 We lost all of our locations pretty much overnight because we were leasing those locations. And that's three and a half years of hard work and money totally down the drain. We had to lay off the majority of our staff. When that was all done, I sat back and looked at him like, this is either the most depressing thing that has happened to me in a long time or there's an opportunity in here that could be much bigger than anything we were able to access before coronavirus. And I trained my brain and kind of our team's energy and culture around the fact that whatever has happened has happened since the past, it's done. What now, what's possible going forward from this? And how can we make ourselves better as a team? How can we make a better company? How can we provide a better service for people coming out of this? Because what we are offering is going to be more in demand than ever before when this is over. This is Startup to Storefront, the podcast where we inspire entrepreneurship through truth. Today's guest is Ben Seidel, founder of Neighborly. In much the same way as we work or Airbnb, reimagined how we work and vacation, Neighborly is reimagining how we interact within our community. Odds are high that there's a couple vacant commercial real estate properties in your town. Some might see vacant properties as nothing more than urban blight, but Ben sees opportunity. Instead of sitting empty while waiting for the next long-term tenant, Neighborly partners with the landlords to rent these spaces out for everything from one-time meetings, limited-time restaurant pop-ups to multi-year leases for retail stores. So listen in as we cover everything from how he shifted his mentality to succeed in a hopefully soon-to-be-post COVID world, the magic of turning vacant buildings into community hubs, and his bullish views on AI and how it will bring new significance to the humble parking lot. If you're not subscribed, can you go ahead and do that right now before we get on with the video? It helps us out tremendously. That's all we ask, and we're back. All right, guys, welcome to the podcast. On today's show, we're talking to Ben, the founder of Neighborly. Ben, thanks for joining. Tell everyone a little bit about your company. Hey, well, thanks for having me. That's awesome to be here. I've been following you guys' podcast on Instagram mostly, and it's awesome to be a part of it, so definitely thanks for having me. I am the CEO and co-founder of Neighborly, and we are on a mission to democratize access to commercial real estate. And what that means is a bunch of buzzwords, but what that really means is we are hoping to provide access to street-level locations in your neighborhoods and your cities that are vacant. We believe that the commercial real estate world looks at commercial real estate, especially street-level spaces as binary. They're either zero, which is vacant, making nothing, providing no economic utility or social utility. Or one, they are fully leased and that rent role is being collected. We believe there's an opportunity to actually build a layer of commercial real estate management inside of that to unlock a short-term activation layer that lets people create, test businesses, gather, meet, have art shows, all these different things that people want to do. There isn't really an affordable, accessible, and seamless way to do that in your community, on your main street, in your town, yet we have all these vacant storefronts everywhere. So we're on a mission to basically partner with landlords and property owners to open up these locations for short-term utilization. So that's in a nutshell, what we do, it's all about empowering creators, it's about empowering local citizens to take back their vacant storefronts and use them for good, create opportunities, bring their imagination to life, start a new business, build some memories, bring people together. There's all these things that we need real estate to catalyze. We need real estate to make these things happen. Yes, there are virtual versions to these now. Yes, almost all those things are possible to do online, but we're humans. We desire connection. We need emotional, psychological, and physical well-being, and that involves being around other human beings from a genetic standpoint. And so what we're really focused on trying to solve is how can we make our cities more vibrant? How can we reduce the barriers to entry mostly for people who have traditionally been barred from using some of these spaces? So it's a pretty exciting thing to try and take on. It's a big idea, it's hard, but what we believe is that this can really make it impact on the livability of cities and neighborhoods. I wanted to have you on for so many reasons, Ben. One, obviously I'm a real estate person, and so in this world I see a lot of opportunities, especially coming from the tech world where as a startup we were forced to sign a five-year lease in a space that was really big enough for 10 people and any startup in San Francisco or elsewhere is probably gonna outgrow that. And it just seemed really silly to me that there wasn't any flexible spaces. And this is just giving you context around like 2015. Obviously we work comes in and we work solves that. We work says these long-term leases don't make any sense. If we have sub-lease upon sub-lease upon sub-lease, really foolish, the landlord needs to be a little bit smarter, but they're not. We work comes in and kind of dominates this world. Which for me never really made sense to be honest. I just didn't see the economics of it working out and I hated their coffee. That's just me. You know, but I think there was something there. And I think people like you are onto that something I wanna give context to people since we're talking about this kind of in an almost post-COVID world. When was it that you first launched the concept of the company? Was it, obviously it was pre-COVID, but just to give people a sense of reference, was it 2018? We've opened our very first location in 2016 right around Thanksgiving. So we're about four and a half years old. I started the business with my brother who was the only person in the world that I could convince to move and to start up this wild idea with no money. And so you moved down from Seattle and neither of us had any experience in commercial real estate. I didn't even know what Elise meant. You know, I didn't get it. I was afraid of it, but we saw I was going to school in Berkeley and Berkeley is a very well-to-do place and a thriving Bay Area at the time, 2015. And there was just a wild amount of storefront vacancies. Beautiful spaces too, right? Like nice architecture, clean, ready to go, ready to be used. We just totally boarded up, signs in the window. Nobody calls you back if you call that number. And what I realized was like, this is just, this is mad. Why are these places big? And they're in the heart of the city. They're in the heart of these neighborhoods. They're great spaces. What's wrong? Of course, everyone's being impacted by the shift