Prior to Stessa, Heath was Vice President, Worldwide Business Development and Marketing at Edmodo, the leading global education network.
A seasoned technology entrepreneur and executive, he has extensive background in developing and executing multinational strategies and formerly held positions in product, sales, and marketing across Amazon, Intel, and a number of technology startups.
Heath received a BA in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley and an MBA with High Distinction from the University of Michigan, Ross School of Business where he was recognized as Entrepreneur of the Year.
Stessa gives the millions of real estate investors with single-family rentals and multifamily buildings a powerful new way to track, manage, and communicate the performance of their real estate assets. Property owners can now see all their key metrics in one place with a visual dashboard, automate their income and expense tracking, and save time with tax-ready financial reports.
Most frustrating: The extreme highs and the lows of the day-to-day…although the rollercoaster is also what makes it all so invigorating.
Most rewarding: achieving product / market fit and getting lots of customer love.
Lack of focus – trying to do too much.
1. Value your time appropriately.
2. Surround yourself with great talent.
3. Set regular, clear and measurable goals.
My co-founder Jonah Schwartz and I didn’t start off knowing we would be doing a real estate technology company. Rather we started off contemplating a number of big ideas around the future of work,… yet we kept on getting distracted by our real estate portfolio. To get some immediate gratification, we did a deep dive into one of our multifamily properties that had been on autopilot for a couple years and ended up nearly doubling the value of the building.
We were shocked by how much value we were able to create in such a short amount of time and came away with three big takeaways:
1) As real estate investors, we should be applying these learnings to our entire portfolio.​
2) As product people, we could build software to automate nearly everything we just did.
3) As entrepreneurs, there was a huge opportunity in the space to build a company around a technology solution that we could make available to the millions of investors like us who today use little more than a spreadsheet to manage their portfolios.
Stessa is ‘assets’ backwards.
Early on, we also had this concept of a real estate chatbot that could provide real-time insights about investment properties. ‘Stessa’ sounded like a nice person with whom I might enjoy discussing my properties. Who knows, we may have that chatbot in the future…
Bonus: Trust your instincts.
