Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to From the Ground Up, the podcast where we delve deep into the inspiring stories of entrepreneurs and their journey to build successful startups. I'm your host, Jake Aaron Villarreal, and in each episode, I sit down with the founders to learn about their experiences, the challenges they face, the lessons they've learned, and the insights they've gained while turning their dreams into reality. And excited to have with us today York Baur, the CEO of MoxiWorks. The platform that you may not have heard of but has touched over 25 percent of all real estate transactions in North America. Uh, York, welcome to the show.
York Baur: Yeah, thanks for having me, Jake. It's a pleasure to be here and excited to have a conversation.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. We're going to dive into the company MoxiWorks that you run and have been there for 10 years. Before we do that, we'll dive a little bit more into you and your personal life. York Baur is a startup executive and turnaround expert who joined MoxiWorks in 2012 and has grown the company to over 290 employees serving 800 brokerages in the real estate market, including 400,000 agents. Now, my mom works for Coldwell Banker and she's been there for 40 years, so hopefully she's been using your technology at some level.
York Baur: Yeah, I would hope so. We've actually in various forms we've had Coldwell Banker as a customer for over five years, and we've expanded that relationship over those five years. So yeah, it's likely she would have touched our stuff in there somewhere.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Well, let's dive into you a little bit. Where are you from originally?
York Baur: Sure. I'm uh, I'm a Tacoma boy, born and raised in Tacoma, Washington, just south here of Seattle where I'm located today. And kind of a fun upbringing because well, my... I was the, the side of American, of immigrants to America from Germany and Switzerland, so I grew up in a unique setting that way. And there's also a lot of uh military background in the area that I grew up, which made it a real melting pot before we talked about you know, some of the issues of, of all that stuff today. And so I just gained an early appreciation for div-, for diversity because it's where I was and what was around me. So kind of a fun place to grow up, I'd say.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Now as a kid, what was the first job you actually had? And did it help shape your entrepreneurial spirit?
York Baur: Uh, I'm going to give you two answers to that. The first job I had was actually working on the, the property where I grew up. My dad was a horse guy, and so I you know, mucked stalls and dug ditches and built structures and did all the stuff that you have to do. And I think what I learned from that was uh kind of a sense of grit, you know. It's, it's not always fun work, especially when you're a kid, but you got to get 'er done and get to the goal, you know, get the project finished uh no matter what. And so I, I think that gave me a good appreciation for that. My first sort of real job, believe it or not, was stuffing envelopes for a computer software company. And, and this goes to the wayback machine, this is the mid-70s when I was uh you know, in, in... actually later 70s when I was in junior high school. And that was already the beginnings of my interest in, in technology.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Now, before you got into your career, uh you went to USC, got a computer science degree there, and then worked at Microsoft. How did you land at Microsoft and what were you doing there?
York Baur: Yeah, it's, so I... you're right, I have a computer science degree. And I really thought early on that I would, that was a path I would take. Meaning I would be an engineer and do the thing because I do love the technology. But what I figured out pretty quickly for myself is I really enjoy interacting with people. So my career really has been built around the idea, the intersection between the technology and the business side and the people side of, of any technology business. And that's really how I ended up ultimately at Microsoft. I'd done some other gigs before that that had taken me down the enterprise software world. In particular connectivity between uh PCs and IBM mainframes, which dominated business computing. This is in the '80s. And by the early '90s Microsoft had figured out that they, they need to play ball in that world because they're not going to replace the mainframe at least at that point anytime soon. And I made an ideal addition apparently, because I, I kind of was able to bridge that gap between the, the PC and, and client-server at the time technologies and the old world of, of the IBM systems. And so that's, that's what brought me to the company.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. Yeah, that transition from computer science into more of a marketing role. Is that correct?
