Elise AI's Minna Song on Building the Artificial Intelligence OS for Housing—and Why Leasing Is Just the Start

Hello and welcome to the thesis driven leader series. I'm Brad Hargraves, the founder and editor-in-chief of thesis driven and your host here for the leader series today. Thank you all so much for joining us. Today we're joined by the founder of one of the most interesting prop tech companies out there and certainly one of the most successful of the past few years. Minisong is the co-founder and CEO of a lease AI. You may have seen we did a deep dive on the lease AI a few weeks back where we really focused on the interplay between what a lease AI is doing from a technology standpoint and this broader trend of centralized operations in multifamily that is more multifamily operators are taking tasks that have historically been completed by team members on site moving them offsite to centralized offices whether here or offshore and that both unlocks new technology as well as requires new automation and tech to manage. A lease AI partly because of what's happening with centralization partly because of what's happening with AI is one of the rising stars of prop tech. They're widely seen as one of if not the best AI tools particularly from multifamily out there and they raised a 75 million dollar round of financing last year which is really notable given how difficult it is to raise venture growth rounds for prop tech companies right now. So it's really saying something that they were able to go out and land a round like that. But one thing to understand about a lease AI and Minisong is that they bet on AI well before it was cool and every company had dot AI in their domain and they're seeing dividends from that. Today go back 10 years ago a lot of prop tech companies were building chat bots these were basically leasing or customer service assistants that were programmed in a very traditional manner. If this then that they would see the words pet and rent in a message and assume that the customer was asking about pet rent and give an answer accordingly. Yeah they're a little bit more complicated than that but not much more complicated. A lease AI didn't go that route they decided to go with AI from the beginning even when AI was not really that much of a thing back in 2016 2017 2018. And so while those kind of programmed interfaces did well in the early days the chat bots have had an advantage they could be controlled they were predictable. LLMs have advanced over the past three or four years to a point where they're uncontrovertibly better than the programmed version they can produce human-like responses they can deal with unstructured requests data etc. So Elise was early to that and they've since expanded into a wide variety of use cases outside of AI from customer support to collections to even reporting and interestingly enough they just launched a new vertical in health care that I'm excited to discuss with Mina. So we're going to talk about tech we're going to talk about where multifamily is headed state of prop tech as well as Mina's journey as a founder. But before we welcome Mina to the show I do want to thank our sponsor for just a moment this would not be possible the thesis-driven leader series without the support of neutral their multifamily developer redefining sustainable real estate with that focus on resident health well-being they are building the tallest mass timber and passive house residential building in the US with state-of-the-art wellness club in Milwaukee they operate in other cities like Madison they've done some cool projects but beyond environmental impact neutral offers investors access to sustainable tax credits and deductions definitely chat with them learn about what they have at invest.neutral. Now really excited to invite Mina Song co-founder and CEO of Elise AI to the show. Mina welcome to the show so excited to have you on today. Thank you for having me I'm excited. So I'd really love to hear the story of Elise AI getting off the ground because you have a technical background you and your co-founder both have technical backgrounds but you're not from the real estate industry often you look at startups out there people from tech who come into real estate it doesn't end well but you've managed to figure it out so tell me a little bit about some of the things you did in the early days and what you attribute that figuring it out too. Yeah certainly didn't come from the industry we started in multifamily because when I met my co-founder we decided we wanted to start a company and thought from first principles how can we maximize our impact in this world and we both come from software engineering backgrounds met studying computer science in college actually so we decided we would build technology for industries that serve fundamental human needs that was the concept and what are our thinking about the hierarchy of needs right it's food water and shelter and so we picked shelter and that is the residential real estate industry so that's how we picked the industry we didn't want to build products that didn't really solve a problem and probably pretty likely if you start building products for something you know nothing about how we got started was I took a job working at a real estate firm in Manhattan actually where our office is based our headquarters is based and I was just there to listen and understand what the pain points were it was really research into the people the problems the bottlenecks in the process and honestly in the first couple weeks it was pretty obvious that the biggest thing that people were complaining about all the time was not getting responses back and forth communication being very slow asynchronous and just falling off a lot of the time so we thought hey AI is getting good in research it wasn't really a thing like it is today we started initial research about 2016 we got very lucky on timing quite honestly 2017 was the year the transformer was invented transformers the T in GPT so that's really the architecture that unlocked a lot of the amazing inventions that have come out since then so that was the big change that happened