The Zillow of Land Resources
Interview with Yoann Hispa, CEO & Co-Founder of LandGate
Tell us about LandGate. What do you do?
LandGate is a data intelligence and marketplace for land resources. These land resources include oil and gas, solar, wind, water, mining, cell towers, agriculture, and recreation rights. LandGate provides free information online to landowners and developers alike so that they can understand the value of the land resources available more efficiently and accurately. LandGate also provides an online, free, and transparent marketplace for the exchange of resources from landowner to developer or operator.
What is your startup’s origin story?
Prior to LandGate, landowners were being taken advantage of by their lack of industry knowledge. The only data available for resources like oil and gas were locked up in costly subscriptions and only available to large oil and gas companies. Because of this, oil and gas developers or middle men, could low-ball landowners and flip their properties for five times more on average. Two of the main founders, Yoann Hispa and Craig Kaiser, worked in oil and gas companies and saw the opportunity to bring transparency to mineral and land resource transactions, just like Zillow did for residential real estate. They did this by co-founding PetroValues. They both spent much of their time travelling to resource-rich areas to educate landowners on their worth and show them the free website of data points that could tell landowners the likelihood of future development, nearby sale prices, and allowed them to check their royalty checks against production graphs. After a Series A Investment with Rice Investment Group, PetroValues transformed into LandGate. LandGate offers the same complex valuations and free data but also for renewable energy and other land rights that are often exchanged. Even though renewable energy often gets a better rep, the same disadvantages plague landowners through unfair leasing terms and LandGate aims to change that.
Had you been involved in the industry before this startup? What is your background
Yoann Hispa is CEO and co-founder of LandGate. Prior to that, he was Executive Director of Engineering of Ruspetro, and President of Optimix Energy Corp that worked for Private Equities and Investors in their oil and gas evaluations, acquisitions, divestitures, and drilling operations. Yoann has 17 years of experience in the oil and gas industry mainly with Operators in various technical roles from Geoscientist to Reservoir Engineer. While at Anadarko Petroleum Corp, he worked on most of the Unconventional US Onshore assets, in International Exploration, and as Technical Team Lead of Wattenberg’s development. Yoann holds an Executive MBA from the University of Colorado, an MS in Petroleum Eng. from the University of Texas at Austin, an MS in Geomechanics from the University of Birmingham (UK), an MSc in Civil Engineering from ESTP (Paris, France), and a BS equivalent in Math/Physics. Yoann speaks English, French, Spanish, and Czech fluently.
What’s unique about your company? What are the key differentiators between you and other players?
Similar to Zillow, LandGate’s differentiator is the platform of data intelligence it created for sellers and buyers alike. LandGate created the LandEstimateTM that provides an estimated value of each resource on the land: mineral, solar, wind, water, etc. LandGate data, listings, and closings are available for free to anyone. This transparency empowers sellers with confidence to lease or sell their properties, which increases capital flow in the $5 trillion a year land resource market. Most of the wannabe land resource marketplaces are in fact working for buyers to source cheap properties for them. LandGate’s key competitive advantage is the digitization of the valuation process of land resources. Beyond the free estimated land resource values, the LandEstimateTM, LandGate offers PowerVal, a SaaS tool for buyers to facilitate and greatly accelerate their evaluation of assets, from weeks down to minutes. By buying on LandGate, buyers cut their acquisition costs by not having to hire an army of landmen to run title and cold call mineral and land owners. They also don’t need a large team of geoscientists to run economics. They can find great assets on LandGate and run economic and reserves reports in minutes. By listing on LandGate, landowners feel more in control and can typically achieve a better sale or lease price. The result is that buyers buy for less and sellers sell for more.
Take us through a day in your life. What does the typical day look like?
LandGate is an agile and fast-paced startup where everyone pushes hard and gets to wear several hats. LandGate keeps every employee motivated simply: they all have large amount of shares in the company. For example, Yoann Hispa is not only the CEO, Co-Founder, and Director, but also Chief Engineer, Head of HR, Head of Finances, and Marketing Director. He has 4 Master degrees across 3 different countries, and he speaks 5 languages fluently. It comes at no surprise he sets very high expectations. His meetings typically begin around 5am and continue throughout the day ranging from current and potential investors, to picking up phone calls from subscription clients. The marketing and brokerage teams are usually vying for his attention and personal edits of documents and web page mockups. Yoann can answer questions about our employees’ insurance policy and share prices because he does it all personally. He is also the one that wrote all of the complex algorithms that built LandGate’s competitive advantages.
What has been the most challenging part of growing your company?
The most challenging part of growing the company is being able to swiftly adapt to change.
What has been your best marketing channel? What are some channels you are looking to explore next?
Our best marketing channel has been Facebook. We were able to arrange and market educational events for landowners to attend. We are also looking to explore more avenues by encouraging land real estate agents to become more educated on land resource transactions.
What apps do you use that you would recommend to others?
We are a G Suite company. We all have been working from home since the beginning in 2016. We love Google Hangouts, Google Docs, and working live together. We have used Hootsuite and other numerous CRM’s in the past, including PipeDrive, Mailchimp, Hubspot, and Streak. We feel that all of these supported us well at different times, but we are now happy with Salesforce because of its growth potential and its easy integration with Gmail. We would highly reccomend Google products and Salesforce to anyone.
Do you have a book, podcast, or Youtube channel you would recommend to other Entrepreneurs?
I constantly read articles of advice to entrepreneurs from Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk. I’d be very proud to achieve a fraction of their success.
If you could go back in time to the day you founded your company, what advice would you give yourself?
Expect you will have to go all in.
What’s something you’ve learned from building your business that someone else can learn from?
Many don’t talk about their business idea for fear it’d get stolen. They wait for investors to give millions of seed money just for their idea. Without execution and proof of concept, an idea is worthless. Talk to everyone, ask if the market truly needs it.
