Laurent-Grill_Real-Estate-Capital_R01

Laurent Grill (0:00 - 0:29)

When you're sitting down in front of a founder, sometimes you just have to ask the question of like, why you? Why you, why your team? What is different about your business and you personally that's actually gonna give you a chance of success in this market?

Because there's probably five, 10, 15 other really smart people trying to build some version of this. What makes you different and what is your, and you asked me the question, what is your unfair advantage in the space that's gonna give you the ability to be successful?

Nancy Lashine (0:29 - 3:52)

Hello, and thanks for tuning in to Real Estate Capital. I'm your host, Nancy Lashine of Park Madison Partners. Capital is a lifeblood of the real estate industry, but the decisions on where and how it's allocated are driven by people and personalities.

Who are they? What motivates them? What can we learn from their experiences?

On this show, we introduce you to some of the real estate industry's most influential thought leaders and decision makers. And we talk about what is important to them, how they make critical decisions, who has influenced them and a lot more. Okay, I have a confession to make.

Every time I hear someone described as a venture capitalist, I brace myself for a very particular kind of conversation. Lots of buzzwords, a healthy dose of Silicon Valley optimism and the quiet implication that the rest of us just haven't quite caught up yet. And then I met Laurent Grill.

And honestly, I could not wait to hit record. Laurent is a partner at JLL Spark, the venture capital arm of Jones Lang LaSalle. And what makes him so refreshing, so genuinely different for most people I talk to in the proptech space is the thing that's the hardest to fake and venture.

He's actually been a founder, not once, multiple times. He built a music education platform, a video streaming business, an on-demand health and wellness services platform. And he has personally lived through the specific joy of a product that won't ship, a co-founder disagreement at the worst possible moment and investors who ask questions like, but what's your TikTok strategy?

Oh, and his first company, Meso Media, was featured on Shark Tank. He joined JLL Spark in 2021. And since then, Laurent's been deploying capital into the early stage proptech companies trying to do something genuinely hard, transform the way the built environment works.

And if you've ever tried to change anything about the built environment, permitting, construction, operations, the tenants, the data systems that somehow still run on spreadsheets, you know that genuinely hard is a spectacular understatement. Today, we get into Laurent's founder first investment philosophy, what it actually means to back people before the product is obvious and why he thinks that's the only way to do it well. We talk about a concept I had not heard before, the AI native building.

What does it actually look like when a building is designed from day one to think, to learn, to optimize itself? We get into construction technology, one of those industries that's been five years away from transformation for about 30 years and may finally, finally be at an inflection point. This conversation will make you reflect on the proptech cycle.

Well, Laurent, it's such a privilege to have you on the podcast and I think you are one of the first, maybe our first guest who, you know, doesn't come from a pure real estate background. So this is super fun and I'm really excited to have you. I think of you as much more of a, you know, an investor, a venture capital guy, a tech operator.

I think you are all those things. But before you were that, you were born and raised in Hawaii, which in and of itself is fascinating. So welcome to the show.

Love to have you on, thank you.

Laurent Grill (3:52 - 4:10)

Thank you for having me. I would say that I categorize myself as a bit of a technologist that was looking at the real estate space as a really interesting opportunity a handful of years ago. And so now that I've been doing it for five years, I'm not sure I can still say that I don't come from real estate at all. But I learn a lot every single day.

Nancy Lashine (4:11 - 4:18)

As we all aspire to do. Can we go back to the beginning? First of all, what island in Hawaii did you grow up on?

Laurent Grill (4:19 - 4:43)

So I was actually born, at home in a small town called Waimanalo in Oahu. So the main island, which is where Honolulu is based, but is based where Honolulu is. But I was born on the beach in a little house in Hawaii. My parents are musicians and my father still lives in Hawaii. 

My mom actually lives here in Los Angeles now. But it was a great place to grow up. It's a beautiful place. The people are great. It's a bit slower, but it's it's lovely 

Nancy Lashine (4:44 - 4:50)

And you went to college in Los Angeles thinking that you were going on the pro soccer path?

Laurent Grill (4:51 - 5:09)

So I went to USC, but I was playing soccer. I got to play a little overseas.

I did that. very difficult path of pursuing the professional life. But, I think that. One, it's an incredibly hard journey for many reasons 

Nancy Lashine (5:11 - 5:13)

To be a pro athlete, you're saying? 

Laurent Grill (5:13 - 6:47)

 Yeah, to be a pro athlete.

 But I think one of the interesting things that I saw in that time was the people who were in it. It was all they had. It was like you have to be all in. I had the blessing of having a college degree from a great university and a wonderful foundation of network here in Los Angeles. And it's just in general to be able to really explore what I want to do beyond sports. And while I loved it, I think it was when things ended for me for multiple reasons, I had some injury issues as well. I look back now, almost 15, 16 years later. And honestly, it's like the greatest thing that ever happened because it's very difficult if you go down that path, you get, get to a point you're 30, 35, whenever you retire and then you have to start your life again. And I have many friends who have done it. And, it's amazing when you get to do that type of job for a long time. But it definitely sets people back. If you go a little bit too long. And don't necessarily have the nest egg. I jumped into technology right into that. My brother was starting a company in the music education technology space. We were teaching people how to play the guitar, bass, banjo, ukulele, mandolin, all the stringed instruments using your iPhone and your iPad. 

And this is right when the iPhone came out. So this is like 2008, nine, ten. And he asked me, he's like, hey, you know, we want to build this company. 

Would you want to do this? And I'm like, look, I don't know what I'm going to do. I was just thinking soccer. 

Nancy Lashine (6:48 - 6:50)

And so... Are you a musician like your folks?

Laurent Grill (6:51 - 7:33)

Yeah. So I grew up playing the trumpet. I played jazz trumpet for my whole early growing up period. What is that my childhood, I guess, into my teenage years. I think when you're committing to something, you have to make a choice. So I definitely focused on sports towards the end of my teenage years. And it was something that it was like music and sports. And you kind of had to balance the two. And I never lost it, though. 

