KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Leveraging AI Agents and First Principles to Build Scalable Real Estate Businesses

Episode Date: October 22, 2026

Summary:Exp Realty Chief Innovation Officer Seth Siegler joins host Heather Manzi to explore the transformative impact of generative AI and autonomous agents on real estate operations. Siegler details how applying a "first principles" mindset allows agents to re-architect their businesses from scratch using modern technology. The conversation covers practical tools like Claude Co-Work and Fixer to automate administrative tasks, handle email management, and build hyper-customized web software. Agents learn how to retain their core personal strengths while leveraging AI to drive business efficiency and scale.

Hi everyone and welcome to Women Who Rise. I'm your host, Heather Mancy. Today I'm joined by Seth Siegler, chief innovation officer at EXP Realty and one of the most forward-thinking voices at the intersection of real estate, technology, and AI. Seth began in real estate as an agent and broker before building a career in prop tech as a startup founder with two exits, eventually stepping into innovation leadership at scale. At EXP, he's helping shape how agents and teams actually use emerging technology in the real world, not just to move faster, but to build smarter, more adaptive businesses. This conversation matters because Seth brings a rare perspective on what it means to lead through disruption, stay grounded in the people closest to the work, and rethink growth

for an AI native future. Good to see you again, Seth. And welcome to the show. Thanks, Heather. Awesome to see you too. And thanks for having me on. I'm really excited. Absolutely.

We are so excited to have you. Well, let's just jump right in. So Chief Innovation Officer at EXP Realty, again, where you are working with agents to develop, test, and scale new technologies that can produce meaningful business outcomes. What does that really mean for real-world applications? for those agents inside the company.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a great question. There's so much, so much new. Every single day right now, all of the ways to describe it seem cliche. You know, like, yes, it's an inflection point. Yes, it's moving quickly. Yes, everything is changing.

It's all true, but it keeps accelerating. And it's an opportunity at the end of the day for companies like EXP and agents everywhere, ideally the ones at EXP, to take advantage of the speed that everything's changing and of the new technology itself. Yes. So what I try to do is distill it. I try to get my hands on as much of the new emerging technology as possible, you know, just as it comes out, even in some cases before it comes out, thanks to our relationships

with some of the big AI companies and see what works, see what can actually make a difference day-to-day for agents at EXP, just because there is so much noise and there is a lot of stuff that agents can waste their time doing or trying to dig into. So I try to do a lot of that for everybody and try to find out what works, what can actually move the needle, what can actually make a difference? And then the next level is what can we actually build for our agents at EXP using the new tech that can actually give them the unfair advantage, if you will. I love that. Yeah. And by the way, you know, unfair advantage is never a bad thing. You know, we have to retool. Like you mentioned, this is moving so quickly. It's very interesting. I was around when in advertising sales when the first, you know, a web banner came out. And I got to be literally, I think I was the first person at my radio station to sell this thing called a web banner in 1990s, you know, six or seven. And the internet had already been around, but the idea of selling advertising on.

it was brand new. And then, boy, we just don't even, it's like the air we breathe now. It's really quite extraordinary to us. And AI, I mean, shoot, we're even the average person is, I think, using it at, you know, numerous times a day. What are your thoughts about that?

I think what you just said is, is super important spot on, actually, in that, yeah, like when all of that stuff first came out, when the internet first came out, right? and not everyone was using it yet, especially for their business day to day. That was something where people are like, ah, am I going to have to start using the internet?

What tools on the internet are you using? What websites are you going to, right? And we don't think like that anymore. They're just tools now. And they're part of our workflows. And we will very quickly get there too with AI, even more so because of how baked into everything it will be, just like you said.

And we're already starting. to see that. Just some of the tools that we were using already are now AI enabled in some way. And a lot of things where AI is the tool

like Claude, yes, that's going to be very, very powerful right now and we all should be trying to figure out how it can help us and, you know,

in our day to day. But soon enough, a lot of that will just sort of fade into, just sort of fade into the background and we will just sort of work the way that we work It will be, and already is becoming much, much more efficient.

Agents will be able to handle more scale, do less busy work, focus more on the things that matter because of the workflows that they'll be able to put together using tools that are powered by AI. And by its nature, a lot of the AI that happens to be exploding right now, that sort of the generative type of AI is just perfectly suited for that. It's suited for not needing to figure out very much about it, right? You can, all the tools that we use, you just talk to them. You just say what you want help with.