to e-commerce. Amazon was really having a big impact at that time and people were trying to figure out what to do and you could just see the writing on the wall that this vacancy issue was only going to get more severe as time went on. I never, of course, envisioned a time like we went through in 2020 where the world was turned upside down and the vacancy issue, we still don't know what it is because we haven't come out of it, but I will tell you that when we do come out of this, it's going to shock some people. And so we started the business to try and solve that issue and it's been four and a half years. We've done every number of iterations and versions of this business to get to this point today, but it's been a long, it's been a long, really fun and exciting journey which I'll never forget. And I think we're just getting to the best part of the story, to be honest. I would think that this presents an interesting time for you and your company because like you said, we don't really know the full extent of what we're going to come out of COVID into in terms of properties being vacant. And for neighborly, that seems like on the surface to be a really good opportunity. You can't necessarily take advantage or capitalize on that just yet because public gatherings are still really not allowed or and no one's, not many people I would say are seeking that out, but on the other side of that, do you look at this as something where you're going to jump as the opportunity arises or like how do you approach this kind of conundrum? Yeah, absolutely really good question. So I think like every small business in the world, but specifically for this podcast in the United States, we have been through the ringer. We got knocked out. We had eight locations of leases when the pandemic hit. Of course, we got banned from operating and we are still more or less currently banned from operating at this point in February, 2021. So it has almost been a full year without the ability to run our business. And we're really small business. And I think what every small business entrepreneur has had to confront is the duality of this situation in the sense that with every wildfire or forest fire, which is what this is for small business, there is very ripe future with fresh soil and ingredients and the ability to basically rebirth a new version of that forest. And that's what we're seeing I think and to look at, there's two ways to look at that wildfire of COVID-19 is like it's the end or it's the beginning. And it's certainly hard to look at it when it's burning to say I can see the other side of it. And that was I think the hardest psychological part of last year for any retailer or small businesses is keeping the faith, right? And keeping your psychology trained on the fact that this is not permanent and there will be an end and you will survive. Your business will work and survive if you might have to make some drastic moves. You might have to lose everything like we did. We lost all of our locations, all eight of them. We were in Sacramento, Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley. We lost every single one of our eight locations pretty much overnight because we were leasing those locations. And that's three and a half years of hard work and money totally down the drain. We had to lay off the majority of our staff. So it was complete construction for us and like every other business who does in real life physical operations. And when that was all done, I sat back and looked at him like this is either the most depressing thing that has happened to me in a long time professionally or there's an opportunity in here that could be much bigger than anything we were able to access before coronavirus. And I trained my brain and kind of our team's energy and culture around the fact that whatever has happened has happened. It's in the past, it's done. What now, what's possible going forward from this? And how can we make ourselves better as a team? How can we make a better company? How can we provide a better service for people coming out of this? Because what we are offering is going to be more in demand than ever before when this is over. Our goal is to survive long enough to see that through. And in the meantime, it's triaging what you have to do to literally stay solvent. We flirted with insolvency multiple times, found our way through that financially and barely scraped by and we're in an okay place now to keep going. But that's obviously every business's first order of operations, get your finances straight, do whatever it takes to pull through this thing financially so that you can start to plan what the other side looks like. And we did that, thankfully, with support from the government, of course, PPP, SBA, supremely thankful for our country actually in this time. And there's a lot of ways to look at the failures of government or the confusion of government. But I would say that regardless, we pulled together pretty strong as a country and supported people as much as we could. And it certainly helped us get through that. So on the other side, the answer to the silver lining, we saw that A, there would be an incredible amount of supply that we could acquire. There would be B, poll hosts of new landlords and REITs and operators who would be interested in new models of business. And then C, there's an entire new generation of customers of users of people who can create things in our communities that are just waiting to rebirth themselves as well and are going to need a new system in which to do that. So if we compare all three of those opportunities together, access the supply, build new landlord partnerships, and then redesign our offerings to better suit the post-pandemic economy, then we could potentially find a much brighter future for ourselves after this. That was the way that we approached it throughout 2020 and even still now, or we're still not out of the woods yet, but we're close. Weirdly enough, it's been one of the worst thing that's happened to us and the best thing that's happened to us at the same exact time. And there are a lot of entrepreneurs who I think could say the same thing because it's forced us as entrepreneurs, especially physical entrepreneurs, to digitize our beliefs, digitize our offerings, digitize our data systems, spend that quality thought time to develop those systems so that when you come out of this, you're on the channel. You've got more capabilities and understandings than you ever had before because you retooled. And so I'm excited about the future of small business in America. I'm excited about the future of retail. I'm excited for our future, of course, and it's just gonna be a new generation for sure for creators all over the world, especially in this country. I think there's just a crazy amount of opportunity. It's easy to look at it like devastation, but the other way to look at it, which I think is healthy, is to say, wow, everything is possible now. Landlords who wouldn't have talked to you before will talk to you. Leases that might