I think that I grew up in a recording studio. My dad's a recording engineer, producer of music. When you go up in a recording studio, it's like it was very meaningful to us.

So we built this product and it was very, very cool. But it springboarded me into tech. And that's how I started. 

Nancy Lashine (7:33 - 7:38)

So the first company was called Miso Media, am I pronouncing that correctly? 

Laurent Grill (7:38 - 7:40)

Yeah. Miso, like the soup. So Miso Media. 

Nancy Lashine (7:41 - 7:45)

And then you were on Shark Tank with which company? 

Laurent Grill (7:46 - 7:46)

Miso Media. 

Nancy Lashine (7:46 - 7:47)

With Miso, okay. 

Laurent Grill (7:47 - 8:31)

So it was season three. And my brother went on there with a great artist named Ingrid Michaelson, who is a very famous like folk artist. And that was yeah, that was a very cool moment. And we ended up raising money from Silicon Valley and had a lot of success. But ultimately, this is a time when people were still trying to figure out how to build businesses in mobile. Honestly, we were, unfortunately, part of the casualties of those who couldn't really figure out how to monetize. But really, interesting experience. And as I said, it sort of introduced me to this new world that obviously has evolved tremendously over the years. And then we're talking about A.I., but mobile was that first big boom for me. 

Nancy Lashine (8:31 - 8:35)

What do you mean couldn't figure out how to monetize? And how is that relevant today?

Laurent Grill (8:38 - 8:43)

Well, I think sometimes in venture, we lose sight of the fact that we've got to make money. I think there is.

Nancy Lashine (8:43 - 8:45)

There is that, yeah.

Laurent Grill (8:45 - 9:18)

There is small details that, it's interesting. We invest in technology companies and we build technology companies with the intent of building users, hours of users and of achieving engagement from those users in some capacity. You start thinking, OK, well, how do we monetize that? And many people have been successful in doing that.

You have a lot of social media that has proven that they can monetize the user. The old adage is, I guess the new adage is if you're not paying for it, you're paying for it on the back end. 

Nancy Lashine (9:19 - 9:21)

Someone's monetizing your usage. 

Laurent Grill (9:22 - 9:56)

Someone is paying for your time on this platform. And so we unfortunately were unable to figure that out. And I think that, again, it's unfortunately a very difficult thing for many companies to do because they go down a path of, well, we just want to get the users.

We just want to get the engagement. Without really having a strong vision of the fact that, hey, just a reminder that you're building a business. A lot of people have really struggled with that in software, not B2B software, but more B2C space. And so I learned that the hard way.

Nancy Lashine (9:57 - 10:04)

Well, you learned it and you've moved on. You have this litany of companies that you've started. I mean, it's incredible. EAT Club, which is catering? Corporate Catering?

Laurent Grill (10:05 - 10:55)

Yes. I didn't start EAT Club, but we built Tiki, which was a second company, which was honestly what we're doing right now, which is crazy. In 2012, we built a virtual auditorium, cloud based virtual auditorium to be able to host meetings, conferences, things like that. It was a big shift from Miso because what we were trying to do was how do we create something that people will pay for right away.

The funny thing is, in 2012, unlike 2026, is that people did not think that doing online meetings was that important. And phone calls were just fine. And they could use the Cisco's and the WebEx's and all of these other old school desktop platforms. And it wasn't necessary to really pay for software in this space. I guess I was a little too early on a couple of these. 

Nancy Lashine (10:56 - 11:11)

Can I ask, do you ever have this eureka moment where you feel like you're in 2026, but it's 2012 and people don't appreciate the value of something that, you know, they'll see the value of in five or 10 or 15 years? 

Laurent Grill (11:13 - 11:20)

I'd like to think that I don't know if that's necessarily true. I think being too early is just as bad as being too late. 

Nancy Lashine (11:21 - 11:23)

It's true, it's true. Yeah. 

Laurent Grill (11:24 - 13:39)

And someone thought of putting peanut butter and jelly together before someone else did when, when people were ready to eat it. 

Like you could get as basic as that. But the reality is, I mean, I could sit here and be like, good job. We thought of something that became super popular eight years later because of Covid. That was, I think that it's more. 

OK, yeah, it's great that we were a little bit ahead of the curve. But how do you monetize that? Now, I will say my shift into venture definitely allows me to do that a little bit more effectively because I take bets on a handful of these, I guess, perspectives of where I think the world is going. And candidly, I think that I've actually done OK a couple of times in that department because my first fund, I'm fast forwarding. 

So from Tiki and the video streaming, I did take a step back and I joined very early. I was, I joined the series of EAT Club to write an expansion for that business. Now it's a totally different world, which was corporate catering, using technology to allow people to order their food individually. 

And yeah, totally different world. And it was great. And I learned a lot. 

I moved to San Francisco for a year for it. And it was very, very interesting. From there, I then moved into another company in the on demand marketplace world, which is called Zeel. 

And it's, it was a massage on demand company. So like Uber for massages become a bit more of a health and wellness platform now. 

So I had all of these different experiences, both as a founder and as an operator. It was kind of, I'm in L.A. and we were very early L.A. venture days. And I looked around and I was like, look, I've got all this experience. 

Clearly, I'm missing the ball when it comes to being an operator as an entrepreneur. I guess the better way of looking at it. But how can I apply some of the things that I've learned along the way to a career, to something where I can actually leverage maybe some of the what you just alluded to, which is being ahead of the curve, doing it in a way that actually could have success? 

That's when I met this company called Luma, who was really interested in building out some version of an investment platform. And I had a vision of what I wanted to build. And I pitched it to them. 

And we—

Nancy Lashine (13:39 - 13:42)

What does Luma mean or where does it come from? 

