out how to break up the office floor plate where you have windows so that it works for residential because rooms need windows in order for it to be technically a bedroom. Right?

Joey Kline: [00:22:35] I mean, again, let’s just take the building that we’re sitting in right now. I mean, you if to get everyone a window, you’d have to make this a very long, narrow hallway of an apartment. That just doesn’t make any sort of sense. Now, for an office tenant, right? That depth is great. Not so much for residential units. I mean, the one I can think of that’s happening downtown, which I think makes a lot of sense, is the old grant building, which is being turned into residences. And that makes a ton of sense. But case in point, that’s a building that was built in the early 1900s. And I’m going to guess off the top of my head is probably 12 to 13,000 square foot floor plates.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:23:14] Yeah, no, I agree with you that that is the challenge that I feel like the conversions are going to have. But there’s I’ve been reading there’s there’s architectural firms who are really pushing and trying to figure it out. But I agree with you, it’s not going to be easy.

Joey Kline: [00:23:27] Well, and look, they should because look, not just because there are some buildings that have reached the end of their useful life as an office building in this new economy. You know, for whatever reason, they just cannot compete with the newest of office buildings. But also, no offense to the multifamily industry of the day, but my God, I mean, I just feel like so many multifamily developers have totally lost an eye for design, anything unique. And, you know, in an environment in which people want choices to turn an old beautiful art deco building into a residence just seems a little bit more esthetically appealing than, you know, six storey stick built, right?

Ramtin Motahar: [00:24:12] No, And I definitely understand your sentiment because based on what’s out there, there is buildings that you can retrofit to help the, you know, the shortage of housing. Totally. Yeah. I’m with you.

Joey Kline: [00:24:26] Yeah. Yeah. And look, it’s not like it’s cheap, but we have it takes the will, right? And it takes someone that is actually adept and maybe that’s, maybe that’s the problem is that it is just hard to find a group of people with that have the skill set to really thoughtfully make that conversion and also have the expertise and access to capital to do it right.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:24:48] And I think, you know, where you saw maybe about 20 years ago or even 30 years ago, where you had developers who would purchase the turn of the century warehouses and then convert those into offices or even sometimes residential. I feel like you’re going to start finding some people who are very clever in how they, you know, go about it so that they can start maybe moving this needle and reusing these buildings.

Joey Kline: [00:25:14] Well, that’s I mean, that’s certainly what I hope is going to happen with Braden Feldman picking up the south downtown portfolio. Right. They’ve been very good at taking old factories, making them into cool places. Right. That should hopefully translate. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So so let’s talk about your entrepreneurial journey, because I think this is always an interesting question for a founder. I feel like there are two people I have on the show. If they’re in the founder seat, there are some that are innate founders because they couldn’t ever do anything else. They couldn’t ever take orders from anyone else. They could never not have it their way. And I don’t I mean, I’m again, I’m I’m not so much an entrepreneur, but I am someone that has a hard time taking orders. And thus I’m in a commission only job because no one can tell me what to do if they don’t pay me a salary. And then I think there are those that. Are entrepreneurs by necessity in that as hard as they tried in the corporate world, they could not find something or someone to solve the problem they saw, and they finally just threw their hands up and said, I guess I’ll just do it myself. Which one of those categories do you find yourself in?

Ramtin Motahar: [00:26:23] I think maybe in the latter one, yeah. Where had an idea, hadn’t seen it out there being implemented and was like, you know, I feel like this will be great. And then the more you look, the more you see that it doesn’t exist. Yeah. So you try to figure out how to really figure it out. And so I think that’s that’s essentially, you know, trying to go back to school to learn how one industry thinks in order to bring it back to a different industry, but still make it where it is approachable, it is understood easily. And then you bring all of the understandings and and I guess technicalities from the current industry, which is the world of real estate development and take it to the next level.

