Podcast: Revolutionizing real estate: A journey with GetGround CEO Moubin Khan

In this episode of Fintech Thought Leaders, QED's Head of Early Stage Investments Bill Cilluffo speaks with GetGround CEO Moubin Khan.

‍

‍

‍

‍

Show notes

Bios

Bill Cilluffo joined QED as a Special Advisor in the fall of 2014 and became a Partner in 2015. He is currently Head of Early Stage Investments after six years as Head of International, leading QED’s Investment teams in Latin America, Europe and Asia.

Prior to joining QED, Bill spent nearly 20 years at Capital One, spanning several roles and leading several businesses. He spent the first 6 years of his career leading Marketing, product development and credit policy for Capital One’s subprime credit card business; ultimately having overall P&L responsibility, and growing the business to become the most significant player in the market. He moved on to spend 2 years in various new business development roles, spanning the telecom, medical finance and small business finance industries. Bill spent 3 years as Deputy Chief Credit Officer for the bank, playing nearly every role there was to play in the central credit function, after helping build the department from scratch in 2002.

Bill then pivoted his career to general management, leading Capital One’s Canadian, and ultimately International businesses, over the course of 6 years. Profitability of the business grew significantly under Bill’s leadership, through new product and channel introductions, acquisitions, and significant cost take out. During Bill’s last 3 years at Capital One, he led its Co-Brand and Private Label credit card business, building the business nearly from scratch to one of the top few players in the US market, through a series of acquisitions, most notably including leading the acquisition and post-merger integration of HSBC’s US credit card business, which closed in May 2012.

Bill graduated with a BA in economics from the University of Michigan, and competed the SEP program at Stanford GSB.

‍

Dr. Moubin Faizullah-Khan is the CEO of GetGround and was an investment professional at Apax Partners, one of the world’s leading private equity houses. There he was involved in numerous key transactions in the retail, consumer, and services sectors. Previously Moubin was at McKinsey & Company and trained as a medical doctor at Imperial College where he graduated with distinction.

‍

About GetGround

GetGround is the property investment platform, where every investor can find, finance and structure their next U.K. property investment – all in one place.

From selecting a property, to structuring and then financing it, GetGround solves the time-consuming, fragmented administration that, until now, is associated with managing UK property investments.

At its current run rate, GetGround is adding $1 billion of UK property to its platform a year on behalf of thousands of landlords and investors based in more than 60 countries globally. Headquartered in London, GetGround also has offices in Hong Kong and Singapore. The company is a recognized supplier with the National Residential Landlords Association and was part of HM Land Registry’s Geovation program. GetGround is backed by QED, Mosaic and Hambro Perks.

Full transcript

Bill Cilluffo:

You're listening to the Fintech Thought Leaders podcast from QED Investors, your deep dive into the world of venture capital and financial services with today's digital disruptors. QED is a global venture capital firm focused on investing in fintech companies all the way from pre-seed to IPO. Fintech Thought Leaders brings together the most talented entrepreneurs tackling today's biggest problems. If you're looking to learn more about what motivates our founders and team members to succeed, you're in the right place.

Hello and welcome to the Fintech Thought Leaders Podcast. I'm Bill Cillufo, head of Early Stage Investments at QED Investors. Today, on the podcast, I'm really excited to be joined by GetGround CEO Moubin Khan. Moubin, it's been a long time since we've seen each other, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Moubin Khan:

Thank you for having me, Bill.

Bill Cilluffo:

Look, there's a lot of topics I'm really excited to talk about with you today. We're going to dive much more into the business in the middle of the podcast, but I'd love to just start by giving a short commercial on what is GetGround and what do you guys do, just to provide some good context for the listeners.

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, no, absolutely. So GetGround is a property investment platform. We make it easier, faster, and more accessible than ever to make investing in UK property a breeze.

Bill Cilluffo:

Awesome. I know you've got a long roadmap of what you started with, where you think you're going to go, and we'll certainly get into that later on. But PropTech is a hot topic always, an interesting industry. It's been through some ups and downs globally, but I think you guys are in a really interesting spot in London and the UK industry. But to get started, let's go all the way back to childhood. We like being comprehensive here on the Thought Leaders podcast. You grew up in Singapore. You have parents from Pakistan and Uzbekistan. You're probably going to get a nice international theme through this entire interview here, but I'd love to hear a little bit about your early days and what stands out about growing up in Singapore.

