The following interview is a conversation we had with Matt Giffune, Co-Founder at Occupier, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $16 Million Raised to Build the Future of Tenant Lease Management
Matt Giffune
Thanks, Brett. Appreciate you having me on.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we begin talking about what you’re building, let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Matt Giffune
Sure, yeah. So matt. Jaff hoon. I’m Co-Founder of Occupier. I live in Boston, Massachusetts, where about a third of our company has an office. And then we also have offices in New York and Austin, Texas. My background, I grew up in upstate New York. I went to a small college in Maine. And then after that, I got directly into the commercial real estate space as a broker. And I spent about a decade working at JLL, which is one of the largest global commercial real estate services firm doing leasing for tenants and landlords. And throughout that process, kind of started getting interested in using technology to solve become the pain points of the people that were transacting commercial leases. So in 2014, I left my job at JLL and I joined a startup called VTS. At the time, they were called View the Space. They were doing marketing technology for commercial office buildings.
Matt Giffune
But then the platform evolved into being a full blown leasing and asset management software platform for some of the largest institutional landlords on Earth. And so I rode the wave of BTS, growing from our Series A funding all the way through now their unicorn valuation. But in 2018, along with a couple of colleagues from BTS, we started Occupier, which is a lease management software platform for tenants. We help corporate Occupiers, retail, Occupiers, restaurant groups, franchises, you name it. Anybody that occupies lease space uses our software to manage the entire lifecycle of their leases through transaction management, lease administration, and staying in compliance with lease accounting regulations.
Brett
Very interesting. And we’re going to dive deeper into Occupier here soon. But two questions we’d like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick. As a Founder and entrepreneur, what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Matt Giffune
I’ll be honest, I don’t really have too many just, like, corporate CEOs or entrepreneurial idols that I follow. I think that people can get really caught up trying to emulate certain things about certain people. I think what makes great leaders great is their ability to use their own tools and their own personality to inspire others. So I’m going to say Phil Jackson because I thought he created probably the most high performing team ever. Obviously he had Michael Jordan on his teams and Scotty Pippen and the cast of players. But to be able to motivate people to that level of greatness, I think is something that is pretty admirable. Nice.
Brett
Yeah, that’s a great call out. And what about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a Founder and this can be a typical business book or just a personal book that’s influenced how you view the world?
Matt Giffune
Yeah, kind of the same theme of the first question. I don’t read a ton of business books. Obviously, day in, day out, you’re reading a ton of stuff to help you optimize your business. But I am kind of a history buff and I love to read biographies of really interesting people. So I think the one that always kind of like I go back to is I read up John McCullough’s biography of John Adams, and the guy just accomplished so much in a time period where literally he was riding. A horse from Boston to Philadelphia in the middle of the winter to figure out how to create a country and sailing across the Atlantic in a wooden ship and stuff like that. So I love reading stuff about that because it just brings into perspective how easy our lives can be these days, even though we feel like everything is such a challenge.
Brett
How long is that one? Because I’m also interested in these types of historical books, but they tend to be so long sometimes.
Matt Giffune
Yeah, you usually have to have your page turner, like, by the bedside, because it’s not yeah, they could take a while to get through. Those types of books are like 600 pages long, so you really need to kind of devote yourself to long periods of big chunks of reading or you’ll never finish them.
Brett
Yeah, makes sense. Nice. Very cool. All right, well, let’s change gears now, and I know you touched on Occupier a bit, but let’s dive deeper. Can you just walk us through that origin story and just the early days of the company?
Matt Giffune
Yeah, the origin really goes back to just being in the seat of a broker in commercial real estate, just because that’s where you learn the ins and outs of the business, what works, what doesn’t. And as somebody who is always kind of thinking about better ways to do things, I wasn’t that impressed with the level of technology that this massive asset class of an industry used while I worked there. Big corporates have very rigid ways that they look at technology. At least back a decade ago they did. I think they’ve all evolved a little bit at this point. But as I was saying earlier, I left to go work at a startup because I saw the promise of how easy to implement lightweight, cloud and mobile technology could help the job that I used to do. So I made a personal bet to give up a pretty good career as a broker to go work at a startup.
Matt Giffune
And it was during my time working at BTS, my eyes just kind of opened up to how much run room there was for innovation in commercial real estate. And what BTS did specifically was created software so that owners office buildings and office portfolios could have one command center view of all of the tenants in their portfolio. Every space down to the square foot. How much? Those tenants were paying which ones were likely to renew in their buildings. Essentially giving the owners of these companies a command center view over how well their portfolios are doing so they could act strategically on data and make really good decisions. Much loafs, just like, work smoother using one central piece of technology. So were selling this software to building owners, but it was during my time at BTS that I started thinking about what type of technology do the actual occupants of these buildings use?
