Yael works to make property investing accessible, transparent and streamlined with SolidBlock, where she is the CMO and Co-founder. Prior to that, Yael has spent almost two decades in the financial markets. She started at a Wall Street broker dealer as an analyst, moving to M&A and private equity, as well as financial engineering, structuring products and indices for pensions funds and family offices.
Yael worked on the largest IPO of an Israeli real estate company on AIM and served as an executive on the largest MVNO in Israel that was listed on NASDAQ. Yael has co-founded several fintech startups, a successful marketing company in the blockchain space and an import/export company that was acquired.
Yael is also a regional co-chair at FIBREE, the Foundation for International Blockchain and Real Estate Expertise, the leading international network for exchanging knowledge between the real estate industry. Yael is an influencer, who has appeared as a guest speaker in over 50 conferences and events, has a podcast (Apple podcast, Spotify: BlockSolid) and a full course on tokenization. Yael was listed in Top 25 Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Speakers and 100 Most Inspirational Women In Blockchain.
What is SolidBlock all about?
SolidBlock is an end-to-end platform that helps real estate developers and fund managers raise funds through offering digital securities to investors. Its platform is used across a variety of fields such as finance, real estate, tokenization, fintech, and digital securities. The company is best known for its role in the world’s first successful commercial property tokenization, raising $18M for the St. Regis Resort in Aspen, Colorado
Tell us how you started your company?
Yuval Wirzberger and I founded the company in 2018. Yuval brings over 15 years of technology and product management experience to SolidBlock. He’s helped both startups and large enterprises bring new media and technical visions to life. I have over a decade of experience as a marketing executive within the fintech, finance, telecom, and energy industries, as well as a long track record as an entrepreneur. I am also a regional co-chair at FIBREE, the Foundation for International Blockchain and Real Estate Expertise, the leading international network for exchanging knowledge between the real estate industry.
How do you plan to grow this company?
Our plans for 2021 are to become the leading company in real estate tokenization and continue with our efforts to become the global NASDAQ for asset-backed securities. In terms of a non-specific industry goal, our most important milestone is to develop an ecosystem. That’s why we have been working hard on creating partnerships with companies from both ends of the spectrum; the primary and the secondary markets.
in addition, in order for us to scale effectively, we will have to hyper-focus on our niche which is technology, and build a streamlined funnel of additional activities with the secondary markets, from onboarding to fundraising to connection, and rely on our partners and other members of the ecosystem to deliver their parts of the puzzle.
What was the biggest problem you encountered with your business and how did you overcome it?
Similar to other startups in a new industry, our biggest challenge has been educating potential clients. In our case, SolidBlock is a Marketplace and therefore we need to educate two types of clients – real estate companies and real estate investors.
In order to relay the added value of tokenization to our prospective clients, we have had to devise a lot of educational materials which we have done consistently and successfully during 2019 and 2020. We have prepared a course on tokenization, built a prolific blog, webinars, a podcast channel, as well a book on tokenization, and a handbook on how to tokenize – both due to come out in 2021.
The efforts to educate real estate investors is a work-in-progress. With the recent rise in crypto, there has been an increased interest in additional crypto-like asset classes, which is essentially what we create. I believe that in order for us to overcome the challenge of getting investors on the SolidBlock platform, we will need to create easy-to-understand messages and tools as well as partner with various investor groups and platforms where we would be able to communicate our added value of this particular property-based asset class.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
SolidBlock is a Marketplace, supplemented by global partnerships with distributors who assist us on the primary offering, as well as exchanges that provide access to the Secondary Market.
SolidBlock’s role in the ecosystem is to provide a global liquidity pool.
What is one thing that you do daily to grow as an entrepreneur?
The most important thing for me as an entrepreneur is to be able to see the “big picture”. So there are several things I do daily to enable that, which include waking up early, planning my day, and critically assessing my performance over the past days or the week.
In order to be able to focus, I try to meditate daily, however recently, with all of the stress surrounding having children at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, I haven’t been able to practice it consistently and I think it has affected my performance.
What are three books or courses you recommend for new entrepreneurs?
For those who are in my industry, I definitely recommend SolidBlock’s Tokenization One-on-One course as well as the Tokenization for Real Estate Entrepreneurs book that is coming out this year.
In general, my favorite books are Pitch Anything, by Oren Klaff, as well as his other book Flip the Script.
I love the book Four Hour Work Week, and even though it doesn’t necessarily fit with the tech startup grind, it still has a very important message of how to prioritize different tasks within an entrepreneur’s activity. For those in the FinTech sector who want to learn how to think differently, I highly recommend Robert Kiyosaki books such as Rich Dad Poor Dad.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your business?
I had several other startups before starting SolidBlock. With SolidBlock, I think my co-founder and I have been very careful to avoid pitfalls and mistakes that we have made with our previous businesses. However, I feel we should have been more mindful of how much time we had given out for free to clients in order to educate them, an issue that many other entrepreneurs face as well.