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, no, it's crazy. When I started thinking about my life in batches of 10 years, which I guess shows how old I'm getting, it used to be, two, three years ago, I was doing this and doing that. But no, growing up, I guess, on a tropical island was fun. How do I summarize it? Hot sugar cane juice, spices. I was thinking about my early days growing up, and one of the things that came to my mind was the number of hobbies that I used to have, endlessly picking up different things, whether it was thinking about how to build a marine fish tank or how to create a bonsai or bird cages. So I guess I spent a lot of my childhood doing that and also in a very unique situation with Singapore. Singapore, I think, is a bit of a miracle in and of itself, small island with zero resources, 5 million people, and it's turned into an economic miracle, a superhouse. Watching that develop and all the lessons learned from that was, I guess, really interesting growing up too.

Bill Cilluffo:

No, that makes sense. So lots of kids have lots of hobbies. I know many of them will have a hobby that'll last for four days, and then they'll move on to the next one. For you, did a lot of these tend to be deeper passions that lasted a little bit longer? Or were you in the every other day, picking up some new flashy object?

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, no, it's a bit of both, actually. My son right now is into Pokemon, I think next week that's going to be gone. I was probably a bit of the same, but there's a few things that probably stuck. So fish tanks, I love aquariums big time. I've probably had an aquarium continuously since I was 12 years old. I'm 39 now. So it's a lot of fish tank years. There's a lot of algae scrubbing, and then probably horse riding as well. So that's something that I've done my whole life pretty intensely too.

Bill Cilluffo:

Gotcha. The fish tank thing is interesting. When my kids were younger, still living in the house, there was that show that talked about the crazy deluxe fish tanks that everyone built in urban Vegas and all over. I forget the name of it, but that was one of their favorite shows.

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, I watched those too. There's a little thing of mine, which is, so when I was young, one of the fish tanks that I really wanted to get was a marine fish tank. So my mom said, "Why don't we do a bit of research on it?" And I compiled a folder, and it turns out marine fish tanks are really expensive, so I couldn't afford to get one, and I didn't get one. Since then, I've never ever bought myself a marine fish tank because it's almost become a symbol for, if I ever make it in life, I'm going to get a marine fish tank. So it's now this symbol that I guess I'm never ever going to catch because I don't think I'll ever make it truly.

Bill Cilluffo:

I don't know. On the day that GetGround goes public, you're going to be in the London Stock Exchange and finish that whole process, and then you're going to go right to the fish tank store-

Moubin Khan:

100%.

Bill Cilluffo:

... right when you finish.

Moubin Khan:

Give me the biggest one.

Bill Cilluffo:

Nice. I know what the theme of your IPO party is going to be. That's going to be super fun to be there celebrating with you.

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, I can't wait.

Bill Cilluffo:

Nice. So you mentioned horseback riding. I know that you've actually been quite an elite horseback rider, and if I'm not mistaken, a very active polo player. At least you were. That's a pretty unique set of hobbies. I'd love to hear a little more about how did you get started, how far did this take you, and how far did you at one point consider riding with this? No pun intended.

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, no pun intended. It was a great... That was fantastic, Bill. Yeah, no, look, my family's a big horse-riding family. My parents were from Central Asia. Children basically grow up on horses there. So I started riding when I was probably six or seven years old and really got into it. I spent most of my life doing dressage up until I was probably about 19, and I did it a lot. So I would go twice a day every day, and I'd go before school, and school starts at 8:00. So I would head down to the stables at 4:35 AM, and I would literally wake the horses up. So they'd be sleeping on the straw, I'd be like, "Hey, wake up. It's time to go riding." Then I picked up polo when I was about 19, played loads of that. I've played in a bunch of places across the world, Thailand, Malaysia, Brunei, here in the UK. I've been kicked, bitten, fallen on by horses, broken ribs. It is just a tremendous hobby, sport, and massive passion of mine, actually.

Bill Cilluffo:

Do you still play at all?

Moubin Khan:

No, no, I don't have any time. I don't have any time anymore.

Bill Cilluffo:

Fair enough.

Moubin Khan:

Between building the business and family life, I guess we can do that after the IPO as well.

Bill Cilluffo:

Makes sense. I was going to ask for any scoop on the British Royal family you might have from playing against them, but maybe that'll have to come later.

Moubin Khan:

Series two, I guess.

Bill Cilluffo:

So in Singapore, you specifically grew up in an international schooling system, and again, I joked about it, but you've lived in a number of places. You've traveled to a bunch of places. We'll explore that. How would you say that that helps shape you, and is that something you'd do again if you had to do it all over again?

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, no, I'd 100% do it all over again. I loved my schooling years, and I think it is funny, many people think your formative years are a bit when you're older, but I really believe your formative years are very early on in your life. Think 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, up to 10 years of age. International schooling in Singapore really enriched my life. It was an incredible community full of diversity. There was 70 different nationalities at my school. I got to know people and how they live different lives across so many different ways. We've got friends in all parts of the world now.