have cost double last year or 2019 are gonna cost half. You can access opportunities, resources, business partnerships like never before right now. And I think that's the bright side and that's I think what we as a company really wanna focus on and encourage our community and our creators and our network to think positively and look at all the great things that we're gonna do as a country and as a community coming out of this. I love that. I think it's spot on. I mean, I think it's funny pre-doing this. I remember Nick knows this well, but I remember like going to visit Facebook or Google and I was like, do you guys see what they're doing here? They're just trying to build you a home. Like you can get your haircut here. You can get your dry cleaning here. You can go to the gym here. I'm like, do you, you can like food, right? Like all these tech people I know we're just making decisions on who's gonna have peaking duck on Chinese New Year all over there. And it was like this thing that would just drive me crazy. It was like from a philosophical perspective. I said, do you not see that you're losing your humanness in doing this? Like you're just literally a robot. You might as well just be on a conveyor belt walking in and then walking out at 8 p.m. Like that's really the setup. People laughed at me. They thought it was crazy. I sounded like a cynic. And that was just me. Like that my personal beliefs are different, I guess. COVID hits and I go, finally, finally people can understand that there's the whole notion of trying to build culture while you're all working together is silly. Like companies like Google and these major companies a large part of why they build these assets is a tax play. And so there's this notion that, oh, we wanna build culture. So we're all learning together. It's like, okay, that might be kind of true, but you've been sold that bill of goods. It's not how I'm programmed. And I certainly don't believe it. COVID hits and I go, this is great. And to some extent, because it's like no one can go to the office and now we have to reconfigure to, which I think puts your company, just like you're saying in a really beautiful position because it's like, I think people do wanna meet just like dating, right? It's like no one can do zoom dating full-time. You have to at some point meet the person and make sure they are who they say they are and hug them maybe, right? You have to do these things in person, you know? And it also creates a flexible environment for real estate to operate in different ways. I know right now your company's focused on meetings. We had a company called Popup Groceron. And so popups, you know, I feel like they fit right into your model where they're putting brands on for a week or two weeks, but it's a short amount of time. But in a really cool way, I know you're doing events, you're doing production, like video shoots, let's say here in LA would be a good example of it. One of the things we're doing, and this is something I wanted to chat with you about. So we get a call from someone that came on the podcast, they had a coffee truck. So it was just like this iconic coffee truck vehicle that just drove around LA. It was a 1950s Citroen, this old French vehicle. It breaks down. Only one person in LA can fix this vehicle, which does not make a business. And so they call me saying, hey, Diego, we can't operate this thing. We're thinking of selling it COVID hits, right? So they can't operate it anyway. And I thought, let's put this thing in the building, right? Let's put this iconic brand, it's their brand. And so to sell it, I thought was kind of silly. If we put it in the building, let's do that. And then as Nick and I were discussing, like maybe we can put our podcast studio behind the coffee truck, but in like a speak easy type way where it's kind of secret and really cool and unique. And so one day once COVID passes, we can bring in our guests and our guests, like imagine you walking in as our guests, like, whoa, cool car, right? Here's my coffee. And a big part of podcasting is like energy, just like beautiful design, right? There's a big like, there's a big part of it where if you can put people at ease or make them forget about their 20 employees or their emails, it helps. It helps have a more honest conversation. And Nick said, maybe we can rent this out and blah, blah, blah. And so as creators start, like how do you see from your own perspective sort of the, almost like the rise of the creator as a space that right now is something that no one talks about, right? And people think, oh, that's only in LA. That's only in small parts of New York because New York is so finance driven. And there's a part of me that like wants to double down big on this type of experience where I think there's something here based on what you do in terms of like just to recap the meetings, the pop-ups, the events and then some of the production value. What has been the best thing for your business and do you think that's gonna change post COVID? That's a complex question. You're right on about the range of offerings and kind of how we position ourselves. But if I could explain it in a simpler way, which may be a little bit too broad for a lot of people to comprehend, but we actually see ourselves as a layer, an operating layer on top of commercial real estate. When I'm envisioning these products or services that we're creating for a given space, we are certainly tailoring certain spaces for certain things, especially when our landlords are saying, hey, we're happy to give you a retail space in the row in downtown LA, but we'd like you to do retail only. Awesome. We need to have an ability to service that location with that exact use case. If like happens a lot, if we have a company like Westfield who says, hey, we've got a bunch of restaurants on our properties that are vacant, what can you guys do? Do you have any restaurant creators? Do you have any restaurants or is there any chefs who are looking to build something new? Yes, the answer is yes. And so what we're really looking to do at the end of the day is we don't actually see the network at neighborly as being any one thing. We hope that when you come to neighborly.com and it's not necessarily that today because we're still pretty small, but when you go there in a couple of years, you should be able to find the specific type of space that you need to express yourself, to build a business, to create something that you have in mind in your neighborhood or your city. And that can be any number of those things that you mentioned. Now, what COVID has kind of sprung upon us in a lot of ways was that challenge of that question, which is before the pandemic, we basically only did meeting spaces, event spaces and a little bit of film production spaces. So they were like these general spaces that we furnished in a general way and people can use them how they like for those things and booking them by the day. Well, what happened is as we have been growing throughout this pandemic with new partnerships