Laurent Grill (13:42 - 15:05)

Luma, actually, Luma is a visual effects creative agency. And they were based in Los Angeles.

All of like the not all, but most of the Marvel films, Luma did a lot of visual effects so they're a very high quality visual effects studio, totally out of left field because you would assume what they wanted to do from an investment perspective would be around that. That was not the case. It was owned by a man named Payam Shohadai, who is a very forward thinking individual who was trying to figure out how he and Luma could invest in really interesting companies outside of the core business.

And honestly, I just looked around at our city from a sort of a technology ecosystem perspective and was trying to figure out where was there an opportunity? And the opportunity was to build a platform to support early entrepreneurs at, sort of across all verticals, not just within our space. So we built Luma Launch, which was this fund in 2015-16. And it was a pre-seed and seed venture fund with an accelerator component to it.

And the reason I kind of say it that way is that we actually wanted to bring some of these early companies into our office and build a community around. 

Nancy Lashine (15:05 - 15:07)

Was this early in the era of accelerators? 

Laurent Grill (15:09 - 15:37)

I mean, accelerators have been around for a long time. I mean, you have like YC, Y Combinator has been around for a very long time. 

500 startups actually invested in Miso Media. So that was one of the early accelerators, Techstars. In L.A., a couple of the early accelerators were Amplify, which started in like 2012. 

Mucker, which is still, both Amplify and Mucker are still kicking today. They've evolved tremendously. But there were people around like the 2010s, 2011, but it's still fairly. 

Nancy Lashine (15:37 - 15:38)

Is Luma still around? 

Laurent Grill (15:39 - 15:55)

No. So when, unfortunately, when I left, Luma shuttered. It was a combination of things, mainly COVID and a vision that was how do we sort of do what we want to do? But I think that's a whole separate podcast.

Nancy Lashine (15:55 - 16:02)

OK, well, we won't go there. But just one question, I do want to ask you about Luma. How many companies did you end up investing in? 

Laurent Grill (16:03 - 16:03)

40.

Nancy Lashine (16:03 - 16:04)

40 companies, OK.

Laurent Grill (16:05 - 17:32)

40 companies, but not all of them were in our space. So we had about 10 that worked out of Luma. 

And for whatever reason, I couldn't tell you why. Are most of our best companies were in that 10, which I think is a very interesting thing, because when you're investing in such - 

Nancy Lashine (16:21 - 16:23)

Well, just give us the hypothesis to why? 

Laurent Grill (16:24 - 17:32)

Yeah, so I mean, there was a clear example of one where they were sitting next. They were a consumer facing business that was doing OK. 

It was quite well. But then they hit a bit of a plateau and they happen to be sitting next to one of our B2B like SaaS businesses, more of a data driven group of founders. And, every day they're talking and they're having conversations. 

And one of the challenges that the consumer business was trying to figure out was how do they actually build something that's sustainable and has foundational business success? Kind of going back to my whole thing is like they had all these users, but they couldn't monetize. How do we leverage what we've created from a product perspective and turn it into something that we can actually monetize effectively? And one of these individuals who's now actually a senior AI executive at Snapchat, but one of these individuals had an idea like, well, why don't you sell this B2B? But create this platform in this way. We can get to the specifics of what he suggested. 

And that company ultimately pivoted into that business, which was a B2B messaging platform and went on to raise, I don't know, 100 million dollars and grew. Theorically.

Nancy Lashine (17:33 - 17:43)

Right. It does give you a little bit of the confidence that, being around people talking about ideas, just being in the moment, real time has a value that's very hard to quantify.

Laurent Grill (17:44 - 18:46)

One, there's just different perspectives. I think there's something really valuable about getting out of your vacuum. I think we in the real estate space, we've faced this very often ourselves, which is, we're kind of set in our ways as an industry because it's worked for so long. 

You have so much success in real estate in the way that we've been doing things for a very, long time. And when you start to introduce things, especially as industry changing as some of this technology that exists today is starting to present, we're in a place right now where it's. 

It's very uncomfortable. Right. It's very uncomfortable for those who have said for 50 years, this has worked and we've made hand over fist money. 

Well, why would I incorporate and take the risk of introducing A.I. or why would I introduce, even just traditional software products that aren't necessarily pretty, embedded significantly into our workflows? And so, I'm seeing the same challenges from a non-technical perspective right now, and I think it applies to everything. 

Nancy Lashine (18:48 - 18:50)

What attracted you to the PropTech space?

Laurent Grill (18:51 - 21:30)

Yeah, so that's kind of bringing me back to the Luma transition to JLL. So when COVID hit, we all I think everyone took a moment to breathe and figure out what the next step was. 

Not just necessarily personally, but what did the world look like during and post COVID? I was just trying to look at some of the industries that I felt like were most vulnerable to meteoric change. And this was a black swan event. 

So it was one of those situations where, I thought I truly did feel like this was going to completely shift the entire market when it came to a handful of industries, which we've now confirmed. And the perspective that I had is I wanted to focus on raising a fund around the intersection of real estate technology, financial technology, and then commerce and commerce being a bit of a broad one. But they all intersect in a really interesting way. 

And so you have, real estate technology or just called real estate, commerce and fintech real estate, which is. Single family, multifamily, commercial, and you could obviously break all of these down tremendously, but you have a variety of different aspects of the real estate industry that we're going to get severely disrupted and in totally different ways. Commerce, which was e-commerce, retail, all the logistics on the back end and how we were going to manage that whole world, because suddenly people were purchasing in different ways. 

And there were, not suddenly, but it accelerated what was already happening in that case. Then you had financial technology, which sort of the underlying nature of all of it. 

And so how did we connect the three in a way to invest in the technology that was embedded into all of it? That's when I went out to raise capital to invest in this space. And I met the JLL team and the founders of JLL Spark, Yishai and Mahir, in 2020. It was like prime, COVID. 

