The founder of a $5B platform on cracking private markets

Brandon (00:21) All right, welcome back to the Owner Mode Summit. I'm excited. We have a very special guest with us today, Mr. Ryan Williams. I did not have a pre-existing relationship with Ryan. I pretty much stalked him because the theme for this Owner Mode Summit is private market investing. And this guy is one of the pioneers, built the platform, Cadre, which many folks have heard about.

ultimately unlocking high quality institutional real estate investments to folks that typically would not have access to them before. That's kind of you know, kind of the idea of the platform. I think overall kind of this mission of opening up access and also just the masterclass, this guy ran and getting the best partners, the best folks working on a team, I mean, operating at the highest level. So with that, Brother Ryan, I appreciate you joining the summit.

Thank you for having me, man. I appreciate the opportunity. All right. So a lot of ground to cover here. You know, as we talked about the theme for this Owner Mode Summit is private market investing. How old were you when you first, you know, launched Cadre? And I know what I really want to get into is the backstory behind it, because I know you did some stuff early, early on in college. So how old were you when you actually founded the company? Yeah, I was 25 years old.

when I started Cadre. So I had a few years under my belt in the investment banking world at Goldman Sachs and the tech media telecom group in New York. And then I was fortunate to get some principal investing experience at Blackstone on the private equity, the real estate private equity front as well. So I had the institutional world under my belt. I'm an entrepreneur at heart and combined those two worlds and Cadre was the result. But before that,

before that, we gotta go back to the dorm room and undergraduate. There's this infamous story of you seeing an opportunity and not being willing to be held back by maybe preconceived notions that this guy's too young to be making these kinds of moves. You hatched a pretty ambitious plan. So tell us a little bit about kind of the genesis and share that story with us. Yeah, man. So look, to really go back,

Originally from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I'm an entrepreneur, I mentioned, largely because of my perspective on the world. That's to me, the most important defining attribute of an entrepreneur. why I believe anybody can be an entrepreneur. It's kind of how you see the world and the lens you see the world through. know, it's seeing challenges as opportunities and it's having a curiosity and a willingness to ask why, not just to ask why, but then to pursue that why as well. So...

I started my first business even before I started Cadre. I was actually half the age of myself when I started Cadre. about 12, 13. When I started my first company, happened to be a company I started after asking the question why. Why were sports apparel products like headbands and wristbands ridiculously priced for the average person if you want to get a name brand. So I won't bore you with all those details, but I asked that question and then I pursued.

building a more cost effective headband and wristband brand that also personalized them and grew that business, scaled it, exited it. Most importantly, I walked away crystallizing, you know, this perspective that you can do anything if you probe deep enough and you have things go your way. And so that built my entrepreneurial muscle. I was fortunate through that experience to get exposure to new worlds that I didn't even knew.

it no existed rather. And I was fortunate to have mentorship through that experience after winning all these awards for the business and had some people take me under my wing, under their wing rather and say, look, we believe in this guy. Probably a lot more than I believed in myself at the time. Encouraged me to think broader, apply to Harvard. First one in my family to go to that kind of college, four year college. And I was accepted.

I applied regular decision where the odds are even more against you. you know, they said, look, we're going to give this guy a shot and took it and I ran with it. When I got to Harvard, I had culture shock, of course, and I had imposter syndrome. And I said, I don't know if I can do this, but I found my footing in the entrepreneurial world while I was there. You know, I spent way more time outside the classroom than inside. And now it's a cool thing to do to build businesses and to get your side hustles on.

And I was doing that before it was the thing to do and it was in vogue in a lot of ways. And so when I got to Harvard, you know, I got, as I mentioned, this kind of culture shock through behind me and I leaned in and I said, look, you know, I look back at my family and my ancestors and what they overcame. there's no reason for me to let fear paralyze me. And so when I got there, it was a playground of resources is how I described the college. And I felt

ignorant in a lot of ways around money making. You know, I saw so much wealth around me and I started asking why and how all these people that I saw who came for money got their money. And the short answer was ownership. You people have families that own real estate. have families that own businesses. They have families that owned investment funds and vehicles. And that ownership journey really became something I got passionate about. And like I mentioned to you earlier too,

A lot of it is luck and a lot of it is timing. When I started my journey at Harvard, it was a little bit before the subprime credit crisis in 2008, 2009. And I didn't honestly see the opportunity right away that was happening around me, but I did, my sophomore junior years, see a lot of fear. And I wasn't the only one who saw fear. Many other people did too. I saw people getting laid off. I heard about banks going under. And I was just a kid at Harvard.

watching in a lot of ways some of my classmates' families get hit hard because of the subprime credit crisis and this great foreclosure crisis as well that was happening all around us. And so the first time that that became real to me was when I was visiting my roommate, one of my best friends from Southwest Atlanta, and I was driving up to his house between our reading period semester breaks. I remember seeing foreclosure signs all around his neighborhood. And I'd been there a year or two before.

