The Pomp Podcast - Natalia Karayaneva, CEO of Propy: How Blockchain is Transforming Real Estate

Episode Date: February 7, 2020

Natalia Karayaneva is the Founder and CEO of Propy, a Silicon Valley prop-tech company revolutionizing home purchasing globally by deploying smart contracts on the blockchain. In this conversation, Natalia and Anthony discuss growing up in Russia and Bulgaria, the current fundraising environment for blockchain companies, how real estate markets are evolving globally, and where international investor demand has gone for U.S. based real estate.  American Airlines-----airline tickets, cheap flights, vacation packages and American Airlines AAdvantage bonus mile offers at AA.com. McDonald's-----It's a good time for the great taste of McDonald's. Just look for the Golden Arches and pick up a meal that will have you saying "Mhm I'm lovin’ it". -----If you enjoyed this episode and want to stay updated on everything Bitcoin, blockchain, and crypto. Check out Off the Chain newsletter by visiting offthechain.substack.com and join 35,000+ other investors currently subscribed to my daily investor letter.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Natalie Karayaneva is the founder and CEO of Propi, an automation platform for real estate transactions for homebuyers, brokerages, and title companies. In this conversation, we discuss growing up in Russia and Bulgaria, the current fundraising environment for blockchain companies, how real estate markets are evolving globally, and where international investor demand has gone for US-based real estate. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. But before we get into the episode, I want to talk about our two sponsors today. That's right,

one of them is American Airlines. They're the only company that I trust with my life while in the air. Head on over to aa.com, get you an Advantage number, and start booking flights. They go anywhere you want to go. Seriously though, American's the only airline that I fly. If you head on over to aa.com, they got all kinds of flights. You could fly to Miami. You could fly to China. You could fly to Europe, South America. They probably even got one to Antarctica. Head on over to aa.com. I'm executive platinum. Get upgraded every time. But if you fly anything else, that's all right. I'll see you at the airport. I'll just be getting on the nice planes that American. So AA.com. Now our second sponsor today, McDonald's. That's right. Mickey D's.

Everyone knows the best restaurant in America. Why? They're consistent, they're cheap, and they got great food. There's not a person listening to this that's going to tell me they've gone and eaten a Big Mac or a McFlurry or a McChicken or how about a large fry? You walk out of McDonald's every time saying, damn, that was good. That's right. McDonald's. There's one on every street corner, head on over to McDonald's. So go check out American Airlines and McDonald's, the two sponsors for today's episode. Now, before we get into the episode, though, don't forget, Off The Chain is not only a podcast. Every morning, I also wake up and I write a newsletter to 40,000 investors analyzing the Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrency industry. Head

on over to offthechain.substack.com. That's offthechain.substack.com and sign up today. Now let's get into the episode with Natalie and see what she's got to say. All right, guys. Bang, bang. Coming to you live from the new off the chain studio. Not really. We just moved the office around. But I'm here with Natalie. Thanks so much for coming to do this. Sure. Thank you so much for inviting me. You got your propi shirt on, ready to go. Absolutely. I love your new office. ABC always be closing. I like it. All right. Let's let's jump right in. You are not from the United States and you've got an awesome story. So you were born in Russia.

and then eventually ended up in Bulgaria. Kind of tell us how, what were you doing in Russia and then in Bulgaria? Yeah, absolutely. So I was studying software engineering in Russia. And at the age of 19, I moved to Bulgaria, established my first engineering company. That's how my entrepreneurial career started. and for 15 years I was building and constructing real estate in Bulgaria and then I thought well actually I want again to build software and so knowing all the problems I've experienced in

real estate I relocated myself to the U.S. four years ago and this is how the story of Propy started. All right let's talk about school in Russia. Okay. What is that like? I'm assuming it's like school in most other countries. Absolutely. I think in America, we have this vision of like Russian kids going to school and sitting there from 5 a.m. to like 10 p.m. and just being told, learn, learn how to code and spy on the U.S. Right. Yeah. You can't say that joke. All the Americans are now turning off the podcast. Wait, but no. What is that like? Actually, it's a great point that recently we had one account at Propy that we didn't pass the background check with them because of my Russian background. They were very resistant to give data to a Russian-founded company.

Crazy. All right. So, what's school like in Russia as you study computer science? Yeah, so it's an international university of nature and computer science close to Moscow. And the beauty of this university is that the first two years you have to learn many subjects, including software engineering, even if your major like mine was environmental scientists. And then the others were lawyers, economists. They had to learn how to code. Oh, everyone learns.

Yeah, the first two years, everyone had to learn how to code. And I just loved it. That was my first experience with a computer. Before that, I never touched the computer, even though I had a dream to do it. But this led me to actually transition from the environmental studies to coding, engineering department. And I used to help all those artistic majors to code and then do their work the first year. That's awesome. All right.

So you learn how to code and you pretty much know, hey, I'm going to go do this instead of the environmental work. Why go to Bulgaria? Our university was international. You're putting that in air quotes. Why are you putting that in air quotes? Because the only international students we had was from other post-communist country, which was a Bulgarian group. And so, yeah, I met my now ex-husband in the university. I relocated myself to Bulgaria.