and new landlords, some of them, like I said, have said, well, we only want you to do production. We only want you to do a retail space. We only want you to do a restaurant space. Can you do that? So we started developing new service offerings to tailor specifically to those opportunities. And so what I see at a high level neighborly becoming is more or less this short-term layer that allows you to access and test and be a part of a commercial real estate space for a short period of time to do something locally. And that could be any number of those things. So as a quick example, just to put it concretely, one of our locations that we have in Berkeley, we took over, it was an old restaurant that had been abandoned for two and a half years and the water main was even disconnected, like not even water services saying is that off the grid now? And basically left for abandonment by this massive property company. Did they want that? No, but there just isn't a, there wasn't a long-term tenant in hand for that space and then marketed it for years and basically wrote it off as not worth even the effort to show it anymore or spend time marketing it. We got offered the opportunity to activate this building. So we looked at it and we're like, okay, this is pretty rough and needs a lot of work, but this used to be the center of community and it's part of Berkeley. Could we get it back to that point? What would it take? Turn the water back on, deep clean it, fix some of these electrical issues, give it a little paint job, put some tables and chairs in here, get the wifi going, turn the lights on, put it up to the community to use. What's gonna happen? We don't dictate after that point what it is that goes on because what we love to do is look at these spaces as canvases for creators to say, if you have a need for real estate in your community and you can't afford or you don't want a long-term lease because you're not ready or you don't feel like it's the right thing for you, but you wanna take a step in that direction, let us help you. Come check out our spaces. And so we got a restaurateur who was like down the block who lost their lease and was running out and they had nowhere else to go. They're a great, very popular restaurant, but they couldn't line up the next long-term lease. And so they're basically gonna be business homeless for a period of time, which could be six to eight months. You lose your whole customer base if you go dark for six to eight months. So they heard about us. They checked out this location in Berkeley. They were like, okay, it's pretty rough, but we have all the skills and equipment to make this thing operable. Could we make this into a pop-up restaurant? I was like, absolutely. And so they, within 36 days, went from it totally closed to opening for business. And they sold out on the very first day. They've been selling out week after week. It's just, it's like one of the hottest sandwich brands in the East Bay right now called Augies Montreal, Delhi. Best Philly cheese steaks, best economy sandwiches, but these are young entrepreneurs who, A, don't have the capital. B, you don't wanna lock themselves into some long-term situation without knowing what they're getting into. And C, they see what we're doing as in alignment with their mission and giving them the flexibility to talk and meet and serve their customers in the way that they want to. And so that is, at the heart of it, what we're doing is we're basically, in some sense, recycling commercial real estate that has been left for abandonment and saying there's value here. There's a lot of people who can bring a lot of value here. It's just that you're not talking to them. You're not positioning your property in a way that is accessible to these people. And if you did, watch out, because there is a storm of underrepresented, underappreciated, overlooked entrepreneurs and creators in our neighborhoods that do not get a chance because of the systemic way that this industry works to win and it's garbage, quite frankly. And we are on a mission to make sure that if you have a dream, you wanna work hard, you got a concept, you're willing to put the work in, it shouldn't be that you don't have the space. It should just be like, okay, maybe your idea didn't resonate or whatever kind of thing happened, but it wasn't because you couldn't try. And I think our country needs that to be able to basically democratize opportunity so that entrepreneurship comes back in this country bigger than it ever was before. Because if you guys know the stats, the last three decades before coronavirus, every single year, 30 years straight down to the lowest point in 30 year history in 2019 of the amount of small businesses started in this country. It's a crime. And everybody talks on Instagram about how great, like, you know, there's all these social media influencers that'll make you feel like in the startup world, that'll make you feel like everybody is creating the next billion dollar company and everyone's doing something and you're not, it's completely false. They've tricked us into thinking that everyone's doing it. So no one does it and our numbers are so low that I think it actually took this pandemic to wake people up and when they come out of this, I don't know if you guys have seen these stats, they're so exciting. 2020 was the highest amount of small business application registration in the last 30 years. It's like a wild spike. Quit your job, people, quit your job. I've been telling everybody. When these people come out of this and the economy is reopening, watch this wave, this next generation of entrepreneurs and creators, get these spaces, build their businesses, recreate our communities and express themselves. It's gonna be absolutely brilliant and breathtaking and I can't wait to see it. And that's the way we position ourselves for these people is to say that, do not let it be that you don't have the opportunity. Let us get you there, after that, it's up to you. I wanna cement something you said too. So traditionally, like, let's call it an office building that has a kitchen inside of it, right? And that tenant left because they couldn't survive because of COVID, so now they're out. And so what a normal landlord or even a property manager's gonna do is look to just fill that lease. And so they're looking for the same, they're looking for a copy and paste. So what they end up doing is bringing in a tenant with probably two years of free rent just to fill the space for a five-year time, which is good and bad. If you have a bad idea in the market, you wanna know quickly. And so a long-term lease isn't gonna show you that. And there's this thing I keep thinking of. It's like every single office that is, let's say, 5% occupied right now, every single huge tower they've built all around the world, there's a kitchen in that place, maybe two, maybe three. Literally it's the best time for you to be a ghost kitchen. Like just be a ghost kitchen, operate at all these places where there isn't anybody, just have an