Now what is real estate tech? How do we define it? Well, just like in other spaces of Fintech, but broadly, there are all kinds of categories, acronyms, names that come to bear. We're calling it real estate tech, but you could call it a RealTech, Prop Tech, Proptology, RETech, CRE Tech, which is commercial real estate tech. And in part it's challenging to put a specific overarching name on it because the segmentation of real estate technology and how it's being manifested in startups, or companies adopting technology is bifurcated, either on the commercial side or the non commercial side, the commercial sector CRE or residential sectors of the industry. We're just going to call it real estate tech broadly even though there are very different players and very different characteristics. And we know of relatively few companies that currently span both spaces. So one way to think about the industry given this challenge is to rotate the definitions a bit and focus either on being additive, focusing on operational efficiency, or on disruption, by way of creating say new platforms. And in fact, maybe some examples could help illustrate. One company that's been around for quite sometime, and which many follow, is a firm called Zillow. It's not necessarily today, thought of as a providing in revolution and technology although I'm sure there are those who would disagree. And that's in part because online platforms, portals, aggregators for listing residential properties or multifamily or land as Zillow lists had been on the scene since the 1990s, and were developed in the late 1990s, mid and late 1990s dot-com boom. Zillow has combined a bunch of different functions and ultimately connected back to brokers, expanding data access, democratizing data access for those who are buying or selling, as well as connecting to brokers to become a market leader. Zillow, someone said the other day and their Zillow's compatriots, Realtor.com, Redfin and of course, others that I'm leaving out, but which are also leaders are useful to to understand what your own properties are doing. Or as they said their spouses spending their time looking at their neighbors' properties, giving a kind of democratized view into regions, into individual properties, into being able to search and ultimately aggregate functionalities in a one-stop shop. Another one on another side of the business is a little bit more, let's say transformative, by way of introducing a brand new methodology, WeWork. And we'll talk more about WeWork in a second. It's often considered to be not just a provider of real estate, transitory real estate or real estate services but a real estate tech company. The concept of shared workspaces either rented or leased, I mean that's been around for decades and decades. And of course, it's a platform technology. It's app based. So it's not like it's necessarily bringing brand new deep learning technology to the game. It's a transformation of office space via the progress of technology and also linking back into social values and workplace methods. We think WeWork, has been a category leader on the commercial side as a result. And of course, we all know it now as a unicorn startup.
