Driving value through strategic tech integration: Growth Partner Danny Klein

I love working with entrepreneurs. Their passion and energy are contagious. I started my career on Wall Street at Bear Stearns, moved into market research consulting, then spent a decade in venture capital — five years early-stage, five in the lower-middle market. All in, more than 25 years working with entrepreneurs and startups. 

Verizon pulled me in as an intrapreneur to build new business lines inside a large company. The first was a mixed reality business, deployed commercially with Verizon’s utility clients and then taken to consumers through a contract with the NBA. The second was the digital transformation of Verizon’s 100M sq ft real estate portfolio, including three PropTech testing labs in Boston, London, and Hyderabad. 

Today I’m the Growth Partner at JLL Spark, leading a team that aligns business objectives with best-in-class technologies. The pace of change in real estate tech is rapid and accelerating with the advances in AI, and a big part of my job is making sure JLL stays out in front of it. 

How the role creates differentiation for our entrepreneurs 

Every CVC claims they drive value to their portfolio. JLL Spark actually does it, and the growth team is the reason why. 

The growth team’s job is to embed inside JLL’s business lines — understand the priorities, know the budgets, and influence which technologies get selected and deployed. That’s a different posture than most CVCs take, and it changes the math for our entrepreneurs. 

For example, we invested in Ingenious, a project management software company in construction tech, and we’re rolling it out globally to all 3,500 of JLL’s project managers. That’s the kind of scale most early-stage companies spend years chasing — and it’s the direct result of the growth team being close enough to JLL’s operators to spot the fit, build the case, and shepherd the deployment. 

Everyone wins. JLL and our clients get first look at best-of-breed technology. Our portfolio companies get what they can’t buy: direct access to the decision-makers who can scale them. 

Scaling tech in a large corporation 

Scaling technology inside JLL comes down to three things: identifying leadership’s real priorities, understanding where budget is allocated, and getting a named leader assigned to evaluate the technology. 

JLL Spark has developed a top-down engagement model working directly with JLL leadership and the CEOs of each business line. It lets us focus on the handful of priorities with both executive attention and budget behind them. That’s the unlock — where scaling stops being a guessing game.  

How JLL gets value from our portfolio companies 

JLL Spark portfolio companies drive value in many ways, two of which are: efficiency and sales. 

On the efficiency side, they automate work that used to be entirely manual. PRODA extracts and standardizes rent roll data — a process that used to eat hours of analyst time and was famously error-prone. 

On the sales side, they show up across the full lifecycle of a deal — like Ren and Jeeva, which help our leasing teams sharpen prospecting and outreach. 

The model works in both directions. JLL gets more productive and more competitive, and our portfolio companies get deployed at real scale inside a global services business. 

Closing thought 

What makes JLL Spark different isn’t the checks we write — it’s what happens after. The growth team gives our portfolio companies a real path into a global services business, with visibility into the people, priorities, and budgets to deploy their technology. JLL gets sharper, our clients get earlier access to what’s next in technology for the built world, and our founders get scale that’s hard to manufacture from the outside. That flywheel is the whole point — and it’s what gets me excited to come to work every day. 

Connect with Danny on LinkedIn.