Joey Kline: [00:27:08] What are you looking for as you’re building your team? Because this is a very different yes, it touches real estate, but I think it’s a very different type of person that you’re recruiting than those in, you know, a development development company. So who are you out there looking for? And that can be personality type skill set, all of the above.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:27:29] Sure. What what what I’ve noticed is that in the world of, I guess, technology for for for the commercial real estate world or just technology for the real estate world, proptech or whatnot, whatever you want to call it. Um, we the only way to, to really attack this is that you have to have a multidisciplinary team. So the team can’t be a lot of mechanical engineers, the team can’t be a lot of architects. It has to have some of everyone in there. So where we’re coming from, you know, the fact that we have the drones that are flying autonomously, we have aerospace engineers because we’re assessing mechanical systems. We have mechanical engineers who have designed buildings before. Um, when you are assessing how the product should look, we actually literally have someone who one person who’s on the on the UX team, she essentially her background was architecture undergrad and then she did UX UI. So you know, really trying to understand how someone based on their background, how they can really help create relevance for our client and how our client can see something and we can take those gleanings from how they see it, either good or bad, and then we fix it. The the bad obviously needs to be overhauled and the good can always become better. So, you know, we have aerospace engineers working on the drone portion of things. We have mechanical engineers, like I mentioned, working on the mechanical systems and optimizing that. We have computer scientists who are working on computer vision models that when the drone flies, it’s flagging anomalies automatically through algorithms. So I think that’s that’s the only way you can really deal with with this situation because like I said, it’s it’s multivariate a world of real estate. There’s a lot of uncertainty. So we really are trying to do things to bring that uncertainty down.

Joey Kline: [00:29:34] Yeah, you you’re in this interesting position in which you have to find people that have certain certainly skill sets and deep knowledge, but you also have to find folks that along with that have flexibility and can pivot really easily, are okay with uncertainty. That is a very small center of a Venn diagram to search for.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:29:58] Yeah, it’s not it’s not it’s not easy. But one thing I will tell you this, it’s it’s been really great for us, the fact that we’re close to Georgia Tech, that we find Georgia Tech students who are graduating to come on board.

Joey Kline: [00:30:10] I can imagine that that has been a huge talent pipeline for you.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:30:13] Yeah, it’s been very helpful. And, you know, it creates, I guess, kind of like not necessarily relevance, but it creates a connection that we’ve also been there. But, you know, you also want to not get into the concept that everyone’s from Georgia Tech. Then you get groupthink. You know, you want to kind of break it up a little bit. But no, it’s been great. It’s been great. Just willingness to to deal with uncertainty. Like you said, their willingness to be challenged mentally and where it’s actually fun, it doesn’t give them a headache. You know, it’s it’s that’s one aspect. I feel like Georgia Tech has been a great mover in the entire just start up community here in Atlanta.

Joey Kline: [00:30:52] How do you test for that? Because that is it’s you’re saying the the accepting of uncertainty, not getting stressed by that, but getting energy from it. It’s hard. Two. Sometimes it can be hard to ask questions that draw that out, but that, I would think, is an absolute must have right. You can’t hire someone at your stage that doesn’t have that. How do you suss that out in an interview?

Ramtin Motahar: [00:31:20] Yeah, no, I think one way is okay, what have because some of the previous things that they have done, they’re going to do aspects of those previous things to help what we’re trying to do now at Julia. So I feel like when you when we’re that’s how I do it when we’re talking to see how excited are they when they’re describing their previous projects that they worked with, either if they be academic projects or if they were commercial projects where they were working for a company and how they were when when they hit some type of because this is all a nascent industry, no matter like, you know, all this machine learning stuff is nascent. So how when they hit a, you know, a roadblock, a lack of data or a lack of full fully understanding how to maybe implement a way to analyze that data, how do they, you know, surmount that? So hearing just kind of the the enthusiasm when someone’s talking about it, you kind of pick up on that.

Joey Kline: [00:32:16] Yeah, I get that. I mean, yes, you can you can try and tell by attitude, but we also.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:32:22] Send software assessments. Personality assessments. No, no, no. Actually like just assessments where they code and such so that we see what are their coding skills. Yeah. Okay. So you know, technically we have that. But then when you talk to them after the assessment, you know, you can kind of see when they light up and they’re talking about a specific aspect that they’ve worked on before.

