Caren Maio
President and chief strategy officer at Moved
Sales at Caren Maio’s Moved, a resident onboarding platform for multi-
family properties, have more than tripled in the last year. Maio, who became its president and top strategist in early 2022, is quick to point out that the growth was a team effort.
“It takes a village,” she said. “I subscribe to the quote, ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.’ In the case of Moved, it’s certainly the people. It’s also very much the product, the vision and where it sits in this moment. But I’m here because of the people.”
That innate empathy is also what drives her to mentor other emerging founders in the proptech field, particularly women. Maio is a RE200 mentor at venture capital firm MetaProp, and is regularly involved with New York University’s Female Founders Fellowship and the Fordham University Real Estate Institute.
Co-founding Funnel, a renter management software company, in 2011 was the best thing Maio ever did, she said, but it was also the hardest and scariest — even the loneliest thing. What excites Maio about guiding the next generation of founders is helping them to embrace that struggle — “embracing the roller coaster,” as she calls it — which in turn helps unlock their potential.
Starting a company “is a big, audacious, scary thing we’re trying to do, and there are times where it feels really lonely. … Every founder has experienced that at some point in their journey,” Maio said. “Starting a company, operating a company — I think we glamorize it to some extent. We don’t focus on some of the harder aspects of running a business.
“Vulnerability is something that, as an industry, we all need to work on — being more open, being more vulnerable, being real. I know it’s ugly to talk about when we’re struggling. But we can all help so many more founders by talking about it openly.”
The most important lesson Maio has learned over the years? Be kind to yourself. No one has all the answers, and everyone makes mistakes, she said. But there’s a tendency to learn much more from failure than success.
