Coming up on this episode of the leadership lounge, say yes to things that I think it opens a lot of doors. I would say that the statement that I try and live my life by is I always want my humility to be greater than my influence. And that humility greater than your influence, I think, enables you to be just in a lot of spaces with an attitude of what can I learn? How can I grow? Not because of my own knowledge set, success, money, whatever. But the humility greater than my influence, I think, really has enabled me to just be in rooms and around people with open hands and seeing what happens. My name is Mitch Slater, executive director, UBS New York City. And I'm joined by my colleague Saman Samii, account vice president, wealth management from Dallas, Texas. And the best way to contact us is by emailing Mitch Slater at UBS dot com or Saman Samii at UBS dot com. Our guest today is not affiliated with UBS. That was the voice of Kyle Waldrep, the founder and CEO of Dotted and our special guest today on Leadership Lounge.
Big question to start off. Samii and Mitch, thanks for thanks for having me. Keep it short and simple. Born and raised in Dallas. Never left. Samii mentioned love tennis, went to SMU to play. And then to get right to it, yes, started a company post-college and just exited that business last fall to JLL. And so I think if I were to sum up 31 years of life, I've seen seen a lot, got to persevere through a lot. I've had an infectious disease. I've started a business, exited that business, all sorts of things. But ultimately, at the end of the day, been really, really grateful for the people and the experiences that I've had to just go live, love, kind of learn about life as much as possible. And my faith is incredibly important to me. I'm super close to my family. Everybody's here in Dallas. And then the Lord's been really kind to surround me with a great network of friends. Obviously, Samii, including including you these last few years to go be about the business of other people. So that's kind of in a nutshell. That would be me. That's awesome. I'm a personal believer in like if you have sports, it tells a lot about a person. Can you talk a little bit about your tennis background? Because I know it's amazing. And also that infectious disease that you had that has been a big part of your life. Sure. Struggles that you went through early on.
So shout out to my dad for that one. But the tennis skills, I guess, came along with that with that practice early on. And I was playing, you know, seven, eight years old. I was playing kids over 12 and 13. And then Samii, as you know, because of our common interest, you just kind of keep playing, keep playing tournaments, trying to win, trying to practice, trying to survive on the tennis court. And then was going to have the opportunity to play at SMU starting in the summer of 2012. And I woke up first day of college with West Nile virus. And so West Nile virus is a mosquito borne illness. I would say low research, low treatment capability around the world, frankly, for the disease. And so I was sick for about two years. So my freshman and sophomore year of college looked very different than most of the guys and gals that I was around at SMU. Tennis was out the window very quickly. I had no body. I had no fitness. I had no ability really to do anything athletic.
So took junior year to train and then actually ended up helping coach the women's team that year and working for President Bush at the Bush Institute, my senior year of college. So that whole story is just one of God's graciousness in a lot of ways, but perseverance in so many others as well. Yeah, I was so sick and yet still got to do a lot of things that really could not have imagined doing when I was starting college. Perseverance is everything. A good friend of my daughter had West Nile virus. And also, actually, she wound up almost three years where she was out of college and she was like doing little odd jobs like just dog sitting just to get her stuff back together.
And I do think that that makes a big difference. So so let's let's talk a little bit about the company you started. Tell us about what the company was, how it all began and and then, you know, work work our way a little bit towards the acquisition. Sure. So I was going to be a broker in commercial estate coming out of school. I wanted to go to law school because actually the illness, I decided that just another couple of years of education was not probably in my best interest at the time. I needed to stay in Dallas. I needed to likely be at home, be around family. And so living in Dallas, what do you do when you graduate college? You go into commercial real estate. That's seemingly a fast track. And that's what I wanted to do. So I was going to lease office space for one of the big brokerage firms.
And technology was an obvious first step for that. So I asked a bunch of people in my interview process what they hated about their job. And ultimately, the idea for Dotted, what became Dotted, was formed during that interview process. And I turned down a job offer, cashed out my savings, moved home, and kind of the rest is history for the next nine years. And it was a long journey. It was a hard road. We built a great product. We had some very significant challenges around the market. We came to market February of 2020. So if anybody remembers that time, that was a great timing for us. You had a great month. Honestly, we got our first customer at the end of that month. And I was thinking, man, this is going to go great. And then the world ended, I think, a few weeks later. March 13th. I know it well. You probably remember it very well. That was indicative of, I think, what I got to learn the next four to five years.