street was almost immaculate then. so something clicked with me that, you know, there was a big shift going on and it was right in front of me. And the shift that was happening is that prices were collapsing around the real estate world, but especially in places like Atlanta. But the paradigm I noticed after I some research was while prices were collapsing, the fundamentals were not. And so, you know, the schools were still there. And some places like Atlanta, the jobs were still there. know, you have Delta, got Coke, you have a lot of

big major industrial hubs and economic catalysts. And I always knew that people were going to need somewhere to live. And so the work I started to do as I started to ask my roommate questions and do some diligence is that price had really decoupled from value. And the question was, you know, is that decoupling temporary or is it a permanent thing? And so, you know, to me, I started asking around, starting to talk to folks and the question wasn't, is this risky?

Of course it's risky, know, it's uncertain. So, you you're taking some level of risk, but I didn't really care as much about the risk from having built a business and knowing the odds were against me. The question for me was what would I have to believe for buying these kinds of homes and building a portfolio of real estate ownership for this not to work? And the answer was I'd have to believe that Atlanta was going to be permanently empty.

I didn't believe that, you know, my roommate didn't believe that I still don't. But as I mentioned, the hard part was seeing having the vision to see what the future could look like. And a lot of people saw it. lot of people saw, you know, Atlanta was oftentimes a boom and bust market like places like Phoenix, Arizona as well. But the hard part was acting on, you know, this opportunity as a 19 year old or 18 year old, was with no money, no capital, no resources. So I did the thing that

I knew I could do and that only I could do, which was asking some classmates and roommates to pool some money together, know, to make a bet on me. Because the bet that I started to believe was that we were in a dislocation and that this was a moment in time, you know, and not a movement where if you could invest and act and buy some of these homes that yes, we're mispriced and yes, we're

were really coming to opportunity as a result of people's distress, and you could play that out long enough, then you could live to see the market rebound, as my roommate told me had happened decades before. And so the idea that we had was let's buy single family homes in this Atlanta market that we knew really well, because we had an unfair advantage. My roommate was born there, he lived there, his grandparents lived there.

We knew with the trends and we knew which streets to be on, which streets not to be on. We knew some deals were going to work, some deals were not going to work. But we did know that these homes that were being foreclosed on and sold back to the banks for pennies on the dollar were worth a lot more than what they were being sold back for. And we started to do research. We started to go to these auctions. And in Georgia or in Fulton County specifically, I think it was every Tuesday, you could go to the courthouse steps and they would literally run down a list of

homes that were being foreclosed on. So you could see, right, yeah, this home on New Hope Road or this home, you know, on Martin Luther King Boulevard was being sold for 60,000 and had been purchased by the previous owner for 250,000. And, you know, it doesn't take a genius to see that there's some opportunity in that dislocation. So we started to do our research over weeks and weeks and months and months. And we start to track what the discounts were that were these houses were being traded at.

And it became clear that even if we were wrong on the exact value, we had enough buffer from how big these discounts and distress prices were, where we were gonna make some real money. And so right away, we knew that there was a money making opportunity. But what was most important to me was that there was also an impact opportunity too, because this neighborhood and these neighborhoods were largely neighborhoods that were black owned previously. And what we wanted to do, because I saw my family and many of the folks that were

where it fallen on hard times is we wanted to invest and own as many as we could and then rent them back out to people that have been foreclosed on, give them a second shot at the American dream, do well while doing good. And so that was the broad thesis for the business that we started buying single family homes at a foreclosure in Atlanta. We did our first deal in late 2008. It was a house that we bought on New Hope Road. I love the name and know that was something to a sign of things to come. Cause we had a lot of hope around us.

And we bought the home for about $63,000. Recently, we've been sold for about $250,000. Single mom who had lost her job, she had a few kids. We reached out to her, gave her the opportunity to actually rent out the home. And we did well on the cash yield we made by renting it out to her. She was able to get a loan from another local bank about a year later, bought it back from us for around $185,000. We made three times our money unlevered.

This is going in my junior year now. And when we returned the money to our investors, they said, amazing, now let's do this again. And so we got more capital from more people because they heard that this was something we had executed on. And we had to start to have a track record, which was really what we were working towards trust at the end of the day, because that's what that track record is a proxy for. And we ended up raising a few million dollars over the next six months. We ended up buying dozens of

homes and residential units, buying duplexes, quadriplexes. And as we graduated, we were approaching hundreds of homes and units that we owned in the Atlanta metro area. Kept that business really running as my night job. My day job was paying off my student loans at Goldman Sachs. So I was working in arguably the most technical, I'll put it like that, investment banking group in all of Wall Street, the TMT banking group in New York. And I was doing that by day.

