Building a Company in Maine

Dr. Lisa Belisle and Dr. Jeff Barkin talk with George Matelich, co-founder and CEO of Rely, an AI-powered platform that automates due diligence for multifamily real estate transactions. Matelich moved to Maine from San Francisco and has committed to building his company here rather than in a coastal tech hub. The conversation opens with the personal decision behind that move, a shared interest in Maine painter Jack Gable, and a candid look at what is genuinely harder about building a venture-backed startup outside a major ecosystem, including perceptions among investors and the challenge of assembling talent. Matelich also describes co-founding Nexus Maine, a community connecting entrepreneurially minded people across the state, as a direct outgrowth of the wide-ranging conversations he had while figuring out what company to build.

Rely's product is the center of the episode's second section. Matelich explains that acquiring or transitioning a multifamily property requires reviewing potentially hundreds of thousands of pages across leases, rent rolls, contracts and financial records, a process that typically takes multiple team members several business days. Rely compresses that work to an afternoon for a single reviewer by reading an entire data room and linking every finding back to its source document, a feature Matelich describes as visual grounding. Barkin and Matelich work through the trust problem at the core of any AI product: because the system references the original document for every data point, users can verify outputs rather than accept them on faith, and the platform learns from corrections over time. The co-hosts draw a clear distinction between augmenting the professionals making acquisition decisions and displacing them.

The final segment turns to the broader questions the co-hosts care about as physicians and as Mainers: what responsible adoption of AI looks like, what sustainable founder life actually involves, and what it takes to build in this state. Matelich is direct about the psychological cost of tying self-worth to a company's outcomes, the structured early mornings that allow him to balance a young family and a demanding startup, and the rarity of fishing trips that once served as active meditation. Belisle draws a parallel between the incremental, trust-building approach Rely uses with real estate clients and the challenges facing AI in healthcare, where the stakes involve people rather than property. Matelich's advice to anyone considering starting something, in Maine or elsewhere, comes down to listening more than talking, testing ideas in the world rather than only discussing them, and being honest about whether a particular path is the right one to keep pursuing.