Instagram page and to your point, it's like you can now test your idea. We spoke to a ghost kitchen and as I was speaking to them, I'm like, this would be great if they did it in every single office space right now because it's also a free litmus test. It's like if the building's 5% occupied, that means there's some people that still want food inside this building. So at a minimum, you might have like 10 customers, let's say. But if you have an online storefront and you're a ghost kitchen, it's a perfect litmus test to see if your product's gonna resonate in the market. I think you're right. I mean, I think the challenge of it, right, is getting these old heads or this old school of thinking to start, to start, and it's almost like as you're talking, I'm like, what are the words we need to use? The no-no's are creator, creativity, flex space. Like we need to use words that they like. Yeah. Which is like, how do we boost your NOI with ghost kitchens? Like things like that. Absolutely. Yeah, passive income. Passive income, an immediate. But yeah, you're getting the crux of the work that we do. The work that we do is completely inglorious. It's behind the scenes, it's tough and it involves a lot of hard discussions and a lot of representing, basically going into things, representing this class of people who don't get a voice, don't get to see the table and saying, I'm here to speak for that and here's what's gonna happen if you open up yourself to these opportunities. And here's all our data to show you what will happen and we're giving you, we're inviting you on this journey to be a part of this. And if you wanna like actually learn what the future of commercial real estate is gonna look like, let us show you. Like try it out, what do you have to lose? It's a vacant space, you're making zero. We're talking about furnishing your space, making it operable, cleaning it and handing it over to people who are great and vetted and doing awesome things. So like, what's holding you back? And the reason why we are kind of are able to acquire a lot of spaces and close these deals with these old heads as you call them is that we're not trying to get in the way of the long-term lease. We see ourselves as supremely fitting right in the middle to say, we're only here to service your building to get you from vacancy to long-term lease, however long that takes, hire us to help you do that. And whenever it is, you call me and say, I finally got my five year lease, so happy. And I just get to say to you, I'm so happy for you, we'll be out next Monday. Like that is how it works. And when it's presented in that way, it's a no lose situation for the landlords. And so they have a hard time. They will try, trust me, poke holes in this and be like, here's why I don't want to do this or here's why it doesn't make sense or here's why it's a threat to my system. It's a threat to no one system except for being open to the future. And if you don't want to be open in the future and you want to just keep doing this and having your hands over your eyes and praying for the best that your long-term sentence is going to come around tomorrow is not a winning strategy. And so we've been fortunate enough to be able to tell this story at scale and to bring landlord partners along with us to help them do this. Because actually what's weird Diego is that most of them want to do this. They just don't know how. They don't know, it's hard work. They need a partner, they need you. They need someone that's gonna teach them or kind of show them success. Yeah, it's not hands off. We're good at everything from technology, software development, infrastructure, operations, management, customer experience, financial payments. I mean, there's this level of... And media, right? We talked a little bit about this. Let's talk, I want to jump into this because every company we have on here, it's the resounding, today we are a company that makes X but we're also a media company. And because X is new, the product is new and therefore the media company needs to either educate the consumer or make it really clear on what the product offering might be. And I think today we have a social media landscape that allows us to all kind of, even for us with the podcast media company on a real estate development, we film everything we do and we put together like this HDTV style show that was originally meant to be an investor update, to be honest, because I'm sure you do investor updates. I used to do them and they never get read because Jason is an investor in hundreds of companies and so why is he gonna take 10 minutes out of his day to read your PDF, right? And I would be like, I would get so mad at my investors and at some point I realized, you know what, it's not the, it's not, it's the medium, it's the PDF, we need to change the medium. And so I started it just as a way to, hey investors, here's what's happening. And it was like, great, it was like three minutes, Nick does a tremendous job with this, super fun. As you think about media, I know we kind of spoke about this, but what are you looking to do in the media landscape from a real estate perspective here in the coming years? We want to inspire that generation of entrepreneurs, those people who have been possibly sitting on the sidelines, have a dream in their head, have an idea, maybe consume a lot of content around that, but haven't actually done something. Haven't taken that step to open their first Shopify store online. Haven't taken a step to try a pop-up. Haven't tried to go out and start trying to wholesale to different accounts, but trying to really think about how do we use our voice and our platform to catalyze people to action, to get out of your house, to get off your couch when it's safe and bring about what it is in your head and try it. There's no harm in trying and when you try something that's been in your head, that catharsis, that creative catharsis that happens is one of the best feelings I think you can have as a human being who is passionate about something is being able to realize that in the full sense of that word of realization, bringing it into reality. And so we wanna really use our Instagram, our YouTube channel we're about to create, our whole platform, Twitter, to highlight what people are doing in your neighborhood, in a neighborhood space, what their stories are, what their challenges are, how they got this success, what it takes. And then also I would say it's a little bit deeper than that, just not just inspiration, but to catalyze someone to move, they also need to be trained, they need to be equipped, they need to know how to take the right first steps if they do take those first steps and that's what we're all about doing. So for the infrastructure that's going to help you do that safely in a fun way and in a way that is totally different than the way that commercial real estate used to work in the past. So we wanna be able to talk to you, inspire you, train you, educate you and then offer you the solutions and the infrastructure to go try, to