And yeah, so this is how I ended up in Bulgaria. so most people know that uh i'm fond of bulgaria now uh now that uh polina is in my life and uh i've been to bulgaria numerous times where in uh where in the country were you in sofia um i used to live in sofia in plov div in the on the sea coast uh right now our engineering team sits in sofia but before that i was constructing resorts on the sea coast so it was a lot of fun it's nice there yeah it is beautiful you you know that yeah uh so what is that like like how how do you go from software development to building resorts yeah um so my first company was in a small garage and i was um coding simple applications primarily web

applications for small businesses and some real estate developers and then bulgaria as you know it's a new European Union country. They announced that they will join the European Union. So, suddenly, those British investors were coming to Bulgaria to acquire properties and build. And I was looking at the couple of those buildings appearing on the sea coast, and I thought, okay, it looks like it's a very capital-intense and lucrative business. So, I went to UK, I went to Russia, Latvia, talked to potential customers, figured out what they want, and told to my engineers okay now we're gonna acquire land do awesome renderings of future buildings and sell them cross borders so this is what made me to transition our engineering team to

so you took the engineers that you had yeah you would buy land yeah then you would have the engineers create building renderings just drawings of them basically they were the the most beautiful sophisticated rendering and people were buying those real estate pieces cross borders without coming and seeing even the site so the site was empty so you would sell the land or you would sell them on investing to build the property like to build out the building sell condos so it's a resort full of condos with like spas restaurants and so on so they would buy a future unit that i would uh and then you would build it yeah and i would build it within one or two years and normally they would be all very happy with execution that everything is just like it

it was uh projected and designed uh for the pictures but everything was tech driven like we had our own crm system we had programmers to make sure uh where we're having the tracking system of our customers uh and that was 2005. yeah and um so one of the theories i have is is that Bulgarian real estate is going to make a resurgence. Do you agree? Well, the reason I decided to relocate myself from Bulgaria is actually my company was able to drive all that interest to Bulgaria from Russia, Latvia.

So the UK was interested there anyway. They love real estate globally. but then 2009 and 10 the interest started to decline so there is there is no more such an interest from foreign investors not only uh because um there is a decline of those international home buyers but also the economic situation the political is is really depressing there um so yeah as soon as there is no such um an influence from direct foreign investment the local uh community also stopped investing in real estate and it's very affordable uh so yeah i would agree that uh the real estate industry they won't uh see any more oh you think they won't see

any more uh interest no all right here's my theory ready tell me yeah so before instagram nobody really knew about iceland yeah right and then all of a sudden some people go and they take a picture in iceland and they put it on instagram and oh my god looks so beautiful yeah and now iceland's popping off like everyone loves iceland yeah and there's a bunch of these places around the world where that's happened bulgaria is a place that a lot of people don't know about they couldn't find it on a map you know etc but they have the sea they've got the mountains etc at some point over the next five years my guess is that people are going to quote unquote discover bulgaria yeah and then they're going to all start going there and it's like this whole thing so this

what i did in 2005 you did that 15 years ago yeah i actually opened the eyes of russians which is huge population i opened their eyes to bulgaria i invited tv shows there reporters uh influencers like yourself so what might happen now i'm not a russian influencer yeah but what what may happen now is an american influencer will drive an american interest to bulgaria and maybe we'll we'll see a new wave in Bulgaria to be discovered by Americans. Yeah, I think it's gonna happen. Yeah, let's do that.

All right, so how much did a condo cost at one of these resorts? Oh, it's super cheap, like $50,000. $50,000 for a condo, and that was in 2005? Right now you can buy property for $50,000 with one bedroom. Oh, okay, so now it's 50,000, even then it was even probably cheaper than...

Back then, for example, I could sell a property in 2007 for $30,000. Next year, it would be $90,000, so 3X. Wow. We did that with my property. That's pretty crazy. Yeah. Sounds like some crypto investments. Absolutely.

It was that hype of a market, and we were part of the creation of it because it's a beautiful country. It's a really beautiful country with the seacoast, the mountains, the talent. the food everything is natural organic uh also it could become sophie is becoming a technical hub there are many talented google there's a bunch of places uber hewlett packard and the engineers there are very talented and very disciplined and they work hard they don't complain like the people in america sometimes absolutely 24 7 yeah all right so how How do you go from building the resorts to running a real estate technology company?