York Baur: Yeah, I mean I did a variety of things uh: sales support, selling, and marketing. But yeah, I consider myself, like, like there's one discipline that I have spent the most time in my career at, it would be marketing.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Yeah, I spent a number of years at Oracle Corporation and on the sales side, and I remember lots of head-to-head I guess [with] IBM as well as Microsoft. And this was back you know, late 1990s, early 2000s, and there was a healthy competition going on there. It sounds like everything's moved into the cloud, and we're going to get to that here in a little bit. Um, what was your, your first startup experience?
York Baur: Yeah, it's, it's a great question. I, I worked for some smaller tech companies, but the first actual startup was uh in '99. I went to a company called Netpodium, which you know, we're kind of on the Zoom-like experience here. It was kind of Zoom back in the day. It was the first product that used, that combined an online presentation format, which had existed and you know was out there in other companies too, but uniquely combined it with streaming media. So it was really the first example of what we're doing here. And that was a fun ride. I joined in '99 and we sold it within 12 months. You know, this is the go-go [era]. And that worked out well.
And then I co-founded um a startup of my own in March of 2000. And for those of your viewers that may not have retraced or lived that history, that was the, the beginning of the dot-bomb, you know, the market fell off a cliff in April 2000 for tech. So my timing was impeccably bad, but uh these are great experiences. You know, you learn from, you learn when things are difficult. You don't learn when things are easy. And I don't wish difficulty on anyone, and I you know, I don't want it to be any more difficult for me either, but it's honestly, that's where you, that's where the character building and the real education happened.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: You led me right into that next question, which was: everybody that's an entrepreneur at some point faces failures, whether it's within their company that they turn around, or a company that doesn't make it. Can you share a little bit more about the experience you had there with the startup, whether we know that there was a market issue with the timing of where everything was going. Um, what were the main lessons you learned coming out of that?
York Baur: Sure, yeah. And to paint a little bit more of the picture as I answer the question. So we founded this thing in March of 2000. And of course, this stuff went south from there fast. But yet by mid-2001, we had, we built a product, it was a media meta-search product. Pretty innovative and it has been proven out over time you know, a lot of the concepts that we created there have been, have made their way into search experiences subsequent to that. But yet, and we actually had the company sold! We sold it to another company uh in July of 2001. And then in August the whole thing exploded because uh one of the key investors in that merged company just decided not to continue funding. What literally, we went from it being funded on a Thursday to him changing his mind on the weekend, and we laid everybody off on the following Monday.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Oh no!
York Baur: That did not work out well. Not what you want. Um, but to answer your question, I think what you learn is a few things. One is, it's certainly, it's very easy to go down the road of "coulda, woulda, shoulda." You know, you, you spend a lot of time beating yourself up about the things you might have done differently, uh the choices you made, the, the opportunities you didn't pursue, etc. I, I don't know that that's always the healthiest thing. In other words, you have to be self-aware and you have to acknowledge where you could have done things better, but do that once and then move on. Because, you know, beating yourself up over history you cannot change is the dumbest thing ever.
And the other thing I would say is what I learned through it is: focus on what you can control. Now so much of our time... and if you look at what gets said on the media, and the amount of conversation that we have in person, online, through social media, think of the collective effort that's wasted talking about (and I'll just give you you know, a couple examples) about the price of oil, or about you know some conflict happening in the world, or you know these things. They're... and I don't mean to trivialize them, those are serious issues and I'm not saying we shouldn't talk about them. But the excessiveness that we have when we talk about it is... it's, none of us are going to change or influence that particularly, so it's arguably wasted. And I think the same thing happens in, in startups. Even ones that don't fail, you spend all your time revisiting you know, something, something bad has happened. You spend all this time churning on that when that's not adding anything to what you need to do next. And so I've, I've learned through my, not just that one experience, but through experiences as recently as this week, you know, you just have to be able to learn from something, draw whatever the lessons are, and then put it away. You know, cast it aside, because it's not going to contribute anything further to making you better or making the company move forward. Easy to say it, hard to do by the way, but I, I think it's so important because we only have so much energy. Let's apply it to the things that can move the ball down the field, not rehashing a mistake that we can't get back.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that 100 percent. Um you mentioned last week. What, what, what's the current state of the company today?