And like Claude takes it from there or whatever tool you're using with the chat interface now just takes it from there. And inherently, that's so much easier to use because you don't have to learn very much about it or change, right? Absolutely. What you do. Yeah. And it's one of the things I'm most excited about.

and you just drop like so many wisdom bombs because look, I mean, it's, you know, because, you know, I kind of wrote down, you know, we can both save money and make money. So save more money in maybe ancillary services or things that we were having to use additional assistance and things like that. And also make more money. Because you mentioned, we can actually have a bigger deal flow, for example. So if you're in the real estate industry, it means you can probably crush through more client deals. And by the way, with maybe more perfection and more accuracy and better checklists and better, you know, this for me in from a legal sense as as a team owner and a branch brokerage owner for XB, it's really fascinating because, you know, you're breaking down for a corporation,

what is my job as the owner of this team to break down and kind of spoon feed to my agents, which is, you know, it's their job to be out there in income producing activities, shaking hands, taking names, you know, helping people. But it's our job to figure out what their workflows should be and constantly retool them so that they are the best fit that they could possibly be, the best outfitted that they could possibly be. And it's why I'm so excited about the fact that, number one, EXP is already a very technological corporation. It was established on this cloud-based idea. But your position, in particular, what you know, what you've learned. You know, I imagine it's like a kid in a candy store. And I have a question about that.

in a minute. But just the fact that you mentioned, look, the generative AI knows what you're going to do. And when I think about our generation, I mean, you know, I grew up, you know, graduated high school in 1990s, so you can do the math. But, you know, it's, it's our generation has had to go from, you know, having the first seat, you know, compact disc player to being able to learn computers as a whole. You know, I learned on an Apple 2E in seventh grade. And then to be able to go to, you know, to be able to go to learning the internet, absorbing that massive, massive change in our lives, learning apps and smartphones. And now they're just, you know, I probably opened 30 apps this morning, you know,

before I even started work. It's just very normal. But I love the fact that AI, like you mentioned, this adoption is going to happen so much faster than the internet because the simple fact that we're already an internet society. That's already happened. That's it. Yeah. Yeah.

And we're just using the internet. We're going to use the, we'll have to actually. use the internet less, which is pretty sweet. By the way, my high school also had Apple 2E's. I love that. Okay. I love that. Then we can compare birthdays next. Yeah, I was, I think it was my seventh or eighth grade, you know, computer class. And now, you know, I call the, you know, millennials as the generation born with an iPhone in their mouth. I don't even know what to say about the next iteration. I know. Just because it's absolutely so ubiquitous to them. But just this idea that we have technology that knows how to teach us, we've never had technology that knew

how to teach us to use it and can anticipate what we need and things like this. It is genuinely extraordinary. And it's one of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you. So I want to talk about something else. You were recognized as a 2021 and 2024 housing wire tech trendsetter and an inman Innovator Award finalist in 2013, 2014 and 2016. You are publicly associated with the EXP's AI strategy and including the agent-facing tools, the beta solutions, innovation hub work, and AI-enabled internal productivity systems. And I really, it's like a word salad, but I really wanted to ask you, can you explain that really fully to our, you know, more than I know we talked about it a minute ago, but can you explain,

you know, the beta solutions, the innovative hub work like that? Can you explain that to the layperson and the agents out there that want to know what all this means to them? Yeah. So the first thing to say about it is that it says a lot about, you know, EXP as a company and Glenn as a founder. Yes. To have created a position like this, to be honest. Yes, it's a dream job for somebody like me. but it says a lot about the company to recognize how important this moment is. We're just not going to see another thing like this probably in our lifetime where there is such an opportunity.

And on the flip side, there are a lot of consequences in not fully recognizing and embracing how much of a moment in technology this is. for big companies, you know, like EXP and a lot of other companies that are not embracing it. And so you've got, you know, the technology of the company, there's core technology that those trains need to come and go as scheduled, right? Commissions, all of that sort of work needs to get paid. Revenue share needs to be calculated properly. There's agent-facing tools like my EXP, and even new agent-facing tools that are AI powered or centric, like Mira. And we have a CTO, an awesome CTO, Carrie Lysenko, who oversees all of that work.

And then in my position, what's cool is I get to just simply focus exclusively on what's next, on what could possibly transform the way that we operate as a company, transform the level of service that we can provide for agents, since agents are, that's our only customer at the XP, essentially. That's how we see it. We don't have franchisees. The buyers and sellers are, you know, those are the customers of our agents. We just focus on building the best possible platform for agents and team leaders

and any type of real estate business to operate within. So there's just a massive opportunity. given what's happening with emerging technology is sort of the charge, right, to focus on emerging technology. There is just one to focus on at the moment, and that is AI. And so it's a lot of prototyping,

R&D, understanding and, forging partnerships with startups and established, you know, leading AI labs and things like that, you know, leveraging the scale of EXP, and really pulling out all the stops to figure out and effectively be ready for, you know, what's next, essentially, right? So the biggest way that I, the thing that I like to do

is approach it from a first principle standpoint. I like to think about if I were going to start EXP over today or if I were going to start a real estate business or team myself today, how would I do it? How would I build it and forget everything that I know about how those organizations run today. Just a clean sheet of paper, knowing what I know about AI today.