I think the other big thing, apart from the diversity of international schooling in Singapore, was their approach to learning, and their approach to learning wasn't, "Hey, why don't you memorize this list of stuff or these facts?" It was, "Hey, let me teach you the best way to learn so that you can become the best learner." So how is it that I am more than able to take information in, understand it, process it, and use it in valuable ways to me? And I think that's really stuck with me throughout my life. I love to learn, and I'm less about memorizing facts.

Bill Cilluffo:

A great lesson, and I think probably one of the weaknesses in American education. I think there's plenty of other strengths, but certainly the focus on memorization is a little overkill at some point. If I'm not mistaken, you're not the only person in your family to have this passion for education. I know you've got multiple degrees. Am I correct, that your dad went to university when he was 14, has three master's degrees, and two PhDs? Is that the right set of facts?

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, embarrassingly so. That's tough to live up to, I guess. Or my mom always teases him that he probably really, really liked university life.

Bill Cilluffo:

You can't really blame him on that.

Moubin Khan:

He just didn't want to leave.

Bill Cilluffo:

I think my son would share that. I'm not sure he is going to translate that into three PhDs. It might be several more years of undergrad, but I can relate. Why is it so important to your family? Hearing you talk about it, you're passionate. If he wasn't passionate about it, he would not have invested that amount. What do you think drives that importance in your family?

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, I think it's just fundamental to being a human being. This idea of curiosity and this idea of learning, I think that learning as well is one of the biggest celebrations of being humble. I think people with curious and humble minds, they realize this really simple fact that I cling onto, which is, the more you know, the more you know you don't know. Because every time you find out one thing, it opens up two questions. If you've got that attitude, then you're always able to look at someone else's perspective. You're always able to find something from someone that you can learn, and you're always eager and open to going into new avenues, into new places and trying to figure it out and understand how the world works. I just find so much joy in doing that. I think we're going to talk a little bit about what I've done previously, but if you sew that all together, really, it's just following a pursuit of challenge and learning.

Bill Cilluffo:

Oh, that's awesome. Particularly in the industry that we're in. I can't necessarily speak from your shoes since I was never a founder. But speaking about venture capital, what's really exciting to me is, you just meet so many people from so many backgrounds doing so many different things. No matter how much expertise you have, you're never an expert at the exact thing somebody's doing. As soon as you think you have pieces of this business figured out, the world changes and it starts over. I think that's, again, sometimes it's a frustrating aspect of this business, but it's also one of the things that keeps it really interesting, and that you're always on a stiff learning curve.

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, I actually think, by the way, that probably the single most defining characteristic of a startup's success is its ability to learn and iterate, because that's what you do. No one goes into a startup knowing what the answer is. You just have a hypothesis around something, and what your job is to do is just learn, test it, iterate, learn, test it, iterate. So whether you enjoy learning outside of startup life, I think, if you choose to be an entrepreneur, that is what you're going to have to spend most of your time doing.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah, absolutely. Look, switching gears to one other aspect back to Singapore before we move on. You, along with everyone else growing up in Singapore, did a stint in the military, a mandatory service there. Talk to me about your experience. I've heard a couple quite interesting stories of that period, but I imagine that's also been quite influential in very different ways than all the hobbies and all of the continued education.

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, no, absolutely. So in Singapore, there's a conscription service. This is something you have to do. It's not something that's voluntary. Back when I used to do it, it was two and a half years long. It's now two years long, but it's an incredible experience. You get chucked into the police, the navy, or the army, and you get taken out of your day-to-day life and just thrown into this completely different reality. I spent my time on a ship going up and down the Straits of Malacca looking for criminals. That was very, very different to what I was doing before that.

Bill Cilluffo:

Holy cow.

Moubin Khan:

You pick up a bunch of skills that are really, really transferable. Resilience, dealing with people that you don't normally deal with, and then a bunch of skills that are really not that transferable, like how do you clean a gun? Which I haven't done since for a long time.

Bill Cilluffo:

I don't know, Moubin, if you lived in America, you might be-

Moubin Khan:

Still transferable.

Bill Cilluffo:

... thinking about those skills more. I don't know.

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, no, it's an incredible experience. I think the biggest thing about it is, you just get chucked into a completely different world with people whom you would not ordinarily have met in your life. That just creates this new set of experiences and perspectives to cling onto for the rest of your life.

Bill Cilluffo:

Makes sense. What's your craziest story from that period?

Moubin Khan:

My craziest story is pretty intense moments of conflict, let's put it that way, followed by lots and lots of hours of doing not very much.

Bill Cilluffo:

Gotcha. I could see probably a lot of sitting down. I understand there were some interactions with pirates at various points of your career there.

Moubin Khan:

Yeah. Pirates. I've fished a dead body out of the sea as well. Bunch of stuff like that. But like I said, it's a really, really different world.