And so we can have, obviously, a lot of conversations on that. But Jotted was fortunate to be acquired by JLL at the end of last fall, middle of last fall. And now we're excited about what the future holds for the business at JLL. How was the process for you with the acquisition? I know exiting a business is a very personal issue. It's an emotional issue as well as quite a business issue. What things worked really well for you and any tips for other people that may be considering exiting a business in the future? Yeah, the process went as smooth as I guess you can hope it goes. When you're doing it for the first time, you just don't know a lot. You're in conversations and meetings you've never been in before. And they seem to keep happening because you're always having discussions. You're always being asked for certain pieces of information. You're always trying to report back on your side. And so you're doing things for the first time every day. And I think the wisdom that I actually got from a couple mentors was just keep learning. You're not going to do it all right. You don't also have to sweat the small stuff.
I mean, you have to push the deal forward. It's just how it works. Both sides have to be kind of equally in tune with wanting to get an outcome. But you don't want to press too hard where you push someone away. But you also want to press too little where you don't kind of get that interest back in return. So the things that I was learning was day in, day out, stay steady, stay confident, stay motivated, and stay in communication. Because that was what I think our side did well was we were in constant communication and ultimately got an outcome last fall. Yeah. Talk about one of the things that really impresses me about you is you're such a connector. And I'd like to be that as well in our business. I think business is all about connections. Do you feel like you had built the right connections before you walked down that path? Because that is a once-in-a-lifetime path sometimes. And you need to have the trusted advisors around you. Had you done that legwork or did people just come after hearing that you're going to sell? Yeah. I'm not a huge like, hey, it's just going to fall into your lap.
And you just continue the relationship, check in, have phone calls, send emails. Hey, what's going on? What are you seeing in market? Basic stuff about connecting and relationship building. That's what I tried to do really throughout the course of DOTA. I think that's what allowed us to continue to have open doors in the market, even despite a difficult market. It was a lot of relationship building and a lot of networking that you just never know where something might lead. If you would have told me in 2021 that that relationship would lead to now me working with that person that I met back then and now JLO, that's not what I would have guessed. But that's all part of the fun. Knowing you, you probably tracked how many people you met with. I did. It's the same as tennis. It's like if I had 500 forehands, there's no way I'm going to get worse. Yeah. I've got a massive spreadsheet of everybody. Exactly. So it's just specific and measurable activities. Sounds like that. You got it. Having worked with Larry King years ago, one of the things that I learned in my 20s, I was very fortunate to be in his world. And the guy was an amazing listener and a curiosity. So I always kind of put myself in the ear of the listener back then. It was radio.
And we had a holding business, but we didn't have a logo, a name, really anything that was super official. We were sitting at a coffee shop in downtown Dallas and this was pre-COVID. So totally different time in the world. And we were just kind of spitballing ideas. And I really liked the idea of connecting dots. I kept utilizing that thought process in how the transaction of a lease gets done. You're connecting a lot of dots with a lot of people over many months. And so we started with this idea with dots. And then at midnight that night, the marketing consultant sent me this late email and was like, it's dotted. I love it. And I was like, that's genius. And she actually spelled it D-O-T-T-E-D. And I, in my so lack of edgy nature, I said, let's replace the E with an I and call it Dotted. And the rest is history. I knew you were a connector. I told you. Hey, as a young entrepreneur, you built this company from scratch, took it from being a one man shop and then having employees. And now all of a sudden you get into the leadership role.
You want to build something, want to lay a great foundation with people that you trust. And so the early people that I was fortunate to work with. I always used to joke about it. I rarely hired anybody because we always just worked together. I saw it. It wasn't like, oh, hey, you know, you work underneath me or whatever you work. You work for Dotted. You work with me. And we're working together for a common goal, which is to build a business. And so the people that I got to hire early on and got to work with were fantastic. They were friends. They were people I met through networks. And they were just people we wanted to lay a strong foundation with. I think the lessons learned is that in our space, I didn't have commercial real estate knowledge. I also didn't have technical knowledge. The CTO that we brought on was fantastic. He's still with us today. And he and I really, I think, from a directional perspective, early days tried to build as much of the business together as humanly possible. And he and I also were not kind of the same personality type. He was much older than me. We had different backgrounds.
I knew that if he was in a technical meeting that I was not part of, I knew I trusted his decision making. And I think the same would be true for him if he was asked this question. He knew that if I was in a meeting that he was not in on the business side, he trusted that. And that trust, that commonality, and that shared, ultimately, outcome of what you're seeking was just what I wanted early on. Now, as we grew, you can't multiply that across everybody. Not everybody can be in all the meetings. You can't have 30 people in all the meetings or 50 people in all the meetings. That doesn't work. And so then you really begin to trust how that person who you've hired early on and worked with early on, how they're going to take and embody the values of the business to go replicate themselves and to teach the people that are underneath them. And I think that's what we tried to do at the company. We had a very young business. That may have been one of the mistakes we made, but I also think that that led to a lot of creativity and a lot of innovation very quickly.