For instance – I’ve spent hundreds of hours creating proposals to clients or spent on phone calls speaking with potential clients, explaining how the industry works. These hours spent provide tons of valuable information about the industry yet it did not generate revenue for SolidBlock. Had I known this beforehand, I would have found a way to gauge potential client interest or engagement through jotting down a Loi or an engagement letter that identifies a client’s intent. I would have also provided the clients with sufficient resources (reading material, blogs, webinars, and course) so they could educate themselves, and this way bring them up to speed so they reach the stage where they are ready to start an official engagement with us.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
The most effective marketing strategy for us has so far been to maintain our status as the leading company in our space. This starts with thought leadership – making sure that every stakeholder in our industry knows our brand and knows I can gauge our level of expertise through a variety of videos, conference appearances, educational materials, testimonials, etc’ online.
That said, this may have generated a particular interest from clients, yet (and as I mentioned earlier) it generated limited interest from potential investors in the products listed on our platform. So during 2021, we plan to turn our efforts around and focus on educating this additional client cohort and create a full-fledged Marketplace.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
Right now we are not looking to start a new business. But if we had $1,000 to improve our existing business or help our business grow, I would spend it on legal and compliance advice. We are now working towards the distribution of products in additional jurisdictions, which requires separate legal opinions for each jurisdiction. Therefore, I would opt to use the money to put to words legal opinions for each jurisdiction so that we could market our products there.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
I actually have 2 important pieces of advice:
Firstly, I believe that the team you build around you is the key to the success of any new start-up. If you don’t have people working with you who you trust, you will not be able to overcome the difficulties you will likely face along the way. If you have a weak team, the first solution, in my opinion, would be to either replace the personnel, reassign roles or regroup. Once you have a fantastic team and a shared passion for the vision, you can pivot your solution to a better product that is market-fit and lead your company to success.
Secondly, the reason certain startups are successful in scaling up is the fact that they know how to acknowledge their own failures, learn from them and turn them around. A startup is in fact an experiment and if you fail early on it will actually help you get closer to success. So my advice is that every time you fail, you shouldn’t let it cast a shadow of doubt on your ability to lead a successful startup.
The team is everything. And if you believe that you’ve got an amazing team that includes yourself and your co-founders as well as your first employees, you will overcome any sort of difficulty you may face along the way. The reason certain startups are successful in scaling up is the fact that they know how to turn around their own failures. A startup is in fact an experiment and if you fail early on it means you get closer to success. So my advice is that every time you fail, you shouldn’t let that cast a shadow of doubt on your ability to lead a successful startup. And if you have a weak team, the first solution, in my opinion, would be to supplement your team, reassign roles or regroup. Once you have a fantastic team and a shared passion for the vision, you can pivot your solution to a better product that is market-fit and lead your company to success.
What is your favorite quote?
My favorite quote is “no one owes you anything”- By Yael Tamar. This philosophy encompasses two truths for me:
Don’t blame anyone else other than yourself for anything
Don’t expect anyone else to come and solve your problems or bail you out when you’re having challenges
Once you internalize the first truth, your brain stops dwelling on why things went wrong. It doesn’t matter who screwed up because at the end of the day what you have to do is fix it. You are the leader of the company and you were the one who allowed the mistake to happen in the first place. Even if the mistake was caused by one of your partners, it’s still your responsibility to check up on the process and do better. Following this line helps avoid finger-pointing.
The second truth means that you have to have a plan A, B, and even C for the failures you will most likely experience. Investors’ money will renounce, the products you promised your clients will not be off too far and you may even experience a security breach. The question is will you let any of these things pull you down. The answer depends on your attitude and your ability to problem-solve and jerry-rig the situation.
One of the great examples of entrepreneurship is the story of how one founder went from living and working out of his family’s garage and eventually become a multi-billion company called Zappos. This story is described in Tony Hsieh’s book Delivering Happiness. Unfortunately, Tony has passed away recently, which is incredibly unfortunate and I will be forever grateful for everything I’ve learned from his books and videos.
We should plan in advance for situations where products are not finished on time and various unpredictable scenarios happen. You need to remember that you are the leader in all of these situations and nobody but you is expected to act and solve whatever problem is thrown at you. You need to remember that you are in charge; remember and that it’s in your hands to become one of the greatest entrepreneurs; it’s your responsibility to lead the way to grow a truly wonderful business – one that will generate revenues and value for your clients, upside for investors, and provide you, your co-founders and employees with a true sense of achievement and satisfaction. But it is just as important to remember to make sure you have fun while doing this. It’s not worth doing anything unless you wake up in the morning and enjoy what you do. Your enjoyment will be reflected in your work, output, and health.
How can we get in touch with you?
Yael Tamar, CMO & Partner Linkedin or you an email me yael@solidblock.co
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