According previous reports this week, Adam Neumann, the famous and controversial co-founder of WeWork, is creating a vast network of residential real estate properties that – we assume – can be rented out very flexibly to people who don’t want to be confined to one place or on a lease, but live as a “citizen of the world”. That was the vision behind an earlier company Neumann started, WeLive, a short-lived offshoot of his much better-known company, WeWork, and it’s an idea that, in a post-Covid world where remote working reigns, has more sense than already.

This is Neumann talk to the guard about the idea in 2016: “It will be a new way of living, day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year. You will be a global citizen of the world. If you are a member of one, you are a member of all.

The idea is so timely that another serial entrepreneur might go even further with their version, even if you’ve never heard of it before. It’s Bill Smith, the 36-year-old founder of the flexible, three-year-old, members-only 600-person furnished rental company. Landing.

Smith, who prefers button-up shirts to graphic tees, is the anti-Neumann in many ways. While Neumann’s actual drama with his investors has become fodder for a TV shows, Smith has, without fanfare, made a lot of money for his own backers. After raising capital from friends and family for a reloadable Visa card company in his twenties, Smith sold this outfit to holding company Green Dot for what Forbes says amounted to tens of millions of dollars. His next startup Shipt, a same-day delivery company that Smith founded in 2014, sold at target in 2017 for $550 million.

Smith – unlike Neumann, who sold too much of WeWork to SoftBank at too unrealistic price – has also been conservative when it comes to VC. Shipt raised $65 million from venture capital firm Greycroft and others before it was sold, but Smith still owned half of the company. The result, which he now calls a “game changer”, has given him enough confidence and capital that he has now invested at least $15 million of his own money in Landing, of which he owns a third. (According to Forbes, Landing has raised $237 million in venture capital to date at a $475 million valuation, including from Greycroft. Meanwhile, yet-to-launch Neumann’s Flow comes to raise $350 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz at a $1 billion valuation. .)

These differences aside, the two seem to be looking for a very similar opportunity to create a platform that anyone willing to pay a small premium can join in order to live a very flexible lifestyle.

It’s a guessing game what Neumann might charge a member, though one imagines receiving a SoHo-like aesthetic for the price based on the look of most WeWork locations. In Landing’s case, its dues are $199 per year and the rent is 30-40% more than Landing itself pays building owners to rent their space. But in exchange for a commitment of at least six months, a Landing member can live in a growing number of places — including Tampa, Austin and Las Vegas — where Landing has rented apartments. Members receive fully equipped rentals (Landing has its own innocuous furniture made in Vietnam and shipped to the United States to keep its costs down). And how long does a member need to stay in one place? Just a month.

After reading a (very good) Forbes coin about the company earlier this week, we asked Smith to explain some of our own questions, including lessons he learned, if any, from watching Adam Neumann from a distance. You can hear this conversation here. Except, edited for length, follow below.

You estimate that perhaps 10% of the 40 million Americans who currently live in apartments could choose furnished, flexible living homes within a decade. How did you come up with this estimate?

When you think about all the other aspects of our lives over the past decade, the way we live has completely changed. But apartment living is usually an offline, fairly old process. There isn’t a lot of freedom, flexibility and convenience in the current model. . and many of the 40 million people who rent today are in their 20s and 40s and want that flexibility.

You take the word “flexible” to the extreme. It’s enticing as a consumer, but from a business perspective, how do you rationalize it?

We are not trying to create a vacation brand or a travel company. The people who live with Landing are committed to this lifestyle and to living on our platform, which allows us to offer a very high occupancy rate. And if you can offer a high occupancy rate, you can provide this product at an affordable cost to a large number of people who stay for a long time.

How long do people tend to stay in one place?

Right now, people stay in one place for about six months on average.

Do you handle all types of home repairs? Before launching Landing, you were trying to create a home services-type marketplace.

We don’t. Home repairs are handled by the companies that own the properties in which we are located. We provide cleaning and these types of services. You are right, however. The first company I started [after Shipt] was kind of a home concierge service for landlords, and we tested it for about a month, and it was a really quick flop, and we decided to move from that to what is now Landing.

You use data to try to understand how to reduce your costs, including adjusting your prices based on location and seasonality. Can you say a bit more about the type of data you process and how you use it? Along the same lines, how much can you glean from your customers once they’re inside a unit?

We need to know where people want to live so we can have a supply available for them and ready, so we look at what neighborhoods people are looking for; what time of year they want to live there; and how quickly they want to move in, and we use this information to fuel our sourcing efforts.

We also have fulfillment centers and our own last mile delivery network, and we use data to determine where we invest on that side of the business. At certain times of the year there can be a lot of demand to move to certain parts of Phoenix, while at other parts of the year you see a spike in demand in Miami, and we need to have items physical ready to ship in these so people can get set up in them very quickly.

Your software lists an apartment even before you sign a lease with a landlord, and then you find the tenant. Once that tenant has signed a lease with you, you sign the lease with the landlord and furnish the apartment. This is how it works ?

Yeah, so what we’ve built is the first on-demand model to expand supply in this way. An apartment community will list the units on our site, then we’ve built the technology and operational infrastructure to create a “landing” in just days, which sounds super simple but is incredibly complex if you think about everything. it takes to furnish and set up an entire home, from your sofa to silverware.

Is software development a priority for you?

There is a huge technological component to Landing. We’ve built the entire platform that runs our business, everything you see on our site, from discovering and booking a home, to the experience once you check in, including how you enter the building and [ensuring all your needs are met] once you live there. These are also the applications that our teams who provide field services use. It’s the technology that powers our fulfillment centers and our last-mile delivery network. So there’s a significant amount of technology that we had to build to make this business work. It’s not something you can just buy off the shelf.

Are you focused on buildings with community spaces at all? How people literally flow and congregate was a big focus for Adam Neumann, and I suspect that continues to be the case with his company Flow. In a world where fewer people are entering offices, is this a consideration when looking at buildings?

We think about community more at the neighborhood level than at the property level. If you think about the typical apartment community, there might be 250 units, so that’s not a lot of people and [they] are going to be a very diverse group with unique interests. So you think about it more at the neighborhood level and building a community between people who have chosen to live that lifestyle in a particular part of Miami, for example.

You sign one-year leases with apartment owners. Why not lock these spaces a little longer and hopefully secure a better rent?

Sure, we could try to do multi-year deals, but I think it’s best to have very little tenant liability in the business. We would be the antithesis of the WeWork model where we have very little rental liability. And we can adapt to changes in the markets. [Also], over time, we’ll be partnering with landlords to bring this product to their building, and it really won’t be a Landing rental product; they will simply join the landing platform. They will operate using our technology and our standards and it will not be this model, Landing leases it and commits to this lease.

So Landing will become a SaaS company in some respects?

Having a SaaS component is probably the best way to describe it, yes.

As a student of space, are there any other lessons from WeWork that you replicate or avoid?

WeWork and Landing really are such different companies – office vs. residential is just a totally different category. But what I’ve really learned, and not directly from WeWork, but generally speaking, is that the unit economics of business is key. At the start of any business, you try to understand unit economics. But on this one, in particular, we had to master the economy of the unit very quickly. We haven’t had five or six years to prove that like a lot of other consumer companies have, and I think that’s because people have seen WeWork and seen all the challenges there. found.