York Baur: We are doing quite well in spite of the real estate, residential real estate market. So for the audience, we service the enterprise residential real estate brokers. Yeah, you mentioned, Jake, you mentioned Coldwell Banker for instance. So the big brands that you would typically know in the real estate space, many of those are our customers. And as you can imagine, the last 12 months have been brutal for our customers. And therefore challenging for us as well. Um, the, the residential, the number of transactions happening is down over 30 percent. In fact, almost 40 percent year over year. And that's in a commission-driven industry, and there is nobody in our industry, and arguably by extension including us, makes money unless a house gets sold. So um, we've had our collective share of challenges, but we're still growing. Moxi is still growing. And a lot of that has to do I think with well, several factors.
We have [a] great team. And everybody says that, but you really, you have to. Always, good or bad market, you have to make sure you have the right team. And it's just, it's a simple saying, everyone's heard this before, but I'm going to remind everybody. Get the right people on the bus, get them in the right seat on the bus, and then drive the bus to an interesting place. And you just have to be maniacal about that. And I'm happy to say that we have an awesome team. Um particularly my exec team I'm thrilled about. Um, good or bad, right, it's you, you need to work together whether it's a great market or a crap market.
But the second thing is we chose um... and this wasn't clairvoyant, it was just a function of how we approached our market 10 years ago. We said we're going to sell to the enterprise. And the downside to that is you need to invest a lot more in your infrastructure, you need to provide a level of support that's much higher, and critically, you need to develop a broad product family. And all those things are very expensive to do. I know, by the way, you have a long sales cycle, relatively speaking, right? So all those things sound like, "Well, why the hell would you do that?" The answer is that once you get that going, it's the flywheel kind of thing. Once you get that going, you have a very durable and stable business. We have, you know, over 90 percent gross retention and over 100 net retention, which in the world of real estate is almost unheard of. Because anyone selling to agents or teams or small brokers has huge amounts of churn, you know, anywhere between 40 and 80 percent retention, which is, it's very hard to grow when you're hemorrhaging, you know. So um, so our business, while we've slowed and it's gotten harder, our business remains very stable and we see ourselves as the quality provider in our space.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great, great. Well, you really fast-forwarded through a little bit of uh some of my thoughts here about the company. And for the listeners that don't know MoxiWorks, I'll take a step back here and fill in some of the gaps, but also ask you some more questions.
York Baur: Sure.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So MoxiWorks is that enterprise software platform that is led by you. That platform is focused on the brokers and 400,000 agents. Is a lot of agents. What specifically does the agent see as part of your application? Like what's the functional aspect of your app that's helping them?
York Baur: Sure. And I'll describe the product family because, you know, depending on the customer that that agent would be part of, they may not have 100 of what we offer. But... and that's a big advantage we have by the way, because we can customize uh the, out of our portfolio products, that the things that are appropriate for a given customer. Enterprise customers, they all have something right? And nobody's got a blank piece of paper. So the way we approached our product family, this is a decade ago when we created our product strategy, was to say that fundamentally an agent and their, their brokerage, they do two things. They find the business and they close the business. And both of those can be made better with technology. But we were going to choose, and we did choose, the "find the business" portion of it.
And the reason for that was twofold. One is the, the "close the business" part is heavily regulated and requires a level of capability I would argue that most startups just can't muster. It's dominated by people like DocuSign and you know, big sophisticated companies. Uh and moreover, the second reason was that you know, if you think about what a brokerage and an agent are, they're largely sales and marketing entities primarily. So we wanted to go where their minds were, which is on "how do I find my next transaction?" And that's worked out quite well.