Like what came out this week, right? What Google is announcing at their next conference right now, you know, how would I build it? And then you end up with this ideal state that ignores the way that teams are built or that even the company of EXP is built today, what software we run, all of that. You've got this ideal state now of what you would do.

The people that would be there, the systems that would run, the AI agents that would be providing service around the clock, that sort of stuff. And then you know where we are today. And the greater that difference is, the more work there is to do, right? The greater that distance between your new ideal first principle brokerage state and the brokerage as it is today or your team as it is today or your just solo agent business as it is today, the more work that you know that you need to do because somebody

will start that ideal first principles brokerage or team or, you know, solo agent in your, in your area. And you do not want to have to reactively compete against them. You want to beat them them to that. This is fantastic. Yeah, that's the, that's how I look at it every day when I wake up. And that's, that's sort of the work on our plate. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. And, you know, I just had so many thoughts around that number one, the fact that you are in the position that you have and that this position exists, like you said, in this corporation, there are other corporations that, you know, have real estate and, you know, are doing real estate and are not necessarily spending the money for this whole department that you have. And just the fact that, you know, I know Glenn,

Glenn Sanford as a whole is really forward thinking and this idea of first principles. And I think we're probably introducing a lot of our audience. to that idea right now. And all I can think of is how about, you know, take your household, take your life, take your, you know, relationships, take your daily operations as an individual or an entrepreneur or a CEO or an ice cream shop owner and look at, here's the world I'm in today. What if I could, if I could start my company from scratch today, what would I say? What would I do? How would it look? Tools, what I use? How would I advertise? You know, how? How would I even establish myself to capture market share?

I absolutely love this because, and we haven't talked about this yet, I don't know, 45 guests in and nobody said this. So I really love that you did. And I also love for the corporation that as a whole, you know, this is the value that we're getting, is that every day you're going, this is where we're at now. How can I make it that this corporation is there? And like you said, that gap, if I were to make it today, versus where we were established at or where we're at today,

there's a difference there. And if there's a difference is time to roll up the sleeves, you know, and get to work. I love it. Right. Right. And it's something I would challenge everybody to do and sit down by yourself and question every single thing.

If you say you're going to do something the same way, really red team that and ask why. Do we really need that? Could we build that ourselves? Would we be better doing it? You know, so on and so forth. Anyways, yeah, I spent a whole other podcasts. No, but I love that.

Yeah, it's almost like any one of these concepts we could sit there and spend an hour on. There's something that, you know, that you mentioned. And that's, you know, the agent tools and things like that. You know, mirror is fascinating. You know, I'm guilty of probably not using mirror as much as, you know, I could or should. But I'll just mention one, you know, and by the way, you guys should go to the rallies. If you are any ex-p, please go to the rallies because you'll get to see people like Seth speak in person. I've seen Glenn Sanford speak in person at a Seattle.

Seattle rally a year ago. And he mentioned this thing called Fixer. And he was so passionate about it that I literally loaded into my phone while he was talking. And I consider myself a fairly slow adopter of tech, just personally. But, you know, I have people who work for me that I say, okay, you know, find out about that. So I want to be in the know very quickly. But personally, myself, I may be more comfortable with a system that's older. And immediately, Fixer got into my email and it made my life easier on day one. And every single day since, and it's been a year, my life is easier. My workflow is easier. And I can absolutely crush through my emails every day because of that one little app. And now I know it's like so yesterday, you know, because now we have Claude Co-work and all the things. And I heard to speak about this a little bit. But I have to tell you, just even that one thing, if people can adopt putting something in their email, that helps them sort into buckets or, you know, be able to pre-draft a response using your voice,

which then you can go through and modify. Boy, it's amazing. It truly is. It truly is amazing. So there's a great tool. If you're, if you are an agent at EXP and you're a capper or icon, you get Fixer for free.

Yes. You know, for included is the proper. And that was, yeah, that was like a great, a great partnership with a very young company that has since blown up quite a bit. But very, very cool tool.

Yeah, that helps you response emails way, way easier, pre-drafts all your responses, learns from you and so on and so forth, is really, really cool. Yeah, it is amazing. You know, what are maybe some other tools that if you said, okay, let's take any business owner any entrepreneur or a real estate agent. And, you know, what are some of the things that you see that they should probably be thinking about using? And, you know, maybe, you know, even if it's a type of things. So like something that helps you with email might be Fixer or Claude Co-work. What other types of things do you see

that maybe an early adopter or sorry, slow adopter like myself should be thinking about? So, yeah, so Fixer is an easy one. And that's FYX-E-R because you just connect it to your email and It's already saving you time. But like you said, Claude is another, if you're going to have one tool today, I would get Clod. It does so much. If you've used ChatGBT, BT, move to Clod. It's just a much better experience. Their models just seem to be better and more enterprise ready.