Yeah. So I've met many high net worth individuals acquiring properties in Bulgaria, Dubai, UK. And they all had this stress like, OK, I want to buy property in London and also I want to buy property in Silicon Valley. But the process is different and I'm not sure if I will be fooled. so we saw this pain and it just I got very very excited like hey we have the opportunity here a huge opportunity to automate the process and we know how to make it internationally so this how I came here for one real estate conference for the first time in America made this visa in those times it was easy and yeah

I came here and the American real estate community was very welcoming and saying you have to do it here um yeah so this is how i transitioned into the property got it and then that's when you moved to the u.s four years ago yeah what what was the first city you went to in america san francisco uh what was your uh initial impression uh you would be surprised it was very very good somehow i missed all the homeless part and all the disasters i don't know how but for the first week i kind of didn't see that uh and i love the city i love the community every single meeting i would go to in san francisco or in the bay area in the peninsula all people are so welcoming to newcomers they would ask how can we help you can we make an introduction you need to

meet this person or that person so that was a big changing environment for me because before that i considered to move to dubai or monaco or london those are all horrible places very bad what a list london dubai or monaco oh my god all right so i had a hard time to decide okay so you choose san francisco yeah right and um you knew that you were going to go try to solve this problem but had you already started prop yet or uh okay you had already started i just bought the proppy.com domain. So I knew that I want to build a global listing,

something like Zillow, but global with an ability to talk about properties with a couple of clicks. Obviously, in order to make this process with a couple of clicks, I knew that I will need hundreds of millions of dollars

to make it as a technological infrastructure. So we just started as an infrastructure, like a listing platform. Very simple. And then I started to go around and meet many, many engineers who can solve cross-border payments, who can solve paperwork and process. And this is when I got to know blockchain.

Got it. And so when you first started, you didn't have any clue that blockchain or crypto would be a part of the business. No. But quickly figured that out. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. And so tell us what exactly is Propi doing today? Yeah.

Propi today probably is the only solution that is dedicated to automate the entire home buying process. process, the closing process from the offer to recording. And the infrastructure level is powered by smart contracts, but on the front end, it's all easy to understand for the homebuyer step-by-step wizard how to acquire property. Got it. And does the same thing apply when you're selling those resort condos? I don't have to go see the property, right? Back then, they weren't looking at them today i don't need to see it because you guys are doing what like like what information are you providing me on the platform and are you guys doing like the due diligence for me to make sure that the property it says you know it is what it says or how does

that work well actually uh we are on for now our focus is a closing process which means that you've made a decision and we always recommend our customers to come and see uh the property uh But there are many cases like our first transactions were all made remotely with not even like seeing a property. So, yeah, we're just focused on the closing process. Even when I was constructing and selling properties in Bulgaria and they're cheap, many of our customers, like half of them would not come and see the property. But we always like recommend them strongly to see what they're buying and then afterwards to make the closing. Got it. Right. And so today, if I find a property that I want to buy, do I need to have that property

on Propy? Does it already have to be listed? Or I can talk to the seller and say, hey, let's go ahead and actually finalize this transaction, go on Propy, create an account, et cetera. Yeah, that's correct. So you can find a property. You may have an agent and the seller has an agent. You tell to your agent or the seller, hey, I'm ready to close and I'd love to make it securely and faster, so let's use Propy. Got it. Where does crypto come in? The crypto is coming on the smart contract level.

So every single transaction step is powered by smart contracts. And our goal is to eliminate all the manual work. Right now there are 20 participants in every deal, at least that's minimum, that has to do manual verification. And they input data manually again and again and again. And so at the point when the transaction is going to a recording, there is a 20% rate of mistakes from manual work. So where smart contracts is coming? The mission is that we're doing e-recording and ownership transfer when software detects that the payment wire transfer is executed and the paperwork is executed.

This is why every single step is handled by smart contracts. Obviously, it's not seen by the users. And for every single transaction on our platform, we have a token that unlocks the access to smart contracts. And do I need to buy the property in crypto? Like do I pay in Bitcoin or Ethereum or can I pay in dollars? You can do both. You can do any currency. We work with 40 currencies, fiat and all the cryptocurrencies.

We did transactions in Bitcoin, Ether. What's the weirdest one? uh well not the weirdest but i love this first transaction that we did 2017 the first ever blockchain uh and a power transaction what happened in ether and uh the the buyer michael errington oh that guy's horrible what a bad guy he did a good transaction though now michael's great yeah obviously i know obviously and i tried to get him to come in deals with us i'd say man let's go yeah i know he's listening to this right now he's probably laughing right now all right go ahead absolutely regards and uh she said regards

well sitting here in new york and michael being in um yeah um so the uh the transaction was fabulous in a sense that Ether were transferred to acquire property in Ukraine. The seller was in New York and the smart contract hold the funds till we get the data that the paperwork is in place and the signature with notary is approved and notary actually approved the transaction on the platform. And then once the ownership transfer happened, which we had a data on because of our governmental pilot, the smart contract released the funds to the seller and to other parties associated. So it actually disrupted the escrow function entirely. So that was the interesting part of the transaction back then. And this is what we're aiming here in the US, because the

majority of our deals here are happening with wire transfers in dollars. It's like 99.9%. And we're aiming to do the escrow function with smart contract capability. Got it. And so in that first transaction, Mike was sitting in California, the seller's sitting in New York, but the property's in Ukraine. Yeah, that's correct. That's pretty complex, but you guys can automate that. All remotely, everything automated, everything is recorded and there are hashes on smart contracts now. You can go to EtherScan, find the transaction, see the movement of money.