And by night I was buying real estate homes in Atlanta. would fly down to Atlanta on the weekends. Not sure my boss always knew where I was going, but I was scaling that business because I saw a bigger opportunity at the end of the day doing that than working for someone else, getting back to the ownership piece. And we got to about thousand residential units we owned around my first year or so at Goldman. And that was the point in time where I said, all right, this business is big enough where we've helped.

dozens of families have another shot at the American dream. We've made millions of dollars in profits. The asset class still hadn't been fully institutionalized yet. You still kind of get a major loan to go out and buy thousands of real estate homes. We thought we were on the precipice of that happening. And so my view was like, look, let's find five other markets in the U.S. that have those same dynamics I talked to before. The great macro fundamentals, dislocation of prices. So looking at places like Cleveland, Ohio, where

You know, there were a ton of unique macro drivers and opportunities, had to stress, you know, on a whole new scale where we know we could go in and really make a big difference. looked at Phoenix, we looked at Houston, Dallas. We looked at LA. There's so many markets, many on the coasts and the smile of the country that we thought were right for the picking. And so we put those, those homes down on a map. did some fundamental valuation modeling.

So forecasting before Zillow and Trulia and Redfin were out there. And we got commitments for about $8 million from family offices and high net worth investors. And that little idea I had about seeing this dislocation in Atlanta ultimately led me to multi-generational wealth creation. so that thread again of seeing opportunities and then being able to make bold action is really what to me, capital.

appreciation and wealth creation is about. And so my advice is, look, you're sitting on capital today and you're waiting for an obvious moment, it doesn't come, right? By the time it's obvious, the dislocation is gone. So you've got to have that courage and that conviction to have a thesis. You have to have the courage and conviction to act when others are paralyzed. And that's where the opportunity is in building any kind of long-term wealth. And one of the key lessons that I took away. That is a heck of a story right there.

And I wanna kinda double click on a couple of things that I think are really interesting. And I would argue you personify. And so we'll get to chapter two in a second where you saw an opportunity to bring tech in and merge that with this world that you knew. We'll get to that in a second. But I'm curious, like you had a lot of chitspah, I'll call it, right? Where you had the nerve to be a student.

and sell people on your ability to execute, right? Cause you have these seasoned investors who they do analysis as well. They look at markets, they look for dislocation, but here you are a guy who's in a dorm, right? You've done your homework, but they're like, you know, are you ready for what you're asking for? And you obviously didn't have any hesitation, right? And then you're now running this business. You got that early validation. You're now running this business as you're working as, you know, a banker in one of the more challenging shops. So, you know, I'm an ex-banker. So I definitely respect.

Your hustle. To me, it comes back to that 12, 13 year old, you know, young man who was building a business. What are the ingredients that brought that velocity, a sense of velocity and movement to you? And, you you start off the kind of the conversation talking about you really view yourself identity wise as an entrepreneur. That was in your mind what it was. And I'm sure it starts there. what what brought were you surrounded by entrepreneurship? Like, where did that come from in the earliest ages?

Yeah, it's a great question. I reflect back on that a lot to see what the inspirations and motivations were to, now that I've got to a point where you can kind of reflect back and try to evoke lessons. I was not surrounded by entrepreneurs growing up. I didn't know in a lot of ways

what was even possible because I didn't see a lot of people who looked like me doing the things that I was doing and thinking about doing. And so, you know, from an inspiration and motivation perspective, it was really about seizing an opportunity and capitalizing on an opportunity that I knew could change the trajectory of my family's life that could allow me to do things like buy my mom a home, which I was able to do. But, you know, I always tell people.

first homes that I owned actually weren't even for me, it for other people. And so, you know, I saw that and saw what that could mean for others. And I said, got to apply that to my own life. I never owned a home growing up. You know, we lived in apartments and moved from apartment to apartment when I was younger. And we didn't have a lot of stability. We didn't have a lot of consistency. And so I wanted that. I wanted to have a different type of life for my children. Not that I was thinking about kids back then, but for my family. And that was my motivation was

ownership, like I said earlier, you know, I didn't want to be in a perpetual state of relying on other people for anything. And so to me, true freedom, know, and true autonomy was about ownership. was about, you know, being the one to make the calls and the decisions. was being the principal, you know, not being a third party, not being somebody who had to rely on someone else to dictate your circumstances. And I knew that was a blessing and I knew that was unique, you know, having the ability

you know, to shape the trajectory of my family's life and to shape the trajectory of others' lives as well. So that was the greatest inspiration was just always working towards maximizing ownership, maximizing autonomy, and knowing that by doing so, I could call the shots, you know, and I can make mistakes and I could, you know, screw things up. But at the end of the day, you know, I knew that I had enough confidence in myself that I'd figure it out if things went south because, you know, I'd seen

real adversity and I'd seen real challenges, I'd seen real struggle. And when you come from struggle and you come from adversity and challenges, like I said, it builds a resilience muscle. And for a lot of people, it's not necessarily circumstances that can make you great or can allow you to do great things. But I knew that I had the makeup and I had the...

