Before he founded Leon Capital Group, Fernando De Leon crossed the border for school and traded translation fees for a stake in the future. His career keeps returning to the same question: who gets to own what comes next?

After a career translating technology at IBM, Bloomberg, Technicolor, CoreLogic and Xperi, Crexi's CMO has a new brief: make commercial real estate's hidden advantages available to more people.

A drink with a mentor became a resignation six weeks later, then a nine-month build in a Venice house. A decade on, Michael DeGiorgio is still pursuing the same unfashionably practical idea: better software should give real-estate people more time to be human.