The nuance in there is that we figured out early on (and the data is immutable about this by the way) that while Zillow gets all the attention and there's all this discussion of lead generation, the reality is that 82 percent of a mature career agent's business comes from people they already know and know, like, and trust them, the sphere of influence as we call it. And um, and so our, our products are, are optimized for and are the best at making an agent great and successful with the people they already know. Yeah. And that's proven to be a very durable approach.
So to answer your question, what are these mystical tools? Well so this [is the] type of stuff you as a consumer if you've ever transacted real estate would know. So your agent has a website, the brokerage has a website. The agent is going to market to you, typically with various marketing campaigns depending on what you're doing or not doing with regard to a home search. Uh and then they're going to eventually going to come and present to you if you do want to either buy or sell a home. So all the tools through that are what we supply. We supply websites to, to agents and the brokerages. We have a CRM and other associated marketing campaign technologies. We have presentation software that they use when they come to present. So it's, it's the stuff that I could, that an agent would use with the consumer to find uh, to find business.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Now for the agents that are out there today that might be listening, what are some of the companies, the brokerages that you're working with now? We mentioned Coldwell Banker. Any other big names that you can share?
York Baur: Yeah, so Coldwell Banker is part of a, of [a] franchisor called Anywhere, formerly known as Realogy. And they have other brands like for example, Century 21 is a big brand of theirs, uh also ERA and Better Homes and Gardens, Sotheby's. You know, those are all brands under that umbrella. And then we also have a number of uh independents, large independents. And so Howard Hanna for instance is a good example, very dominant up in the Midwest and Northeast. Windermere here in the Pacific Northwest, we actually grew out of as I mentioned earlier. So it's a, it's a palette I would say of, of a bunch of different uh brokerages, but all of them in one form [or] another at the enterprise level.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. That's great. Now you've been there for 10 years. Um, you're focused on the brokerages. First Zillow, which is more on the agent or the, the consumer, that's right... correct?
York Baur: Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: And the advantage for you focusing on the brokerages is a little bit more, I would say probably a lot more consistency, stability with those enterprise contracts and agreements and relationships.
York Baur: Yeah, that's right.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So more stable in the up and down markets and not having to worry [that] the churn is going to happen without knowing about it.
York Baur: That's right. And it also allows us to over time grow our product family, because it's much easier to take a complimentary product to an existing customer base than it is to take that product and try and find new customers out in the wild with it. So I think over time our customers expect us to deliver more for them and offer more to them. And I think our, our strategy allows us to do that better than, than those that are dealing with at the lower end of the market.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Now you had some experience working at a Salesforce partner. And with MoxiWorks, is your application built on the, the Salesforce platform, is it your own platform, and then in the cloud? How, what's the structure there?
York Baur: So it's really... so you bring the subject [up] because when, when I often speak to investors that may be unfamiliar with the residential real estate market for instance, and they're trying to understand what we do, the, the one liner I often will say is we're trying to be the Salesforce.com of residential real estate. And um other sort of little known fact is that when I came to Moxi a decade ago, as you pointed out, I had worked uh immediately prior at a, a startup that actually grown into a medium-sized training company, but it had been a Salesforce partner. And so my instinct was, could we use the Force.com platform as you mentioned, and build all our stuff around that, not reinvent the wheel?
And what I discovered was two things. Firstly, Salesforce has a complexity and an unfriendliness to it. And that's not an indictment, it's an incredibly successful company. We use Salesforce by the way in our sales and marketing internally. But an agent does not need that level of complexity and sophistication. And therefore the interfaces and the capabilities actually become a barrier to usage in, in the real estate world. Which is why Salesforce has yet to successfully penetrate residential real estate, in spite of a number of attempts on their part to partner and do so. And the second problem was cost. You know, Salesforce is very expensive. The real estate vertical is cost-conscious I would say, and maybe, maybe undervalues the role of technology I would say a bit as well, and therefore is price-sensitive.
