Name: Robin Rivaton
Job title: CEO, Stonal
How did you start your career: Most of my career to date has been in France. I started as a strategy consultant at BCG, working with a large pharmaceutical company and telecoms company. My next step was at Groupe ADP, where I became adviser to the CEO and represented the investment board of a corporate venture fund.
What motivated you to get involved with Stonal: During my time as a VC investor, I met Stonal’s founder Michel Tolila. I immediately bought into the vision to transform real estate asset management using AI. So, I crossed the Rubicon, became an entrepreneur, and joined Stonal as CEO in April 2022.
How did you get into the property industry: As an individual investor in real estate, around 2015, I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated by the poor quality of service in the industry. I founded Real Estech, one of the largest proptech communities in Europe gathering corporates and over 250 startups engaged in the disruption of real estate. I’ve been writing for some time too, and wrote about the transformation of the real estate industry in French and English called ‘Make Real Estate Great Again’, which was one of the first of its nature at the time. I was involved in public policy writing reports for the Ministry of Housing in France and then joined the boards of several property developers and asset managers.
What is the biggest misconception people have about the tech industry, and more specifically the proptech industry: The nature of AI for sure. We are in the midst of the AI hype, and the debate is either captured by doomers who attest that AI will actively intend to harm us, or utopists who sell that AI will solve everything. AI is intricate, and for our clients, who are primarily asset managers, it is complicated to gauge the genuine possibilities of such an innovation. Stonal uses machine learning and natural language processing, and we have taught the algorithm to understand, classify and extract information from real estate documents. It is not magic: it is learning through repetition. However, once trained, the algorithm could be 1,000x more efficient than a human depending on the computing power.
What is your biggest bugbear about the industry: Data quality. Data is so unstructured in the real estate industry and so difficult to extract manually, that everybody began to throw in the towel. Sub-standard and non-existent data has encouraged excessive poor decision-making, generating waste. I think we can fix that.
What is the biggest challenge you have encountered to date and your biggest achievement: I’ve now written eight books and have turned Real Estech into a newsletter with 15,000 weekly readers, which are certainly huge personal achievements. At Stonal, we have recently released the open-source format of our meta library of building components, which is the first step to creating a true digital building passport. As a business, we are extremely pleased with the outcome of this, which I’d say is a particular success of note.
What advice would you offer to young individuals looking to set up their own business: I’ve met with a good few entrepreneurs in my time as an investor. Succeeding is hard, but succeeding alone is impossible. Choose your business partners wisely, and they’ll become the greatest investment of all.
Who you would invite, living or dead, to a dinner party and why: Bill Gates. He is such a successful, yet humble man having worked to place a computer in almost every home. He then used his success to become one of the world’s most famous philanthropists, through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other work.
What is your motto/mantra: Believe you can and you are halfway there.