blessings to be able to land on my feet if things went south. And I always tell people with adversity and with challenges, you can let it break you down or you can let it drive you to break records. And for me, it was always about breaking records and it was always about setting new bars and new standards. So, you know, I didn't have like the, you know, the classical, saw my dad or I saw my friend go out and build an amazing business. And I grew up around entrepreneurs and

seeing people create things. And I think that that's fine. You can embrace being unconventional. You can embrace being different. And today, there's so many people who want the playbook and they want the blueprint and they want the classical path to go on and to do exceptional great things. But most times it comes down to doing things that are unconventional. And to me, that's the best way to have unconventional outcomes is to do unconventional things. So my motivation with my family,

And my motivation was having the ability to shape my day every time I woke up and to help change other people's lives as well for the better and promote self-determination amongst the underserved because to me that's my life mission. It's really about promoting autonomy. It's about promoting economic self-determination and every other form of self-determination amongst people who have been overlooked, who have been underserved and under-invested in. And so that's what drives me.

And we're gonna move into chapter two here because you went from new hope to basically a new expression of that same idea about building cadre. But I will say, you hear about folks with agency, you had super agency. It takes a lot of balls to say, look, I'm gonna work at one of the hardest working groups at Goldman and then build this business and run this business successfully on the side, right? And I think it's interesting, at least that I didn't have that perspective.

when you kind of connected with Blackstone, it was more like a partner who could really help them do what you were doing versus the analyst who now becomes the associate kind of, you know, another cog in the wheel. And you really, it's funny how you built the value outside of your core role, which ultimately gave you the leverage to ultimately, you know, kind of be brought in in a whole different light in your next opportunity. And you didn't even have an opportunity, right? No, no. And it's a great point, man. And if I could just jump in on that, you know, it just goes to a little bit of advice to...

Uh, and I don't always like giving advice. like to share experiences more cause you know, everybody's own path, but just to share an experience for me. Every time I went to a place like Blackstone or Goldman Sachs, I know, I know who I am and I know I'm not going to be happy sitting there making pitch books and decks. don't care how much you're paying me. Um, but I'm not going to be happy making pitch books and pitch decks for other people to make a whole lot of money or to advise some people I'm never going to get a chance to sit with.

and make a whole lot of money. So what I had to do is change my mindset and I had to say, all right, you know, I'm in this environment with a lot of wealth being created. Let me do everything I can to understand how the people making the most money and having the greatest decision here, how they're operating. And let me understand what I can do to help them, you know, drive value and drive growth. And it comes down to being entrepreneurial even within an institution. And I think that that's something anybody can do who's working in a big company is think about

Where can I uniquely bring value and especially to those who are making the biggest moves at this firm and this company. So when I was at Goldman, you know, I wasn't thinking about how do I build the best pitch book and pitch deck and build the best model just because my associate or my principal VP will be happy. What I was thinking about is how do I come to this firm and bring value and utility to the partner that's the deal maker. And how do I make sure, you know, that I can be differentiated and helping him or her have an idea.

a unique insight that they can use to go and make bigger moves and have a greater impact. So I was thinking to myself, not as the next level, I was thinking to myself as a partner there. And I was thinking about, you know, if I were a partner here, what would I want beyond the books and beyond the pitch decks strategically? You know, what would I want to do and what would I think? And I think that was one of the reasons why I was the one that was getting called in out my entire group as an analyst into partner meetings. And I was the one that a partner would choose to take to go see, you know,

the owner, primary owner of the St. Louis Rams for a sports transaction when normally he's taking his MD or his VP or associate is because I had certain ideas and I had certain ways that I thought that partner could maximize the chances of getting a deal done. And I put myself in the shoes of, if I were a member of this ex-team, sports team for instance, I really love sports, how could I help bring these two companies, these two partnerships, these two

teams together in a way that creates a one plus one equals three dynamic. And so, again, I encourage people to always think themselves if they are passionate about building businesses as entrepreneurs, even within these institutions. And I encourage people from an experience standpoint to think about leveling up, not one or two levels, but three or four from where they are, if they really do aspire to have the kind of impact that they can have.

So, Cadre, revolutionary, right? I'm curious to hear how this transition from Blackstone to Cadre. What I love about Cadre obviously is the mission. And I used to actually, COO, Javier, I think for Cadre, he was someone who was an early, early Gravy. Yeah, good people, guy. My point is, I was so enthralled by the mission of it, which was bringing institutional quality, real estate, investment opportunities to like the average person, expanding that access.