Bill Cilluffo:

Look, it's always good to get into some different experiences, take yourself out of the comfort zone. My in-laws were a very big military family, and they started jumping out of airplanes, then went into logistics, and did so many things within the military. So it's great to-

Moubin Khan:

Amazing.

Bill Cilluffo:

... hear about the different experiences. We touched a little bit on your family as it relates to education, but I know family is really important to you. Your co-founder is your brother, so it's very important on a truly daily basis, on a minute-by-minute basis. Your wife actually works for one of our portfolio companies, Wayflyer. So I feel like I'm part of your family,-

Moubin Khan:

You are, Bill, you are.

Bill Cilluffo:

... which is pretty cool. Your sister has joined you in London. Just talk to your family, how that shapes your values, how that's influenced the starting of GetGround, and how you think about leading that.

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, I think family is super important to me. I actually am in awe of every other set of startup founders that aren't family because I can't imagine doing this with anyone else other than my brother or someone else in my family because it's such an intense experience. It's so fast-paced and there's such high levels of trust required that it puts strains on relationships sometimes as well, and you really have to have solid fundamentals in order to survive it. But look, I'm really thankful of starting this business with Misrab. When we started, we didn't know how well we'd worked together. It turned out we were more complimentary than we thought.

I know finance and business. He knows tech, but it went a lot further than that. I'm more of a risk-taker. He likes to think about risk more. I'm more of a cowboy. He likes process and structure. So there's this very healthy tension between us, which is underpinned by a lot of trust and a lot of love. So it makes a wonderful experience. I think just more broadly than that, family is super important to me because it's basically where I get my strength. Life, in general, is a tough set of experiences by and large, and having your family to go back to and share those experiences with as well as draw energy from is really important to me.

Bill Cilluffo:

Look, I'm going to go in a slightly different order here to what we intended, but I think this leads into a great topic. We had a chance to speak to your wife, Rasheen, a little bit about the topic of work-life balance. One of the most challenging aspects, I think, of being a startup CEO is how can you continue to live a life while you're in a job that's so intense. How can you, at some level, compartmentalize different components of what you're doing so that you're not always thinking about work when you're home? And I know that it's important for you to figure out how do you do that when you're home with her, and the family, and the kids. How do you make sure that you're giving your all there? I'd love to hear you talk about that aspect while we're on the subject of family.

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, no, absolutely. I think, first off, it's really, really hard. Doing a startup, building a business is all-consuming in really good ways sometimes, in really difficult ways in other times. It's all-consuming because you care so much about it, and as it grows and develops, you care more and more about it. When things go right, the highs are really high, and when things go wrong, they're pretty low. Being able to isolate yourself from that is super important. So I think you said the word there, Bill, and I totally agree with, it's about compartmentalization. So even, for example, with my brother, Misrab, we've got certain rules, "WhatsApp's for family, Slack's for business." You don't WhatsApp a business thing. So very early on, we set that rule down when we started finding things spilling over where they shouldn't have.

We don't talk about stuff on the weekends. With my wife, I think it's about being present. So if you're doing something together, put the phone away. Just be in that moment, which is easier said than done. Then I think the last thing I would say about that is, with small kids, they compartmentalize for you because they're so intense and require so much of your effort, basically keeping them alive most of the time that you're all focused on it. So kids, for me, at least my young children, are a really great way for me to not think about work.

Bill Cilluffo:

I personally hope you're keeping your kids alive more than most of the time.

Moubin Khan:

Not all of the time are they in jeopardy, but it's amazing. I really, really question, by the way, how the human species has survived. You look at young children growing up, and they're actively doing dangerous things or quite helpless. They need someone to stay alive. I guess we did it somehow as a species.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah, it's a good learning experience. How good are you at taking vacations?

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, I'm good at it. In fact, I'm going tomorrow.

Bill Cilluffo:

Nice.

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, I'm heading for a week to Cyprus. Generally, when I go on vacation, what I do is I can't switch off entirely. If I try to, I find it actually more stressful than not. So what I'll do is I'll have one or two hours in the morning, and then I'll literally put my phone in the safe in the hotel, and then I find if I've got that one or two hours, I can deal with anything urgent. I still have a pulse for what's going on in the business, but for the rest of the time, I'm just relaxing. If you don't do it that way, you get the worst of both worlds. You leave. You're not having the impact you want in the business, but at the same time, you haven't recharged because you haven't taken real mental and physical time off.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah, I think that's great. I know that that's one topic many startup founders struggle with, how to get away, how to really take a vacation. Look, it's important. I'm sure there's a couple examples in the world, but great companies aren't usually built in a year or two years. This is a marathon, and if you're not there for the whole journey, there's going to be problems. So I think that's really important. It's also interesting to hear how you're dealing with it. I'm somewhat the same way. I can take a full day and disconnect, but if I'm gone somewhere for a week, I just get more stressed about what there's going to be when I come back than if I just take a little bit of time every day to deal with it. So that's not how everyone does it. I think I've learned that everyone's got their own strategy and there's no right or wrong answer, but it's interesting to hear how you handle that.

