Name: Pia Hauch
Job title: VP growth, Redpin
What I do: I lead the growth team at Redpin, a payments and embedded software platform for the international property industry. My team’s focus is on new growth vectors, market expansion and global partnerships.
What were you doing before you joined Redpin: I oversaw global operations and the UK market for Checkout.com, a global payments business and Europe’s most valuable unicorn. Apart from a short stint in banking, I’ve spent my career scaling VC-backed technology businesses in operational and GTM roles.
Why I got into the property industry: One of my professional passions is transforming traditional categories and sectors with innovative products, customer experience and technology. The property sector is one of the last age old, global industries to be relatively untouched by technology. Of course, we’ve seen a rise in proptech companies in the past 5-10 years who are all coming at the pie from different angles but there is still so much white space to tackle. Our vision at Redpin is to create an entirely new category of software solutions for all the key players in the real estate ecosystem: by combining a world-class payments platform with completely new technology, we are able to reduce complexity, improve security and transparency and unlock a new way to buy, sell and manage property for businesses around the world. We are backed by incredible investors like Blackstone and it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.
My first proper job: When I was 14 years old, I worked at a local ice cream shop but my first real adult job was as an analyst at JP Morgan in San Francisco.
My inspiration(s): I’ve always been inspired by complete self starters, by those who had a vision that nobody else could see or believe and made that a reality.
The biggest challenge I’ve encountered to date: Before I moved to London, I was the third employee of a mobility and hospitality start-up which we grew over four years and ultimately had to shut down during Covid. This was one of the toughest experiences because of the high-highs and very low-lows that comes along with launching a company from 0 to 1.
My greatest achievement/proudest moment to date: I’ve had many failures in my career (probably the times when I learned the most!) but I always find a way to pivot, rebuild and continue learning. I’m proud of that resilience and it’s something I think is such an important characteristic in long term success.
My biggest bugbear about the industry/the one thing I would change: The biggest bugbear I see is the widespread manual and offline nature of the industry. Most processes are incredibly clunky, lack automation, are very fragmented by geo and quite archaic. However, this is also why I have so much conviction in the opportunity facing the property sector: there are endless ways that technology, data analytics and AI can be applied to streamline the current way the industry operates and I find this incredibly exciting.
Where I’d like to be in five years’ time career-wise: There is still so much I want to build in my current company – and potentially one or two more after that – but long term, my dream is to work for myself.
Who I’d invite, living or dead, to a dinner party: I love hosting so I’ll take the liberty of inviting a few people to my dinner party: David Attenborough, Serena Williams, JK Rowling, a navy seal, Bob Iger, Reese Witherspoon and Andrea Bocelli.
What I do in my downtime: I’m a bit of a health and wellness nut so I love doing anything active and outdoors: tennis, skiing, cycling, hiking. I also live to travel so I’ll take any opportunity to hop a flight to somewhere new.
The job I’d be doing if I was not doing this: Professional athlete!
My advice for someone just starting out: Learn how to be the most reliable and resourceful person in the room. Have a bias for action; identify problems and bring solutions. To be successful, you don’t need to do anything earth shattering, you just need to consistently do lots of small things right.
My motto/mantra: Work hard, don’t make excuses, ask for help and be nice to people.