Matt Giffune
How advanced is it? Are these old systems? Are they homegrown systems? Because the pain points for a commercial tenant are sometimes probably bigger than they might be for landlords. Because when you are occupying space, especially if you have this multinational or, like, national portfolio of leases, real estate tends to be the second largest expense for your business behind payroll. So if you’re not managing it properly, you’re most likely making a lot of mistakes that are costing your company a lot of money. So when we started digging into this idea, it was kind of a side project for a while, having a full time job, and then we started to get some customer traction, at least some interest that made us dig a little bit deeper. And so the idea was really born out of a combination of working in the commercial real estate space and also working at a technology company that was innovating in a pretty stagnant industry and just realizing there’s probably more room for better solutions.
Matt Giffune
So, yeah, 2018, we decided to take the leap. Myself, Andrew Flank, Eric Pearson joined up, and we founded the company, and we’ve kind of not looked back ever since.
Brett
And on the website, I see the text, the future of lease management is here. Before we dive deeper into the future of lease management and what that looks like, can you just talk to us a bit more about what the state of lease management looks like? If you’re one of the customers who are in the market looking for lease management software?
Matt Giffune
Yeah, so there’s probably two categories of customers. One is people that actually are already using an existing system to do what they need to do to manage their leases. And the others are people that have never adopted technology for this at all. So the state of the market is a combination of people trying to make real estate decisions by poring over PDF leases or trying to manage the massive spreadsheet which are fraught with errors and require a ton of manual upkeep. Or you have companies that have adopted software for this already, but the software category itself has been around for quite some time now and we’re talking a couple of decades. And the tools that are in market right now just aren’t fit for the way that modern business gets done. So we’re talking about software that’s been developed. A lot of them probably initially on premise, moved to the cloud.
Matt Giffune
Their user interface is clunky, it’s tough for them to really keep up. And rapidly iterate on the product such that the customers needs are met and each customer obviously has different needs. But generally speaking, commercial leases are relatively standard. I wouldn’t say they’re at all standard in terms of documentation, but the data that you’re managing out of these are things like rent schedules, dates, contact information, legal clauses. So the technology is built right and you think about all of the stakeholders within a company that are increasingly getting involved in the commercial leasing like decision making process. You can envision a world where all of those people are working out of one system. So I think the biggest differentiator for us and the competitive landscape is our product serves multiple stakeholder groups within the business. Not just the accountant or finance person who needs to close the books, not just the head of real estate that needs to sign the leases, but everybody else throughout the organization that needs access to the information.
Brett
And is there a certain number of leases where company needs to start looking for a lease management software? Like for example, just looking through the site, I see bluestone coffee. That makes sense. I can imagine they have a lot of different leases that they have to manage. But what about a company like HubSpot? I don’t imagine them having hundreds of leases to manage. So what is that number? Is there a sweet spot where you see this needs to be something that they have?
Matt Giffune
Yeah, you’d be surprised at how many offices some of these companies have, to be honest. Because the way that the world has shifted recently is there’s the idea of flex work and remote work. So a lot of tech companies use HubSpot example, might set up beachhead offices in cities around the world in a WeWork or an industrious or something like that. So that is actually a lease that they have to account for. And they might have several of those. But yes to the question how many leases does it really start to become painful to manage? It could be as few as five leases. And what’s really driving adoption in this category is the recent changes of the lease accounting rules. So whether you have, like, a couple of leases. If you’re subject to gap accounting, you need to follow this very strict, almost Byzantine code on how you account for your leases on your balance sheet.
Matt Giffune
So a mom and pop like restaurant operator that has five locations in Nashville still has to generate the right reports to pass their audit. So that is putting downward pressure on the number of leases that you might need. But in general, once a company has a full time person that’s responsible for this, that’s typically when they start looking at adopting software. Got it.
Brett
That makes a lot of sense. And are there any numbers you can share just to demonstrate the growth, traction, and adoption that you’re seeing today?
Matt Giffune
Yeah, we’ve got, I think, in the last call, it three years of actively selling the software. We’re upwards of 300 customers. So that’s 300 businesses that use our software. We’re talking about tens of thousands of leases in our system, thousands of deals being created. And from a revenue standpoint, we’ve raised our Series A financing back in about a year ago. So we’re at that scaling point, Series A profile of numbers. And, yeah, we’re growing quarter over quarter by 100% pretty consistently.
