Great businesses, like great buildings, are designed for the people who use them.

When people ask how I ended up building a real estate technology company after studying architecture, I usually smile, because the path makes more sense than it sounds.

Architecture and entrepreneurship may seem like different worlds. One deals with buildings, materials, structure and space. The other deals with products, customers, systems and growth. But after years of moving between architecture, real estate and technology, I’ve realized they’re deeply connected. Both are about solving problems for people.

A building isn’t successful just because it looks beautiful in a rendering. It has to work. People have to move through it naturally, and it has to respond to light, function, structure, budget and daily life. The same is true for a business. A company can have a beautiful logo, a polished website and a slick pitch deck, but if it doesn’t solve a real problem for real people, it will eventually crack.

Here are a few lessons architecture taught me about building a better business.

In architecture school, we were trained to think about the user before falling in love with the design. Who is going to live here? How will they move through the space? Where will they sit in the morning? What will annoy them after six months? That way of thinking stayed with me.

When I first entered the real estate industry in New York, I noticed something that seemed obvious but was strangely ignored: Apartment hunters were frustrated.

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