Their only focus is on the enterprise. So if you're using it for business, it's just fantastic. for that. So you've got chat, you've got, like you mentioned, Co-Work, which is another sort of mode or layer inside of it. Co-work lets you connect, use these connectors inside of the settings area to connect the different pieces of software that you use, things like Canva, your email, your calendar, if you use Notion. And then, most excitingly, it can actually use and control your computer and browser. So you set the permissions, you set the sites, it can go to, the files it can access. But if you get it configured, you can sort of create a new project inside of Co-work

for whatever it is that you may want it to do. Let's say it's a task that involves creating, let's say it's like a task for taking a new listing or something like that. And you can just go to the Co-Work project and kick it off, give it the address or something, and then it will be able to do things like Total Example here.

Use your browser to pull up the information about the new listing from your CRM. So it'll go into, you'll see it using your browser, going into your CRM, finding the info, pulling it out, using a connector to create the flyer in Canva, which is another benefit. Canva is another benefit that EXB agents get, by the way. This is true.

And just do all this work for you, right? And it's not the fastest thing in the world, but it literally doesn't involve you once you kick it off. And it's doing all this stuff agentically. And this is, I think, a very good example of where things are going, right? Because this was something, not only did it take time to do all of this stuff, but you're hearing, you know, you're going to your email, you're going to Canva, you're going to your MLS, you're going to your CRM, right? And increasingly, as humans, well, who use AI, will have to go into fewer and fewer pieces of software. And those pieces of software will still exist for quite some time.

but increasingly our AI and our AI agents, not AI real estate agents, but just the AI that can do stuff is called agenic AI that can work autonomously. Those will use the software. Yes, and I was going to define it for the audience actually. You know, what is an AI agent? And what does that mean? Yeah. You know, like you're explaining. And I know a lot of people are just like, wow, what is happening?

You know, this is incredible. And we've seen news about it. It's super cool. very few people have really, that I know, have really gone in and created an AI agent or used one. Yeah. And, you know, there's a news, what was it, a news report that said someone created a collection of AI agents. And within whatever period of time, some of them had started a religion and another group of them had, you know, I think we're complaining about their, you know, human programmers. And so it's really interesting, just kind of let them create a community.

and, you know, this is very science fiction and yet we're living in this reality now. So can you define, you know, what really does all this mean in terms of like AI agent? What does that mean to a person? So I will, yeah, so two thoughts on that. One, so yeah, here's what an AI agent is.

So it's a, well, I'll just, I'll preface it by saying the first thing is that if you've used Claude, if you've used ChatGBTGBT recently, you're using an AI agent already. And an AI agent is, think of it as an AI that has some autonomy and decision-making

skills and access to what's known as tools. So if you use Cloud or ChatGBTBT and you query it to do some and ask it to some information, you'll start to see a chain of thought dating back several months. You'll see a chain of thought. Like it's deciding

based on what your query is if it needs to search the web, for instance. And you'll see it search the web. So that's a decision it made that it does need to search the web. It checked what tools it has access to. One of them is web search, and then you'll see it using its web search tool. So that's like an example of an AI agent.

And it's a very buzzy term. And there's a lot of consultants making a lot of money, implementing and training people on what they are. And yes, there's a very buzzy term. And yes, there's like very powerful examples of having like a personal all-purpose AI agent, like OpenClaas, something you may have heard of. But what I would, what I would say is it is, it is what's happening right now. Like it is just what AI, the AI is that we're all using is morphing into.

It's all-agentic AI. And it's what makes possible getting work done. Like having a get work done what we all want, what we all were problem. is agentic AI that will allow it to happen. But I wouldn't get too caught up in, you know, am I using a agentic AI? Am I leveraging agentic AI enough? Because I know it's overwhelming and it's hard to,

it's going to be impossible to sort of like keep up. And I would, I just wouldn't let it get to you because it just like the rest of the stuff is going to fade into just how we work. And we're not going to need to know if we're using agentic AI or, or if we're using not agentic AI or if this and that right, there's all kinds of different pieces of software architecture, let's say. Like, we don't need to know if the software that we're using,

our CRM is using service-oriented architecture, right? We just know that we're using the CRM. And I think that that's just something I would encourage people to do. It's just a little bit of a paradigm or a perspective shift in that all the AI we're using is agentic. for the most part. It's very powerful. Just like as we evolved, we learned to use tools. AI is evolving and learning to use tools.

So it can do stuff for us. And that's like, that's kind of the big takeaway about it. And the most fascinating thing, really, just the fact that it is evolving. Very exciting. I don't think we've had a tool previously that was self-evolving. Obviously, we programmed it to do that. It is amazing. Yeah, like if you have a ratchet, it doesn't like learn to be a better ratchet.

