Huvvit's poet co-founder and how poetry inspires the platform

Huvvit, a real estate platform that was launched last year, was co-started by a Somalian-American poet named Elias Yabarow. The platform sends out alerts to available agents in certain areas when a prospective home buyer makes a request. It's first come, first serve with Huvvit– the first agent to reply to the alert gets the lead and the platform then connects the agent with the client through text or phone call. The phone numbers are coded between users and agents for confidentiality purposes. All personal information stays private.

According to Yabarow, Huvvit’s on-demand approach is a sweet spot for millennial first-time buyers, who tend to spend a lot more time in the home-buying process and are more receptive to on demand services.

Also known as Alakkuu, Yabarow was influenced by poetry after moving to Nairobi at 13. He studied and became a trained engineer and had to learn to retrieve the best both worlds had to offer. He launched Huvvit months before his new book, Wet Grass Vanilla, was published because he thought the insight of launching a company would help him market his book successfully. 

With his first TEDx talk in Washington, D.C. on April 13 called "Layers of Love," Yabarow hopes he can inspire other engineers and programmers to take advantage of their interests in other areas, and not choose one path or make a “binary decision.”

Maryann Reid: It's a big difference between engineer and a poet. Why both as full-on careers and not choose one?

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