We talked about this for a while. Honestly, originally, I was actually raising capital from JLL to invest in a fund. Long story short it led to them presenting this opportunity, which is what I'm doing now, which is to join and help grow the platform. 

I joined it. So I eventually did end up joining instead of raising my own fund because it was on a platform. They did a wonderful job in the early days to establish ourselves in the market. 

And it was really in line with a lot of the things that I felt like were going to be really important over the next five to 10 years. And we've done a lot of that. 

Nancy Lashine (21:31 - 22:22)

So for the people who are listening, who are more in the real estate space than the VC space or technology space, give us a little bit of the landscape that you learned about real estate tech. 

Who's investing in it? Obviously, if JLL, a very large publicly traded brokerage business and investment management business has a tech angle called Spark or tech business, the other firms do as well. There are also VC firms that only do real estate tech and they go from series A to mezzanine. And then there are others who do it. 

So who are more strategic investors, who are, say, large companies that are investing in tech so that they can become more efficient and use it and figure out which products work best for them? What's the landscape broadly look like from your perspective?

Laurent Grill (22:24 - 25:06)

That's a good question. So the way that I look at JLL Spark compared to the likes of many of these strategic proptech funds, well, so we'll start there. 

So there are a handful of proptech funds, however you want to define it, but real estate technology funds. We are actually LPs and partners with a handful of them. And we've built really good close relationships with all of them in many ways. 

They have a really important place in the ecosystem for a variety of reasons. For one, they have obviously a bunch of LPs that can often be valuable to those portfolio startups in the early days. But their approach is outside in, which is, a core group being the VC goes and raises money from a bunch of strategists.

 Unfortunately, what that means. And I want to be very careful not to. I don't want to say that their product is the wrong approach. 

It's just very different. they take a bunch of money from outside LPs who have a general understanding of what their needs are. But it comes in sort of spurts. 

So I'll speak to them once a quarter or once a month, whatever it is. And they're hearing from generally one or two individuals from that company who are relaying information around. What are the things that are important to you name whatever company. There's value there, right? They bring startups. They say, hey, we think this is going to be valuable to you. 

What do you think? And there's a sort of this communication. Great, from our perspective, and what we've done a really great job of at JLL Spark is to build a pipeline of direct and constant communication with all of the various business lines within JLL. And we happen to be such a massive company, right? We're over 100,000 people. 

We're doing everything from capital markets to brokerage to construction. We're doing a lot of various different things all over the world. And each region has their own challenges. 

But we have a constant pipeline of communication with all of the leaders and sort of the vision of each of the business lines so that we can proactively understand what are the products that we should be looking for? It's a very different approach rather than saying, I'm going to bring this to you. It's we're finding out what are the things that are pain points in our industry right now, both for us and our clients. 

And we go out and we find some of these companies. And sometimes we obviously, it's inbound and outbound And we'll be able to recognize immediately the value of those businesses so that we can then go and inject it into the workflow. And we had, I would say, a much higher level of success when it comes to our strategic capabilities because of that. 

Nancy Lashine (25:06 - 25:18)

So let me just make sure I understand. So you're making investments in these early stage businesses because you're really early stage. And then you're having that product. You're having your clients or your own firm use the products?

Laurent Grill (25:20 - 26:28)

Very often. So maybe we'll take a step back. So JLL Spark, as I didn't actually define it, but we are the strategic venture arm for JLL. We invest in everything from seed to series B, but mostly our sweet spot is series A companies, which means that they have a general level of product market fit. 

Ideally, they have a handful of clients that we can validate their product and make sure that it's something that we feel is at least best in class. In the time that we invest, things move very quickly. And our goal is to be the best possible partner we can be, both as a venture investor, but simultaneously as a strategic partner. 

And it's a very hard battle because, you know, we're hoping that these companies become multibillion dollar public businesses because that's obviously a success for the fund. But simultaneously, that's also, success for everyone, because that means that's probably the best product in the market that we chose. And we've been doing it since 2018. 

So we've actually invested in over 70 companies to date. 

We're very active. We're investing across not just the US, but APAC, EMEA. And we'll even look at other regions.

Nancy Lashine (26:28 - 26:31)

How many people do you have making investments for?

Laurent Grill (26:32 - 26:42)

Our team is 11 total, but our investment group is a bit small. I mean, the investors within our group are only five.

Nancy Lashine (26:42 - 26:51)

And so you're not only making the investments, but obviously on the boards and monitoring them. It's highly active. That’s a lot.

Laurent Grill (26:51 - 27:58)

Highly active. Like any other traditional fund. We are leading rounds.

We are sitting on boards. We are helping them fundraise beyond JLL. But again, the thing I think that makes us. 

I'm going to say I think what makes us more valuable from a strategic perspective than really anyone else is that we've perfected the ability to I don't know, we're never perfected, but we're trying to perfect the ability to help the company's post investment in navigating both JLL, our clients and our colleagues. And so we actually have an operating team that's dedicated primarily in supporting those businesses and partnering with the investors. So, when I make an investment into a business and I'm sitting on their board or if one of my team has made an investment there, they're connected to that business from a financial perspective. 

We now bring in what we call growth principles. And our growth principles are on the spark team. And their entire job is to support those businesses on the back end. 

How do we help them find the right people at JLL to talk to about whatever it might be? Right. It could be becoming a client. It could be opening up other networks and so on. 

Nancy Lashine (27:58 - 28:09)

So just to be devil's advocate for a moment, don't the other brokerage businesses who have or operating businesses who have these technology arms claim to do the same thing? 

Laurent Grill (28:11 - 28:14)

I think you used a great word. You said, claim to do the same thing. 

Nancy Lashine (28:14 - 28:17)

Yeah, okay. Well, I haven't done any due diligence on this subject. 