Yeah, that's pretty good. Look out 20 years. What does this grow into? Where are you kind of building towards? Yeah. In 20 years, we envisioned Propi.com to be an international e-commerce platform where people are finding this property they want to see and to buy. They would see it and they would come and they would have an experience like on Amazon. They go through a number of clicks and they got the deed registered right there on the platform.

So very easy way to transfer money. You would put your bank account, if banks still exist in the way they exist today, and you would get your deed. No worries, no anxiety. Enjoyable process, just like we love our iPhones. You would love, actually, the process of home buying because it's one of the most valuable assets in our lives. And do you do fractional ownership or is it just I own the property or I don't? We had a number of requests, probably over $1 billion worth of requests. One day we just said and counted them all from institutional players to tokenize their real estate.

So we have great expertise on that, but we don't do that. But you don't do it. Yeah, we haven't. Will you potentially do it in the future? Maybe. Maybe. I mean, once we have this marketplace up and running for many, many countries and many buildings, then obviously, why not to also offer, hey, invest $1,000 in this building or that building or in a resort? Yeah, that makes sense. What are you seeing globally in real estate?

So I want to talk a little bit about kind of a macro economy and real estate for a second, because real estate, similar to stocks, has just been going up. Value keeps going, keeps going, keeps going. As we know, as students of history, that can't go on forever. And so there's likely to be a market downturn at some point in the future. It is happening already. It's already happening. Okay, explain that. Silicon Valley, San Francisco market are all soft.

For over 15 months. Really? Yeah. It's been soft. Some markets are turning from seller market to buyer market. Dubai had a disaster in the last two years after even announcing the Expo 2020. And everyone was hoping that the market will outperform. But instead, it had at least 40% down rate.

So, yeah, you're right. We're in this time when the real estate market is softening globally, but at the same time, there are so many emerging markets where the properties are underestimated. Like Bulgaria, for example, it's still a very, very affordable market. And there are a number of countries where they just figured how to avoid fraud and make more efficient title registry. In fact, $9 trillion are unrecoded today, and it's a dead capital in real estate, which will come to the economy one day. And obviously, why you would invest in a property in Silicon Valley where the minimum check is $2 million, where you can invest in 200 countries with a couple thousand. 50 grand. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And you know that they would appreciate. For sure. One of the pieces that is interesting here in the U.S. So take New York, for example. I read that 50% of the construction since 2015 of high-rise condos, only 50% has been sold. So there's incredible amount of supply that has come online that there's just no demand for. Really? I didn't know about that. And one of the reasons why in one of these articles I was reading is because foreign investment has gone down. So basically, one of the things that you got to think about in terms of real estate for the people listening, you obviously know this, is we sit here and we say, hey, there's a lot of people who want to buy real estate. And we say, let's go build real estate. We're going to build high rise condos. That sounds like a great idea.

But, you know, today in January 2020, let's say, well, it takes us a year to build it or more, right? 18 months. But by the time it gets done, now all of a sudden nobody wants to buy it. The demand has gone away. And so that lag is actually pretty painful for real estate developers. And they're faced with, do they offload the inventory at below market prices and try to recoup something? Or do they hold it? Rent out and sit on the cash flow.

It's pretty crazy to kind of see it happen. Well, it's not happening in the Bay Area, for sure, and in San Francisco, because there is still a huge lack of housing. Of course, affordable housing is the main asset the region lacks. But in terms of real estate development, yeah, this is what I was doing before. I see the interest and demand, and then my company would build a lot of inventory, and we'd sell it. But then we saw the interest was softening, and we just stopped doing that. So in New York, because foreign investors now had to pass through more KYC than they used to, it refers to Russian investors, Chinese investors. And, of course, the majority of local communities, they don't want the outsiders that don't occupy buildings. So some of the cities like Vancouver, for example, they actually introduced taxes for foreign investors.

Oh, interesting. Yeah, 15% tax on top of the property price so that they encourage more the local community to occupy those buildings. Yeah. It's pretty crazy how real estate is such a well-established game, right? It's been around forever. And people still make the same mistakes. People still make a lot of money off of it. And there's the same cycles that you would see in real estate and every other market. And it's kind of this, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Yeah, definitely. It's one of the most outdated industries uh but it's worth 280 trillion dollars uh globally so it's that's more than bitcoin yeah a little bit more right just a little bit for now yeah for now but the reality is that

the population is growing we will need more inventory we will need more homes we will need more buildings and yes in some local regions like here in new york they might be we we reach some highest peaks in price. And this is now the market has to adjust. But in the majority of places, even though the market will soften, but we probably won't see any crashes. Yeah. It's really interesting to think through, right? Because there's some counterintuitive components to it. But we'll see. What's the general environment right now as a founder in terms of fundraising and kind of interesting crypto, et cetera? You're doing this every day. What do you see in there and how are investors feeling about blockchain and crypto companies?

