David Greenberg’s next move began with a list

David Greenberg was moving apartments in Manhattan when he began making a list. Businesses needed his new address. So did schools and organizations. Each required its own small act of administration, and the acts were adding up. He looked online for a service that would take care of the job. The gap he found was large enough to change his occupation.

At the time, Greenberg practiced corporate law at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. His education had taken him through the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell Law School, where he was an editor of the Law Review. He had spent a little over three years practicing law. Then an address-change problem acquired the dimensions of a business.

“So, I quit my law firm job and got to work,” he recalled in 2011. The sentence makes a considerable career change sound like an item being checked off. There would be plenty more items. Knowing that moving was irritating turned out to be a different qualification from knowing how to build a technology company.

A forwarding address for a career

Greenberg dates starting Updater to 2010; the company dates its launch to 2011. Its first name was Updtr.com. That version was available for about $10, he explained, so the vowels could wait. Once the business raised money, it bought Updater.com. Even a company devoted to simplifying moving had to spend some time at a temporary address.

The initial concern was broader than forwarding envelopes. Greenberg was interested in giving people control over where their address went and which mail reached them. On the other side of the exchange, organizations were trying to keep their records current. An apparently private nuisance connected households with a network of businesses, each holding a different piece of the same information.

That connection would shape the company. Moving involves an unusual collection of purchases and notifications packed into a short period. The sofa needs transport. The internet needs installation. Accounts need updating. Each task is familiar enough to seem manageable until several demand attention at once. Greenberg had chosen a problem whose difficulty lay partly in the number of other people involved.

The invitation had to arrive first

Early users sometimes discovered Updater after they had already handled much of their move. They could appreciate the idea while having little left for it to do. A well-organized checklist loses some of its charm when you have just finished improvising your own.

Greenberg began developing relationships with real estate businesses. Updater joined the inaugural REach accelerator run through the National Association of REALTORS in 2013. An agent or property manager could offer the service while a move was still taking shape. The introduction came attached to a relationship the customer already had.

In February 2015, Updater adopted an invitation-only model. Paying partners licensed the software and introduced their customers to it. The arrangement gave those businesses a service to offer beyond finding someone a home. It also addressed Greenberg’s timing problem: the company could meet a mover earlier.

In the model described in 2017, partners referred customers three to ten weeks before their moving dates. That interval helps explain the strategy without requiring a theory of technological destiny. An introduction made early enough leaves room to arrange things. Greenberg’s task included finding a place in the customer’s calendar.

The lawyer’s useful, inconvenient habits

Greenberg has been unusually specific about what he got wrong. His first engineer was among the early respondents to a job advertisement, sounded confident and offered a low price. Greenberg later acknowledged that he had not understood how to evaluate the skills the job required.

His experience as a lawyer also encouraged him to protect ideas. He spent weeks and thousands of dollars on patent and trademark protection when, by his later account, he should have been showing people a prototype. The cost included feedback he never received. Confidentiality had its place in his previous profession; a young product needed conversations.

He also waited too long to find a technical business partner. Together, these admissions make the career change more interesting than a simple escape from a law office. Some of his existing skills remained valuable. Others required adjustment. He could understand a complex transaction and still need help judging the person who would write his software.

“Your success or failure is just a function of the people around you.”

David Greenberg, 2017

His advice was practical: ask experienced founders and people already doing a job what qualifications matter before hiring for it. The lesson concerns the limits of competence as much as recruitment. Being good at one demanding profession does not make the requirements of another conveniently obvious.

Twenty-five people, one public company

On December 7, 2015, Updater began trading on the Australian Securities Exchange. It had 25 employees. For a New York technology company working on American household moves, Australia was an unexpected place to raise money. The route began with an Australian seed investor suggesting Greenberg take a look.

He approached the listing as a way to finance the business. His account describes comparing investors by what they would do to the company’s future choices, ownership and obligations. His legal background became an asset here. A career he had left behind supplied relevant experience for the financing he was trying to complete.

The decision also had risks. Public investors could punish missed expectations, and a listing brought ongoing responsibilities. Greenberg’s argument depended on finding shareholders who understood the company’s growth plans. The unusual route still required the fairly ordinary work of making promises and meeting them.

The five questions are revealing because they leave room for answers other than a larger cheque. An investor can bring industry relationships, impose obligations or change who gets a say. Greenberg had already assembled American venture investors and a connection to the real estate industry. In his explanation, the next funding decision could therefore put different considerations first. There is a lawyer’s attention to terms in that reasoning, applied to the founder’s problem of paying for work that would take years. The career change had given his training another use.

Updater voluntarily delisted on October 10, 2018, with plans to raise further capital in US private markets. The return matters. It prevents the Australian episode from hardening into a universal prescription. Greenberg had chosen an instrument for a stage of the business, then changed course as the financing plans changed.

The checklist keeps getting longer

By then, the company had been expanding what it could coordinate. In 2017, it acquired IGC Software and Asset Controls Inc., combining them as MoveHQ. That brought it further into software used by moving and storage businesses, extending its work beyond the household’s side of the transaction.

The December 2019 Bridgevine acquisition added technology for buying home subscription services. Updater and Bridgevine had already worked together. Combining them promised closer connections between the moving platform and the providers supplying internet, television and other household services. Greenberg was buying capabilities adjacent to the original checklist.

Updater acquired Dolly in July 2021, adding local moving and delivery services. A household might need a full moving company or help with a single bulky item. The same change of address can contain several different transport problems, none particularly interested in how neatly a software company defines its category.

In May 2022, Vista Credit Partners announced a $215 million investment in Updater. The stated uses included research and development, new markets, product features and talent. After the address list, the partner introductions and the public listing, Greenberg was still financing work on the connections that make a move happen.

A Boston fan, a New York clock

There is a person inside this succession of corporate decisions. Greenberg’s author biography identifies him as a Boston sports fan living in New York, a preference unlikely to make every local conversation easier. In a 2017 interview, he named Michael Bloomberg as someone he admired for both business and philanthropy.

He also described a workday shaped by late-night strategy and investor relations. At that stage, he generally arrived at the office between 10 and 11, then used the first hour to clear urgent messages. The explanation was less glamorous than a founder’s productivity formula: he disliked leaving colleagues waiting for answers.

His definition of success included changing an industry for the better and making employees and customers happy. Both groups appear in his account of the work. Customers needed fewer loose ends; colleagues needed decisions and the right people alongside them. The founder’s own administration had grown considerably since that Manhattan move.

What follows the move

Updater’s current positioning stretches beyond relocation. The company now describes infrastructure for complex purchases across applications, websites, call centers and AI agents. Internet plans, utilities and moving services remain among its examples. The stated ambition is to let a transaction happen where the buying decision takes place.

There is a recognizable connection to Greenberg’s early experience. Choosing a new home did not complete the work of living there. Choosing a service does not arrange every detail of buying and activating it. Availability, scheduling and separate providers still have to be reconciled.

The scale of the ambition has changed. The original annoyance remains easy to recognize: one decision creates a list of other things that need doing. Greenberg began by writing that list down. His next move was to leave his job. Much of the career that followed has been spent getting the necessary people involved a little earlier.