and you were going into this not necessarily understanding that AI was going to have the moment it has had what got you into AI not many people were talking about AI outside of research and academic and technical circles back in 2016 what did you see yeah all techniques worked not nearly as well but they could produce commercially viable results and so we knew that we could build something I think what we ended up building is much greater because of the acceleration of the advancement of AI we knew that it was getting funded pretty heavily and a lot of great research was being done because we had ties to the academic circles through the universities that we attended so had a good friend working with professors actually working on some of these newer models and telling us the results were outperforming anything that existed it really did come from early indication from academia these were tech space models you were at university where were you in school again I went to MIT so you're at MIT which is where a lot of this stuff is happening when you say funding you're not necessarily talking about venture checks getting written a little bit of that was happening but not much this was academic grants exactly so you took it straight from academic research at MIT to working at a real estate firm in the middle of New York City and applying that theory into practice yeah and so at the time just to understand the context this was when there was a boom in these chatbots and you always have been careful to distinguish between alice AI which I think a lot of people say at the time we're like lumping in with that trend versus what other people were doing creating these programmatic things so maybe can you explain for the audience a little bit of that distinction and how you draw that yeah I think chatbots really refer to the old age of how people interacted through those very decision-making choose your own adventure keyword matching chatbots not really true natural language input and we made sure that people understood that what they were thinking of when they thought chatbot was not the same product that we would be delivering them not the same customer experience those older chatbots have essentially a lot of limitations can only handle a subset of questions have predetermined set of answers and just generally frustrating like we've all experienced just so our audience is clear when we talk about these are fundamentally different technologies so a chatbot would see the words pet and rent and assume that a prospective tenant is asking about pet rent which is different than how alice AI works completely different if you spell something incorrectly is not confused by that or not finding the response it's really much more like your experience with chat bt it's taking in the meaning even if you're not communicating very clearly and it's giving you a comprehensive response right it's not giving you a predetermined response so you can ask it multiple questions it can speak many different languages you don't have to ask it to speak Spanish it will just pick up that you are speaking Spanish so a bunch of benefits that you get from being really a true natural language conversation obviously a lot has changed since 2017 when you started the company and started building alice AI and from this AI base tell me a little bit about have those changes and how you've ridden the wave of AI going from something that is in academia to the most popular real estate tech trend there how has that impacted your company it's been a completely wild ride when we were first getting started AI didn't mean anything a lot of people didn't know that AI stood for artificial intelligence and definitely really took off in late 2022 in 2017 we had customers we really started with the smaller mid-size operators and then started getting into larger operators and really it wasn't about the technology it was just about the problems that they had to solve Avalon Bay and equity residential where some of our early customers and honestly they were attracted to being able to solve this at scale for the first time any other technology in history had not been able to help them really solve the problem it changed a lot since 2017 we used to say this thing where our goal was to make AI for leasing the status quo it sounded extremely futuristic at that point but now it's a must have for anyone in the property management industry it's clear that AI is never going to go away and not just leasing either but across the entire resident life cycle yeah I'd say in late 2022 when chat GPT came out it really changed people's minds because they became familiar with AI as a consumer product right before it was very much the thought that AI is never going to do something as well as a human but when people started interacting with it and saying oh actually it's writes emails better than I write emails so I want it to write all of my emails oh maybe I can have it answer all of my leads as well or maybe I can have it handle all of my resident requests complaints whatever it might be and with no emotion and no mistakes that change in mindset was really powerful for us so what were some of those early customer conversations like you mentioned to me when we were chatting a couple weeks ago you sat in Avalon Bay's office down in the DC area for a little bit to just understand how they were working that was once again pre-pandemic 2017-2018 when AI was still very much an academic thing it wasn't as hot as it is today and maybe even a little scary for a lot of people so what were those initial conversations like we're going to talk to your leads with AI you couldn't really just tell our early customers about it just showing them I think it does the talking for itself literally and by showing them obviously it's having those one-on-one okay cool play around with this and see how it does but then you're going to get to pilots and roll it out at a building and see how it does what was that initial data those first experiments what were those like it was pretty crazy so our first customer was Stonehenge based in New York City when we launched the product with them there's