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, and I just echo the point that building a business is a marathon. So you've got to be able to have the energy over that entire period. The only way to do that is to find a balance for yourself.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah, for sure. Look, let's finally get back to the previewed section on the business. I think you've got a fascinating company where you've got a strong endgame vision, you've got an initial entry point that is related to the vision, but it's only one step along that journey. Let's start with the origin story. How did you get the idea for GetGround? What got you to be so excited about real estate? Take me to the early points.

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, no, I love talking about this. So thank you for the question. Misrab and I, we always enjoy talking about interesting problems that we think we could solve or to find a way to solve that could have a big impact in the world. We'd often chat about stuff but never really found that idea that was big enough or that we thought we could solve that excited us. One day we fell into almost real estate, and we looked at it and were like, "Wow, this is the biggest asset class in the world." I think it's worth something like $300 trillion globally. This is massive. It dwarfs things like equities and debt, which are big. It's also really dysfunctional. It's super disintermediate, it's super intermediated, it's so opaque. There's all sorts of issues with trust and accessibility. We were like, "Wow, that's really crazy." Because it's also such a fundamental part of everyone's life and the ability for people to create wealth.

So we fell in love with that, and we started talking about it and saying, "What's really driving this inefficiency in this biggest asset class?" And we kept going down layer after layer after layer till we got to what we think is the ground floor, which is, issues are caused by a lack of information, a lack of trust, and a lack of ability to act on information. You just look outside the window at a big building, and you think about, "How do I find out about that building? When was it built? Is it structurally safe? Who's using it, how much are they making? Can I trust that info? And if you wanted to do something about it, you couldn't. We came up with this crazy idea to fix it, which is, what if you could wrap every single property inside its own limited company, almost like creating an abstraction layer around the property?

Suddenly you could pin information to it, who owns it, what are its financials, what contracts has the property entered into? You could trust that information, and you could really easily act on it by buying and selling the shares to trade ownership. So we fell in love with that, and as two scientists do, we came up with probably the worst name for a company in the history of peoplekind, which is Terranova.network Limited, which means a new global network for assets. That's what we're building, a new global network for assets, specifically property. We trade by GetGround, but that's how it all started.

Bill Cilluffo:

Nice. So this notion of, I know we've come to use the term containerization, but how do you set a company around a property? That's still a core part of what you guys are doing. What pieces of that feel like your initial hypothesis was correct? And from what parts of it did you learn, "Hey, you had to change course and alter the idea"?

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, so we always looked at this asset class and we said, "Look, it's really big and it's really dysfunctional. I'm sure lots of people have tried to fix this." And they have, but they haven't been able to do it. So there's got to be some big reasons to that. It's an incredibly large industry, it's incredibly fragmented. A lot of the players in the ecosystem have got a lot of inertia in the way they do things today and are reluctant to change the way they do things. So we said to ourselves, "That's a problem." Because if we're going to try and affect change in this massive asset class, we're going to have to deal with those things. So we basically closed our eyes and we said, "Imagine a world where every single property was inside a company structure. Do we think we could create a much more efficient and liquid market?"

Our answer was, "Yes, I think we could do that if every single property was in the company." And so the problem to solve was, "How do you get every single property into a company?" And we had a hypothesis specifically in the UK, but this is true globally as well, which is, investment property, what is it at its heart? It's a business. You're purchasing an asset to produce an income, just like you buy a factory to produce widgets that you can then sell for revenue. What is a company? A company is an invention to hold businesses, and it's older than the bicycle. So it's got some used to it. It's stuck around. So if you put a business in the company, you get a bunch of benefits, and it turns out that's true.

So we went to people wanting to buy investment property and we said, "Hey, stop for a second. Put this into a company structure and you're going to have things like the ability to limit your personal liability, the ability to do it with friends, with legal documents. You're going to have some tax efficiencies, you're going to have better inheritance or estate planning, you're going to have more innovative access to financial structures, et cetera." Our hypothesis was, that was going to sell. That turned out to be right when we started GetGround, roughly 15% of all buy-to-let transactions were going through corporate vehicles. Today, it's 65%.

Bill Cilluffo:

Wow.