Yeah. So as a founder, obviously, I had to fundraise. I have to build a product. I have to sell. We're 30 people right now in the team. When we talk to investors, it's very different now in comparison to 2018. In 2018, we probably were bombarded by emails from VCs every single week, from generalists, from top VCs, like, yeah, the blockchain is cool. And also you're applying it to a real industry.

And now it seems like they all are afraid of the blockchain and related investments. But in every single VC that is not focused on the blockchain, they always have this young associate or young partner that is super excited about cryptocurrencies and blockchain. And they always try to push through the senior partner or investor to find a way still to be at least to research or invest. do you think that that changes in the short term or do you think that it feels like this is going to be how the sentiment will be among venture capitalists for a while um it's a hard question yeah i'm not sure probably uh it yeah maybe two three years it will be staying the same um but i see more and more vcs traditional ones that are not focused on uh blockchain have still blockchain-related companies in their portfolio

and they start to perform. They start to have exits, acquisitions. So they tend to prove themselves as very valuable businesses. Yeah, so it's kind of like if they see success in the investments they've already made, they'll get more excited and kind of pour capital. It makes sense. Yeah, especially those that have invested in Ripple, in Coinbase,

and now they became giant companies, obviously they tend to be those that can attract more LPs and more investments. The same with venture capital and early stage startups. You mentioned Ripple. Has anybody bought a house or property with XRP yet? We had a number of sellers listing in XRP in 2018, but then we didn't have any sales, unfortunately. Oh, man.

Brad would have been excited. I know. I think he actually retweeted one of those listings. But at that point, the majority of people felt that they had to hold and wait the market to recover, which never happened. Yeah. Till now. We'll see what happens. We'll see, right? We're believers. Absolutely. What's the one lesson that you've learned building Propy?

Just one? At this point in time, what's the one big takeaway that you have so far that maybe when you went into building the business, you didn't know or think about, but now you're like, oh, this is what I've learned? As a founder, right? Yeah, of course. Blockchain space? No, just company building. Probably be ready to learn every single week. like the very often we would discover something like hey that's the path to go and we would stick

to it for two three four months and then we would realize oh no uh that's a mistake so every single week to be learning reading and asking uh successful people in your field that that have already proved for their mentorship uh that was very because we did a lot of mistakes obviously every startup we did many many successes we did all those historical transactions we proved to the world that blockchain can work for a real industry for real case uh but just never stop learning and there are so many amazing books um yeah just asking on twitter like following you and seeing what uh what articles people are reading and liking this is helpful as well it's one of my favorite things i do because people actually find really high quality articles

yeah like i tweeted it i don't know one saturday and tweeted it again and i generally was interested like what are people you know reading um so i could kind of be lazy and just have them send me stuff and then uh it was so valuable that i just kept doing it yeah and then it became a routine right yeah this is amazing yeah and we follow that i can't believe all these smart people are actually sending me stuff to read um but what um okay so being willing to learn something new every week do you do anything from like a habit standpoint that uh you do intentionally for learning yeah uh yeah we just discussed it uh now with your colleague uh that joe joe's sitting in the corner joe's got a new desk he's fucking balling over in the corner

Thank you, Joe. Yeah, and he updated me with your fantastic metrics that you're doing so great with the podcast. Don't tell anybody that we have 10 million downloads a month. Come on, don't share that. So congrats. I wish you guys could see Joe's face. Joe's bright red and he's dying laughing because there's really 12 million downloads a month. All right, go ahead.

That's a great asset, actually. I think you guys are a great team. Yeah, back to routine. Joe's just trying to sell ads, that's all. all right so great team yeah absolutely great team congrats on that and um your previous podcast was fantastic as well uh this book uh oh kamal we're recording this right after uh we just recorded with uh kamal ravikant uh the author of love yourself like your life depends on it yeah yeah exactly pretty good pretty good uh you like those kind of books right

Absolutely. And this is what I got into my schedule of learnings. A lot of business books and a lot of psychological books on how to be more effective and productive and how to make my family, especially my daughter, teenage daughter, how to communicate with her better in a more effective way. way because I can learn a lot from experiencing the daily life. But sometimes you just read a book and know how to deal with the specific situation. So my habit is whenever I go to gym, I have this one hour to listen to a podcast and I have this queue of those items that I want to hear as well as when I go to massage, which I also have a routine on. Also, I have a podcast And I consider those hours as like work hours because learning for something specific I need in my business today. So during the day, it's always something specific I need to learn today to make my company better. What's the best business book you've recently read?

What would be a recommendation? Oh, this one I love. From Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin. It's on SaaS. From impossible to inevitable. Yes. Okay. Or the book that Aaron Ross published previously.

It's a Bible for B2B sales, predictive revenue. Yeah, this is a book that's phenomenal for B2B sales. Got it. And for sales in general, how to practically do it, how to build the team or how to rebuild, restructure some tactics. Then I really love the book Negotiate by Chris Voss by the FBI negotiator. Oh, How to Negotiate. Yeah. But that's not what it's called.

Never Split the Difference. Never Split the Difference. Yeah. Chris Voss, the former FBI negotiator. Yes, that's correct. That was also fantastic. Then the CEO within, a recent one by a CEO coach. Again, very practical on how to be an effective SEO, how to build OKRs, KPIs, how to score your team yourself.