So we made the decision then that we would have to, to build our own infrastructure. What that led to is the creation of a thing that we call the Moxi Cloud, which is analogous to what the, the Force.com cloud technology is, except for residential real estate. So keep in mind, we chose to serve the enterprise. The enterprises that I mentioned earlier, nobody has a blank piece of paper, right? They all have some stuff. So when you show up, the customer is going to say, "Hey, I have these specific problems." And we can go, "Okay, well these specific products from us are going to help you on those problems." You need to have therefore modularity in your product family. A number of our competitors will show up and go, "It's all or nothing, you know, take it or leave it." And we found that that modular approach to be very helpful. To do that well, you have to abstract the data and a bunch of the other capabilities into, in our case a cloud infrastructure that we call the Moxi Cloud. So now it becomes straightforward to build a new app, for us to build a new app and plug it into that, and not have to reinvent all this data handling. Because the data issues in residential real estate are mighty. I could talk for an hour on that alone.
But what we've also done is again taken a page from [the] playbook really, is we created a third-party partner ecosystem around that. We call it the Moxi Cloud Partner Program. And we now have 175 other real estate tech companies that have plugged into that infrastructure and use our data and contribute to it. And it, it really has... we've been the first to do that in our, our space. And I'm just, having worked as you mentioned with Salesforce, and Microsoft, open platforms win over time. They just do. So I, I wish I could say I was the inventor of that strategy, but I'm not. I certainly though have, have borrowed and applied it here.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Yeah, well you know, there's been a lot of breakthroughs in technology recently. And AI has become a very topical product that companies are using and, and trying to figure out how to embed into their platforms. Uh with the transaction in real estate, I know it's very personal, it's very emotional, there's a ton of data, and a lot of processes that go into the transaction of real estate. Where do you see AI playing a role in the real estate sector and is there an opportunity for it to be integrated with, with Moxi?
York Baur: Absolutely is the answer to the question, to your last question there. But I, I may have a bit of a contrarian view about AI. And keep in mind as we discussed earlier, I have a computer science degree. I love technology, right? So I'm not, I'm the, the comments I'm about to make are more as a pragmatist who has seen this movie a bunch of times. Uh and to put that [in] perspective by the way, I took a course on Lisp. For those of you that are computer science historians, you may recognize that that was really the first formal computer programming language for AI. This is... I took that course in 1984.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Nice.
York Baur: So this is not our first rodeo on AI. Um and what I find disappointing about the technology industry is that we, we got these incredible hype cycles. And this is one of those. Whenever a new technology is developed, we, we tend to so overstep on, on representing it as the, the thing that's going to change everything in the world. And I think that does both the technology and the business a disservice because it creates these boom and bust cycles that, that you know the dot, the dot-bomb, .com dot-bomb thing we spoke about earlier is a great example of that. Obviously the internet survived and has become this incredible thing, but you'd have thought it was going to cure cancer in 1999 and by 2001 that it would cease to exist. And neither of those was, was accurate.
And I feel that same way about AI. Um, not that it, it doesn't have myriad amazing and interesting application opportunities, it does. But it also has limitations, and it has challenges, and frankly it has problems yet that will take a long time to sort out. Some of them are technology related, but a lot of them are cultural or business oriented. You, for example, you mentioned what makes a real estate transaction so unique. It's two things. Firstly, and you touched on this, it's the most emotionally and financially significant transaction that the vast majority of consumers will ever do. Very hard to apply AI to something that's emotionally driven. And then the second thing that people don't think about is it's a non-tangible asset. There are literally no two homes [that are the same]. And everybody counters that, "Well what about a development with a cookie cutter [house]?" Well they're not on the same lot, right? Every lot's different. So my point in simply to say that that's where the human, a good agent, is so absolutely critical is navigating this emotionally charged, financially significant, very unique setting. And by the way, the analogy I would give you is the medical profession. So I don't think we're going to see AI performing heart surgery anytime soon, right? These, whenever the stakes are high, it's a lot of money and it's unique (because again no two humans are the same either), uh I think those will be the last frontiers that AI will, will really be able to contribute to, and, and maybe ultimately take over to a degree, but I think we got a long road ahead of us in these areas.