You know, if you have a computer, it's generally right. It doesn't learn to be a better computer. And yet we have this tool that can learn to be better. Yeah. And I really like that you were able to, and I have never heard that to say that, in fact, they are already agents, but it makes perfect sense because like you said, they are making autonomous decisions already. ChatGPT is making a decision on every sentence.

that it's sending back to you when you ask it to clarify a document or whatever it is. Personally, I jumped very quickly from chat GPT to Gemini because at EXP convention last year, there was a gentleman. I can't remember what product or thing, but he said he wasn't reppping it, but he just said, you know, first of all, you know, please start using Gemini. You know, for him, he was saying use Gemini instead of chat GPD just because of the amount of information it can kind of carry back and forth. And he said it was very robust in comparison.

in comparison. And, you know, everyone in my household has very quickly switched and we're using it for everything. It's just unbelievable instead of Google and Google is now, of course, AI. So it's happened very quickly if you search a subject or a thing instead of a list of sites that might come up on a search, you're now actually hearing the AI summary first about what you're asking about. It's really, really helpful and robust. It's totally. It's helpful, robust. Yeah, we used to have to click through all those blue links and read everything on the site and make the decision, you know, and you still can. Yeah. But a lot of times, you just want the answer, you know, that you're looking for and

that AI overview is what most people take away. You know, they ask a question, they get an answer, and the AI agent, the Gemini AI agent in that case, does all that research for you and does that work for you and just a huge time saver. And then what you do with that, with that save time is, is up to you. You can do more work. You can go outside as well. Yes. And by the way, you can, people go, oh, are we still going to be humans at the end of this?

Well, yeah, I mean, I'd like to think, like you said, we can go outside and, you know, hug a tree or pet a dog or something. You know, we can maybe get a little bit more of our lives back and go play with our kids, throw a ball. Yeah. It's really very ideal when you think about it. Yeah, I was actually kind of surprised that I was done with my job by, you know, 530 yesterday. I had just blown through all my emails and that can be a tedious task that can take me a long time as a manager with 18 agents. It's just, it seems to be, you know, the email inbox never ends. But I love that you pointed all this out. And I wanted to ask you kind of like on a speed round, you know, if you needed to, you know, build a website today and you were an entrepreneur. and you know, you started this new team or concept or whatever. Should you go hire a company to help you build a website or should you talk to AI and, you know, which one or, you know, what, what, you know, who's on the cutting edge of really talking to it, like you say, talking to it.

And it just creates something amazing for you. Very timely question. So for about a year at EXP, we've had a enterprise contract with a tool and company. called Lovable, which is a platform that lets you just, yeah, describe what you want it to build, and it builds it. And over the last year, it's incredible to see how far that has come. In fact, then, XP founder Glenn built what's known as the hub at EXP. It was the sort of the initial version of what we all use as staff and agents to interact as a community.

So you've got sort of if you think about it in the Facebook equivalent of like groups and a wall and stories and stuff like that. Plus messaging the entire package Glenn built to MVP status and then handed off to my amazing team of builders of innovation enablement leads. We've got to shout them out. Tanner, Talley, Shannon and Nicole have taken it from there since then and flushed out this incredible tool that we all now use. day-to-day to communicate at EXB. Yeah. Yeah, with mobile apps and everything. We don't need Slack anymore.

All kinds of amazing things have come from that. And that's an example of one thing that more than 250 non-technical staff members have been building in the last year at EXB. A ton of software, websites and software. So they use a combination of lovable and clod code. Those are two tools that you could use to build. to build basically anything. So should you build everything?

That is a good question. And it comes down to your needs of that software or website. And what else you might be doing with your time in that amount of time and the cost of a vendor who might do it for you. And how well that vendor will deliver something that fits your exact needs? Because the beauty of building something yourself using these tools is that not only are they becoming more powerful and easy to use, they allow you to build something leveraging your subject matter expertise, right? So you know your business better than any vendor ever could. And if there are some specialized things about it that you want your software to be able to own and sort of enable, then you may be better off building it yourself.

That may not be the case, right? And in some cases, it may just be like, I think that the vendor, there's not anything that's like so different about, you know, and I can communicate with them enough. And they're going to take the time to understand my business and needs and uses enough that, yeah, anyways, that it might make sense to go with the vendor. So it is a very good question. The build versus buy decision is very different than it was a year ago. You can, and in some cases, should build, not just because of the cost savings, like I said, just because you might come away with a That said, it also, the same thing that allows us to move quickly or anybody, any non-technical

subject matter expert to build quickly, that same technology is available to software vendors, too. So the ones that are leaning into it are able to deliver hyper-customized software at hyper-fast speeds, but not all of them are doing it. Some are still moving the old-fashioned way, which is unfortunate. Yeah, and by the way, that's an interesting point as well. Yeah, you might go, you know, hey, are you guys AI adjacent? And are you building in that way? Or, and, you know, what does that cost savings that possibly is reflected or even just speed of implementation and ability to modify or whatever that is? Yes, because websites or anything like that, you tend to need something that's going to be modifiable over time to match what your business is doing at any given time. And I really liked the comment you made. about, you know, just having something that is even more perhaps fitted to you, your, you know, your business style, business, a human and expertise, which I thought was