You kind of were at the intersection of tech, right? But also bringing the wealth of experience you had built in your career to the table. How did that formulate into what ultimately became Cadre? Was the initial thesis what it ended up becoming? Did it morph at all along the way? Yeah, so I went to Blackstone after Goldman largely because I wanted to bring that experience I had in single family investing world.

you know, to blast on a different scale. And I wanted to see how the biggest, the most disciplined real estate investors actually made decisions as well. And I got that, you know, and I closed, you know, billions of transactions while I was there. Probably learned more about the fundamentals of investing more in that period than any other stretch of my career. But I also saw some things I couldn't unsee. You know, I saw these incredible, lucrative institutional deals, the highest quality assets, the best cash flows.

reaching a very small group of institutional LPs. And that wasn't because, you know, the deal economics required it because the economics could have supported individuals participating, you know, like people I grew up with. A lot of it was frankly, because there wasn't the mindset and the innovation very directly into and connects directly into my own personal self mission. talked about

you know, promoting self-determination amongst the underserved. And so I still believe that. I believe that innovation and infrastructure can be, you know, some of the most hard to crack gates and gatekeepers. And it always has been that way. But I believe that if you brought tech to this space, you can level the investing playing field for the masses. And so, you know, that was the kind of mindset jumps that I had to take to actually get to the point where I saw this as an opportunity.

And then the question is, how do you go about fulfilling the promise of this vision and this mission? How do you bring to life this idea, you know, that you now know is possible and you've got the tactical steps you need to be able to execute on it. And the real answer is capital, know, human capital, financial capital, social capital. I didn't have a ton of financial capital, but I did have a lot of access to human capital.

And I did have a lot of access to people who have financial capital. so question then is, all right, well, how do you aggregate all that capital and structure it in a way that will allow you to unlock building this business and this idea? The answer to that is you've got to leverage trust. You got to leverage credibility. You've got to leverage the brand equity that you hopefully have built so you can get to a point where you just do enough

where people see the potential for the opportunity. And so for me, it was about finding some investors, finding a cadre of people that were convinced by this idea. And they were convinced that I was the right person to execute on this idea. And there are a lot of people who didn't believe one of those, even more people who didn't believe in both of those in one person. But there were enough people and that's all you need. You only need one person who did believe in me, who did believe in this idea and this concept.

And so those are the people that ended up writing the first checks, you know, because they saw that I delivered and executed on ideas and other contexts. And they saw that this was like the natural culmination of everything that I had built. And I say this a lot, but in this industry, nothing compounds faster than trust. Nothing. Not capital, not talent, not credentials. And the first investment that most people get, the first dollars in,

they're oftentimes just trust dollars. You know what I mean? Like this is money that people are putting in because they believe in you, you know, as, you know, the number one person who can execute on this concept and they're betting on you as the jockey, right? It's, you know, like horse racing. They're not looking at the horse, they're looking at the jockey. And so I knew that people were going to have to take a leap on me. And then the second dollars that you get in are, me you didn't waste.

the first ones, the people that believed in you. then finally, it's like third dollars and show me what you learned. And so that's like the curve that I see from a compounding trust perspective. And what changed for me was that, you know, the trust capital that was invested into me was something that I didn't take for granted. And I knew I had to be completely guarded as a true steward of the capital. And so I was going to do everything that I learned at Blackstone.

that was institutional, that was rigorous. knew every single transaction we did at Cadre, it had to be, we always said like institutional plus. It couldn't just be a Blackstone transaction. needed to be, you know, Blackstone on steroids, whether that's the diligence memos, the reporting cadence, the transparency, everything had to feel embarrassingly overbuilt for like the kind of skill we were at at the time. And that's the point, you know, like you don't get to be casual on the way up. You got to go above and beyond.

You got to be the most disciplined version of yourself when you're the smallest because that's what earns you the right to be bigger. And so the thing I always tell people and folks I'm mentoring, be the institutional version of yourself before you have institutional reasons to be that way. And that's how you accelerate. That's how you also compress the trust curve. And that's what we did at Cadre. You brought up Javier. No, we brought incredible people together. I always say, and I put this in an interview once or an article that I was interviewed about.

you should try to go and hire people you have no business hiring, you know? And that kind of bit me in the tail a little bit, because then I would be in interviews and people would say, you know, I have no business being here, Ryan. You said that, you know, that's the kind of person you should hire. I like, that's not what I meant exactly. But the point is, you know, go above and beyond on every dimension, including human capital and trust. And so at Cadre, what you would see is the most exceptional leaders from Blackstone, Starwood, Goldman Sachs,

the best colleges, universities, you know, the most innovative people from colleges you hadn't heard of. And then you saw on the tech side, folks that were running teams at Google and Facebook and Square. I I hired my first head of product and Jack Dorsey flew out from the West Coast to try to keep him, you know, at Twitter, sorry, at Square at the time. We won out obviously, but that just goes to show you the caliber of the people we are bringing together.