Moubin Khan:

So that's happened in three and a half years. It's seismic. You don't normally get that change in such a big market that quickly. We've been really lucky to have built a product that effectively takes something that's very analog. Setting up a company through an accountant, going to a bank, opening a bank account, going to a lawyer, getting legal documents, bringing and then doing your accounting and tax returns, bringing that all under one roof, and making it infinitely quicker and infinitely more cost-effective, look, we've grown. We're probably still a 10% market share here in the UK for all companies set up to purchase buy-to-let property. Now the challenge for us is, how do you step into the next phase of our business, which is the marketplace, enabling people to start to transact property, start to use other services that they need in order to make property investments like financing, like property itself, like solicitors, and eventually taking them to actually starting to transact the shares of the companies holding these individual properties?

Bill Cilluffo:

Gotcha. Very cool. Have you started the marketplace transactions yet, or is that still in the works?

Moubin Khan:

No, it started. So we started it last year. For the first five months, we were spinning our wheels, not getting very far, until we made two big realizations. The first is that if you want to have a property investment marketplace, you need to have property, not SPV structures, at the heart of your application. So we ripped up our entire application and rebuilt it around this concept of my investment, which is a single property. The other big realization we had is, you need to solve big pain points for an investment's life cycle. So think about an investment being bought, transacted, managed, and sold. Let's create products around those big life events, if you would, and sell those because they're going to solve big pain points for people. So we started launching new products, things called GG Search, Gigi Mortgage, et cetera. We're growing very quickly now with the marketplace. So it's happening. We're transacting.

Bill Cilluffo:

Nice. What's the single biggest obstacle right now that's in front of you that you're actively trying to solve?

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, I think if you had asked me that question six months ago, it was, "What does this marketplace look like that's going to allow it to have traction?" I'm very, very pleased to say that I think we've got a view on that now that looks like it's working. So for me, the biggest thing now is around execution, getting stuff done and doing it at the right velocity and quality. That's difficult when you're moving really, really fast. It's something that we, as a business, have actually been recently talking about, how do you build stuff that's pretty complex at speed and at quality?

One of the learnings that we're having as we're doing this is what I've coined in the business as hashtag dog food, which is, "You've got a dog food for every single thing you're doing." When you build a part of the application, just dive in and test it. Become a customer, set up a company with GetGround, even if you can't put a property in it. If you're building or changing a process in HubSpot, which is our CRM tool, try it out in a live environment a few times. If you're kind of obsessed with that, I think you're able to catch a lot of stuff that otherwise would slip through the net when you're moving at this speed.

Bill Cilluffo:

No, that's fantastic. Now, so you've started with this legal company formation, you're moving into the marketplace. You talked about a multi-hundred-trillion-dollar market that you eventually have your eyes on. Talk to me through where this can go. So let's say you've done the execution, and you've got this property marketplace that's vibrant within the UK. What are the next steps? One might be globalization. I know that's on your mind. Presumably, there's more products that are in that roadmap. Flash forward five years, 10 years, what can this really become?

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, so I think in the most immediate term within the UK, there's an incredible opportunity to change the way that people can get access to this investment asset class with really innovative products. So I'd love to be the place where someone thinks about buying an investment property. They think, "Okay, I'm going to go to GetGround and I'm going to be able to do everything I want to do over there. I'm also going to get access to products that just aren't anywhere else in the market, really innovative things, whether those are innovative financial products or the ability to just string multiple things together very easily and conveniently." And then on top of that, I think about, like you said, globalization. The UK is the fourth-biggest market in the world for investment property. Germany, Japan, the US are bigger, and they're incredibly interesting. So we'd love to do that whenever we feel like we've got the UK buttoned down.

I think the highest level to think about it is, "If you think about a property, what are the actors that can interact with it?" You've got people that own it, you've got people that operate it, like letting agents, and you've got people that use it, like tenants. Now, if you can make every single property a lot more accessible with high-quality information that you can trust and act on, each of those actors is going to be able to interact with that asset in a more efficient way. So you're going to create tons of value for owners, people running these assets, and people using these assets. I think that's just going to fundamentally change a big part of our society today. That's really the exciting Nirvana state.

Bill Cilluffo:

No, that's really cool. That's really cool. One of the things that's unique about your business is, the transactions are large. Somebody's buying a piece of rental real estate, maybe it's $100,000, maybe it's a couple million. There's large transactions. So you can build a large business while not having that many customers, which is an interesting aspect. Because it means you can probably get to know some of your customers and you can talk to some of your customers in a way that consumer businesses don't always have the ability to do. How much do you invest in your first few customers by talking to them and learning from them? How close are you to some of your customers, and how does your business take advantage of that fact?

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, it's a super interesting dynamic. We can build a really, really big business with not that many people. I think your first customers are so important, you need to obsess over them. I've got a few funny memories if I think back to our first customers. So when Misrab and I first started the business, we didn't have a website. We didn't have an application. We basically put our idea inside a printed brochure, and we went and met a developer who said, "Hey, this is a pretty cool idea. Why don't you fly out with me to Hong Kong and Singapore, where I'm selling some properties, and why don't you sell the containerization or the SPV to the clients over there?" And we flew. We're like, "This is really cool. Let's do that."