amazing. Well, I know that I just have a few more questions for you. You know, if you were advising a leader who wanted to grow in an AI-shaped world without, you know, losing, your judgment, your voice, you know, or your competitive edge, what would be maybe the three non-negotiables or sort of the decision-making framework for that entrepreneur? Well, that's a very good question. Think that the, and yeah, so most of my history was as an entrepreneur

and, you know, solo founder most of the time. And that was so hard and such a disadvantage to be solo and or have a small team for so long. You were just at such a disadvantage. And that is no longer the case. So I think that for today's entrepreneurs and startup founders, it is important to lean into, yeah, pretty much like I'm doing here, first principles approach to building your business. And forget just the way that people have done it before or the incumbents have done it.

Yes. And take advantage and leverage what is available today. But maintain and resist the urge to sort of. of outsource to AI what makes you special, right? Your superpowers, keep doing those. Or use AI to magnify them, if that makes sense. Absolutely. There's a lot that it can do, but there's a lot that makes an entrepreneur special as well, and they should lean into that and try to leverage AI for the rest of it, I would say, as much as possible. There's a lot of great examples of companies that are doing that right now that are building incredibly lean,

scalable, profitable organizations, companies like Cursor, which is an AI tool that software developers can use as a tiny team and hundreds of millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue. Wow. And they're able to do that because of how much AI they've layered into their customer service and software development, lifecycle, and all of those things. that are very time consuming and tend not to scale without a huge amount of expense, let's say.

So yeah, there's a lot of cool examples like that out there. So yeah, in a nutshell, all that babbling. Yeah. It's good. You mentioned you had a lot of coffee at the beginnings. A little joke there. I've learned a lesson. So yeah, so I want to, I love this

because this discussion has been so fascinating to get to leverage what you know for a brief period of time. And I know I've kind of kept it kind of technological. But I wanted to ask you, you know, what caused your rise from solopreneur and in those ways that you were? You know, how did your sort of, you know, what's your origin story, right? If we're talking Marvel heroes.

Yeah. And so, you know, how did your early life influences lead you to this entrepreneurial world that you were in? And then how did that inform your decision to segue really into, you know, this technology that you obviously love and are so well adapted to and then going into that corporate world? Yeah, it's a great question. So I grew up in New York. My dad was the third generation. My dad and I'll go with a third generation owners of a moving and storage company in New York City.

It's the second oldest corporation in the West Village. It was called Seagler Brothers Moving in Storage. And so I kind of came from generations of entrepreneurs there. Yes. On my mom's side, my grandmother came to the U.S. to escape the Holocaust as a little kid. You know, like ran away from an orphanage and, you know, crossed the ocean and did a lot of scary stuff. I then, you know, made a life for herself in New York, you know. And so I grew up with hearing stories like that and seeing my parents, you know,

working and, you know, and not ever taking the typical sort of nine to five path. And so that was sort of just what I knew, you know. And then they were always involved with real estate. There was always something that they did. and, you know, as buyers and sellers and stuff, and before I was born, my mom was an agent herself. And then when I graduated from college, I just decided to become an agent. You know, I was around so many real estate agents from all their transactions and stuff in it. And though I was a tech person, I wanted to stay in the town that I went to college in, which was Charleston,

South Carolina, and there just wasn't tech. That was interesting there at that time. And so I went into real estate and I learned the business. And it was super hard, but I did it for a while. And And I started the brokerage that just did not work at all, but I built a lot of cool tech for it. And other brokerages were interested in that in the tech, you know. And so there were like, can we license that? And I was like, that became the business pivoted. I was able to sell that little business. And that was like my first startup exit.

And then that just started the whole sort of snowball from there. It was a buzzy little startup. And then even that exit was kind of buzzy and everyone learned my name. I worked as the CTO of the company that acquired it for just a year. And then I went out of my own and built a whole bunch of software for a whole bunch of the names that we know in the real estate industry. And then did another startup towards the tail end of that. That was a little bit bigger and VC backed that one and built a team and then sold that. And so again, people sort of knew my name that during.

that time is when I met Glenn as like he was a small startup founder at that time of a little company called the EXP. And we just stayed in touch ever since then. And then as EXP was starting to blow up, you know, during the long time that it was in the process of blowing up, it was in 2019 where we caught up and I had, I was exited of that other, that VC back startup. And, and we just decided like, maybe there's an opportunity here. You know, innovation is a core value of EXB. Everybody that works for the company, it's just something that's in the DNA,

even the age, all through the agents, especially through the agents. It's just an innovative group of people. And Glenn wanted to maintain that culture. And he was like, maybe, you know, let's just start out. He wasn't even totally sure, I think, to be honest, exactly what my day to day would be. But he was like, just kind of keep doing what you're doing.

but inside the ego system of EXP, just keep inventing stuff and, you know, building cool things. And that's how it started. And then it all sort of went from there, you know, sort of worked my way up through the seven years that I've been here now. It's amazing.