Yeah, so those items are very, very helpful. What about the psychological books? Yeah, the one I recently loved is The Courage to be Disliked. uh then the non-violence communication so non-violent communication and the courage to be disliked yeah yeah those i really like uh normally um like those motivational speakers like tony robbins and so on they don't very much um relate to me because they empower you to act execute and go and do something and i have an opposite problem i want everything to execute i have tons of ideas you need somebody to tell you stop yeah exactly slow down yeah exactly like

stop focus on one thing do just one thing at a time if you don't want to pay tony robbins twenty thousand dollars to tell you to go act you can pay me twenty thousand dollars i'll tell you stop breathe chill out i will next time um and then what uh what is it like raising your daughter who as you said is a teenage daughter yeah in today's society with tiktok instagram twitter uh i don't tinder whatever other things she can have on her phone like like what is that like as a parent it's tough it's always negotiating and this book never split the difference what are you negotiating with her over yeah how old is she she's 13 she just turned 13 I mean, she has never been into Instagram, social media just yet, but I feel she's turning into that.

And she's very much into iPad, watching YouTube videos. Till now, they were more like, okay, doing some stuff, craft. So I was kind of, okay, it's not that bad. But then very often she would not do her routine stuff. She's really great in homework. When we moved to the U.S., she was actually very self-independent. Nine years old, but she would go to the school all alone. She would wake up herself.

She would make pasta for herself. So we just had to survive and be self-efficient because I couldn't afford nannies or something like that. But then now this iPad and always being on screen, it's very, very hard to find a balance. What does she watch on YouTube now? I wish she was just watching your podcast, but no. Our podcast gets 50,000 downloads a day on YouTube, too.

No worries. Yeah, I'm trying to get her into crypto. We're talking very often about Bitcoin. She knows that you can buy a house with a token. Yeah, she knows that stuff already. But she's just watching some teenage series plus crap. Like the influencer stuff and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, that stuff.

and then like doing slime so also those childish stuff like toys and wrapping uh and then what to wear yeah it's crazy to me uh i obviously don't have any kids um although polina would tell you i am a kid but the rise of the devices the connected devices the social media etc um you I remember as a kid, like, my mom and dad had a pretty good idea of what I was doing, right? Like, I see what you're watching on television. I know what video games you're playing. Like, the things that were going into my head, the content, they pretty much knew. I feel like parents don't know that anymore.

Yeah, right now it's scary. Or at least they have a harder time knowing what their kids are doing. Absolutely, yeah. Which could be good or bad, right? Look, you got a kid that, you know, wants to learn and stuff. Yeah, they just need to know that they have borders because sometimes with internet, they feel they can do whatever they want. Well, they can. They can do whatever they want. You don't want them to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there are many apps with like parent control, but it's an additional work for a parent.

OK, you have again those apps you have to control, see what's going on. But I agree with you. Just paying attention and look what they're excited about. That helps to understand where their minds are into. But yeah, our childhood was easy. And we had like, you know, the TV channel with a program. You have 15 minutes cartoons and Saturday movie. Well, the conspiracy theorists would say that the state was programming people, right? They're going to tell you what you're going to watch.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you're like looking forward. Okay, it's on your schedule. Yeah, absolutely. And then you're bored between those. This time in our childhood, we were very bored what to do in between. So we were very creative and loving nature, going, exploring what's happening outside. Kids don't go outside.

Come on. The only thing they know about the forest is they saw it on their iPad. Yeah, exactly. YouTube since. I got a 23-year-old brother who was in New York City, no joke, for two weeks doing an internship. He was two weeks into his summer internship. this was two years ago and we had to go to

St. Louis my brother was getting married not him but another one and so when we get there the entire like bridal party whatever went golfing all the guys and we're out on the golf course and I hear my 23 year old brother who's been in New York City for legitimately two weeks

hit everyone with man so great to see like trees and stuff and we all looked at him like shut the hell up Central Park at least even for two weeks yeah actually i think that's my main challenge because i love to to rest in nature going parks and hikes and it's very hard to get out my family from the house and and get do that and it's very hard for me to actually make her love nature and explore like

yeah yeah uh but we made it as a habit now um so she knows that she just has to do it because it's a family tradition now. That's a good way to get her to do it, right? It's a family tradition. All right. So before I get into rapid fire questions, I feel like for people to be a user of property, they've got to understand real estate. And most people will do that on their own, right? They'll go figure out how to learn about real estate. Hey, I want to buy property, whatever. But one of the things that strikes me is I've got to know about other countries' real estate, right? So I understand the US or New York City or San Francisco, whatever. I can find that stuff out. I can talk to people who live there, whatever. How do you suggest people learn about

other countries' real estate markets? So Ukraine, Bulgaria, whatever. If I don't go there, how do I actually get a good sense for what's going on in that market? I think that that's what will happen in 20 years with Propy or with another competitor. This is what will happen. No, with Propy. Come on. Of course. The world will come to one platform that they have trust to it. Like in Amazon, we have the trust that the good will be delivered. Then there will be one platform where you will be able to trust that the value of a certain property in Bulgaria or London is the one that should be.