a very MVP we were on about five properties with them and then in three weeks they said get this on all of our properties as soon as you possibly can that's when we really knew we had something for the first time that we knew we had product market fit we built out a lot of features with them but when we worked with Avalon Bay and Equity Residential about the same time we moved to Arlington Virginia actually to work with Avalon worked very closely in their office with their team they dedicated to rolling this technology out we were building features that really allowed this to scale to an enterprise level and enterprise grade software we had done only pre-tour when we were just serving a smaller market then we had to expand it to how are we handling post-tour getting these people all the way through lease because just generating tours is not sufficient there were week after week a ton of feature development and at the time it was just me and my co-founder we were building the product we didn't have other developers besides us really excited that we had this opportunity our whole company was three people when Avalon and Equity said they were going to roll out to full portfolios we started hiring we needed a bigger team to support this multi-billion dollars of real estate asset then the ball started rolling and more of these top 50 customers were looking to do what Avalon and Equity were doing certainly a great set of logos to start with you have two of the more tech forward big real estate owner operators out there then you have Stonehenge which is not as well known on a national scale but certainly in New York and New York real estate is its own little bubble I also note that it is a very positive sign that you were able to break out of the New York real estate bubble because so many real estate companies that starting New York build for New York and New York is weird it's different than any other real estate market out there so getting a start with the New York real estate company and immediately adding on Avalon Bay and Equity Residential was probably a key to not just build inside the pool that is Manhattan real estate yeah we were very scared a lot of people told us that get out of New York don't sell to New York landlords but from first principles it made sense even outside of New York City people have to lease apartments they have to answer questions about people interested in learning about their community they have to book to appointments they have to sign leases yes those leases are strange in New York that process and those questions are different it was funny that later on customers asked us because we'd have information they had to give us during onboarding and there's what is a child playroom do you mean playground so it was like different amenities that had to change but fundamentally the product was the same and added the same value nationally that's funny New York is such a little bubble in many ways so historically a lot of people associated a lease with leasing which is where it got its start but you've expanded a lot outside of that at this point clearly there's a lot of little places within the customer journey in the management world of real estate that AI can be helpful so tell me a little bit about how you discover those opportunities where you can add value and how do you choose which ones to go after yeah we listen to our customers we think a lot about automation how can we get a really high level of automation for the workflows that our customers teams are doing on site because they're overwhelmed they want to take different responsibilities off their plate so they can focus on all the good ones right spending a lot of time on site with teams is the strongest signal of finding product market fit with all the new products that we've built so we do leasing we extended to a bunch of resident products a few years ago handling delinquency collection handling maintenance requests handling lease renewals then we've just expanded to a lot of the workflows that people are doing the delinquency collections as well yes is AI pounded on the door saying you gotta pay it is which is a great task it's a very automatable task and not something humans like to do and then doing it really consistently and having a high-touch process for delinquency is particularly important and then expanded workflows to things that are also clearly automatable tasks like scanning leases and if there's discrepancies and the leases and what people are being charged just general hygiene of the property and then generating documents instead of having people copy and paste information to generate a document AI can do that these problems are solved in other industries they just haven't been solutions brought to multifamily yet well one interesting thing that I discovered when I was on the management side is the number of small outstanding balances that create delinquencies and just hey you have a $80 charge that hasn't been paid and those misunderstandings causing delinquency it saw an interesting data point from one of your case studies about how a lot of people think about collections as someone who's three months late on rent well a lot of it's not that a lot of it's someone who has a small outstanding balance and just doesn't know where it came from AI being a really interesting way to solve that and make sure that the people who pound on the doors are pounding on the right doors yeah a lot of people forget to pay our intentions bands are very limited so the AI will reach out and if someone answers says hey I'll do it later the AI is going to follow up at that time they'll like I'll do it tomorrow end of day the AI is reaching back out and saying hey I haven't received it any issues can I help and just staying on top of people and meeting them where they are is what drives a lot of the results it's a lot about financial education this was in your lease here's what happens when you get charged a late fee and try to prevent any of those behaviors it's honestly just a lot of education people won't necessarily have the time to sit there and do it but we can serve residents a lot better if the AI is