Laurent Grill (28:18 - 28:41)

No, totally. I think I actually don't know if they do claim to do the same thing. Some of the other platforms have made venture investments and they have the capability of doing it. 

As far as I know, none of them have committed to building out a platform as dedicated as ours is. And it's not even a flight to them, by the way. It's just, I just don't think anyone's really taken that approach. 

Nancy Lashine (28:45 - 29:03)

And is it competitive to when you have founders come to you with an idea, is it competitive to be? I'm assuming you want to be the lead or to be a primary investor in their company, or is it often just like an obvious fit? 

Laurent Grill (29:04 - 29:49)

No, we have to compete like the rest of other venture funds. We have our value often. Luckily, at this point, we have a pretty significant track record. I'm happy to introduce any of our founders that we've invested into prospective founders and let them make their own decisions. 

But like any other competitive venture round, we come in and we say, we think we're the best partner for you. We'd like to be your lead investor. And we also do our best to not be super sharp elbows. 

We've co-led many rounds with some of those partners that I mentioned earlier. people who we have invested in multiple companies with us. And so it ends up actually working out really nicely because we can work closely with others to find the best solutions for those portfolio companies. 

Nancy Lashine (29:49 - 30:14)

Where's the capital today in the VC proptech world? Obviously, we hear so much about private companies that can't find capital to go to the next round and there's no liquidity in the market. So have you been tempted to move up the chain to do some further stage companies where you have capital and they can even do a down round or something like that? How is that evolving? 

Laurent Grill (30:15 - 31:01)

Well, we're currently investing out of our fifth vehicle, which is a hundred million dollar vehicle that we. Like any other fund, we have to think about the portfolio construction and how we're investing and how we're going to get the returns required in order for it to be successful. 

That's why we believe that series A is a great place to be, because we can get ownership in at least relatively established businesses of the early stage and simultaneously have enough influence from a strategic perspective that we feel like we can help them. The minute you start going a little bit later, which we've dabbled in the past, and I don't think we've had as much success doing, it just requires a very large amount of capital. it's honestly a slightly different asset class. We just aren't - that's not what we think we can do best today. 

Nancy Lashine (31:01 - 31:02)

Okay, fair enough. 

Laurent Grill (31:02 - 31:11)

For the future, we might - I mean, look, there's a lot of things that we have a lot of goals for the future of what we'd like JLL Spark to look like. But today that's not what we're built to do. 

Nancy Lashine (31:13 - 31:22)

Have you been able to – have your companies that you've seeded that have a market acceptance — have they been able to get the next rounds done in this market? 

Laurent Grill (31:24 - 32:02)

I wouldn't. Look, going all the way back to my original point about sometimes we've lost sight of building good businesses. 

If you build a good business, people want to invest. So we've had some success stories. 

We've had a lot of companies that have really done an amazing job of not only building companies that are solving pain points, but are defensible and are truly solving problems in a meaningful way. And when you do those things, people will pay for it. It's all about ROI 

Ultimately it's, are you solving a problem that's actually going to immediately help me, or at least in the short term, help me make more money. And especially in real estate, I care about that. 

Nancy Lashine (32:03 - 32:19)

I totally understand what you're saying. I think we talk about similar things and we're thinking about our clients. What you – I've heard you say – you ask founders, what is your unfair advantage? Can you give an example of this and when it worked well? 

Laurent Grill (32:20 - 33:23)

I mean, especially in the early days, when you're speaking to founders, I think where I've excelled personally as an investor is identifying very early founders and giving them a chance to be successful. 

What we do at JLL is a little bit later. What I was doing at Luma was taking bets on ideas very often, and you have to ask founders this definitely applies to series eight as well. it's more of an important factor in my decision-making at an earlier stage. 

But when you're sitting down in front of a founder, sometimes you just have to ask the question of like why your team, what is different about your business and you personally, that's actually going to give you a chance of success in this market because there's probably 5, 10, 15 other really smart people trying to build some version of this. What makes you different? And what is your, and you asked me the question, what is your unfair advantage in the space that's going to give you the ability to be successful? And it can come in a variety of ways. 

Nancy Lashine (33:23 - 33:26)

Can you give us an example of something that worked well? 

Laurent Grill (33:26 - 34:05)

I think the obvious one is when, especially if it's a bit of a complicated industry, if someone's like, I've worked for 20 years in this industry doing this, a variety of different roles, I understand it better than anyone else. And I've seen the pain points in for, firsthand, there's a great example of just the obvious unfair advantage. But sometimes it's like I have direct access to the two largest clients or potential clients in the world that have already agreed to sign up for an LOI. That's just the reality of things. Sometimes it's just, you have someone who has access to be able to, springboard themselves into a different sort of position in the market.

Nancy Lashine (34:06 - 34:34)

One of the things you mentioned is that Spark is working all over the world in EMEA and Europe. One of the things that I've heard is the U.S is really the country where we nurture founders. And, if you try something and you fail, that's good. 

Now you have experience and you should try again. Whereas in Europe, if you try something and fail, close the book, you cannot try again. How do you see sort of people's own, how do you see cultural expectations and adaptations for startups? 

Laurent Grill (34:36 - 36:21)

That's a very interesting and important point, especially when we're investing in companies across different regions. 

You're spot on. I know France is one of those where it'd be like, if you fail, you really get a lot, you get slapped on the wrist pretty heavily. In fact, it's, you can't start another company in France, if you do fail at least for a while. 

I think unfortunately there are, I want to be careful bucketing. So Europe, for instance, let's just take Europe as a continent. There are very different sub communities, right? Each country has a very different approach, not very, but a slightly different approach to technology and startups. You'll find that there's a lot of innovation in London and in the UK there's a lot more acceptance because I think there's a bit more of a crossover from, from the U.S in Germany. Same. There's a lot of stuff that's happening over there. 