And then you got have parity in how you treat each group. So there's mutual respect. And that's how you get a one plus one equals three dynamic culturally. And that plus, you know, the standards that you create, as I mentioned earlier, the rigor that you employ and the innovation around the idea, that's where the magic happens. And you look at any great company, look at Apple, you know, and you look at the talent that they have there and you look at the mutual respect that you have irrespective of if you're on hardware or software, you know, if you're in product or engineering, and then you look at the vision.

And that's again, kind of enduring iconic companies that get building. We were doing that in one of the most Jurassic, stodgy industries in the world. So yeah, we got a lot of press. We got a lot of focus and it wasn't by accident. It was really by design and by timing and being in the right place at the right time as well. So I'm proud of what we did at Cadre. I'm proud of scaling to more than $6 billion and being the only truly institutional platform where retail investors could also invest. Innovating.

building the first secondary marketplace that ever existed globally for private real estate where people could trade. have thousands of transactions trade. And I'm proud of the partnerships that we built too. Nobody else had brought Harvard's endowment, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Ford Foundation, plus hundreds of thousands of individuals under one umbrella. And no one delivered the performance and the results that we did as well too. You know, returning more than a billion in profits to our clients and customers. So, you know, we did incredible things at scale.

But the key word was we because that team was exceptional. And you now see what my my cadre mafia is out doing in the world. And that's one of the most valuable and exciting things that I can observe today from a legacy perspective, other than landing the plane, having a great exit and making sure, know, our clients are in team and investors were taken care of. So.

a lot in there, but I want to hone in on the one thing. One of my questions coming in when you launched Cadre specifically was it's a marketplace, right? So I think you answered this question, which is what comes first, the capital, right? The deals, the innovation around compliance, right? You mentioned that it actually really kind of started with trust. And I want to just, when you say trust, define what you mean by that. Because in some ways you can take it to mean, and I'm hearing this in what you're saying, trust to execute or

that you will do everything in your power to execute? Or is it trust in that I trust that you're honest? know, trust can mean a lot of things and you basically say that's the highest leverage thing that's gonna get the velocity going. Define trust from your perspective. Yeah, look, it's a great question. There's a lot of different forms of trust. To me, trust is built through consistency and...

It is, you know, the behaviors that, you you demonstrate in a repeated, frankly, low stakes way long before action happens so that people can understand and see the expectations based off of previous behavior, previous decision making. So, you know, I always tell people like trust is built through

repeated low-stake signals long before the first dollar moves, long before the first capital comes into play. And if your gut's telling you something's off around assessing something or someone, your gut's probably right. And the cost in the investing world of skipping a deal is a lot lower than the opportunity cost of being trapped in a bad one for a decade or so. And so what I tell folks all the time is,

You want to observe whomever it is that you're assessing putting money with or joining. And you want to observe their behaviors over long periods of time, the behaviors of people around them and see what did they say, what did they do, and how does that ultimately make you feel? And so to me, in the investing world, that's one of the best ways to assess trust. There's some red flags and green flags when you're looking at

you know, trust in the investing context as well. You know, green flags, you're looking at an investment opportunity, and you don't see alignment, right? You don't see a GP putting money where their mouth is. You know, you don't see a fund manager putting multiple or meaningful money into deals alongside yours. So got to ask why, you know, and that's a scenario where I would say, there's gonna be questions about how well you can trust the returns that they're telling you they're going to deliver on.

You know, there's trust questions around track record in that scenario as well. And so, you know, that's one of the examples of, you know, it could be a green flag, it be a red flag, but, you know, it ultimately is a reflection of their willingness, their belief, their trust, and what they're telling you they're going to do is are they actually standing behind what they say, you know, and is their behavior consistent around that dynamic as well? You know,

There's red flags around trust too. If you see people pressuring you or creating a false urgency or saying, look, the allocation closes tomorrow and you know, got to get in before it's over. Like to me that that that's telling you that it's maybe it's not somebody that's trustworthy or there's some asymmetry of information. You're not being told everything which can erode trust as well too. It's just one of the behaviors again, you want to observe over the course of your engagement with somebody, your conversations with them and see again.

