My dad is a retired guy who judges barbecue competitions and could not tell you what SaaS stands for. He has also clicked basically every ad I've ever been part of, because he's proud of his son. In most ad reports, that click of his counts exactly the same as a real buyer's. Once you've watched your own dad inflate a campaign out of love, you stop trusting a click as proof anyone was ever really there.

Stripe Press’s newest author is in the tiny handful of people with the strongest claim to being New York’s modern power broker: Mary Ann Tighe, CEO of CBRE’s New York Tri-State region. Mary Ann’s fingerprints are all over Manhattan. Since becoming CEO in 2002 she’s brokered more than 133 million square feet of commercial real estate transactions. A (very small) selection of her deals: She brought Condé Nast to 4 Times Square, and at the time it was the first new office building constructed in New York in a decade(!). She represented the NYT in the development of its new headquarters on Eighth Ave. She brought Coach in as the first Hudson Yards tenant. For 1199SEIU, one of the country’s largest healthcare workers’ unions, she helped engineer a 580,000-square-foot headquarters deal projected to save the union and its benefit funds roughly $400 million over 30 years. And perhaps most meaningfully, Mary Ann was instrumental in rebuilding the World Trade Center, including bringing Condé Nast to One World Trade, and, more than two decades later, securing American Express for roughly 2 million square feet at 2 World Trade Center (broke ground ~ two months ago!). Mary Ann’s book (tentatively titled BUILDING NEW YORK) traces the stories of the deals themselves, but also the personalities who’ve made modern New York, from mayors, to CEOs, to the Vatican—whose approval she needed to broker the air rights for St. Patrick’s Cathedral! It’s rare to get such a candid view into how the real estate sausage gets made, especially at Mary Ann’s level. We can’t wait to bring you her book.