That's really interesting. But again, in France it's a little bit, it just doesn't have the same level of that startup culture and some of these other regions that are more conservative. We haven't seen as many success stories out of verse, for instance, you have Israel, which has kind of built their whole technology around being a startup hub or you go to APAC. It's a very different world there as well. 

You go, China's a completely different market that has a litany of challenges, but obviously they are building a ton of technology over there. We have to navigate all of those. 

Frankly, I think that there's a reason that the vast majority of the investments that we've made are in the U S, that’s ther reality of things

Nancy Lashine (36:22 - 36:31)

Yeah, that's certainly consistent with what we've heard, but it's interesting because it's such a big wide world. And maybe crypto is the exception to that, or blockchain. 

Laurent Grill (36:32 - 37:09)

I will say this thing, in APAC, one of the interesting things that I learned really more recently is if you're creating soft labor it is a lot cheaper in some of these countries.

 What we're doing with software very often is replacing certain tasks and jobs in some capacities. But in regions like India, they'll often say, what's cheaper for us to just hire people to do this than to pay for this software. It's just something that really didn't dawn on me until in the last few years, how much that really was an impactful component of software development, specifically B2B. 

Nancy Lashine (37:09 - 37:31)

So, let's talk a little bit about the PropTech landscape as you see it. I mean, there is hardware and software, and of course, now the pivot to AI and what that will mean. We had construction tech, we had sustainability tech. 

What are the biggest disruptors and surprises that you see coming up over the next year or two? 

Laurent Grill (37:33 - 39:04)

I mean, the obvious one when it comes to how is AI going to inject into the world. I think that's pretty much everything right now. But with AI, it's quite different than, what I'm about to use as an example, but I think it is kind of intrinsic to the same perspective, which is in the 2000s we were saying websites, it was the.com. Everyone had to have a website. 

You had to be thinking about your online presence in the late 2000, like 2007, 8 9, 10, it was the mobile boom. Whereas, all right, well, do you have a mobile app or at least a, is your product mobile friendly, whatever it might be. Fast forward to today, AI is, it's not a, it's not a product, it's a core infrastructure. At this point, almost anything, at least software that we're looking at, and frankly, even hardware is built with AI as part of the plan. It's not something that we are looking for AI companies. I think everything is AI. 

And if you're not doing that, it's like the same thing as websites and being mobile friendly. I think it's far more powerful. I think it's far more meteorically game changing, but it's still is in that same realm of, okay, well this is now the new, - not new, it's been around for a while, but this is now the, fundamental infrastructure of what technology looks like. 

So where do I think we're going? Some of the things that I, especially in real estate, is what is like an AI native building looks like? 

Nancy Lashine (39:05 - 39:08)

Oh my gosh, I have no idea. Give me – paint a picture for us. 

Laurent Grill (39:09 - 39:20)

I don't totally know, but I think of that as spaces that autonomously optimize for comfort, right for occupant comfort or energy efficiency that's incorporated with that.

Nancy Lashine (39:20 - 39:25)

So just to be specific, you walk into the lobby and the lights go on. 

Laurent Grill (39:26 - 39:31)

I don't know about the lobby, yeah, but like any, sort of any spaces, like how it actually optimizes for the people that are in it, yeah.

Nancy Lashine (39:32 - 39:38)

And then if it's a commercial building, the elevator comes to you without you calling it, it sees you with a camera. 

Laurent Grill (39:39 - 40:00)

Absolutely. Could be an example. I think access controls, going to be completely different in the next few years. I think again, a large part of this is energy efficiency. 

I know a handful of companies that are building products in order to think of like a hotel room, right? How do you have a completely custom experience in a hotel room without having to press any buttons?

Nancy Lashine (40:00 - 40:24)

So my mind is kind of racing as you're saying this, cause I'm thinking you can't read real estate. They're hard assets, right? So it's one thing to build an AI native home because that's not such a big capital expenditure, but building an AI native office building, shopping center, hotel, that sounds daunting and that would probably take years. 

Laurent Grill (40:25 - 41:31)

Well, that part is true. I think that one of the great opportunities that we have, at least from a venture perspective, is the fact that it is a hard asset. 

One of the challenges that BCs in general are having right now with investing in businesses is the change of the churn in customers is so high with products that are selling to, if you're selling to a mid level technology company, they're going to jump to the next best thing very quickly. If you sell a hundred story building that takes a year to incorporate your technology into it, switching, right? They're going to, probably keep that product for a long time. And so I think there's a lot of value in selling and embedding technology into our space. 

And what that also comes with that is there's going to be a little bit more slow moving because if you make the decision to do that retrofit or you make the decision to, install technology into whatever space we're talking about, it's a much bigger decision than simply saying, Hey, our team is now going to use this new product workflow software, right? Whatever it might be.

Nancy Lashine (41:31 - 41:45)

But if you think about it like industrial, if it's a cold hard shell, embedding new technology into it doesn't seem as complicated. as if it's a multifamily building. 

Laurent Grill (41:45 - 42:07)

It's not as complicated as you would think. A small device that sits between your HVAC and a consumer facing layers is all it would require. And, sure. There's a little bit of an insult, but I don't think it's as heavy of a lift as you would, we would picture. 

We're not completely ripping out, the infrastructure of the building. It's sitting in between the already existing platforms. 

Nancy Lashine (42:07 - 42:18)

Can you give us an example or two of some of the things that you're seeing in that, in that arena using AI where it wouldn't be a huge, construction project to install it in a larger building? 

Laurent Grill (42:19 - 43:52)

Well, I'll take one. That's, actually not even a hardware install. There are, a handful that are doing the hardware side. 

In fact, our former founder at spark has started a company doing this for hotel rooms. I don't know if I can actually say it because I think it's still stealth, but it's possible it's not. So I'm going to hold off on saying the name, but, but he is building that. 

One of our best companies is utilizing AI for multifamily. It's called a lease AI. They started off as a marketing replacement tool to be able to convert leads to showings in multifamily housing. 

