Anshul Ruparell, co-founder and CEO of Properly, discusses his experience raising over $100 million for his company.
Anshul Ruparell, co-founder and CEO of Properly, discusses his experience raising over $100 million for his company. He shares insights on securing significant funding rounds for a proptech venture.
or co-founders to work with there were a couple things that just have to be there one was just an obsession with the customer and an understanding of their needs and pain points so that you can design for them instead of for yourself the second is that you need to be an exceptional salesperson you need to convince investors that they should give you money to go and pursue this vision you need to convince customers that they should take a bet on you to go in and even test out your product or service and they need to convince amazing people to come and work with you people who have the resilience and the grit and the drive to get through the inevitable downs that will come alongside the apps in those first couple years alrighty hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show so today very exciting i mean the very first time that we're doing this via video and we have a great founder
we're going to be learning a lot you know from building scaling pattern recognition i mean he's gone from the other side of the table as an investor to now being an entrepreneur but i guess without further ado let's welcome our guests today anshul ruparel welcome to the show hi thank you so much for having me so originally born and raised there in canada in calgary so how was life growing up ah life was good calgary is very cold it goes but 40 below zero in the winter and so that was an adjustment um my uh my parents are both immigrants and they grew up in africa and so i think it took them quite a bit of time to adjust to that but uh calgary's in canada is just a great place to grow up and obviously growing up there to parents that had to build their own future now coming from from a different country as immigrants say really building their own business you having exposure to the
entrepreneurial life and the hustling mentality so so how was that for you yeah i mean i saw my my parents really and my grandparents and all my relatives build themselves into something from nothing so that was pretty inspiring and i think you know grounded me in the type of grit and hustle it takes just to succeed generally in life but uh it was fun i mean there were some successes and there's some failures but um i've been around entrepreneurs basically from the day that i was born um and uh and and i think to be honest it's part of what inspired me to do what i'm doing today a lot of the the entrepreneurial work that my family did was actually involved in the real estate sector and now the company that i'm building is trying to transform the real estate industry in canada and so i think there has to be some cause and effect there absolutely and i guess looking at them and seeing them
going through the ups and downs i mean what were some of the key lessons that that you got from them from from being there with them as because obviously you were sharing the same the same roof so you were able to share their good times the bad times you know as well to certain degrees so i'm sure you got your lessons from that as well yeah i mean there's a couple things that immediately come to mind um i think the first is that you need to be emotionally resilient to the ups and downs that are the life of an entrepreneur things when they go well or are euphoric and exciting and when they go poorly it can be quite stressful and so if you can't numb yourself to the to those ups and downs then it's going to be difficult to to endure that life for too long uh and so i certainly think that i i learned that lesson uh both through osmosis for my family and then i've learned it firsthand as an
entrepreneur thereafter um you know i think the other is that there's um there's an incredible importance from surrounding yourself with the right people to succeed and so you know knowing where your strengths are and then finding people to complement you where you don't have those direct strengths is is critical um my my dad and his brothers are actually in business together in many parts and they all just played different roles they divide responsibility really cleanly and so i've taken a lot of that into the relationship that i have with my co-founders today where if you're standing on top of each other and trying to do the same thing it's going to just create tension and friction and results you're moving a lot more slowly than you would otherwise absolutely so so in your case you did your undergrad and then after doing your undergrad you basically went at it you know and and and did
banking so so why banking yeah it doesn't quite follow the uh the the kind of narrative art that i would have expected for myself having seen my what my family went through um but to me to be honest be totally transparent i i went to study business in undergrad and everyone in my program was going into banking or consulting or accounting and to a degree i just followed the herd i think more than i perhaps should have and so i did my first job as an investment banker which was i mean i learned a lot but it was it was a grueling couple years um and then i transitioned after investment banking into private equity where i started to see these um you know the opportunity to learn what it takes to evaluate companies what it takes to work with entrepreneurs and and management teams and i thought that actually could just be a good a good experience for me to learn what it takes to build a
company over time um and it was like my step in the direction of doing something more entrepreneurial and i realized after a couple years of that despite the fact that i learned an incredible amount that i worked with some amazing people and got the chance to see you know executives and companies both succeed and fail gloriously um i just realized eventually that the only way to be an entrepreneur is but being one i can't you know learn by by watching others and so after a couple years of that i decided to go and try to set up more on my own got it and obviously that was the time that you eventually met fabrice grinder who has also been on the show and and that was coincidentally as well with the time that you were in new york city uh and you were doing your mba program at the columbia so so why out of all the places did you decide that new york would be a good stop for you so i am i had
this idea in my head that i wanted to go and do something entrepreneurial and i didn't know if that meant i was going to join an early stage company or i was going to start a company of my own but what i wanted to ensure is that i had the opportunity just to be surrounded by people doing interesting things and building and i i did my mba and so i i knew i'd be spending part of the time in school and i wanted to be a position where i could spend the rest of my time working with companies and entrepreneurs instead of new york gave me the ability to spend literally one day a week in school and then six days a week working with different startups and so and not just startups i worked with other types of companies too but i ended up taking roles on the side and in products in marketing and ops and i got a sense from these different companies and entrepreneurs it's like what it takes to
succeed in some cases things to avoid uh if you want to succeed um and so it gave me uh just an amazing amount of experience and perspective very quickly and uh and then i kind of serendipitously met fabrice grinder who for those who are listening who don't know he's a multi-time entrepreneur and he's built and skilled and sold some very successful companies and he started a venture capital fund with his partner jose marin called fj labs which is now one of the prominent marketplace uh investing firms really globally um and uh and i met fabrice and i was telling him about what i wanted to do and he said you should just come and work for me i can you know teach you what it's like to invest in companies and i can actually give you some experience in in building them uh and so i ended up joining the team at fj labs and in a bit of a hybrid capacity i spent half my time working with them to
meet early stage entrepreneurs that are raising primarily seed rounds of financing um and ended up helping the team make investment decisions and then supporting those companies afterwards and so i was involved in investing in 30 or 35 companies over a couple of years and then the other half of my time i spent supporting entrepreneurs that were incubating businesses within fj labs and so every year fj supports one or two companies to go and and uh you know create an idea from nothing and provide them with the financial backing and some of the expertise to do so and so i was involved in helping two companies one of which was a company called poncho uh working with another internet mike lloyd is amazing and he was building effectively a ddc direct to consumer insurance brokerage focus on pnc insurance uh and i think mike will be the first to tell you that it was a solution in search of a
problem it was a…