handling all that one of the big themes of the piece I did on at least AI which came out a few weeks back in thesis driven is this relationship between automation AI and centralization they're married in a lot of ways so if you're saving people time we just gave the example of like delinquency and collections you're saving people time on site if all the tasks are being done on site you can save someone a little bit of time but you're probably not cutting head count at the building but if that's a centralized role where they're sitting in a back office in Atlanta or Manila or wherever there's a lot more value you can get from these automations and from this AI at the same time centralization makes it easier too you can systematize process it so I'd love to hear a little bit from you about how you see your customers combining centralization in your tech I think AI and centralization go hand in hand a lot of people that I see doing centralization incorrectly just take someone off site give them the same job just put them in a different location either in a team or a remote person then they lose all the context and communication between the people who are still on site and the people who are centralized just completely breaks down and residents also just don't know who to go to you need AI to do a bunch of things one you're not going to get the efficiencies or the benefits of centralization unless you have tech you can't say hey one person in a different location do 10 buildings 20 buildings worth of work you need AI that can do 95% of that work if you expect someone to handle 20 buildings and then they do the rest 5% that really needs to be high touch is very complex requires a lot of human empathy or whatever that task might be it's really important that you're adjusting the process that your centralized teams are doing the communication routing is really critical when a renter inquires the AI triages it to the right team is that a centralized responsibility or is it the on-site team then having the tools like a CRM that are easily routed to the right person and when someone walks into the community and talks to a person who's on site even if that role is handled by a centralized person that team member needs to be able to quickly communicate that's where you need like a CRM platform that is built for centralization and that's why we have a CRM that people can tag each other and tag the AI and it all works seamlessly together because it does become very complex organizationally if you start creating these off-site teams even if you're not outsourcing to other countries just having people work from home in the same region it becomes very complicated you're adding another level of communication when it's not everyone sitting in the same room together but you also can get more efficiency and specialization from that yeah every portfolio is different and we help 50 customers centralize their properties and i swear it is 50 different setups because no one size fits all they have small buildings far away they have small buildings close together large buildings and different classes of buildings different teams it's all sorts of combinations of things if you don't centralize the same way that another company centralized you might not have the success which i think you hear in the industry right people are like oh i tried it but it didn't work for us no because you need a slightly different flavor of centralization centralization came in waves it's not a new idea most people i hear are talking about and if they haven't started they're feeling like they're behind i think a lot of people in multifamily today and certainly a lot of people in multifamily tech forget that there was a time that accounting the books were done out of the property too prior to the mid 90s you didn't have the accounting software that you have today you didn't have the pms ecosystem that you have today even that was done on site people quickly realized that having a roving accountant going from building to building doing the physical books is a bad idea and certainly inefficient so that was centralized 20 25 years ago so you're right this has been an arc i'm curious what you said around different flavors of centralization or different forms of centralization for different types of owners i'd love to make give me an example of that would be helpful because you hear about centralization discussed very generally it's okay you can take these roles you bring them into a back office maybe it's here maybe it's somewhere else it does feel very one size fits all so how are you experiencing that some people have dense clusters of buildings sharing leasing offices and admin roles i see a lot of people do create centralized or work from home roles to retain their best staff and back office tasks delinquency and other functions like renewals some people get efficiencies without centralization they just get efficiencies on site they're not backfilling a leasing agent that turns over or retaining the best staff because they're taking off the most mundane work from them so even that i've heard a centralization which maybe doesn't match the word but there's all sorts of ways that you have to dig into with a customer when they say we want to centralize okay but what resources do you have what does your staffing already look like and is this the goal is it increasing the performance of your asset or running with a leaner staff all those goals that people have end up with different structures and i'd say technologies are different right if you're doing the delinquency or acm sort of additional roles collecting rent that's a very different centralization model you probably can have those people fully remote if you're doing leasing you need an or a self tour product like our ai guided tour product to facilitate especially when people have like a roaming leasing team or someone sharing resources between multiple teams that you have some that are a b you can access through a lock box or a smart lock without a human actually being there or to supplement a human maybe the human goes there but there's two tours booked at the same time and actually one