From that they have expanded into a full stack capability of replacing the many of the property management tasks. Everything from maintenance requests to virtual tours and collections and renewals and all of the various things that come with, communicating with tenants, operators and owners communicating with their tenants and how do we actually manage that relationship in an efficient and effective way that doesn't require any hardware installation. That's just a consumer facing platform in a lot of ways. 

But the value of that for both the tenant and for the property managers is exponential because now not only is the experience immediate, right? You get your answers whenever you need it, but also everything is automated on the backend, but they're increasing their ROIs across the board from a variety of different capacities by simply adding this technology into their system. and obviously we've seen a lot of success from that.

Nancy Lashine (43:53 - 44:01)

What is one of the more ambitious not yet proven technologies that you're looking at or problems that you're looking at to solve with AI? 

Laurent Grill (44:06 - 44:14)

I think there's… that's a good question. So I think that the problem is when you asked me, that's not solved yet because…

Nancy Lashine (44:15 - 45:00)

And the reason I'm asking as I did ask you earlier, what do you think will be the biggest disruptors or surprises that we'll see in the coming years? So I think we can all see our way clear to like sort of customer service type of platforms. We're getting used to them, but like things that we haven't even thought about yet. 

We all know that because of the power of AI, things will happen that we haven't thought about. And in the same way that like, you know, you walk down the street and everyone's staring at their phone, who would have ever thought about that 15, 20 years ago before mobile? so you have an amazing seat where you see people dreaming up stuff that none of us are really thinking about and you see the pain points. What could we expect? 

Laurent Grill (45:00 - 47:09)

I think the most impactful is around construction. we've had a lot of companies over the years that have done, some version of modular construction. but I actually think, how can we utilize AI software that can then speak to a lot of these amazing hardware products that have been developed over the last decade to finally make it efficient enough to actually build using, I guess robots is a very generic way of saying it, but how can we, now start to incorporate, AI customized design into training the various different products that have been created over the years. 

There's many have, obviously, gotten a lot of press, like the icons of the world and whatnot. I'm very curious because we've actually invested in a couple of companies and honestly it hasn't been super successful in the modular construction space. I think AI is going to help to mitigate some of the challenges that existed in those businesses because it's not a relatively high margin business, right? It's still under construction. We're talking about a physical building. and let's forget that you can't just say that, like because you're building a company that happens to have technology, you're not a tech company, right? It's just still a construction company. 

Well, as we start to incorporate some of these, smarter backend platforms, how can that actually effectively then be injected into the physical world? I think that's going to be the most meaningful impact from probably the most important thing, which in our space is affordable housing. We don't, at JLL, we don't do a ton of that here in the States, but it's still something that, I'm keeping a close eye on cause I think from a, ethos perspective, I think it's so important that we start thinking about, well, look, technology is going to do a lot of good. 

It's also going to cause a lot of pain in some places. But, I do truthfully believe that, if we can lower the cost to build a house and there's a lot of people working on this, that's going to be really meaningful, impactful change in our process. 

Nancy Lashine (46:09 - 46:09)

Absolutely.

Laurent Grill (47:09 - 47:13)

Hopefully, I mean, fingers crossed, that's something that can happen. 

Nancy Lashine (47:13 - 47:32)

I mean, as you say, people have been working on this for a long time. Trying to organize the supply chain, trying to cut out middlemen, trying to reduce fees for government programs. We will solve this problem and it will have a huge impact on how people are able to live, certainly in this country.

Laurent Grill (47:33 - 48:02)

I actually do think that agentic AI is a very good, example, or sorry, this is something that where agentic AI would be a very good example of a, massive, efficiency gain for a space If you can create a precise and complex agents to be able to handle a lot of the back end logistics that occur, it would lower the cost tremendously and ideally lower some of the mistakes that are actually paid along the way in order to effectively distribute this type of product.

Nancy Lashine (48:03 - 48:17)

Thank you for that. So let me back up and talk a little bit about what you're doing today and what is a good strategic fit for JLL? What are the investment themes or opportunities that you're most interested in for spark today? 

Laurent Grill (48:18 - 48:22)

So, well, so, so JLL manages over 5 billion square feet globally. 

Nancy Lashine (48:23 - 48:24)

You said 5 billion?

Laurent Grill (48:24 - 48:29)

Yeah. I don't know the exact number. I believe we're just over 5 billion square feet. 

Nancy Lashine (48:29 - 48:29)

That's a lot. 

Laurent Grill (48:30 - 50:31)

We're constantly trying to provide market intelligence to our clients and pilot opportunities for startups within that space and, understanding what's happening. 

that's not only going to disrupt our world, but simultaneously going to help our world, our world being the real estate world. We focus on a variety of different technologies that range from advisory and transactions to property management and project development, capital markets. We're looking at every single business line within JLL and how each of those can be supported. 

It's the broad CRE space. It's the broad commercial space. I call it built world technology.

 That's kind of how I catch all, but it's case by case. Now that said, ultimately what we're trying to identify, products that solve problems for JLLs clients that they face daily. Can these products scale across, not only JLL, but our sort of ecosystem geographically, right? Globally.

 Do they integrate with some of the existing technology stack that exists today, which is not always as easy as it sounds. ‘Cause a lot of the technology that we and our clients are using are very robust and in some cases a bit older. And so what does that transition look like if it's something that is injecting into that? how hard is that to do for us and how hard is it for them? and I think the most important thing ultimately, and I've repeated myself multiple times on this is does it address measurable ROI? 

You're going to get energy savings, operational efficiency. Obviously there's more of a qualitative approach where there's sort of like tenant satisfaction and things like that. But ultimately what we're trying to identify are these products genuinely going to move the needle in a variety of ways, but is it also going to save and or make money for us and our clients?