And the property is actually physically there. Because what happens in other countries, they don't have MLS systems, they don't have National Association of Realtors at all. And there are just many, many frauds. Agents, very often they are fraudulent, they're not licensed. So there are a lot of scams happening and you wouldn't want to risk and buy a property this way. So now you know, okay, maybe I want to buy a property in Sofia for like, I don't know, $30,000, which is nothing, but it will appreciate potentially. uh and then uh you have to go there you know you have to invest time or with a platform in the future uh you would just trust the system you would read what's going on with the country with

economical and political situation you will trust the valuation because it will be based uh on data uh yeah so this is how i envision that the world will be more in real estate will be more open transparent and maybe even a little bit homogenic because right now we have so many differences but maybe at some point we'll actually will come to a more homogenic market yeah it's pretty crazy to think about uh how much real estate has changed yet how fragmented the knowledge is yeah yeah very fragmented yeah and the process is very uh full of frictions yeah What do you think the most important company in crypto is, other than Propy? In crypto?

Company, not protocol. You can name a protocol. Well, I'm the believer in Bitcoin. Great answer. Of course. Bitcoin standard, right? I just respect all the teams that are working on the protocols. Algorand, Near, Ethereum.

We're developing Ethereum, so we see a lot of negative parts as well. But I think, I mean, the main thing now is to have the real adoption. This is what we are aiming to have those enterprise. And we have the support of U.S. institutional partners already. Then when we provide the value, when we see finally that blockchain brings the trust and change to the industry like real estate, then we need all those protocols, the underlying technology, the first level layer and the second layer. uh and so it's amazing that those teams are working on developing uh them even though still there are no real uh volume happening on those networks makes sense what uh what's the one regulation or law that you would change or improve if you could of course you know this one

we all want this is it a little bit um allow us innovators finally work and innovate yeah so definitely the securities laws and just revamp them yeah yeah absolutely from 30s finally like make uh it to to our century and yeah rewrite them what about aliens believer non-believer there is something there you think so yeah i probably believe you're saying like you know like you've seen an alien before well actually yeah once i saw something unbelievable in my childhood and i don't know what was that in russia yeah what did you see something happening in the sky uh but i i'm not sure what was that what like it was like lights or what a lot of lights uh different colors uh yeah there were some speculations that there were some experiments

with some rockets nearby in the near city but i i was born in a nuclear power uh plant um serving city so we were only 25 000 people in the city only engineers uh and um it's a small town to see such a thing uh random thing uh yeah but i don't know about aliens maybe not aliens but there is something there in the universe oh there's definitely aliens come on the uh just so can put it on the record i read yesterday that um there's a a star that is close to the sun and previously that star there was a planet revolving around it right that's been known since 2016 big deal there is now speculation and confirmation there's a second planet revolving around that star and so i don't know what that means yeah like it's in like the

habitable uh or habitable area right i said that word really funny that's fine yeah um habitable uh type planet yeah second one all revolving around the star and so of course i tweet it right because you know i basically have only two types of friends on the internet people who like crypto or people who like aliens um and immediately people start tweeting back at me that it's four light years away i don't even know what that means that's far as shit though yeah right and they still think that four light years away could be a planet in which life could exist oh wow can't get to it but we can somehow see it i guess yeah yeah oh my god yeah this is scary to me when you were in school in russia how many planets did they tell you there were

in america they told us nine they tell you guys nine or tell you more yeah in the sun system yeah nine nine yeah and now suddenly they're over a thousand yeah i don't know where the other yeah 991 of them came from um but but it's pretty crazy to think about in terms of you know you're dealing with space and property here and uh on earth yeah yeah there is a whole universe there we're such a small uh planet but also it's fascinating how we're built as humans uh how our system is self-sufficient we have this intelligence we're building the artificial intelligence yeah i've seen some people on the internet that are a little shaky on that i've seen them as well in our community. I've seen those too. All right. Well, what question do

you have for me to wrap this up? The one question I would have is what is the kind of a founder you believe in to succeed, like generally? Simple. They don't give up. That's it. I'm a big believer that building a company is really fucking hard. And if you want to put yourself through that pain, you have to have one very important quality. And it's that you will literally take every punch right on the chin.

You don't care. You're not going to give up. And if you can have that mentality, you got a shot. You're not guaranteed to succeed, but you're at least in a position where you can be successful. And you got to have a lot of things go right. You got to find the right people. You got to build the right product. All that stuff's got to happen.