You can't go change it. You learn from it. And then you get to make potentially different decisions or the same decisions next time. So we have a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs that love listening to this show. So you've, I'm sure, been given a lot of great advice throughout your career so far. Is there any any one or two things that really stick out that you'd love to put out there? Goodness. Work with great people was one of our board members wrote this on a little slip for me back in 20, gosh, 2022 and brought it to my office. And it just I had it on my actually on my computer for many years. And it was just this idea of like you want to work with incredibly talented individuals. There's always going to be struggle no matter who you work with. There is the pain and the friction of trying to build a business. And so how you decipher how you go about that is is really what I think grows you and then ultimately grows the business. I mean, businesses are just a collection of people and it's not the just. But in a certain sense, businesses are the combination of the thoughts, the experiences and really the output of those people. And thus, I want to work with great people.
And for what we were doing, we just had a moniker. We want to work with the best talent we could find at the time and to go elevate our business. And so that would be one of them. And I think the other thing that I learned over time is in the business world, things so ebb and flow so fast, especially in our market at the time. We had COVID with the basically the Biden administration coming in and putting six trillion dollars into the economy, along with the Trump administration, kind of American Rescue Plan and then the infrastructure bill, etc. All sorts of things that happened. Twenty, twenty one, twenty, twenty two. The market was dynamic and we had to be super agile. We had to respond. We had to go in and push levers to try and grow in different areas. One of the big decisions we made in 2020 was going to industrial real estate, because if you remember, e-commerce was like, yeah, freaking booming at the time. And so moving out of office that was not booming because no one was in the office, but moving to industrial, just trying to be agile and trying to make.
That's great. One of the things another thing I admire about you is how you juggle life. You also mentor to young kids. Talk about that. Talk about talk about your sports on top of just being an entrepreneur. And what's next for you? Because I know you're sure. So my actually my my CFO is actually still with us at JLL. He was a Young Life kid back in Cedar Park, Texas, in high school. And so I met him in college and he came to me at kind of the end of 2015, maybe the summer of 2015, somewhere around there and said, hey, we're going to go lead Young Life in Dallas. And Young Life is a parachurch ministry targeting kind of like a middle school, high school kids. And so that was just my first first introduction to mentoring kids. And I was probably the worst young life leader on the face of the planet. The first three years, I really just didn't get it. Mentoring is so much about listening, as Mitch kind of mentioned earlier with Larry King. You want to be an incredible listener.
I've actually just now kind of hung up the cleats on that and seen a bunch of guys graduate St. Mark's, which is a private school here in Dallas, Texas, and the joy and the fruit of that season of my life, which was really I talked about actually in another podcast I did. But I did two things in my 20s. I built a business and I led Young Life. And I look back on that very fondly because I really appreciate that I made those decisions. I think other people do a lot of things, but I want to do things that produce fruit, not just in my life, but hopefully in the lives of other people. And so, yeah, thankful for that season of life. Thankful for what I got to experience with those boys and ultimately excited for, you know, whatever the Lord has next. And we'll see what that is. I think I think y'all may be where I started a podcast now, work at JLL. So there's a couple of things on the docket. Talk about that podcast. Talk about that podcast. So the podcast is called Intersections and pretty simple starter story. I just sold the business and the former mayor of Dallas, Tom Leppard, who's really was a mentor to me and someone that I got breakfast with about every other Tuesday for about four years, which is a wild thought, candidly. But he was CEO of Turner Construction.
The man has seen and done a lot of things, not just locally, but nationally and internationally, and someone that I got to bounce a lot of ideas and a lot of commentary off of. And we had incredible. Symmetrical interest, we love golf, we love sports, we love geopolitics. And so I had an idea and I created a one pager because every good idea needs some sort of one pager in my book. And so I brought him a one pager at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday morning back November of 2024. And he looked at me after reading it and I think thought I was a little nuts, but he never stood in the way of it. And I think that was what was interesting. The idea was to bring kind of a 70 year old and a 30 year old, put everybody in the same room, get some guests and go have a conversation from a multigenerational lens. He's got the scars and the successes of his experience.
And so Intersections is the name we've started. We've released a few episodes now. And the guest profile that we've had on has been more than I ever dreamed, hoped or imagined. And we've had some incredible guests talking about anything from policing in America to tariffs in the economy. So it's really been a huge blessing and a lot of fun to work on. You know, every picture tells a story and I can't but help see the picture behind you with former President George W. Bush. So tell us that story. Oh, man. This is funny. I don't think I've ever told this story. This is good. This is a great question, Mitch. So long story short, I was interning at the Bush Center at the Bush Institute, my senior of college, and I was that intern that just pushed all the buttons. I was there. I was around a lot of people and I wanted involvement and I wanted to do things.