And if it would, if it does that, then very often these are businesses that have a real future. 

Nancy Lashine (50:31 - 50:41)

Well, I look forward to seeing what comes out, what your successful products look like, over the next couple of years 

Laurent Grill (50:42 - 51:36)

We're always ready to find out what our products are. I mean it's been, look, it's really successful so far. I think one of the great things that we get to do is we are working alongside some of the smartest people in our space. As I said, I don't come from real estate as we talked at length about, but it's fantastic to hear people who have worked in this space for 30, 40, 50 years to be able to show them some of the things that we can do now from a technology perspective. Honestly, I think there's a bad rap sometimes with real estate leaders that they're super against technology and slow moving. There's all these adages, but the reality is I've had a really good experience in working with a lot of these leaders and they're open as to what change looks like and how, how we can do our job a lot better. 

So I'm excited about it.

Nancy Lashine (51:37 - 51:40)

Laurent, what do you listen to or read to stay current?

Laurent Grill (51:41 - 51:46)

In terms of like blogs–

Nancy Lashine (51:47 - 51:52)

Books, blogs, podcasts, I don't know, what do you, how do you get information? 

Laurent Grill (51:54 - 52:04)

That's like, oh gosh, I mean, I have a handful of newsletters that honestly aren't necessarily real estate related. 

Nancy Lashine (52:04 - 52:11)

Yeah. Where do you get your news from? You are in the forefront of technology and what's going on. Where do you get your news from?

Laurent Grill (52:12 - 54:30)

The last couple of weeks I've been doing a lot of them. The news front. I listened to a handful of podcasts. I drive a lot. I'm in Los Angeles. So I spend a lot of time just listening to podcasts. I will listen to Breaking point, which is a good podcast. I'll listen to NPR. I'll listen to Fox news. 

I'll listen to CNN. I actually genuinely think it's important to listen to all of the various different perspectives, whether I agree with them or not. And it's fundamentally interesting to sit there and go, what the, what the hell are you talking about? whatever it might be, pick your favorite one, without getting political. 

It's just like getting into the actual changes that exist when you start listening to, again, sort of long form podcast, it actually starts to get into the nuance of how people are thinking in that specific, vertical. So for instance, if you're listening to someone who's very liberal or someone who's very young or someone who's a little bit older and the way that they see the exact same problem typically around like technology and AI and like the freak out of AI is incredible, right? You have, you'll have a lot of people from one, I'm being very careful not to say any specifics, but you get what I'm getting at here. Like you have one demographic or one group that is extremely, pull the plug. It's gonna burn the world down. And I was just listening to something and I don't remember actually what it was, but they were talking about how a data center was blocked. 

Was it Jersey? I think. so they were able to block the development of a data center and the way that this specific podcast was talking about, it was a huge win. Now, I'm not saying I agree or disagree, but it was just interesting to see the way that certain people are looking at this technology movement. 

And it's like the existential crisis of AI. Now there are other people will say we have to be careful and we have to be diligent about making sure that we put guardrails around what we're doing, but the importance and the value of what this product and a product, but with this, technology movement is going to look like in the future, I think vital to the existence of the human race and that's a very different perspective. And I don't know which one is which 

Nancy Lashine (54:30 - 54:36)

It doesn't really matter if one's right or wrong. It's here. And so the question is, how do you cope with it? How do you live with it? 

Laurent Grill (54:37 - 54:38)

I totally agree.

Nancy Lashine (54:38 - 54:54)

So Laurent, one of the questions we love to ask our guests as we wrap up is, what advice would you give to a young person looking to start a career today, whether it's in proptech or a VC or real estate? Pick an area. What would you say? 

Laurent Grill (54:56 - 55:13)

This is hard. I lecture at USC every year and a lot of these students are all super gung-ho about trying to get into venture capital. And my initial, my general feeling about my specific industry is it's not all it's cracked up to be. 

Nancy Lashine (55:15 - 55:16)

Is it what it is? 

Laurent Grill (55:17 - 55:31)

Well, nothing yet. It's interesting because I actually go back to, I think the reason that venture capital has this very shiny object sort of syndrome is because of Shark Tank.

Nancy Lashine (55:31 - 55:32)

The generation of Shark Tank.

Laurent Grill (55:32 - 56:34)

I think that Shark Tank genuinely created a generation of people who looked at this sort of glamorous experience of investing in cool companies and being able to pull the strings. 

But the reality is, I think you need to get out there and you need to actually build an experience before you should be doing anything. I was very early to venture in the grand scheme of things, but at least I did a handful of things beforehand and I got to experience what it looked like to build and in this specific world where it's so easy to build things, utilizing AI and utilizing all of the tools that we currently have at our fingertips, the value of that is that you can, it doesn't require the same level of money and infrastructure to do it. 

So go and build, go and create. I'm a little bit worried about what the next generation of working class looks like and it's going to evolve and I think it will find, we will find our happy middle ground. I just don't think that it's necessarily what it was 10 years ago. 

Nancy Lashine (56:35 - 56:37)

For sure. I think we know it's not that. 

Laurent Grill (56:38 - 56:50)

I don't think, speaking to venture, I don't think going straight from college into being an electric capitalist makes a ton of sense. But, you know, I'm not going to tell someone not to have dreams of doing that.

Nancy Lashine (56:51 - 57:08)

Well, it's worked out well for you. And with a little music and soccer along the way, I think, you know, it's a great mix. And I'm sure if you weren't doing this, you'd be doing something else exciting. 

So thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time. Great to have you on the show. 

Laurent Grill (57:08 - 57:11)

Thank you. It was wonderful. I really appreciate it.

Nancy Lashine (57:11 - 57:44)

I hope you enjoyed this episode of Real Estate Capital. Before you go, I have a quick favor to ask. We put a lot of thought and effort into this show and making sure we bring you insights from real estate leaders that you don't normally find in the mainstream media.

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