From partner to the team: my journey from Veris to Venn.

I’ve told the short version of this story a dozen times now, usually over coffee at a conference or in the first five minutes of a call with a prospective customer. But I’ve never actually written it down. So here it is.

The problem I was trying to solve

I spent 12.5 years at Veris Residential, across three separate lease-ups, most recently as VP of Innovation. My job, in plain terms, was to figure out how to make nearly 7,000 apartment units feel like one consistent, elevated experience instead of a patchwork of buildings each doing their own thing. That’s harder than it sounds. Every property had its own tech stack, its own workarounds, its own version of “how we do things here.” Meanwhile, residents didn’t care about any of that — they just wanted things to work.

If you’ve heard me talk at an industry event, you’ve probably heard some version of my pet theory: the most expensive mistake in multifamily operations isn’t any single bad decision, it’s doing the same thing a dozen different ways across a portfolio. Every property reinventing its own process for the same problem is expensive in ways that don’t show up cleanly on a P&L — inconsistent resident experience, onboarding friction for new hires, data you can’t actually compare building to building. Centralizing that was basically my whole job at Veris.

Package management was one of the clearest examples. It sounds small until you’re the one living it: hundreds of packages a day, roughly 80 seconds to log each one, concierge teams stuck in a back room instead of actually engaging with residents. I remember saying at the time that fixing that workflow was critical — not because packages are glamorous, but because every minute a team spends wrestling with a bad system is a minute they’re not spending on the person in front of them.

That’s the lens I brought to everything: not “what’s the coolest technology,” but “what actually removes friction for the people running these buildings and the people living in them.”

45 days from selection to go-live

We selected Venn in January 2025. Implementation kicked off in mid-February, and we went live across the portfolio on April 1st. Start to finish: 45 days.

We still brag about that timeline internally, and for good reason. A rollout across thousands of units, touching leasing, resident experience, and onsite operations all at once, is the kind of project that can easily turn into a year-long slog with a typical vendor. Ours didn’t, and it wasn’t because Veris had some unusual amount of bandwidth to throw at it. It’s because Venn’s team was genuinely agile about it — their development and support functions moved at the pace an operator actually needs, not the pace software vendors usually move at. When we hit a snag, it got solved that week, not queued for the next quarterly release.

That’s the thing that stuck with me most from being a customer: speed isn’t a feature Venn markets, but it’s the thing that made everything else possible.

What it actually looked like in practice

A few moments stand out from the time we’ve spent live on the platform.

Package management. We rebuilt it with Quick Scan, Venn’s native package tool. Instead of 80 seconds per package, we got down to four. Across our portfolio that added up to real numbers — 200,000+ packages logged in the first two months, 7.5 hours saved weekly per community, packages picked up 40% faster. But the number I actually cared about was simpler: our concierge teams got their time back to do the job they were hired for, which is taking care of people, not scanning barcodes.

myVeris. We took Venn’s platform and built our own branded resident app on top of it, live across 9,600+ residents. First month adoption came in at 90%, well ahead of typical benchmarks. Residents created 52 new interest groups, sent 3,700+ messages, booked 5,000+ amenities. Golf groups, foodie groups, parents’ groups — people were meeting neighbors and asking for pediatrician recommendations before they’d even moved in. That’s the part that doesn’t show up in a spreadsheet: it stopped being an app people used because they had to, and started being one that actually built community.

Everything else that came with it. Package management and myVeris got the spotlight, but they were just two pieces of a much bigger build-out. We also rolled out move-in inspections, the move-in checklist, an entire renters insurance solution, and — as an early design partner — a maintenance solution and application & screening. Each one on its own is a smaller story, but together they’re the real point: once the platform was in place, adding the next workflow wasn’t a new implementation, it was a configuration.

Brand, not just software. One of the things I pushed hardest on was making sure Venn never felt like a bolted-on vendor tool. Custom fonts, our colors, our voice — all the way down to how we talked about “The Veris Promise,” our commitment to residents around things like 24-hour maintenance response and a 30-day move-in guarantee. Technology should disappear into your brand, not compete with it. Venn made that possible in a way I hadn’t seen from anyone else in this space.

The dinner that changed my path

By the time I sat down for dinner with Venn’s founder, Or Bokobza, at the RETTC conference in Miami, Veris had already been live on the platform for a while. This wasn’t a sales conversation — I was already a customer. It was two people who’d both spent years thinking about the same problem, talking shop.

The conversation that night centered on the data problem operators actually have, not the one vendors assume we have. Or wasn’t pitching me anything. He was describing a way of thinking about resident experience and operations that matched exactly what I’d been trying to build internally, piecemeal, for years — and it got me thinking about the problem at a scale bigger than my own portfolio.

Why I made the jump

Here’s the honest answer: I loved being a customer, but somewhere along the way I’d started thinking like a builder. Every conversation with Venn’s team turned into “have you thought about...” or “what if we also...” I wasn’t just implementing their platform, I was pressure-testing it, pushing on it, imagining what else it could do — because I had thousands of units and real residents on the other end of every decision.

That dinner in Miami was the moment I realized that impulse didn’t have to stay something I brought to quarterly check-ins. If I was going to spend that much energy thinking about how this platform should evolve, it made more sense to do it from the inside, working with the people building it, rather than just being the loudest customer in the room.

So I joined Venn as VP of Solutions Engineering. Now instead of implementing Venn for one operator, I get to help build out the function that does that well for every operator who’s making the same bet Veris made — and to bring the operator’s perspective into a company that was built by operators in the first place. I was Venn’s customer before I was its teammate, and that’s exactly the vantage point I want to keep bringing to the table.

What I’d tell someone in my old seat

If you’re an operator looking at Venn and wondering whether it’s worth the disruption of a rollout: it is, but not because of any single feature. It’s because the platform is built by people who’ve actually run buildings, and a team that can turn around a 7,000-unit implementation in 45 days is a team that understands operators don’t have a year to wait.

And if you’re a partner who finds yourself constantly thinking like part of the team — that might be worth paying attention to. It certainly was for me.