You know, a little analysis of a spreadsheet or a, a fun chat to create a marketing blurb, you know those, those are things that AI is very good at. And I'm not surprised that's what AI should be good at, but I think these deeper applications will take a lot of time to figure out. And also you have, you have both the societal and government reaction. I don't know if you saw that, recently Italy has banned ChatGPT for instance, you know, right, whatever. But it shows you. And then you probably saw the news last week that Musk and Wozniak and a thousand others signed a letter saying, "Hey, whoa, slow down here." So I just, I just don't think that the, as usual, that the hype represents an accurate picture of the path that, that AI will take from here.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, good points. There is a lot of hype around it. Um I think there is 500 to a thousand startups that are in the AI space currently that have been building AI and machine learning applications and looking at creating agents or tutors or ways to reduce the manual process of a certain job or task. And...
York Baur: Yeah, sorry Jacob. But you know the other thing I would say is, it's not like we all woke up yesterday and decided AI could be a thing, right? We've had machine learning, for example, in our products for five years in various forms. And I think we're, to answer your question more directly, I think where AI will find its home first in the residential real estate world (and certainly I'm speaking for this at Moxi) is actually in looking at consumer behaviors and alerting the agent to, to take action based on what it sees as possible with that consumer. But ultimately, I think this is the mistake that happens in, in a lot of places. But in residential real estate with AI specifically, the objective should be to assist the human, not replace the human.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, absolutely agree with that. And I think that's hopefully where it's headed. Um you know, we're hearing stories already about it being you know, a potential math tutor for kids that you know need support there. Or you know long, I guess the long view around medicine and physicians would be that if you can't afford a doctor, that there would be some sort of an AI support nurse or doctor that can give you insights or guidance if you're in a you know, in the US, in a different country, wherever. But it's too hard to predict where it's going to go. A lot happening there, so excited to hear that that's something that you guys are exploring. Sounds like you've been in that area for quite some time already with the machine learning. And um, and, and who knows where it goes. But that's great.
York Baur: Yeah, just one final example if people want to actually go check this out, it's publicly available on our website. We publish every month the thing called the Home Sales Predictor, in which we use uh historical trend data from home transactions, but critically, agent and consumer interaction with our products, and we can predict with five percent accuracy the next two months of home sales in the US.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow.
York Baur: That's right. You can go on on MoxiWorks.com and, and search Home Sales Predictor. It'll take you to our blog for, for the latest version of that. So you know, this is not theoretical, we're doing it, and have been doing it. The, the Home Sales Predictor by the way we've been operating for two years. That relies on machine learning as a, as a component. So you know it's, we're finding good places to apply, but we're just trying to not be hypey and shiny object about it, you know, or try to do it in a way that's actually helpful.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that makes sense. What are some of the lessons you've learned so far over 10 years now, being at a company that really from inception you've taken and grown it to where it's at today? For founders that are out there that may be in technology and a different vertical, what are some of the things that you look back on and you say, "Yeah, here's a couple things I would share with the, with the listeners"?
York Baur: Uh and as you and I said Jake, I didn't prepare for this. He didn't send me the questions deliberately. I love it, being spontaneous. So I'll give you sort of an off-the-cuff, a few things that come to mind. Uh the first, I touched on it earlier, is: be thoughtful about your business model. Do the research and, and test the business model, because you're gonna have to live with it for a long time. And you need to sort of reverse engineer from the outcome you want. For example, if you want super stable revenues, you want to be more recession-proof, but trade maybe a super high growth rate off for that stability, that's a different set of decisions on business model than if you're you know just going to maximize rapid growth. That probably means those revenues won't be as stable, right? So there's just trade-offs that you need to make. Be thoughtful about your business model. We chose well I think, but I've seen a lot of other companies, especially now in the downturn we're in, that, that probably wish they could have that decision back.