You know, is this a consistent person? Is this someone who's under promising and over delivering or the other way around? So this is where Cadre, you know, kind of steps into the game to create that trust proxy for folks who may not have been familiar with investing in real estate. You basically said, look, you can trust us to find, as you mentioned, institutional plus caliber deals. Our name means that. And so if we're doing a deal, you know, we're standing behind that kind of like your boy, Denzel from, from.

forgot the movie, the New York movie. So this is about, know, accessing private markets. You you were pioneering in that front. Make the case as to why it's important for a high earner at a Google, a, you know, Facebook, whatever the case may be, to look at the private markets, right? As you did your work at Cadre, you mentioned that you really, really made...

a lot of effort to ensure that every day you brought to the table was quality. What does someone gain by focusing on the private markets? What did you deliver in your time at Cadre to someone who may have not had that opportunity otherwise, like help make the case for private market access and why someone should be thinking about, you know, investing in the space. Yeah, look, it's a great question. look, public markets versus private markets are

It's two different things, you know, in terms of the investing opportunities and in terms of the outcomes that you can achieve. Like public markets are trillions and trillions, I don't know, 30, 40, 50 trillion globally. And it's pretty efficient, you know, which means that the alpha that

used to be available on people's kind of been arbitraged out. you're paying for beta with a very tiny sliver of a factor to but that's fine. But it's not differentiated. So private markets and we told people this all the time. They're a bit smaller. They're growing fast but they're structurally less efficient. So in private markets you've got a lot more information asymmetry. They're oftentimes a liquid like I mentioned with the secondary market that we built.

to track and to address that illiquidity. And there's a lot of access constraints, right? Which create some return opportunities that don't exist in the public markets as well too. And so you look at private equity, private credit, they've outperformed their public market equivalents over the last 10 year periods for decades. And when you look at like the upper core tile of private...

Mark private equity, private credit funds, the Delta is even greater, which means you don't just have an opportunity to outperform. have an opportunity to meaningfully outperform if you pick the right managers to invest with as well, which is something we pride ourselves on at Cadre too, because like in stock picking, a great management team, a great leadership team, they can outperform the market because they're exceptional what they do.

in the private markets and private equity, private credit, great management team can likewise outperform the market as well because they know the right levers to pull to add value to certain companies or to assess certain opportunities or to generate yield in ways that the regular run of the course manager might not be able to do. So there's multiple layers of value opportunity in alpha in private markets that really don't exist as much in public markets. One again is just this

asymmetry of information that exists because you know don't have a public market that's surfacing all the data and the information about certain companies every single day like you do in the stock market or otherwise. And then you've got this manager selection alpha opportunity as well where like in VC right we know the Sequoias and the First Round Capitals and the Andreessen Horowitzes these are the best of the best and these managers outperform everybody else.

And you don't see that same dynamic in the public markets as well too. So to me, the case for private markets is not really, you know, abandoning what's working. The case is like, you've maxed out on the benefit of, you know, diversification in public markets. And now you want to find compounding returns that can help elevate your portfolio even more. And so if you invest in private markets, you're investing in somewhere that, yeah, it's a little bit more liquid.

but you should be willing to hold on longer duration. You should be willing to deal with some of the ups and downs that you just have naturally in private market investing. And in exchange for tolerating those things, you're gonna get access to a return profile and a tax profile that your 401k is not gonna give you. And so that's my case for it. the one caveat is illiquidity is a real thing. If you need the money in a year or two years,

Private markets might not be the best place for you to invest. But if you're willing to deal with a little bit of illiquidity for a few years, I can assure you that as long as you pick the right managers and as long as you're in an asset class that's not getting destroyed by the macro environment, that you're going to be in an incredible position from a return standpoint and have an opportunity to build long-term wealth. That's a strong case.

You saw a lot of the problems. This is kind of where I want to go next in the conversation, which is, you know, we were talking to Chris Lyons earlier in the summit and we talked about, he built the cultural leadership fund, right? Where folks are able to get access to essentially the early stage investments coming from a top VC. However, you had to be a QP, a qualified purchaser, $5 million net worth, right? Which leaves a lot of people out. Some of your innovations were, we're going to find the best managers. We're going to do a lot of diligence on them.

We're going to bring high quality deals to you and we're going to let you get in. I think your bar was accredited investor and your minimum was somewhere, remind me, 50K, I believe. No, lower. Yeah, we even lower towards the end. So yeah, we went accredited to start to build a brand, the trust, the credibility, the scale, the profitability. We actually went all the way down to a thousand dollars and we actually started to market to non-accredited investors as well.

right before I sold the business. so, yeah, the thesis was we want to bring institutional access to everybody. We're going to do it methodically, right? We're not just going to go out and blast opportunities to, you know, mom and pops buyers because that's what's been happening to so many. And that's what burns so many as well. You just throw in opportunities at the wall. And so we said, like, let's be thoughtful. Let's start with quips, qualified institutional buyers.