Joey Kline: [00:32:42] Yeah, that’s that, that sort of just basic human engagement is kind of hard to fake.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:32:46] Yeah. Yeah. After a while. Yeah.

Joey Kline: [00:32:50] Um, you know, so obviously you guys follow sort of loosely into the prop tech world. I just feel like real estate is kind of the, the last large industry to get disrupted by technology.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:33:03] Yeah, I agree with you. I think, you know, I when I went back into the to the program, to the aerospace program, it was 2014, literally, I think it was I think I graduated in 2017. I took a little longer than the, I guess the typical person. Well, you know, I was a little behind the curve on that. Yeah.

Joey Kline: [00:33:22] Look, you had a career, you had kids.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:33:23] You had to deal with stuff. Yeah, but that’s when McKinsey in 2017, I think it was 2017 that they published their paper on how the real estate world can really become better with technology. But the thing is, you have to empathize with the industry first, understand where the people within the industry are and work so that your product can help supplement whatever they’re doing on a daily basis. Because there’s a lot of, you know, balls in the air in this industry. So you really want to make someone’s life easier by providing them the right info at the right time.

Joey Kline: [00:34:00] Well, and that’s, of course, where your background as an actual developer comes in very handy. Yeah, it helps. You can you can speak from both sides of the equation.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:34:07] Yeah, it helps. You know, you can empathize with both your engineers and like, you know, I want to really make sure that they understand this. Okay, well, let’s maybe go and talk to them and say, if we put this in front of you like this, is this easier to understand or is B easier to understand? So you kind of straddle the fence, like you said. Yeah.

Joey Kline: [00:34:27] What what is next in the next 12 to 18 months for you all?

Ramtin Motahar: [00:34:32] Yeah, we would we’d so we’re working with national asset managers who have buildings here in Atlanta. The idea is to work and develop this this connection and and product and eventually deploy across their entire portfolio. So that’s the idea. I feel like that’s where the value really comes to a REIT or an asset management group. You if you have a across the board goal across all your buildings in the United States, you can’t just, you know, do these buildings but not do those buildings right.

Joey Kline: [00:35:04] One property is not going to cut it right. It might be a way for you to pilot and prove how great the technology is, but you’ve got to deploy it across the.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:35:13] Portfolio, right? So you have to deploy it across the portfolio. So they really see a great assessment on where they are, either good or bad. And then from there, you can just start, you know, making one move a day and literally showing them those small moves, how much it gets them closer over a let’s say 20, 23 is, you know, the year right now. And how and 2030 is their goal that they’re trying to get to how this one move helps them on a daily basis. And extrapolating that over the next seven years, if you were to do this with us on a daily basis, as as tedious as that sounds, but, you know, we’re in the building together on a daily basis. This is what it would do if you make this upgrade. This is how it helps.

Joey Kline: [00:35:56] Okay. So I mean, customer acquisition all day, every day, the biggest focus. Yeah. Which of course, at your stage it has to. Well, for any business it should be, but yeah. There is, you need to expand. And of course, in order to expand, you have to have these proof points within single buildings in this market to be able to do so. Yes.

Ramtin Motahar: [00:36:14] Yeah, exactly. So you realize there’s no perfect building, like there’s no perfect person. So, you know, it’s just every, every, every building has something that can become better about it.

Joey Kline: [00:36:26] Okay. So, look, obviously, if we as New York has finance, as Los Angeles has Hollywood, I think that if there was anything that came close to being a, you know, industry that dominated Atlanta, I think commercial real estate would probably be it. We probably have a decent bit of those folks listening right now. So for anyone in the commercial real estate space listening, Julia is the name of Robson’s company and spelled j u l e like jewel measure of energy. Pun Good one. Where can they go to learn more about you? How can they find out more about the company and the opportunity?

Ramtin Motahar: [00:37:06] They can go to our website and then they can request a demo and we will be. They’re very eager to show them.

Joey Kline: [00:37:12] Cool. Crompton Thanks a lot for coming on. Thank you for having me.