And so this particular picture, Mitch, that you're referencing was an event for all of the Bush 43 alumni. And so it was held in Dallas. It was just a get together in, I think, the fall of. Actually, no, it was the spring of 16. It was the spring of 16. And I wanted a picture with President Bush and I was on the communications team. But as an intern, you're in this weird spot of like you're working. I know it well. But it's also the president. And so you're like kind of screw the work for five minutes. Let me go get a picture with the president. And he was kind of making the rounds with a bunch of people. And I befriended his photographer who lives here in Dallas. And I told the photographer, I said, if there's five to 10 seconds that he turns and I'm available, you're taking this picture. And that's how it happened. Life is life is too short. The similarity of our 20s, because I had a lot of insane things happen in the 20s. And, you know, when you work with Larry King, you meet celebrities every night.
So with Jimmy Carter, it happened organically because my job was to bring him in from the green room. And with Ronald Reagan, he literally had a photographer there. And that's just what they did. And, you know, having those opportunities in life, you have to take advantage of them. I was just telling a story yesterday to a friend about how I met Paul McCartney. But it was one of those incidents. It was pre-iPhone. My kids were at the time 11 and 7. We were at this little farmer's market out on Long Island in the Hamptons. And it's like just before 7 p.m. And my wife says, go buy bananas. I'm like, we already have bananas. And he's standing over there with his wife. And we had this incredible conversation that he talked to my kids, whose names are Georgia and Harrison. And he said to me, he said, I'm a little offended. There's no Paul. And I said, well, it's actually my middle name. He said, OK, that's great. Now, I don't know. It would have been great to have the photo if it could have happened. But, you know, these organic things that happen are so important in life. A buddy's dad told me in college to always go for the door. And if I have any advice for anybody who's in high school or in college, go for the door. Make it happen. Shoot your shot. Don't be afraid to fail. That's frankly how Dotted started a little just another story on this front. And when I the day I turned down the job offer, the brokerage firm, I got basically laughed to the elevator. By the guy who I just told no to.
And I went down the elevator and I called a mentor of mine, a guy named Chuck Anderson here in Dallas, who was former Tremble Crow, and he's been wildly successful in the commercial investing space. And I said, I just turned out a job offer. And he said, great. Go start your company because there's no greater time to fail than when you're 22 with no responsibilities. And that comment at the time was totally true. I was not married, didn't have kids. I had the incredible blessing and frankly, privilege of being able to go live at home. My parents knew nobody in real estate. I knew nobody in real estate except a couple of people I had an interview with. And he said, just go, go and start. We'll see what happens. Ultimately, Chuck is still obviously a dear friend to this day. But that motivation and push is really in a lot of ways in the entrepreneurial world and what y'all are doing, even with starting this podcast, there's friction and you've got to overcome it. And that perseverance and that push is what really I think you get to learn so much about yourself and so much about what you believe when you make decisions of yes. It's always easier to say no. No is a incredibly comfortable answer. But the yes is such a dynamic opportunity to go figure out what yes means. And for me, that picture is indicative of that.
So we ask we ask Tim Ferris's tribe of mentors question at the end of every one of the podcasts that we do for a very specific reason, because I think the advice that people like you give, sometimes it's really helpful to sum it up. The question is, you're granted a giant billboard for the entire world to see. All right. Everyone is driving down every major highway and seeing that billboard with your message. Kyle, what would it be and why? You may have already just answered this. So, I mean, can I give two? I'll give two. Of course, there's a country. Yes. Say yes to things that I think it opens a lot of doors.
And that's it, like it's kind of period the end. There's no and or but to that statement, which I love. Because you never know what might come of something, you never know what might come of a conversation or a meeting, especially in the business world. And so yeah, humility greater than your influence. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Kyle, thank you so much for taking time today. And we're really looking forward to hearing more of your your podcast intersections. And I guess people can find that on Spotify and Apple and everywhere else out there, YouTube, I would imagine, too. And I sent some really great, great guests. I mean, I was listening to the interview you just did with the head of baseball. I'm a big baseball guy. So I heard the Texas Rangers thing. And I absolutely love that comment that that guy sent the email the night before the two games in Houston that, you know, they needed to win. And I just love that. Those are those are the kinds of moments as a sports fan. I'm a I'm a Met fan. I'm feeling really great. We just lost five in a row and we're looking terrible.
Chris Young stepped in the gap when they were down 3-2 in the ALCS the fall of 23. And the Rangers obviously continued writing their story, not just those next two games, but obviously winning the World Series. But you're spot on. And y'all are doing that with this. I mean, this is a great and a great opportunity to be known, to ask questions and to hopefully provide the listener with maybe a little nugget of wisdom that they can take with them. Somehow, I think Mark Cuban's going to be on your show. We'll see. I hope so. We actually just had the former CEO of the Mavericks, St. Marshall. Oh, great. We're working it to see ultimately if Mark will make an appearance. We love that. Kyle, thank you so much for all the wisdom and for being such a good friend and getting on our UBS Leadership Lounge podcast today. Great time. Thanks for having me.
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