I met Michael Mandel at 500 Startups in February.  He’s a former commercial real estate broker in Manhattan.  Been iterating away with his co-founder CTO Vadim Belobrovka and his  Chief Product Officer Jeff Domke for a couple years, refining a information marketplace to serve that market.  Compstak.

I love that market.  “When it comes to wealth creation, there’s real estate, and then there’s everything else.”  And the Commercial real estate side is even more underserved by the tech community that Residential real estate.  I think because fewer technical people have direct experience in commercial.

They have line of sight to liquidity in their marketplace, a great team, and a viable path and the vision to being ginormous.  It’s our only the second time in 10 years we’ve gotten involved in a company in NYC, and the distance certainly presents some challenges, which is why we don’t make it a habit. But these guys are the exception.