The second lesson is, and I again touched on this earlier, is the importance of the team you have and being willing as a founder and as a CEO to trust and delegate to that team. And that's... by delegate I don't mean "do this, do that." I mean actually let them own the decisions that are appropriate for their portion of the business. Let them come up with the solutions by working together. And all those things, every management course will teach you that, but it's just so critically important because otherwise you will not have a life and you will not scale your company.
And then the third thing is, be [willing to do] this, probably [the] most difficult thing to do of what I've mentioned: be willing and, and able to make the difficult uh decisions about people as you grow your company. Because, and by the way, what I'm about to say will be true of me at some point as well, which is: the job eventually outgrows everybody. You know, and I'll give you an example. I, I worked with Satya Nadella when he was 24 years old and had just joined Microsoft. And today he's running Microsoft. I'm running Moxi. And the reason is, I could not do his job. I just, it's just not what I'm good at. He is. He's amazing. Um, and so I think we all have to be realistic not only about our own capabilities but about those that work with us and for us. And if you've got someone that's struggling, then back to the bus analogy, either put 'em in a different seat on the bus if that can work, or you have to get them off the bus and put somebody in there that, that can do that job. At the, and not only for where you are, but for where you're going right? The next phase of your growth. And those are the most difficult decisions. But I can tell you no person has ever said the words, "Gee, I'm glad I waited that long to make that change with that person," right? You can never do it soon enough arguably. So I think of all of the things on this podcast here today, that's the, the one thing I would most impress on my, my fellow entrepreneurs and CEOs is, you know, be human and, and do the right things when you make those changes, but you got to make those changes.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yep, that's great. What's the mission now for the company, Moxi, and why is it great to work for you and why is it great to work there?
York Baur: It's, it's the, the arguably the most important question that you've asked here. I think our mission remains largely the same, only more. Meaning we've had the good fortune I think of, of choosing a good strategy and of, of adapting and molding that, it's with the same core as we've grown, as the market that we serve has evolved and changed. And I don't see that needing to change. Our, our mission ultimately is to make communities better by having agents do what they do really well to serve consumers, right? That's, and there's so much that we have yet to do to realize that. And not just doing better at what we have today, but introducing new products and expanding into related services over time, you know mortgage, title insurance. There's just all this universe of stuff that we can do that I think technology could play a key role in making better.
And so, so why would you come to Moxi? Well, I would hope that that mission resonates, because everybody's got to live somewhere. And many of our... as we call ourselves [Moxians] have a home or transacting [for a] home. I'm actually in the process of selling the home that you're seeing me in here. So um, you know, it's, it's one of those basic need things. And yes, we're not that important, we're not you know curing cancer as I joked about earlier, but we are helping people realize the, the dream of home ownership in one form or another, [making a] small contribution to that. And I would hope that that makes it interesting for, for Moxians. And, and I would give a plug for our culture. We're not perfect, but we do care about um the, the people that work for Moxi globally. Now we have 300 people around the globe that in various forms are doing things for Moxi. And we consider that the, the extended Moxi family. And, and I would hope people would feel that as they, as they come and talk to us about joining us.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Well you know, leaders have to take on a lot. They have to do their job well, they have to influence. But one of the things they need to do most of, I believe, is they have to face fears. And they have to do it in a way that they can show that you know, it's something that everyone in the company at some point needs to follow. Now I saw a video of you scaling down a 40-floor building in Seattle. And to me it looked pretty crazy, pretty wild. But it also was a great example of a leader. Walk me through that, and walk me through the reason why you did it.