Brett
And take us back to those early days on your journey to find Product Market Fit. What was that like? What were some of those challenges that you encountered? And then when you did find Product Market Fit, what did that feel like and what was that like?
Matt Giffune
Yeah, so, I mean, before we even had a product, it was all about talking to customers. So the more people you talk to, the more you learn, and then the more feedback you get, the more you realize you really need to focus in the product and the pain points and the ROI. So Product Market Fit probably didn’t come until after we sold our product, had people using the product got feedback on the product, and then started to build a kind of repeatable go to market motion so that you could actually repeat the outcomes of signing up certain types of customers. So, I think I don’t profess to be an expert on what the definition of Product Market Fit is, but to me, it has multiple dimensions. Part of it is, does the product actually sell the pain point of the user? And then one is, how widespread is this problem, and is there a big enough market for it to fit into?
Matt Giffune
So, from a product standpoint, we had a narrow aperture on what the product did, because what you’ll learn when you start talking to customers is that they all ask you for different bells and whistles. And if you keep trying to go down every path of product feedback that you get, you’re going to build a product that’s a mile wide, but only an inch deep. And that is just a recipe for customers churning. So we decided to focus on a very specific ideal customer profile, learn from them, then build our go to market motion around bad customer profiles. So just building some simple funnel math. How many customers do we need to get to a certain revenue run rate? And then how does that factor into how many sales emails we need to send? How many customers do we need to talk to? How many deals do we need to get in the pipeline?
Matt Giffune
So for the first, I’d call it like two years of the company, that’s like what were building, that engine. So that when went out to raise our seed round, we had really strong product market fit and it was really a much easier story to tell.
Brett
Interesting, makes a lot of sense. And I also see on the website you guys are honestly just dominating the G two grid for lease administration and winning a lot of awards there, getting a lot of recognition there. So how do you think about your market category? Is this a lease administration play or is it lease management? Or is this a totally new category that you’re going to eventually try to create? Or are you in the middle of creating a new category as we speak?
Matt Giffune
I think we’re like evolving a category that already exists. Lease administration software has been around forever, since probably the 90s when software was actually starting to be used by businesses. A lot of that software still looks like it was built in the 1990s. And it only services, like I mentioned earlier, like a certain persona in the decision making tree. So what we see is the opportunity to create a better product that exists today, but also have a centralized place for the business to have like a backbone for its second largest expense, which is real estate. So you’d probably be surprised, but people in the sales organization, the marketing team, the It team, the C suite, they all need access to some sort of real estate data at any given time in their workflow. And an example would be if I’m a restaurant chain and I’m the chief business officer that’s responsible for these restaurants making money, my leases are all based on percentage rents, so I need to know how much sales is being generated per location.
Matt Giffune
That might be a key indicator from my side of the business. So there are people within every organization that need access to this information. So if you literally drew out the whole process of the lifecycle of a lease, you could see where all these stakeholders are being pulled in to this process and it just is a renewable cycle. Leases renew, they expire, they move, they relocate, they grow, they downsize, et cetera. So there’s so many stakeholders that touch this information. And they’re not just internal stakeholders, they’re external stakeholders as well. So brokers, construction managers, architects, attorneys, accountants, CPAs, anybody that is like treating something in this process, they should all be working out of a central place. So our vision is to kind of build on what exists today in the lease administration, lease accounting market, but tie it into one workflow tool that generates all the necessary data and user interactions that a company would need to essentially be the backbone of their real estate operations.
Brett
And as you mentioned there, this is an established market, and I’m sure it’s a crowded market, but you guys are dominating it and growing very fast. So what do you attribute to that success? What have you done right to rise above all that noise?
Matt Giffune
I think it’s just the focus of our team. We’re roughly 45 people at our company right now, so we don’t have the luxury to embark on interesting side projects or, like I’d mentioned earlier, go too wide with the surface area of our platform. So it’s a huge market. There’s millions of companies on Earth, right? And eventually all of them are going to need something like this. So our view on it is if we could be really focused on the product that we build, the value that we bring to our users, and the message that we send when we go into the market to talk to them, we will be successful, whether there’s competitors in the market or not. Some of our deals are net new customers that are just buying this type of software for the first time. But a lot of them are also competitive situations where somebody might be dissatisfied with their current system and incomes occupier, which, from a differentiation standpoint in the product, to your question, it’s the fastest to implement, it’s the easiest to use platform out there.
