Do you want to sell sugar water all your life?

Sun Setting over a Lake, c.1840-5 - JMW Turner- Tate Gallery

On Linkedin recently I read a quotation from a ‘prominent, global tech venture capitalist’ that “Top tech talent is not that interested in the CRE sector. It is not viewed as exciting for them”. Well, that’s not good is it? If true, which mostly it probably is.

But why is it so? And what can we do about it?

Let’s start with where ‘Top Talent’ does go. Some goes, not surprisingly, to wherever the money is. Not always but often that coincides with where they can leverage their talents most effectively, which mainly leads to ‘Big Tech’, who have the most data and the biggest audiences. A sizeable percentage go into academia or ‘Deep Tech’ companies working at the cutting edge of such areas as AI or Synthetic Biology. 

Above and beyond all of this though, the very best go to where ‘the story’ around the work they’ll be doing is the most compelling. Where they believe they are working on creating the future, or ‘changing the world’. A cursory knowledge of the crypto scene demonstrates this; the space is awash with people proudly taking the ‘red pill’ and immersing themselves in a cultish conviction that they are the ones who ‘get it’. Sectors that captivate people attract the best. They also attract the worst of course and many mistake enthusiasm for talent, but to find the very best talent look at those industries or professions where real meaningful impact is in the very nature of what they do.

So the real estate industry should be awash with top tech talent. After all no industry has as direct an influence on the health, happiness and productivity of people as does real estate. All the people of the world are inside real estate some 90% of the time, and the space directly around them has a defining emotional, social and functional impact on them. If you want to change the world nothing beats real estate.

Or at least, nothing should beat real estate. But it does. Why?

Because as an industry we have too few people who care to make it so.

In 1983 a 27 year old Steve Jobs was looking for someone to replace him as Apple’s CEO and help grow the company. He reached out to the acclaimed marketer John Sculley, who was then President of Pepsi. Sculley was hesitant and unsure. Jobs then unleashed his now famous line: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

That entreaty to ‘change the world’ did the trick and Sculley signed on the dotted line.

Ultimately Jobs and Sculley fell out but it is the storytelling power of ‘come with me and change the world’ that is what matters. Jobs had a vision of what he wanted to create and that stood atop all other considerations.

I have written before about his other line that one must ‘start with the customer and work back to the technology’ but this demands a caveat. It’s not just about giving your customer what they want but rather giving them what they want as imagined by yourself. You have to have your own vision before being able to satisfy someone else’s. In fact you are trying to impose your will on your market. Your conception of what is excellent, or beautiful, or unique, or simply perfectly formed in every way. Yes you have to understand your customers wants, needs and desires but those are ephemeral things. Your job is to create something that adheres to your vision whilst also delighting your customer. At the edges of brilliance customers don’t know what they want until it is given to them. Real leaders, individuals and/or companies, want to create products and services that reflect their vision first. Starting with a vision is the killer app. Only the best do.

Which is what is needed in real estate. After several decades of cookie cutter developing of product that ticks the boxes and broadly gives customers what they need, we are entering the era of having to give customers what they want. To get people into our offices, or shopping in our shops, or paying a premium for our homes, the real estate industry needs to start appreciating and encouraging its visionaries. We need people as committed and convinced of the rightness of their vision as Jobs was at Apple. We need more people prepared to put a stake in the ground and declare that what they are building is as good as it gets. We need people who see the vast opportunity there is in real estate to both get rich and to improve the lives of hundreds, thousands, millions of people.

We know how to design beautiful buildings. We know the desperate need to decarbonise the built environment, and we know how to enable people to be happy, healthy and productive, their best selves, inside real estate. We even know that, though rare, enlightened financiers do exist, and can make this happen.

But mostly none of this happens does it? How do we know this? Because if it did the real estate industry would attract much of the very best technical talent in the world. Because the vision, the story, would be so grand, and powerful, and impactful. We’d attract those wanting to ‘change the world’. The industry would be almost the ultimate human + machine space. Where great human and technological skills complimented each other, and leveraged the capabilities of each other. Where the end product improved peoples lives.

The real estate industry has largely been fit for purpose the last 30,40 years. Because the purpose was never very exacting. For the next 30, 40 years this is not good enough. We have the need, and the opportunity, to reinvent a new industry that aims at a higher purpose. That helps save the planet by simply being better across every dimension. 

If we are serious about attracting the best tech talent then we need to stop being sugar water sellers. We need to be better to build back better.

It is possible. Just find the visionaries and let them loose.