So we flew to Hong Kong, it was a disaster. We didn't sell a single thing, and we learned a couple of things though. We learned that parts of the business model that we had in our pamphlet were competitive with the agents in those countries hosting the events to speak to the investors. So they were shutting us up. So we got on the plane to Singapore, we tore that page out of the pamphlet, and they effectively changed our business model. We sold some in Singapore, and we got to really, really know our first customers. They still WhatsApp me, I send them Christmas cards, I know their families. We've had lunch and dinner with them. One of our first customers refused to sign anything on DocuSign. He flew into the UK, I printed out hundreds of pages of legal documents for him, put them in my backpack, bicycled to the hotel, and got him to sign it.

So I think these early customers that you have, they're really a special thing. I'm not in the right room here, but the first order we got, we couldn't even take payments. We didn't have a card machine. So we basically scribbled on a piece of paper, "You, customer X, agreed to buy," Actually, they bought seven SPVs, "From us, sign here." And we've got it framed up on the wall here at GetGround. So look, I think customer obsession, especially in the early days, but always today, even at GetGround, we're obsessed with our customers. I'm personally still on every customer email. The support team would really love to take me off. They are big fans of my screenshots, I think. But I think a business is there for its customers, so it should spend its time talking to its customers.

Bill Cilluffo:

Look, no matter how talented you are, no matter how talented Misrab is, the two of you are never going to be able to build this business on your own. So the team is essential to any startup, and I know that's something that you've kind of spent a lot of time thinking about, learning about, et cetera. So just to dive into a couple aspects there, starting with culture and values, how did you think about, along with your brother, setting up the values of the company? Are they the same as the way they started? Have they evolved? How do you think about building the right culture within GetGround?

Moubin Khan:

Yeah. Bill, that's such an important question. We don't have many deeply held beliefs, but one of the ones that we do have is that product-market fit is temporary. I don't think people are brave enough to say that because you spend so much of your time looking for product-market fit and you find it like, "Wow, I found it." But guess what? It's going to go away. It's going to go away because your customers preferences are going to change, your competition's going to change, the regulation is going to change. So then we asked ourselves, "If that's true, how do you win over decades?" And the answer is, you build a world-class organization that can learn and adapt faster than anyone else.

So you start to believe that, and you start to think about it a lot, and you start to think about, "What makes a world-class organization that can learn and adapt better than anyone else?" And you start to think deeply about your people. You start to think deeply about your processes and your data. You start to think deeply about your culture. We recognized that really, really early on. We're very lucky to have a few friends who have created very big businesses now. We asked them a little bit about this, and they said, "Look, one of my biggest regrets is not addressing culture, not addressing values early enough when we started our businesses because you're so busy. But then what happens is you wake up with a 3000, 4,000, 5,000 person organization, and you look over your right shoulder, and sitting next to you is this big gremlin called culture. You don't like the way it looks, you don't like the way it feels, and you don't like the way it speaks, but it's very, very difficult to get that gremlin out of the room.

So you want to be looking at culture really early on. The other thing that they said was, culture is not this painting that you put on a wall and then it's done. It's this living organism. It changes with the mood of people, it changes with different people, it changes as the business's challenges grow. So culture and values are something that you need to bake into every day at GetGround. That comes in the way you attract people. That comes in the way you assess people. That comes in the way you talk about it or measure it. We do lots of things like that. So we set our values very early on. Our values are really all about learning. Like I said, learning and iterating, I think, is key to success. So we talk about being feedback obsessed, constantly listening from our customers, our employees, our partners, having healthy egos.

I know what I'm good at, but I also know what I'm not good at. So I want to work in teams where I can complement my weaknesses. If someone's better at me at something, I am not intimidated by it. In fact, I want to learn from them. We have no BS. Don't shade the truth with the colors of politics or opinions. Plant them down with data, and let's look at them objectively. Finally, a pursuit of excellence, "Hey, this is really, really good. How do I make it better?" And if you couple all those things together, what I think you begin to describe is a culture that's about learning and about iterating.

Bill Cilluffo:

Let me just pick up on that last point that you mentioned about learning and iterating. Whether it's about culture, team, the business, et cetera, what's one major mistake that you made over the last several years in building GetGround, and what's the key learning that you took away from it?

Moubin Khan:

I have made so many mistakes, which is a wonderful, wonderful thing if you learn from them. What is one of my biggest mistakes? I think we at some point early last year ran away with ourselves in terms of setting up the organization, creating processes, and we lost a little bit of scrappiness and we lost a little bit of being close to the customer. We thought that having really good documentation or processes in place just for the sake of having it there would result in outcomes, but it didn't.