needs to be a self tour in that case because renters want the first time slot that they prefer so every flavor of centralization for every different workflow can be quite different and harder to implement easier to implement depending on how aggressive people's goals are when you think about centralization and a lease ai target customer anyone in multifamily could get value from these things but when you see a customer say hey we want to try this out we're interested what makes you say wow this is going to be a slam dunk this group is going to get a ton of value out of it and going to be super easy and straightforward versus someone you're like all right this might take a little more hand holding with the lines there honestly it's just mostly customers getting in their own head we spend the first amount of time with them really understanding what they mean and if they are committed to getting these goals we've helped customers stand up a centralization team or a person and training them to be specialized in it having someone dedicated to it just shows that the customer is really interested in doing it because it's not just implementing tech but it's also rethinking what are the metrics that we're looking at are those different particularly when it comes to what the agents are doing maybe you're not measuring the touch points any longer with leads because ai is handling that so i'd say analysis paralysis those that are most successful at it just need to start and need to have a deadline for themselves it seems simple but it's the biggest differentiator between someone who's going to be successful and someone who's not i think that is a big piece of what makes someone successful at centralizing is because you do need the technology do you have the tech in place first or do you try to centralize roles without technology and then layer technology in fundamentally that just does not work because a few different reasons one you're not getting the efficiencies the communication all those breakdowns but two then you're working with vendors and saying hey i've done my way now fit your solution to that versus seeing what the suppliers have already built out and the best practices for multiple different customers everything has to be very configurable and customizable but it might be actually better to come in with an open mind and say hey how can we start with technology and how can we change our organization structure to centralize and to make sense within that so it's just are you reinventing the wheel are you starting where people have already figured it out i love that it's a really important point i was giving a talk this morning and responding to a question someone asked me about actually about ai and technology the question was very much in the framing of how can ai improve the workflows i already have the most exciting stuff of this tech and what's happening is that it allows you to rethink the workflows entirely and how you're doing what you're doing when i see success and failure in the real estate world of embracing new technology the people who do it the best are those who take a de novo lens to every technology and say cool now i know this is possible knowing what i know now what can i do and how would i design my workflows my process my org chart in a way that can make use of this technology do you see multifamily and anyone in the multifamily industry thinking like that increasingly some operators still view ai as a sort of a smarter widget or an add-on rather than really a true teammate that can run an entire workflow end to end a lot of people rely as well on this patchwork of point solutions very isolated problems but they never talk to one another not enough customers think about technology from a renter experience and then how do i get that renter through the entire flow that they need whether that's the move-in process or an entire end-to-end maintenance process from when they call in before they were talking to a person but now they're talking to an ai how does that work order get done and what's their experience in that process they think a lot from the property staff point of view and they're very isolated solutions making each one of those things more efficient but all together there's still bottlenecks between those things so a lot more people are starting to adopt the sort of agentic or like autopilot model of operations which unlocks an entirely different set of efficiency gains and then actually you're collecting so much more data that operators were really starting to think i've never had this amount of data before i've never had this quality of data before how can i use this to make predictions at scale and that's where the next big change is going to be so it leads really well to what i wanted to ask next we have a good sense of what ai is capable of today where it's been rolled out multi-family owners embracing it people in real estate embracing it to varying degrees what's next what are we sleeping on that we're going to see over the next two to three years that might not be possible today or might be on the cutting edge today data is the next big thing so is that predicting who's renewing i've seen some customers start building some of these models themselves but very few have the resources to do that it's like a predictive model of okay if someone does x y and z they're likely to renew if this one versus someone else who may be less likely to renew yeah what are the indicators in their experience the obvious ones being how has their maintenance experience been but actually it's so many different touch points from starting from the leasing process that end up telling you if someone is going to renew which then of course impacts your pricing and knowing how much supply you're going to have on the market and marrying that within what's the exposure to the building so data you're going to see a lot more predictive decision-making coming online that's a lot of what we're working on as well resident sentiment people are surveyed out gathering information from residents in a natural organic form you're texting about something you have a much more open line of communication