go do something and let us help you with that in any way that we can. And I think media has such an interesting role in retail right now, specifically, even restaurants, throw that into retail, like you see the Mr. Beast stories, you see the Kylie Jenner stories, those are obviously the most celebrated examples, but even on a micro scale, that restaurant I talked to you about, Augies in Berkeley, has a phenomenal community around their business and they were pandemic proof because those people follow that entrepreneur and that chef and Lex is a person that builds community. And so because of that, those people wanna support him whether or not he's open for in-person dining, outside dining, whatever, they want to be a part of what he's built and he uses media as a way to connect with those people. And I see that happening with the most impressive creators in our network are people who don't actually have a physical footprint. This is some crazy like next level retail where your address no longer matters, you don't even have an address. Your address is your digital audience and the content and the value you create for them. And the addresses that you acquire in the future are ways to monetize that and to connect with those people in real life. They're ways to build your business. You do need to have an address. So use a neighborly pop-up and Santa Monica Place to do your art show and a hundred of your followers coming by art and you make 2000 bucks in a weekend. You don't have to have your gallery on Monday morning and pay rent for the rest of the year. So like what we're seeing a lot of is these newer, these new generation of creators is really digital first, audience first and content first. And then they are on the back of that building businesses to monetize that in smart ways. Not like cheesy ways, not selling themselves out but thinking about what it is that they love to do that supports their audience, that the audience would consume and serving it up to them. So if you're just a hilarious Instagram account that's always doing memes and people love and you're just a comedy based account, how can you like bring that into the real life and bring those people together to do a one night pop-up at a space and do a comedy show with your friends? Like how do you, how do you do that? Easy to do if you have access to the system and the utilities. But in the past, you had to have a physical address start your comedy club at because that's the only way you could get an audience. Now your audience is infinite, it's global, it's free to access. Just like whoever creates the most entertaining and engaging value for people to connect with will then win later on in the physical world. And so it's a complete reversal I think of the way when social media first came out, we all were like, hey, cause I'm 35 and when social media came out, I was in my 20s and it was just like, what is this? How does this work? I watched physical businesses adopt social media to build these followings. But no one really knew, okay, now I have these following this voice and this platform, now what, maybe it'll buy stuff online, cool. But that was the reverse of what's happening now, which is people are starting digital only and then adding physical later to enhance their business opportunity. So it's a really, we see media as the beginning point actually of a creator's journey in a lot of ways. And that's exciting because it's a whole different way of framing how to bring your dreams into reality. You have the ability to do it right now and no one's stopping you. Open a $29 a month Shopify store, open an Instagram account, connect them together, do what you need to do and see where that goes. And if you can do that, then there's a million ways you can grow your business but it's very hard I'm seeing to do the opposite these days. People who are physical only or haven't adopted kind of an audience based content strategy really suffering right now because the foot traffic that they relied upon is gone, not coming back anytime soon. And they're grasping at straws because they haven't built up or thought about that strategy before. And there's gonna be a tough transition period as we go through that in the next year or two. But again, looking at the bright side and not the negative side, the barriers to entry are basically zero now if you care about something. Hell yeah, like it's one of the best things the internet's brought to us is the decentralization and everything. So let's ride that out. Let's be positive with our content. Let's create content that helps people that's looking out for one another that's engaging and entertaining. And then let's figure out ways to serve on top of that and provide another layer of business. And so we really, really, really are pushing within Naverly right now to enhance our storytelling and content creation so that people can get a glimpse of what people do in a Naverly. So it's not just like, one of those websites like I can rent a meeting space or an event space, what do I do now? Like you should see what people are doing. That's incredible stories. But we have been really bad in the past at doing that. And when I talk about physical businesses not having an audience, we were one of those. Literally up until two weeks ago, we started focusing on this. It's never too late. That's my also message, never too late. It's not too late for us. It's not too late for anyone listening to this. Yet going, gotta start. The best day to start is always today. And so that for us is a big focus for the next two years is enhancing that and not enhancing our story about who we are, enhancing the story of what you can do and who you are. It's a good way to look at media. And I think if we do that, then you're really like building a moat around your business. Just a fascinating way to look at it. And I interpreted what you were saying is by leaning more into the media aspects, you're inspiring a new generation of entrepreneurs like you talked about like 2020 was a big year for small business applications. And so you're also creating a moat around your business by really incentivizing new consumers and customers who are going to be inhabiting neighborly spaces and using them to host, like you said, their comedy shows, their art pop-ups. And it all steamrolls into solidifying the next generation of entrepreneurs as we know them. And it got me thinking like, you know, all these spaces, like I'm sure that not all spaces are good for all things. Diga mentioned offices with kitchens, good for ghost kitchens and stuff like that. But like when you walk into a space and you're first thinking, okay, can we use this for this or that, are there any spaces that you've found that you walk into and you're just like, I can't use this for anything. It's not good for us. Have you ran into problems like that? And if you have, what are the issues that cause you just to be like, God, it's not gonna work out for us or how we can use it? Good question. So from a use case, as long as we have a wide enough