So if I think back to that time, really what I think I've learned from that is, you need to always stay close to the customer and you need to always be focused on impact. So what is it that, for your organization, is going to translate into impact, and for every organization, that's very, very different? So you've got to find the ground way, or you've got to find whatever way, whatever the name of your business is that you're running, you've got to find that way. That way is not going to be the same as what you see in a textbook or what you see in another business.

Bill Cilluffo:

I can relate. Scaling is really hard, and there's versions of the story like what you told, "Hey, we got too big a company too fast, and we lost scrappiness." I've seen plenty go the other way of, "I don't want process, I don't want things. We're just going to be scrappy." And then you get so big and you can't handle it anymore. There's no one right path of being willing to try things. If it doesn't work, change it. I think, that's so important. So look, we're nearing the end of our time here. I would love to end on a bit of a fun note. So we've had a theme here around family. We've had a theme around internationalization. I'd love to ask with a couple fun questions on each of those. So I understand that you've got a bit of a vision for your son becoming a rapper, and I understand you are currently trying to teach him Cantaloop by Us3. Can you tell us all about this experience?

Moubin Khan:

I'm more interested in who told you that.

Bill Cilluffo:

Hey, we're very thorough. We have a crack research department, and I cannot shed my secrets.

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, no, that is a great tune. My son... Look, I really like rap music. Cantaloop is incredible, and I'm teaching my five-year-old son how to rap with it. I don't think his mother's best pleased about that, but I'm not sure how his teacher feels about that, but it is what it is. I love the lyrics.

Bill Cilluffo:

Hey, that one's a pretty wholesome song. I listened to what my college-aged kid listens to when he comes home, and it would be very different and not fit for a five-year-old. So that's awesome. Last fun question, then I've got one serious one to close out with. You've traveled all around the world. What's your favorite place? And if you could advise anyone on the call that they need to go to some particular place or have some particular experience, what would you advise?

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, no, that's great. I think everyone should get out of their houses and out of their countries and go visit this beautiful, big, wide world of ours. It's incredible. Probably the Catatumbo River in Venezuela. So the Catatumbo River is a pretty unique place, and that it has the right geographic conditions. At night, it constantly has lightning. So you've got probably 8 to 12 hours of huge, heavy lightning. So you take a little wooden boat out into the middle of this massive lake, and there are houses there on wooden stilts, and you basically sleep in a hammock just beneath the open sky. You watch curtains, literally, as the best way of describing it. Curtains of lightning fall from the sky down into the horizon. It's really quite magical.

Bill Cilluffo:

That sounds gorgeous. I'm not sure that sounds very safe. Is this more like a light show, or does lightning come down and hit some of these houses?

Moubin Khan:

No, I made it, so it's okay.

Bill Cilluffo:

Is it also true that while you're in the Amazon, you went swimming with Piranhas? Is this a true story?

Moubin Khan:

Yeah, it is. Pink-water dolphins and piranhas. The olden tribes over there, they used to get haircuts with them. So I actually got a haircut from piranha teeth. They're so sharp that you take the jaw out, and they just open and close the pincers of the jaw, and it cuts your hair, and the hair shoots to the ground. So Amazon's a beautiful place too.

Bill Cilluffo:

Wow. That is quite the experience. I've not had a chance to be at the Amazon. I've been a few places in Brazil, but not quite to the north yet, so I'm going to have to check that out.

Moubin Khan:

It's beautiful.

Bill Cilluffo:

Cool. Look, I'd like to end with the same question for everyone, a little bit more on a serious note. We've got a bunch of prospective entrepreneurs that I'm sure will be listening to this pod. What's one piece of advice you would give to somebody who's thinking to start their own company?

Moubin Khan:

Be bold, be brave. It's going to be tough, but believe in yourself. If I can quote our friend, Elon Musk, you know his song, Believe In Your Vibe. That's the one.

Bill Cilluffo:

Fantastic. I love that piece of advice. It's certainly not an easy journey, but continuing to be ambitious and aggressive, that makes a lot of sense. Moubin, thanks so much for spending the time with us today. I had so much fun diving in. Some of these we had talked about before. Some of this is brand new to me, and it's one reason I love getting a chance to spend time with folks like you in such a different context. I really appreciate the time that you spent with us today.

Moubin Khan:

Thank you, Bill. Thanks for having me.

Bill Cilluffo:

This has been the Fintech Thought Leaders podcast, your window into the world of venture capital and financial services. With today's digital disruptors. QED is proud to provide the best fintech advice you can get. To learn more or to read the full show notes from today's episode, check out qedinvestors.com, and be sure to also follow QED on Twitter and LinkedIn at QED Investors. Thanks for listening.

‍