how can we use every single one of those interactions to get in front of your performance i think people are sleeping on data in the industry but that's going to change really soon yeah i assume you're building stuff around predictive renewals and that kind of side do you have a predictive renewal product we don't right now don't i assume it's coming one other area i'm interested in is predictive maintenance i think is super interesting you have all this sensor data this maintenance data do you have a view on that there's gotta be something there i was talking to some owners at aim in a closed-door session a few weeks ago and that was a topic that just everyone is very interested in but nobody's figured it out yeah so we launched a maintenance app for technicians so essentially it takes in information from the residents inquiries and then it will create work orders triage and then the maintenance app will actually send that to the right person so it auto assigns schedules every work order by priority technician skill the duration of how long we are learning that task will take location so if people are centralizing it's really built because a lot of our customers want to centralize maintenance so we'll take their GPS coordinates and actually send the right person with the right skill set to the job first translate between different languages between the residents preferred language the technicians preferred language and so you're actually collecting way more information particularly about hey does it take longer to fix this washer and dryer than it did than we expected it to maybe these are more complicated issues even though if you looked at a normal traditional work order system they might look exactly the same so i do think that there's a lot of data we're collecting from this that can be used to think about things like do we need to replace do we need to invest a lot of capital and property renovations or and things like that i really think that wasn't possible without this level of yeah yeah it certainly seems like one of a handful of areas that feels i don't want to say obvious to me because there's still some things that have to be figured out there but if we're talking about where is ai having an impact in property operations today in three years that it's not today feels pretty high on my list maintenance is an extremely exciting problem to solve it's so complicated there's so much opportunity there's not that much being done in space because it's so complicated and some of these problems are solved in other industries right uber knows how to optimize when a driver needs to get to a rider right why can't we do that in multifamily too i want to pivot for a second and talk a little bit about fundraising elise ai raised 75 million back half a last year that's pretty impressive growth rounds are hard to come by in the prop tech world right now there's not a lot getting done so kudos to you for that one thing i did want to just get your sense of you obviously raised back in i assume you raised some capital back in 2017-18 in the early days correct yeah 2019 we're about two and a half years into the company before we raised really that's great how much did you raise in 2019 1.9 million 1.9 million 2019 the seed rounds were very different than the seed rounds are today yes which was easier raising 1.9 million in 2019 before ai was cool or raising 75 million today when ai is hot but prop tech is not which was easier oh certainly 75 million the 1.9 was brutal i think because people saw vertical markets as much smaller it was just not that attractive i think until people saw the value that ai could unlock did prop tech look like a very big market i was like number one is probably is this going to be a large enough opportunity to make it a venture scale opportunity and now it's quite obvious that it isn't of course it depends on what type of product you're building yeah 75 was much easier wow is not what i expected you to answer everyone talks about how hard growth rounds are now your metrics must be bonkers that it was easier than the 1.9 million seed round in 2019 we're working hard so tell me about this health care thing so you launched a lease ai for health care last year correct tell me about that yeah a lot of people say health care and housing seem so different is there any overlap and really there's a ton of overlap actually yes the customers are very different but the technology is the same you can think about our leasing product where we're qualifying inbound prospects inbound renters have questions we need to collect information from them and we need to schedule them for a tour it's very similar to what we do on the health care side patients come in or they call in to our into a practice and then we need to gather information insurance name we need to answer some questions and then we need to schedule them for appointments so it very much feels like a lease ai or immediately says we used to be called in 2017 2018 and it's really exciting to be able to apply the technology to another problem that serves a fundamental human need it shares the same platform so as we make advancements in our health care products it is making our housing products stronger and vice versa health care is primarily over phone calls so that's why we had to build out our voice ai product and of course our customers on the housing side have a ton of calls that they need to handle from leasing to maintenance is a lot over voice so we're excited that the two can benefit from each other voices are very hard technical problem to solve it's been really exciting to see the traction there we primarily focus in women's health and dermatology so we're seeing that a lot of those practices are benefiting because they have a high volume of patients they need to handle similar to the housing side you have a high volume of leads and they're missing calls high abandonment rates it sounds very similar when you dig into the operations i love that two big needs before wrap i'd love to move into the lightning round of a couple of quick hit questions and answers for you that i ask everyone of our guests here on the leader