MetaProp

Episode 2 of Between Zak and Aaron is live, which means the show is now officially a series and not a one-time act of vanity. If you are new to the program, or if the name still confuses you, I have spent ten years at MetaProp seated between Zak (Schwarzman) and Aaron (Block). I am simply reporting the facts. Neither has been consulted. This episode features Fraser Patterson, Founder and CEO of Skillit. Across MetaProp’s 150+ investments, I told him on camera he takes the silver medal for most interesting background. He lost only to Nyasha-Harmony Gutsa, who taught himself to fly a plane and piloted himself to America (stay tuned for that episode). We’ve been fortunate to partner with Fraser and Skillit since 2021, when they joined the MetaProp Accelerator at Columbia University. Their mission: fix the shortage of skilled workers we need to build the housing, infrastructure, and data centers everyone keeps announcing. We get into everything about Fraser’s path to entrepreneurship, which runs from an apprenticeship in Edinburgh (where a colleague once Hilti-gunned his denim jacket to a wall while he was wearing it), to walking high-rise steel at Canary Wharf, to running renovations as a general contractor in London, to a year lost to self-taught number theory that ended with King’s College inviting him to stay, to founding companies in Mexico City and New York, to building Skillit. In the episode, Fraser breaks down how the skilled labor shortage isn’t what everyone thinks. The biggest issue: nobody ever digitized this workforce, so the workers who exist are invisible. Skillit built the searchable record that never existed, and is using it to get workers into the jobs that need them. The conversation also includes a deep dive into Nas’s album Illmatic that receives the full academic treatment, and a formal ruling on whether Frasier Crane or his brother Niles would make the better Series A lead. Link in the comments, as is customary for prestige television.

Three years ago, Emre Altinok and I decided to build a company together. Today, that idea became a $12 million Series A, led by Pathlight, with continued support from all of our existing investors, new participation from MetaProp, and angel investors including Gokul Rajaram, Lenny Rachitsky, and Romain Huet. Emre and I met as freshmen at Yale and became close friends. After graduation, our careers went in opposite directions. Emre went deep into machine learning, I built mine in real estate. Nearly a decade later, those worlds converged. AI had reached an inflection point. For the first time, software could do the work - not just help people do it. The question became: where would that matter most? For me, the answer was obvious: real estate. Few industries are more operationally complex. Every year, more than $1 trillion is spent on the labor required to execute the same conversations, workflows, leases, maintenance requests, and support interactions across millions of properties. The best operators spend years refining those playbooks. They codify every process to deliver a consistent experience at scale. Then they grow. And that's when the operation starts fighting back. The systems that worked at 5 properties begin to break at 20. Conversations slip through the cracks. Growth should feel like progress. Too often, it feels like losing control. That’s what made AI feel so different. For the first time, technology didn’t have to replace the operator’s playbook - it could execute it. That’s why we built Uniti. Not to replace operators, but to help them scale what already makes them exceptional. Today, Uniti agents handle 300,000+ two-way conversations every month across self storage, senior living, manufactured housing, multifamily, and flex workspace. One number still amazes me: 94% of operators who pilot Uniti end up converting. Everything else has followed from earning that trust. This round lets us build faster. More agents. More integrations. More verticals. More operators scaling their secret sauce, on their own terms. To Emre: after more than a decade, I still wouldn't want to build with anyone else. To our team, customers, and investors — thank you for believing in what we're building. There's a lot left to build. Pathlight Mahdi Raza MetaProp Prudence Gavin Myers FLEX Capital Alate Partners Courtney Cooper Romain Huet Lenny Rachitsky Gokul Rajaram Observer Capital Alon Gorbonos Auren Hoffman 📚 Zach Aarons Emre Altinok Ross Partrich Brian Cohen Jonathan Wasserstrum Read the Axios story by Ryan Lawler and our blog post in the comments below. 👇 #SeriesA #RealEstate #PropTech #AIAgents

I’ve wanted to host a talk show since Sally Jessy Raphael was on the air. It took a couple of decades and a venture capital career, but we got there. We’re excited to launch “Between Zak and Aaron, with Zach Aarons.” If the name confuses you, I have spent ten years at MetaProp seated between Zak (Schwarzman) and Aaron (Block). I am simply reporting the facts. Neither was consulted. The premise: I sit down with one of the leading lights of venture capital, startup technology, or the LP world for two things: the honest story of how they got here, and the detours that show who they really are off the pitch. Filmed at our studio in Manhattan (it's our office, but on filming days it is a studio). Our fact-checking army stands by at all times. Episode 1, officially the first and most important episode we have ever produced, belongs to Soraya Darabi, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of TMV and a fellow native New Yorker. We get into everything about her path, which runs from the front seat of her father's yellow cab ("Buy low, sell high"), to The New York Times in her early twenties, to co-founding Foodspotting (Apple's App of the Year, acquired by OpenTable), to writing early angel checks into many of NYC’s iconic startups, to building TMV. The conversation covers all of it, plus a strategic review of 90s television that nobody asked for and everybody needed. Listen to Soraya’s excellent analysis and underwriting of whether The Peach Pit from 90210 or The Max from Saved By The Bell would be a better venture investment. Link in comments, as is customary for prestige television.