net that we're able to connect with, the amount of users from every different kind of possible commercial real estate use case, restaurants, retail, office users, events, art, what have you, then, you know, at least from the use case side, we can pretty much adapt ourself any type of street level real estate. But from an infrastructure perspective, there are certainly spaces that are too hard for us to do based on our financial model. So we're all about affordable access and to create an affordable opportunity means that we ourselves have to run as an efficient operations machine to deliver these spaces in the cheapest possible way. And that means taking spaces that allow us to move fast to only have to do small kind of restoration tasks to get it going, so clean the windows, deep clean the space, painting a couple walls, patching some walls, doing certain things like that. And then furnishing, we don't do any construction. We won't take a project that's raw. We won't do anything like that because it's too cost prohibitive, it's too slow. And by the time we got that done, we'd have invested so much time and money in the space that it'd be hard. The price to use it would be way too high. So we look for second generation turnkey, street level, mostly retail spaces that are ready to go. And frankly, all they need is clean, a deep cleaning and it's an elbow grease and some furnishings connect to wifi and ready to go. So that's, we're very selective about what we work with and the types of spaces we take on because our selection process ultimately impacts the price point by which someone can use the space. So that's to answer your question. Do you ever think about, so sometimes in development I run into like city council or zoning, right? So like, oh, it's not allowed, it's allowed. Oh, you can only have one event, blah, blah, blah, all this junk. So I feel like what you're saying is also very useful just to start speaking to Chamber of Commerce and kind of get this on their docket, like make them aware that the future of real estate is coming and it doesn't look or sound like what you're doing today and these planning departments need to start to think different or at least just consider the opportunity, right? Consider the opportunity for their cities all across America and what it could mean. Anyway, do you run into this a lot? All the time, proactively. It's not that I run into it, I seek that. Okay. Because that is a critical component to offer the right service, right? To a given city or community. I come from a nonprofit background actually, spent four years in Haiti and Dominican Republic and working in kind of the nonprofit sector. And so a lot of community development work that I did in the past kind of informs the way that we go about providing this service in a new market. So we're just about to expand into Chicago this week, right? We just expanded into San Diego and Santa Cruz and when we do that, one of the first orders of business is to connect with the city. Even in an advance of opening any of these locations is to say, hi, we're here. We think Chicago is awesome. We see so much opportunity here. Here's what we've done in the past. Here's the cities we've worked with in the past. Here are the results. How can we help you? How can we help alleviate issues in certain parts of Chicago that you think need activation, that need help, that need have our commercial real estate blight is everywhere and there are not opportunities for people to build businesses. How can we leverage our system and our skill set to help advance a neighborhood in Chicago or the city as a whole? So we've partnered with the city of Santa Cruz, for example, where I live. They've helped us acquire vacant buildings that have been closed for years and we've turned them into thriving crater hubs with their help. They're introducing us to them and they're even sending us leads because actually a lot of entrepreneurs reach out to cities first when they get started, which makes sense, because that's where the permitting happens. So a lot of leads get just lost in these city halls because they're not designed for servicing that. And so in a really cool example of Santa Cruz, small town, they not only hooked us up with supply by connecting us to landlords and vouching for what we do, but then they're also routing locals who are trying to do things who are unable to afford or access the opportunities that are available in the market. So we're helping on both supply and demand to solve a civic problem. And that is absolutely essential for us as we grow to remember that this is not some type of singular impact business. This is a very complex, multi-tiered impact that this concept has when it opens up. And for a lot of people, it's confusing. For a lot of traditional government people, like you said, it's hard for them to wrap their head around, this used to be a bank and now an art show is happening in here. How is this legal or is this okay or something? And what you realize is that it isn't really a question of they're necessarily against it or for it. It's just that it doesn't fit the mold in these specific government forums that they've created 20 years ago of you're either one of these 10 types of businesses in one of these four types of zoning things in one of these 10 sub types of zoning. And because that's the way their system is coded, it's their job to run things through that system the way it's built. When it doesn't fit, they just get flustered and they don't know what to do and they don't wanna be at fault. So they ask a lot of questions and they just wanna understand generally. But if you can, I find that if you're proactive and start with the value that it can create and be coming from a position of service, their ears and their hearts are open to help and do something about it. They wanna be included in the conversation and not ramrodded like Uber or some of these services where it just felt like tech just decided that they could just have infrastructure for themselves. And nothing against Uber specifically, just a lot of startups have done that. Scooter companies, I mean, there's like, knowing as an example of where startups in the last 10 years have treated cities as if they are their playgrounds for profit making and there are no rules applied to them because they smartly came up with some way to code themselves or think about it and that broke the rules. I'm all for innovation, but that approach wasn't, I don't think it was very good. I think it was very arrogant. And so what we at Naverly have learned from that process is actually cities are cool with rideshare. They are cool with alternative mobility. They are cool with home sharing. They're cool with all these things to a certain degree, yet they wanna be included in that conversation because it's their entire infrastructure and their entire way of doing business and running a society. So include them in it. Maybe you don't like their answers and maybe you need to press their answers and then push the limit a little