, co-founder and managing partner of venture capital firm MetaProp NYC LLC, to talk about the state of proptech today. The following excerpts have been edited for brevity and clarity.I think it's important to remember that this is a trailing indicator. This is a survey that went out right at the halfway point , which already feels like a million years ago to many of us.
When we look at our quarterly reports, and I sit down and leaf through them, you realize how much commercial traction there is, how the fundamentals of proptech startup businesses are really, really good. As, I think everybody likes to point out, says: You don't buy a stock; you buy a company. We're very much the same. The valuation in this moment in time isn't as good as we would like it to be. But I think things will look better come the next edition of this confidence index.
There are a lot of what call point solutions out there — solutions that are good businesses that solve a particular problem, but for large enterprise players, they can't afford to integrate with all of them. And so middleware, that in-between layer between the big companies and small companies, gets built and acts as that routing and translation layer. We like that space, we've done some deals there.
There's going to be more, for sure. There's always companies that don't make it for various reasons, and there's every flavor of ice cream out there for quality of management, for quality of technology, size of market, et cetera. You're always going have some who make it, some who don't, so, of course, we're going to continue to see failures in the market.