#95 Zach Aarons

Zach Aarons #95 Co-founder and partner, MetaProp In 2007, Zach Aarons left investment banking to start TravelGoat, a New York walking-tour company. “I was a chameleon,” he told Peter Von Der Ahe on the “Behind the Bricks” podcast. “If you wanted me to do a ‘Gossip Girl’ tour, I could do that. If you wanted me to do a tour about beaux-arts architecture, I could do that. If you wanted me to do a pizza tour, I could do that.” In 2011, he went back to school and studied business at Columbia University. One of his professors, Stuart Ellman, the founder of RRE Ventures and a fellow Seed 100 honoree, told him to write a report on the intersections of real estate and technology. “He ended up investing in a couple of companies that I wrote about,” Aarons said. “That was the aha moment.” Four years later, Aarons co-founded MetaProp to invest in both real estate and tech. In 2021, eight of his companies had exits, including the online real-estate platform Breather, which Industrious National Management Company of New York acquired for $3 million, and the digital-marketing tool BentoBox, which Fiserv acquired for an undisclosed amount. Source: businessInsider