York Baur: Sure. Well so the first comment is: never bet against your employees. We, we have a charitable giving effort that we call the Moxi Fund. And every year we have a goal, and there's a, the committee because I'm, I'm not dictating this, is employee-led. They set a goal, and then of course that goal typically will get accomplished somewhere toward you know closer to the end of the year. And I'll issue some challenge to, to reach a stretch goal. And in return for that, I offer to do something, you know, humiliating usually.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
York Baur: Uh, every single time (this is for many years now) the, the Moxi crew will achieve that goal and I'll have to hit the button. So for example I one uh year I had to shave my head. Now I have no hair, but I had to actually shave the word "Moxi" into my head and go to a conference like that, which I did. Um, and so this was a similar thing. I said I would scale the building... I, or not scale... repel out of the building if they reached the goal, which they did. But the reason I chose that is, I do think, you know, I, I'm fortunate I don't have acrophobia which is the, the clinical fear of heights you know. But everybody has some fear of heights, right? I mean we're built to not fall off things. And uh, so I'd be lying if I said it you know it wasn't a, a challenge to get over [a] ledge you know 500 feet above the, the ground. But I think life is all and business is all about challenging yourself. You know you don't um, you don't grow if you're not doing difficult things. I mentioned that earlier, learning when it's challenging, not when it's easy. It would be very easy to pick you know a pizza party instead of repelling down the building, is the thing.
But I hope both for myself, I mean I learned some things about myself and how I challenge myself in that, but hopefully it also served as a, a way for others to think through for them, what are things they can do to challenge themselves? Counter, or another example: I'm a big motorcycle rider and I'm a pilot. And whether you want to ride motorcycles or fly airplanes, go take a lesson. Go take the Motorcycle Safety Foundation riding course, even if you go no further, you've done it. I've also jumped out of an airplane once. I enjoyed it, it was a challenge. I, it wasn't the type of thing that super resonated with me, which is why I haven't done it subsequently. But I'm damn glad I did it. So push yourself, challenge yourself, and you will learn about yourself and perhaps inspire others to, to do the same. So that, that's really the thought behind the whole thing.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, it's great. It's always good to have some sort of charitable giving within the company, and something that can get behind not just the work that you do but also [a] purpose you're serving. And it's always good to have that ability to do both of those. Your career journey in startups is amazing. What could you share with others, other aspiring founders really? They're looking to build a startup in today's market.
York Baur: Ah. Do not go into it lightly. It may sound obvious, I've touched on some of the aspects of this. But we unfortunately in the United States especially, I think we glorify the startup world. We have, you know, TV shows and movies about it and everything else, and it all looks and sounds amazing. But it's a lot harder than everybody's face. So be thoughtful and understand that arguably the single most important characteristic you can have is grit. And the reason I say that is, there are three components you need to make any, any business, but in particular a startup succeed. You need an idea, you need capital (money), and you need people to execute it. It's that third one that's the magic. Because is there a shortage of ideas? No. And chances are any idea you've had, someone else had the same or very similar idea already. Is it money? God no. I mean, there is more money floating around in our world, particularly in, in private investment vehicles that we all are familiar with, you know angel on down to VC and private equity. Money's not the hard part. It's the people to execute. That's, that's what separates success from failure. That's what separates great from "meh." And that's, that's the thing that you have to be up for. And that's where the grit comes in. You have to be willing to have the persistence and passion for achieving a long-term goal. That's, yes, that's the Angela Duckworth definition. And I, I'm a big fan of, of her work in that area because without that it's not a layup, you know. It'll always be harder and take longer than you think. So just make sure you're up for the, for the mission.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Well York, this hour went quicker than I thought, and I really appreciate your insights not only on the company that you're running today, but yourself, and truly giving inspiring insights about what it takes to build a starting company, a startup, running a company in general, operating it, and inspiring those that work for you. So thank you so much for joining here today, and look forward to catching up with you in the future on a podcast of growth and what happens to Moxi.
York Baur: Wonderful. Thanks for having me, Jake. And I hope for the audience too you got something out of it. It's been a pleasure.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Thank you. Okay, take it easy. Bye.
Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that are joining to make this podcast possible. And for all the listeners for listening, it means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care.
This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market and they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.
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