He spent four years inside the appraisal machine, valuing $3 billion of buildings. Then he walked out to build the machine he actually wanted to use.
Walk into the commercial appraisal business and you find a craft that barely changed for decades. Spreadsheets stapled to PDFs. Site visits logged on paper. Reports that take weeks. John Meadows knew all of it cold, because he did it for a living before he decided it was broken.
Today he is the co-founder and co-CEO of Bowery Valuation, a New York company that calls itself the first vertically integrated appraisal-tech firm. Translation: Bowery employs its own appraisers and hands them software that swallows the busywork - public records, market data, report formatting - so the humans can do the part that needs judgment.
Meadows shares the top job. He runs Bowery alongside co-founder Noah Isaacs as a genuine two-person CEO partnership, with Cesar Devers as the technical third leg of the stool. The arrangement is unusual enough that people ask about it constantly. He keeps answering.
The money has followed. Bowery has raised more than $80 million, including a $16.3 million Series B extension in 2023 led by the Growth Equity business inside Goldman Sachs Asset Management. The pitch never really changed from the first deck: appraisers should appraise, and let the software handle everything that isn't appraising.
Build the system, then let people operate inside it.
The resume reads strangely if you only know the destination. Meadows graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in U.S. History - not finance, not computer science. The numbers came later, on the job.
He landed at the Leitner Group, now folded into BBG, the largest independent appraisal firm in New York City. Over four-plus years he valued more than $3 billion of commercial property across every asset type, and earned a General Certified Appraiser License from New York State. He learned the trade by doing the trade.
That is the detail that separates Bowery from most proptech. Meadows did not parachute into appraisal from a software job and decide it looked inefficient. He was the inefficiency. He felt the dead hours of formatting and data entry in his own week, and concluded the problem was the toolset, not the people.
So in June 2015 he left, with Isaacs and Devers, to build a company that treated appraisal as a software problem with expert humans in the loop - rather than an expert-human problem that software occasionally touches.
Top-down vision moves a company in the right direction; grassroots ownership keeps it honest.
His view: founders should own the vision, the values, the hiring bar and a few non-negotiable behaviors - and hand off nearly everything else to the people doing the work.
He argues that explaining the reasoning behind a decision matters more than the decision itself. Teams that understand the why can carry it into a hundred calls he will never see.
Meadows treats employee-relations signals as culture data. A spike in complaints is not noise - it is the gap between the culture on the wall and the culture people actually live.
Spends four-plus years at Leitner Group (now BBG), New York's largest independent appraisal firm, valuing over $3 billion of commercial property across all asset classes.
Co-founds Bowery Valuation with Noah Isaacs and Cesar Devers, betting that appraisal can be rebuilt around software and in-house experts.
Bowery raises $5 million to automate the clunky commercial appraisal process, drawing national tech-press attention.
The company closes a $35 million Series B, scaling its appraiser-plus-software model across asset classes and markets.
Bowery closes a $16.3 million Series B extension led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management's Growth Equity business, pushing total funding past $80 million.
On The Propcast, Meadows and co-CEO Noah Isaacs lay out the case for why appraisal - one of real estate's oldest, slowest crafts - was overdue for a software-first rebuild, and what it takes to put appraisers and engineers in the same room.
"Future of Appraisal with John Meadows and Noah Isaacs"
His official bio says he still aspires to become a chef, a filmmaker, and the first left-handed shortstop for the San Francisco Giants - a position baseball convention has essentially never allowed to exist.
He studied U.S. History at Penn. The man who priced $3 billion of buildings started out reading about the past, not modeling the future.
He didn't disrupt appraisal as an outsider. He was a licensed, working appraiser first, which is why Bowery hires its own appraisers instead of just selling them tools.
Two co-CEOs, one company. The shared-chair model is rare enough that it's become part of how people describe Bowery before they describe the product.