Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Sydney Phillips, Founder of Zukurri, an AR/VR real estate visualisation platform based in the US.
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Here’s what Zukurri is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
Real Estate is an incredibly slow market, and it's hard for those making the decisions to fully visualise what they're working with. There are so many different players in real estate with little understanding of architecture, while the main way developers communicate with them is through architectural plans.
The Solution:
Zukurri is an augmented (AR) and virtual reality (VR) visualisation platform that helps all players in real estate to be able to communicate, market, and sell real estate better and faster. We use cutting-edge emerging technology in AR and VR and integrate with many other emerging tech including AI and networks and sensors.
Our goal is to make real estate more understandable for everyone, and something that everyone has access to. We want to open a dialogue around real estate to make the process go faster.
The Team:
Sydney has 7 years of experience in commercial real estate, since the age of 14, starting as an investor and recently moving into development. Through investing in tech companies, she developed a real passion for tech. Sydney is a solo founder and has grown the team to five over the past year. Omar is the right-hand technical genius behind implementing the visions set forth by the visionary founder.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
I was in the commercial real estate industry for 7 years, until I realised that the industry moves at snail speed and felt that I needed to do something about this.
While I was getting approval for one of my buildings, I was talking to so many people, policymakers, investors, or bankers, but none of the people I dealt with were architects. Communicating the building plans with these people was really difficult because many didn't really understand what they were looking at, given their background. So, I wanted to find a way to better communicate with them through visualisation.
I had always been interested in emerging tech, but only once I found this problem to solve did I really learn so much more about the whole technology in AR and VR.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
Most founders of tech companies are technical, and rarely the end-user of the product. There are currently very few companies solving the same problem as us, and those that are come at it from a very technical perspective, with a major learning curve to actually using their software. I found that it wasn't accessible for the average end-user, and that's what I'm trying to solve.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
On a personal level, I got awarded Young Female Entrepreneur of the Year 2021, which I was really proud of. At the company level, I am incredibly proud of our customer list which is growing so fast, and seeing that our customers are acting as brand ambassadors for us because they just love what we're doing.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
I started the entire company with my own savings and I would like to delay getting external funding as long as possible. Being bootstrapped means that our budget is quite tight and this does feel like a struggle sometimes. We can't spend on everything that we might like and we really think twice before buying new fancy software, for example.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
I wish I would have known that, especially in tech, starting a company is a marathon and not a sprint. You can't treat it like an all-nighter. You have to also take care of yourself along the journey because if you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of your team. So this really is a constant mental struggle for me. In hindsight, I would not treat the work as hours of input, but rather look at how productive the outcome is. I really had to learn to outsource tasks and treat my own tasks more productively.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
Spend time by yourself. Spend time being bored. Some of the best ideas stem from boredom and taking a break from mindless social media scrolling. Take time by yourself to actually explore your interests.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
The most important thing is to really hone in on your communication skills. I think this is something that really gets overlooked. The ability to articulate your vision will be such an asset both in the entrepreneurial and corporate world. Figuring out your communication style and learning how to get things from your mind into words will help you a lot along the way when sharing your vision with others and trying to get other people on board.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
Every CEO is failing. If CEOs were graded on average, every CEO would score 22/100. You feel like you're constantly failing and every problem in the business is your fault. At least that's what it feels like, especially as the founder. But knowing that this is the same for everyone else too really helps. It's more important to focus on the 3-5 things that you really have to get right, and for those things you're struggling with, consider outsourcing it to someone else.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
Sara Blakely, Lex Fridman, Robert Kiyosaki, Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk
What book do you think everyone should read?
For Business: The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz
For Women:
Brave, Not Perfect - Reshna Saujani
Everything Is Figureoutable - Marie Forleo
For literally everyone: Designing Your Life - Bill Burnett and Dave Evans