Ryan Serhant isn’t your typical startup founder. That became obvious when a Netflix crew filmed our interview, which surprisingly is not a regular occurrence for Term Sheet. But as I learned while trying not to be distracted by the drone flying out of Serhant’s office window capturing wide shots, his fame is a feature, not a bug.
Maybe you recognize Serhant’s name from Million Dollar Listing or his new Netflix show, Owning Manhattan. Or maybe you’ve bought an apartment from the man himself or one of his rapidly growing army of brokers, all operating under his eponymous real estate empire, which closed the sixth most residential sales in Manhattan last year, according to the Real Deal. (Serhant tells me he’s opening in a new market roughly every 14 days.)
But now, Serhant wants to position himself as a tech entrepreneur, raising $45 million from the respected New York venture firms Camber Creek and Left Lane Capital and launching an app called S.MPLE, designed to help brokers navigate their sales.
Most software founders gain celebrity because of the success of their products, but from his flagship headquarters in SoHo, which greets guests with a massive statue of an S right inside the front door, Serhant makes a convincing case for why the reverse can also be true.
Through his reality shows and millions of social media followers, Serhant helped pioneer a new form of real estate sales, where brokers find buyers through virality rather than staid listings in newspapers and Craigslist. His average agent is 20 years younger than the industry average. “They only know their business through social media,” he tells me. The number one lead generator? LinkedIn.
Serhant describes S.MPLE as “Instacart for salespeople” (See, he really is one of you.) It wasn’t his first foray into developing real estate-focused tech, including an aborted metaverse platform called UNIVERS and a real-time video editing app called Spaces, which never…