All the way to this. What a rise to, you know, I think it's so fascinating, the Sepler Brothers moving company. And you find frequently that people who are entrepreneurs or serial entrepreneurs, as you have been, they do come from or have seen someone modeling that, you know, in their family and they can

kind of wrap their, wrap their brain around it. And I love that you also had that, you know, college background and that tech degree. So you were always sort of just like a tech person in realtor disguise, you know, for a while there. Well, you know what's, you know what? What's interesting, Heather, is I actually didn't get a tech degree. I'm self-taught tech just as a geeky kid and always was a coder. And in college, I ended up being a communications major. And I feel like that's part of being well-rounded and becoming more of a generalist,

even as like a solo startup founder, doing all the roles. And as a real estate agent, more than anything, you have to do all the roles. Very true. And I think that that's where you want to be today. The more of a generalist that you can be, given that you can be leveraging AI

for so many specific specialties in your business, the more of a generalist are those are the people you want. And I feel like I stumbled into that. No, but, you know, that was absolutely brilliant because this idea that, you know, it's really the specialization, you're talking about the depth and breadth of knowledge. You know, I was asking, Jim and I, I don't know, late at night when, you know, one day I was saying, you know, how, you know, when will the singularity occur, you know, and I'm kind of geeking out on it. And it goes, well, our limitation, our biggest limitation for AI as AI, yeah, because it was speaking for itself, is that the fact that, you know, the speed at which humans generate more information, more knowledge.

Because it said, and I said, well, what do you mean? And it said, well, we've already read everything that humans have created. We, you know, that's it. And I went, oh, my God, you know. And, but it's incredible. So you're talking about a specialist has breadth and depth. of information. No one will ever have more breadth and depth of information than what AI has. And so you can leverage that and become a specialist in whatever. But I love what you said about

being a generalist. And because, and you having been, by the way, a communications major, and I'm glad you corrected me on that. But it's, we still need to communicate with other humans. Humans thrive off of human communication. Humans learn off of other humans. We need. We need. We need all those visual cues. We could have learned everything in the world by books for a really long time, but instead we go to these classrooms or Zoom rooms and we learn from other humans because we really thrive on storytelling and we thrive on humans explaining things to us. And so just the fact that you mentioned, you know, be a generalist, leverage that incredible technology and information from AI, but be just a really great human. And I would think, like,

a really great human communicator that you can go and take these tools and have the warmth and feeling of a human towards another human. That's right. That's right. And I think increasingly that's what people are going to be looking for, you know, as they chat more and more with a robot. I think that those moments in, you know, in talking to somebody who's alive and authentic and, you know, has experiences and feelings, that's what that's what people are going to. be looking for more. And yeah, that's the, that's the thing to lean into, I think. I love it. Yeah, let AI run as much as your business as possible, but be you and be out there and, yeah, help people. Love that. Well, so how can people find you? How can the agents and others, you know, how can they

learn from you? How can agents, by the way, with the EXP, plug into this new information, you know, that's coming out all the time and ways that they can learn? If you are an agent at E-X-P, get into the hub. The hub is going to be where you can talk to anybody, including me, by chat, and also keep tabs on all the cool things that are happening and coming out. And that would be at, you can get there by hubhub.exprailty.com. And you'll be able to download a mobile app from there if you are using one, or if you want to be.

And then, yeah, aside from that, on Instagram, just my handle is Seth Siegler. pretty easy. No spaces or dashes or anything. And yeah, that, and then you can contact me there anytime. I love geeking out. Yeah, anything else and meeting new people and stuff. So yeah, we'd love to love to chat anytime. Fantastic. Last quick question. Did you have a book recommendation? We kind of didn't stumble into any on the podcast. I thought it'd be fun. If maybe you had a favorite book, you know, you've been a serial entrepreneur. So is there something about, you know, leadership or even technology or anything that you tend to

recommend to people or that you really like. My favorite business book of all time is called Blue Ocean Strategy. And I read it a long time ago. I'm due for a reread. I've read it several times. And it's just my favorite book about business and kind of a mindset to business where in a nutshell, we all get just caught up in not taking a step back and just completely. competing in what, you know, what's known as a red ocean where it's like everyone's doing it the

same way you're trying to do it incrementally different or better or something like that. And it's just like incredibly competitive. You're in this race to the bottom. And the blue ocean strategy is to take a step back and look at it from, you know, from 30,000 feet or whatever and see if there's a different way of doing it where there isn't even any competition, but just, you know, meets people where they are, where they want to be spending their money or hiring for your particular talent. There's a bunch of good examples in there,

the original incarnation of Southwest Airlines, and then someone so forth, I won't spoil it, actually. So I do recommend that book. I just think it's great. And then for one more, a little bonus, for one that's a little bit more current, our CFO, Jesse Hill, recommended this one.