series shall we jump into it sure sounds good awesome so first question tell us about one startup real estate developer or entrepreneur you're watching and why i have been very impressed with the ingrained team we did a partnership with them recently as people are centralizing mapping properties becomes so important it's a big loss if you don't have that person on site and all that tribal knowledge so i think that's a really exciting one in the time of centralization and then i'd say maybe this isn't exactly what people think is prop tech but i'd watch robotics i think tesla is going to be very successful there and figure is a really big well funded robotics company right now as you think about the physical property and how do you service that it's going to be robots next question when we are recording this podcast in the 2030s what is the most important real estate tech topic we'll be talking about and why oh am i going to be invited back thank you absolutely minna yeah 2030s we're going to be talking about zoning laws i talk about zoning laws all the time anyway this is one of the few shows where i've not talked about zoning laws and zoning laws have not come up it's not going to change i think robotics is going to be a big one hitting in general the world's going to change a lot right less work there'll be more focus on life balance and community connections i think density of communities or cities is going to increase people are going to live longer right a lot of the ai academic research right now is happening in extending life or reversing aging and if people live longer that means they're here for longer and probably they will tend to have more children especially if they're not working as much partially for fulfillment partially because it becomes cheaper because generally ai will create more wealth and actually that will end up creating even more density so then i think people will actually spread out as well so it'll be cheaper to deliver things from with autonomous vehicles i think it's the whole landscape of where people live is going to be really interesting and even though i said zoning laws as a joke like it's not going to be a joke if all those things come true and so i think it depends on if you're saying 2030 or the end of 2030 but i do think that a lot of the research and biotech is going to change the population a lot and i think amenities i think the other big thing is amenities are going to change i think the three technologies i really believed in ai and do believe in ai crisper which is like gene editing and vr and apple's made some moves i don't think apple's going back as many people believe that apple vision pro is not going to be a thing i think it's going to be even more of a thing soon and you're going to need vr rooms or the 360 treadmills i think so much is going to happen in vr that i don't even know what's going to look like but it's going to change how people live too so i think all these things are really exciting i don't think progress just happens magically i think it takes a lot of sacrifice from groups of people to make these things happen so it's a little unpredictable but those are the areas i think i'm hopeful or i wish would have a lot of progress i love that we could do another episode on minna songs views on the future of technology there's a lot there and fascinating stuff too the questions around longevity i'm praying you're right i want to live forever i may not forever but for a longer than humans typically live there might be a line where everyone lives forever and stay healthy right now because you might be right on the cusp you're a little younger than me so you're you're probably further on that closer to that cusp than i am but i'm training hopefully my kids are under that cusp that's what i'm hoping for what's one city or place you would bet on depends if it's short term or long term i do think new york city is an incredible city i really believe in science and technology and those happen where there's high density of people i really hope that new york can become denser even if you can believe that or other cities become as dense as new york city because i think that will actually accelerate the growth and innovation i think chicago is going to be really exciting there's great universities there i think there's a lot to be done we just opened up in chicago office which is a part of the reason i think there's not enough ai companies in there but there's a ton of people who they're who could be contributing to ai i love that i hope chicago figures it out it's a great city last lot of it will stay companies in chicago too there's some awesome operators and prop tech companies in chicago too for sure the last question what's your favorite app on your home screen oh i love our maintenance app i work all of the time and all i think about and breathe this work changes every single day right now i probably spend the most time looking at the new features on our maintenance app but it's our first app it's actually quite exciting for us that's awesome i love it minna thank you so much for joining thesis driven leader series so great to have you on the show today thanks so much bruh appreciate you all tuning in today and joining me for that conversation with minna song of a lease ai you'll definitely want to join us next week too as we have one of the most powerful people in the housing world on the show suyana kohn the ceo of anywhere brands now you may not have heard of anywhere but they are the largest residential brokerage conglomerate in the world and you've probably heard of some of the brands they own like better homes and gardens century 21 coldwell banker sotheby's corcoran and more the residential market is going through some pretty serious transformations right now and maybe you've heard about some of them changes around buy side agent compensation clear cooperation potentially going away we're going to dig into that and really understand what's going on in the residential market right now what is the impact of ai and technology so you will definitely want to listen into next week's conversation with Sue Yannecone. See you then.