Aussie-Lankan start up ‘Different’ to change face of property management

Monday, 19 November 2018 00:08 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Different founders Mina Radhakrishnan (left) and Ruwin Perera (centre) with Head of Growth Scott Dolce

Backed by one of Australia’s biggest venture capital funds, AirTree Ventures, as well as the Silicon Valley Venture Capital fund, Foundation Capital, this new property tech start-up founded by two Silicon Valley technology bigwigs from Uber and Google, promises to be far more than a tech solution.

Different is founded by former Uber Global Head of Product Mina Radhakrishnan, and her Sri Lankan-born husband Ruwin Perera, an Australian who was a Softbank director and former global business strategy principal for Google.

“At Different, we are simply Different,” said the duo of their unique offering. “We are merely trying to rebuild property management, offering you a better service at a fairer price, brought to you by technology that automates the everyday and people who focus on what matters most – You. That’s Different!”

Different is a full-service property management agency with a monthly fixed management fee per property. It has built apps which give tenants a way to easily lodge problems in the property that need to be fixed, as well as pay rent. Owners, on the other hand, can review previous transactions via their dedicated web application. Different is headquartered in Sydney, Australia with offices in Melbourne and Colombo 5.

As far as their Sri Lankan operations are concerned, the Colombo office has a self-contained team of 12 software engineers and project managers who work in tandem with their Australian counterparts through a partnership with Sri Lankan-born Silicon Valley heavyweight Rehan Fernando, and his office on Galle Road. Engineering projects vary from building reusable UI inventory components with React to building the next generation of their API using GraphQL and Javascript. Distributed configuration management using Vault and Consul, Codified infrastructure using Terraform and Packer and containerised platform using Docker and Nomad are some of the upcoming projects.

“Different is looking to hire great software engineers at different levels from Sri Lanka who have the consumer empathy to build great product experiences to aid us in our journey of building a global product company, and leveraging the best Sri Lankan knowhow to do so.”

Perera and Radhakrishnan stressed the fact that Different pays great salaries that are very competitive to market, as they believe in hiring only the best and developing them to their maximum potential. On recruiting, Radhakrishnan commented “We are often getting engineering reaching out on our website and emailing us at [email protected]. Engineers are drawn to us because unlike working on short-term agency projects, they get to build a world-class product, and learn from our experiences in Silicon Valley.”