Matt Giffune
So if you open up the screen, it’s like an iPhone. You turn your iPhone on, you automatically know how to use it. There’s no heavy setup, there’s not a huge implementation period. So the time to value that our customers experience is pretty rapid, and that just builds a great customer experience. So you mentioned our G two reviews. They’re all positive because I think people in the commercial real estate space generally think that things happen slowly and the technology sucks, and all of a sudden they introduce to a really elegant way of doing what they’re doing. And it doesn’t cost them a lot of money, it doesn’t take them a lot of time, and it immediately solves their pain. Then you have the recipes for success.
Brett
Interesting. And as I’m sure you’ve experienced, bringing innovative tech to market isn’t always easy, and there can be some challenges along the way. So if we had to just choose one challenge that you experienced and then overcame, what would that challenge be and how’d you overcome it?
Matt Giffune
Yeah, being a former broker, andrew Flint, my co Founder, and I, both former brokers, we came at this problem from the perspective of deals. So when I say deals, I mean the process of signing a lease transaction. It’s a super clunky process. It involves a lot of stakeholders middlemen on both the tenant and landlord side, a lot of stakeholders who are moving through a really paper driven process. So our initial vision was let’s digitize that, which we did, and we still have a long runway of improvements we could make on that product. But then we built lease administration software. So the natural evolution was, well, if people sign leases, they’re going to need a place to keep them. Let’s build a better lease administration. Mouse Trout but the biggest problem that we had overcome was once we realized that people were using our lease administration software, they started coming and asking us, when are we going to have lease accounting software available that would allow them to stay in compliance with ASC 842 and IFRS 16 lease accounting standards?
Matt Giffune
And were like, weren’t really thinking about building that just yet, but the market was like coming at us so fast because these rules just changed and all of these finance professionals were like, I can’t do this in Excel. I don’t really know these rules well enough. I’m looking for software to automate this. So we actually started losing some competitive deals to companies that already had lease accounting module in their systems. So at that point we had to make the decision to build that software and it’s still in development, but we did bring it to market. I think that was the biggest challenge because we had to reorient our product team to be able to build software for accounting, which is very intricate. It’s very involved with obviously numbers, so it has to be very accurate. And then if you’re building that product and you’re going to bring that product to market, you have to reorient the whole sales, marketing, customer success group within your company to properly sell it, properly, handle the implementations properly, deal with customer support requests and stuff like that.
Matt Giffune
So I’d say that was probably the largest challenge. We’re over the hump on it right now because we have obviously brave reviews on that software as well. But I think it’s just maybe it’s a typical startup thing is where you get into the market and you do some learnings and you realize, okay, the initial thesis that we had in our business isn’t exactly what it is today. In reality, we have to make some quick decisions and those might be kind of initially painful, but it’s the right move for the business. So I think that was kind of probably the biggest challenge that we faced.
Brett
Yeah, and I’m sure not the first startup to have a thesis that turns out not to be totally true when you bring it to market right now. Last question here for you before we wrap. So let’s zoom out into the future. Let’s go. Three years from today, what does Occupy or look like?
Matt Giffune
Well, three years from today, we hope to have obviously several hundreds more customers if not thousands. And we are the preeminent lease management software company on the market. And when we’re talking to companies as large as Procter and Gamble or PepsiCo, all the way down to franchise groups of Subway restaurants in a certain region, we are able to handle everything about their lease management needs. So our goal is to just continue to execute on that strategy of innovating in a crowded space and then become the dominant player. And then from there’s a lot of interesting paths down which we could go from a product innovation standpoint in terms of bringing even more stakeholders into our workflows, adding more value to different aspects of each one of our pillar products, whether it’s deal management, whether it’s lease administration or lease accounting.
Brett
Nice. That’s super cool. All right, Matt, unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today before we wrap up here. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build and execute here, where’s the best place for them to go?
Matt Giffune
Yes, well, our website is Occupier.com, so you’ll be able to learn everything about us and our product on that website. We host a podcast called The Fully Occupied Show. You can just look that up in Apple podcast spotify. Wherever you listen to your podcasts, we cover topics like innovation in the commercial real estate space, trends that we’re seeing, et cetera. Had some awesome guests on there. You can find me on LinkedIn, and then you can find me on Twitter at Matt ship. It awesome.
Brett
Matt, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about what you’re building and share this vision. This is all super exciting, and we look forward to seeing you execute on this vision and hopefully come back in a couple of years and chat with us again.
Matt Giffune
Thanks, Brett. Appreciate it.
Brett
All right, take care.
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