bit. But to just say that the city, the government or these people that are in public service don't matter or they're old or they don't get it or we should just do it anyway, I think is a dangerous way to build a business like we're building. So we really, really, really try to work with the cities right off the bat and include them. That's a fun way to do it. Like we've had the mayor of San Francisco in our spaces a couple of times in Mayor Berkeley. We offer up our space for civic engagement. We do all kinds of things where we donate our space to local causes because that's the right thing to do but also because we wanna be a resource. It's not just, this is not just a private profit taking initiative only, it's just a way to look at real estate as a service for the community as opposed to looking at real estate as this stoic asset that is either winning or losing. It's a weird way to think about it. Another thing too, I mean, some of these cities are just sitting on properties that they own themselves and so it could be a super easy way for you to just say, hey look, we have this crazy idea. Do you guys have any properties? Next thing you know that you're touring 10 properties and they're like, we would like this here and it just happens that there's a symbiotic relationship with the offering. So yeah, great point. Don't discount cities for sure go ask them. That's how I did my first real estate deal actually was talking to the city first and ended up being great. I mean, they were a great partner in the whole thing. And they trust, right, right now, there's a kinship. They go back there and they know you and you won over, you earn their trust and that's a relationship and resource that's gonna be very valuable to you as you grow in your company because you need to build everything based on trust and people don't, I don't sometimes think put enough emphasis on building trust when they start something but it's integral. I have one question for you then we can wrap. Parking assets. So Nick's father is the chairman of the International Parking Institute or Mobile Parking and Mobility Institute. Oh wow. And so parking assets, I was also in parking for a while. She was on the board with his father as we think about parking today. I think they're at max 20% capacity. Obviously no one's going to the office. Therefore the parking assets are suffering. I've had some calls here in LA where there are some groups that are trying to almost set up like the simple version is hey, let's lease out the roof and let's put like a gym. All the gyms need places to go right now to be outside. That seems like a no brainer. Kind of difficult to monetize because these companies, it's not like the gyms are doing great, right? It's not like all of a sudden they have all this cash to now pay and then move their equipment to the roof. But I think given that in the next three years if we say in the next three years offices won't go back to normal in terms of an occupancy then it leaves these parking assets either in trouble or right for opportunity. I don't know if you, and this is not to put you on the spot but it's something that's always back on mind for me. Have you considered anything in the parking asset world that might be kind of unique or different? I don't want to unveil our ultra secret strategies around parking lots right now. This is the place to do it. No, to be quite honest, we haven't only because there are some awesome companies really focused on like reef technologies that you guys have heard of them before. They do a really cool thing of activating these parking lots and they're totally focused around that. And also the other reason we haven't really, that was one thing a lot of our team and supporters were urging us to do when the pandemic hit of course is like, okay, how do we bring neighborly outside? And I don't know if I was right or wrong but I kind of made the executive call that it wasn't worth our time and energy because it was a fleeting moment in time and it would be over before we could even monetize the amount of work and energy to shift to some crazy network of real estate that we don't first of all have access to today. We got to attain, figure out and then remarket and I was like, we do this correctly, cool. We're gonna get some people who might do some popups or they might do something, we might get a COVID test operator who needs to rent one of the parking lots but how much value are we gonna provide to that versus like, let's fix our technology. Let's build, let's invent some new things so which I haven't talked about on this call. Let's invent these like new business models. Let's go after landlords, the ideal landlords we've always wanted and so we actually decided against and even Jason's advice was do the parking lot thing and he wasn't wrong but we just, we decided to double down on internal projects, kind of hibernate a little bit knowing that when we came out with these projects that we're about to come out with we're gonna make a bang in the post COVID world but that just means that in the moment we're not really hustling to find COVID opportunities and a lot of that was I looked at the landscape and I said there's reef and there's a bunch of other people there's parking lot owners themselves like why do they really need us? But yeah, but I think I have an entire vision for parking lots that I think is, I think parking lots are going to be awesome in the future because I'm just a big believer in autonomous, I think I've just always been bullish on that and I know the timeline's been longer than everyone's thought and I continue to just drink the Kool-Aid and I will forever because I think it's gonna change everything for cities and if you believe in autonomous you believe in parking lot because that entire infrastructure needs to be built from scratch and it needs to not be in parking garages it needs to be in flat open areas with no walls and you can do new wiring, electricity so I'm super bullish on how parking lots can play a big part of our communities in the future but that's not something that we work on. I like it, honest answer. Yeah, Ben it's been great talking to you. Please just let everyone know where they can find you and support your company, all that good stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Our website is www.neverly.com and you can check us out on Instagram at neighborly or Twitter at neighborly and yeah, we'd love to help any of you listeners with any of your awesome ideas. I know this is a creative podcast and there's a lot of you out there we're building the future so if there's any way we can be of service to you guys or help you with our locations feel free to reach out. We'll shoot you a startup to storefront discount, hook you up on behalf of Diego and Nick but yeah, we'd love to just be a resource so if there's any way we can help anyone on the podcast, let us know. Neighborly, fostering the new wave of entrepreneurship. I love it, I love it. Thanks Ben. Yeah, thanks a lot for coming on. Yeah, it was fun.