But if you don't have that quality, you're dead in the water. There's no way you can build a company. How do you estimate, evaluate one founder if they have that quality or not? I don't know if you can necessarily evaluate it as much as you're looking for other things in their life that they've gone through that are hard. that they didn't give up on right and so like it's kind of this belief um i call it uh the warrior theory i've never actually shared this before so warrior theory is basically if you take somebody who joins a warrior culture whether it's you know developed nation's army or some kind of you know crazy wild uh unsophisticated thing warrior theory is that if you put a warrior

in that situation, whether it's their first day or their last day, they are predisposed to being successful. But the difference between the person who is their first day versus the last day is the warrior who it's their last day they've been through a lot, they're literally war-hardened, right? They've been through it. They have mental armor. They are ready to handle anything because they have seen themselves perform over and over and over again in combat yeah yeah the person who is their first day they believe that they have it but they've never proven it to themselves yeah and so that doesn't mean hey you got to go start a bunch of companies or anything like that it just means somebody who's been through a lot of hard things in their life immediately is better

positioned to handle the next hard thing because they themselves know i've been through a lot of shit yeah right and so i think that that's something that um and are you normally born as a warrior or you can uh educate yourself i think that uh people who are not warriors are just warriors that haven't been trained yet yeah meaning that it's all mindset yeah right it's like it sounds stupid and super cliche whatever but at the end of the day it's not what happens to you it's what you do about it right and so like entrepreneurs are better than anybody like there's the shit entrepreneurs deal with on a daily basis people that don't go through it have no clue yeah like literally you can wake up you know server basically melted down fuck

right okay no press came out look we're so great oh wait uh somebody on twitter's screaming at us because you know they lost their login or whatever oh we're we just got nominated for an award you know okay it's lunchtime like so it's just like this crazy up and down all day long and it's kind of you gotta get comfortable yeah you have to have the resilience yeah for that and what are the like three tips uh short for those that are not waking up warriors but would love to be go do some hard shit there's no there's no three it's just one tip just go do hard shit yeah right and that's different for everybody right some people they need to do physically hard stuff right go work out go on a hike you know all kinds of that kind of stuff there's other people who

need to put themselves in mentally hard positions meaning that uh they're very comfortable and they don't ever step out of that comfort zone and so therefore they get to go to podcast yeah do a podcast if you're scared of doing a podcast you should go do a podcast right if you're scared of you know i don't know fucking walking in uh grand central because you're claustrophobic and there's too many people just go there and sit in grand central for an hour right like like whatever the thing is that you fear a lot of times i think the best thing to do is just do it yeah and i agree the the over exaggerated example is like the parent who says hey my kid doesn't know how to swim throw him in the pool yeah now i'm standing there i'm gonna make sure he doesn't drown right

but like that's one of the fastest ways to figure out the kid to figure out like how do you paddle yeah yeah how do you swim um so i think like that stuff uh generally in life um is important the other thing is go talk to people who've been through it right and so like do hard shit and then talk to other people who've done hard shit yeah and if you start to surround yourself with like people with that warrior mindset all of a sudden you're just like yeah this is what's expected mindset you're empowered yeah it's look one of the greatest things that happened to me in my life is i grew up in a family of five boys oh yeah yeah i heard about that because you can't be soft like you just couldn't be literally if everyone wanted to do something and you didn't

want to do it because you were scared or nervous or you know it was hard or whatever the other four not only did it and you didn't so you felt left out yeah but they made fun of you while they were doing it yeah so eventually he's like all right well yeah so look you've been through all kinds of stuff in your life right like you're uh you're a russian influencer you lived in bulgaria came to the u.s didn't really know anybody like all of those things are data points in a story that like people go through hard shit in life and yeah if they are successful in overcoming those obstacles they're likely to keep doing it yeah yeah absolutely agree with you it look every immigrant does, right? Because they've all lived it. And it's like, Plina and I talk about it all the time.

It's just like, there is something about people who, especially immigrants who come to the United States when they don't know anybody. Yeah. And especially from a post-communism country, you just are born to be resilient. And if you're already here, you're allocated yourself. That's a very, very good sign that you go through hardships. You got here, so you're a fighter. Yeah, and very often, yeah, very often I got those questions, especially female entrepreneurs, on how to move forward when you don't know anybody, how to move forward if you have a kid.

So I totally agree with you, Pomp, here that, yeah, just do the hard thing and go out of the zone of comfort. Like I, for example, had a fear of public speaking before when i just moved here i very much feared my accent uh the lack of english fluency you see now again i'm making the mistake uh but just going there uh out of the zone of comfort and then you become uh an expert in that and even you have fans and you influence people's life and so you start enjoying something that you used to fear yeah it's practice yeah exactly right like how i always am shocked by people who uh believe that you're going to be good at something and you never

practiced it right i literally have never met anybody who's just naturally like the best at something they might be good at it they might be predisposed to be good at something right they might have certain talents that make them good at something but they're never the best and so you gotta be the best yeah go fucking practice exactly yeah all right i'm getting off my soapbox where can uh where can people find proppy proppy.com proppy.com yeah all right what's the twitter handle? At Propy Inc. At Propy Inc. And what's your Twitter handle? At Natalia Propy. All right. At Natalia Propy. Yeah. All right. Thank you so much for doing this. Absolutely. Thank you. I enjoyed it very much. Long Propy, short, all the soft people in the world. Yeah.

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