Shane Mason

Tech Week Day 2 part 1: Carhartt chic and being in the room where it happens: If there's a convenient event you think you'd be a good addition to but you're not on the list, just show up. Don't let a closed door keep you out of a room that you should be in! Read on to learn how I do it below: (If you haven't read it, Part 1 is readable here: teapawt.net/InfillOperator/status/…) LA Tech Week runs on an RSVP system, where the addresses are often hidden behind approval gates and only shared to those who are formally accepted into the event. For the Critical Industries Mixer in Santa Monica, just blocks from my coworking space, they texted the address out to all participants (including the waitlist). Commercial Real Estate is a Critical Industry (real estate is included in the Commercial Facilities sector: cisa.gov/commercial-faciliti…), so I put on my best golf polo and chinos and showed up to deep tech without actually being on the list. I was early enough, friendly enough, and dressed to play the part, and so they let me right in. #LATechWeek

I've hired several Executive Assistants over the years, and Dot is the best Assistant I've ever had. Here's a comparison of 3 of the biggest assistant agents:

Tech networking events are kind of weird in that they can sometimes feel a linked in add-fest, where you talk to a million people and just walk away with a bunch of new names in your Linked In. I'm more of a Twitter guy myself, and hadn't done a super deep dive on optimizing my Linked In brand. So when I settled in at Bower Surf Club (pictured below) to squeeze in a few hours of work, I leveraged ChatGPT computer use and a mobile external monitor to overhaul my linkedin while juggling emails to my capital partner in Century City.

Parking lots are the new country clubs, when it comes to raising capital in LA. During LA TechWeek I spread the word about storage investing in West LA, the #2 storage market in the country. I hit parking lots from Culver City to El Segundo across 15 different events and had a blast doing it. Below please find a first hand account of commercial real estate operator pounding the pavement on a mission to spread the word about storage investing to folks in the technology industry. As an AI Native operator, there would be plenty for me to talk to them about regardless of their desire to diversify into storage investing. I had my Muse book 15 rsvps on partifully and away we went! Day 1 report below: 🧵

Tech networking events are kind of weird in that they can sometimes feel a linked in add-fest, where you talk to a million people and just walk away with a bunch of new names in your Linked In. I'm more of a Twitter guy myself, and hadn't done a super deep dive on optimizing my Linked In brand. So when I settled in at Bower Surf Club (pictured below) to squeeze in a few hours of work, I leveraged ChatGPT computer use and a mobile external monitor to overhaul my linkedin while juggling emails to my capital partner in Century City.

We built a numerical palace around our storage underwriting. Killer analysis is not always the best thing. The details that made our team comfortable with the deal took a lot of time to compute, and they weren’t necessarily the details other people cared about. Some people will do their own underwriting. Others will trust that you’ve done yours. In retrospect, thinking harder about scope and removing as much as possible could have given us a simple enough deliverable to ship faster and get market feedback sooner. That would probably have been a better path than the one we took. Feature creep is real and time to market matters! Can you share a time when you wish you would have cut scope to get to market sooner? Share your story in the comments!

After 13 years in real estate, here's what I've learned: - Understand how long your capital could be tied up - Never underestimate the people and relationships that can make or break a deal - Evaluate the operator as carefully as you evaluate the property. A spreadsheet can tell you what a deal might earn. It can't tell you whether the person running it will make the right decisions when things get difficult. That's where experience and judgment matter. If you're an accredited investor looking to diversify beyond public markets and explore passive self-storage investments with potential tax benefits, subscribe to my newsletter or DM me. I'll share what I've learned from 13 years in commercial real estate.

Mistake #3: Evaluating the property but ignoring the sponsor I see this mistake among high-income investors all the time. They scrutinize the property, analyze the returns, and examine the tax benefits. But they don't always scrutinize the person managing their money. That's dangerous. Real estate is an operating business. Someone has to make decisions about expenses, financing, property management, and the long-term value of the asset. Those decisions can make or break your investment.

We also trusted the wrong signals. We believed the mobile home park operator supported our project. Instead of speaking directly with the people who owned the mobile homes and would be affected by our plans, we relied too heavily on the operator's apparent support. When we presented the actual design, that support disappeared. We hadn't built the community relationships we needed. We lost the project. Looking back, we made two mistakes: We neglected the design's impact on the community, and we failed to engage the people who mattered. The lesson? A project can work perfectly on paper and still fail because you misunderstand the people involved.

Mistake #2: Thinking the numbers are enough We wanted to build a 65-foot-tall structure on a narrow railroad right-of-way in San Jose. The existing industrial zoning required 10-foot setbacks, making the site practically unusable for our intended project. We needed planned development zoning to make it work. So we hired an excellent land-use consultant and put together a plan. From a practical and economic standpoint, we knew what we wanted to build. But we made a critical mistake. We designed a building that worked on paper but did little to address the surrounding community's concerns. It was essentially a blank wall. We focused on making the project economically viable without thinking enough about how it would affect the people living around it.