It's called Range, The Rise of the Generalist. So it speaks to a little bit more about when we were just talking about how there is just this, what was counterintuitive, you know, this sort of value of people who are generalists and can guide AI, you know, in all of the specialties that it will be handling, where culturally we've all been sort of taught to specialize, specialize, specialize in something,

and that's a little bit of a shift now. So that book is called Range. Fantastic. And I love that you shared that one as well. It made me think about, you know, this, the concept, you know, during the Enlightenment or something or even after where we say like, you know, Renaissance Man or, you know, someone who kind of had dabbles or even a relevant amount of knowledge in a variety of subjects. And I think in ancient times it was called Sophists. And, you know, they would have this, this, you know, wide range of things that they understood or knew about. And, you know, it's, I love that we're coming.

into an era when maybe that is, in fact, of great value. And in fact, we certainly are in a renaissance at this moment in AI. So super prescient on that second book. I love it. So thank you so much, Seth. Audience, please remember that you are going to, you know, stay tuned and go to the website so that you can access our episode guide where you can actually, you know, use some of these takeaways and you'll have a worksheet where you can implement them in your own life and your own careers. So stay tuned for that and for our recap. Seth, I just want to thank you so much. It has been absolutely phenomenal to be able to leverage such an amazing mind in business at this time, in technology, at this confluence at a moment when we are just launching into all of this

incredible world around us. And I'm just so happy and proud that we have you at EXP to help shepherd us into that. And so I'm really, really grateful for your time today. And thank you. Thanks, Heather. Thank you so much for having me on. This was super fun, and it's been great getting to know you as well. And yeah, anything I can ever help out with, I'm here. Love it. Awesome. Well, folks, that's it for today's podcast.

Thank you so much for joining us on Women Who Rise, the Success Podcast for Ambitious Women. Today, Seth taught us, number one, use first principles to create the ideal business for today. and then pivot to that. So basically taking the concept that if you knew nothing, had never started a business before, had no other past examples of other people's businesses for whatever it is that you're doing and you could just simply create from scratch

using all the tools and all the things and all the market conditions you know about today, what would that ideal business be and write it down? And then look at the difference between what you have today and what that ideal is. and then go to work. Roll up your sleeves and work on that. Second, he said, resist the urge to outsource you to AI. Your uniqueness is your superpower. And he argues that it is that human component that is the part

where your clients love working with you or whatever it is that you do and understanding that you don't want to outsource that, you know, your superpowers, your top values, your top values, you add for your clients, those are the things you don't want to delegate to AI. You want to keep those as things that you yourself are performing, whether that's face-to-face contact, you know, your voice, your essence in what it is you do in your business. Make sure that you are not leveraging out the superpowers and the core of who you are, because who you are is what's making your business so special for the clients that choose to work with you. And then third, leverage AI for everything else. Just talk to it. Just ask it how to help you. Hey, AI, I don't know how to do this. Can you teach me how to do this? Can you tell me how, what tools should I use? What AI should I use? And it's going to tell you, as Seth and I discussed on the episode, we're in a really fascinating time in the world. And that is a time that our tools are learning themselves how to get better all the time. And they are teaching us. They are capable.

of teaching us how to use them. This has never really happened before, and it is such a really unique and amazing times. It is all new, but that doesn't make it hard. It's just unfamiliar and just go for it. And then forth, use, you know, we talked about specific apps. I wanted to kind of give you guys a leg up on some technologies, since Seth is obviously living in that world.

I asked for websites. He said use Claude Code and Lovable. So if you're looking to build a website, for yourself, you can actually leverage the new way of doing that, and that would be probably starting with Loveable and then also using Claude Co-Work as well. We talked about making your life easier in email. You can certainly use Fixer for that. That's FYX-E-R. That is phenomenal as a software to use. I've used it myself for a year. It saves a ton of time. Some people are now using Claude Co-work to create workflows that are very similar to what Fixer

does, putting your emails in different buckets and pre-drafting responses in your own voice using your past email examples and things like that. So you can do that as well using Claude Co-work, but if you don't want to create that, you might just start with Fixer and then go like that. It is pretty robust and it gets better all the time. And then for your agentic workflows, so you want AI agents to do work for you, you know, take this email, put it over here, go into Canva, make a flyer, all these kinds of things across apps and websites. For that, he said Claude Co-work for sure. And then, lastly, for your large language models, use Claude or Gemini for your research

and writing papers and creating or doing anything with language, knowledge, that kind of thing, the written word. So finally, visit our website to find our episode guide and worksheet. that will help you use these tips to take action in your own life. Please like and subscribe and join us everywhere at podcasts or streamed. We can't wait to bring you more incredible content every week so that you can rise in your own lives and careers. Again, thank you so much.

Heather Manzi, signing off.