Let's go down to qualified purchasers, these, so sorry, let's say the Harvard endowment, and then let's go to the big family office, you know, in the Middle East, and then let's go to the high net worth, you know, doctor, and then let's go to the masses. You know, we had a timeframe with which we did that, and we also brought the product minimums down commensurate as well. But for the most part, to your question, we were mainly focused on accredited investors for, you know, probably five years.

while we were building that trust and that brand equity and that credibility. And from a evolution of access perspective, and here's real question, the fundamental question, right? Yeah. Your case for private market investing was basically you're away from the herd, which creates opportunities to do things differently and get potentially better outcomes if you choose the right manager based on the simple fact that not everyone is in the game, right? And not everyone knows everything about this specific game. And if you find somebody knows what they're doing and you ride, you piggyback,

You'll do okay if you can ride it out long enough. At the end of the day, fundamentally, would you agree or not agree that getting more public investors into the private markets will create basically the same, what you called it, which is like a beta return, right? You're basically riding the market and there's very little opportunity to increase that. And for that reason, you have kind of like a set dynamic, which is designed to keep certain people out.

So is the argument for access, and unfortunately this impacts obviously underrepresented folks the most, is it a lost cause at the end of the day because the more you expand, the lesser the arbitrage or returns for the folks that are focused on private markets just because other folks can't get in? It's a great question. And I think that it depends on the time horizon that you're taking, right? So if you're thinking about a shorter time horizon and...

you're thinking about maximizing dollars over the next five years or three years or seven years, then yeah, I do think returns will get squeezed. The illiquidity premiums are real dynamic. However, if you're thinking long-term and you're thinking, okay, we're now bringing a whole new class of investors into an asset class that they otherwise hadn't been able to invest in. And one thing we've seen with capital markets is that innovation is always happening.

Right. And if you're in the game and you're seeing how the market's innovating, you're seeing new investment vehicles and structures being created, you're going to have an opportunity to ride the next wave because you know how this current wave was built and you know how this current wave is architected. And so you think about like the SPAC world, you know, which was a crazy boom and bust period of time. Or you think about, you know, new ETFs being built on space travel, for instance. Right. If you had never been in

you know, the private markets and invested in SpaceX, right, for instance, as one of the companies, you have no idea really how to assess the next wave of evolution, the next wave of innovation that will have real alpha opportunity. And so I believe the more people that can participate and get into the game, the more educated and informed they'll be, maybe not about this wave, but about the next wave to come and the more opportunity that they'll have because you're not just democratizing access, you're democratizing insights.

in democratizing understanding and education. And that allows you to really ride the wave for future innovations where there will be alpha to come. I think you see that frankly, even in some of the folks that are now investing in, you know, the whole betting and gaming world where people are starting to securitize assets in that space. And the only way you really are going to understand the underlying value of what you're doing is if you had invested in like the first wave. so again, all of these waves start to compound in my mind.

And if you take again, a 10, 15, 20 year outlook, I get excited about the fact that people that otherwise would be on wave one now can ride wave three or wave four because they understand the trajectory of the industry in the space. And that to me is what the access is all about. It's not just democratizing the opportunity to invest, it's democratizing the opportunity to understand how the investing world is being built and why there are certain unique opportunities to come.

And so there were three really interesting innovations that you brought to the table. So the mission to offer again, high grade institutional real estate investments to the regular Joe. One of them was just the compliance pieces, being able to do that at scale so that you can get a bunch of little checks and aggregate them, right? That solved a big problem for the sponsors. Then you had this ability to get the minimums.

down to a thousand, which I want to get into it just a little bit, right? Because that obviously is something that is attractive to many people, but you're not seeing a lot of players going that route. It feels like it's for a reason. And then the third piece of it is the secondary market. So a big part of pain for people is that they put their money in, they can't get their money out. You see that from the institution, know, the pension funds, right? You know, there's no one getting money out, but for the average person, like a 10, 12...

14 year thing is really, really painful. So you created innovation to allow people to ultimately get some liquidity out. These are big innovations. Why are we seeing these kinds of innovations scaling more? Is it the incentives? What limits did you hit as you were building this thing out to say like, okay, so the game is really, I don't want to say rigged, but it's structured in a way where the momentum behind these kinds of democratized innovations do hit certain, you know, natural limits or pushbacks. Yeah, look, I mean, I think that there's,

There have to be certain standards and have to be certain rules that govern the innovation in a lot of ways. look, saw it with, because you did see a proliferation of retail investors investing via like registered investment advisors and financial advisors in products like non-traded REITs. You saw the Blackstone non-traded REITs, Starwood non-traded REITs. You saw massive influxes of capital, the most ever.

you know, in any space, largely coming from retail investors that we had advisors that were investing in these verticals. And then what you saw was that there was some stress in the system and a huge flux of folks looking to get redemptions and looking to sell, you know, these non-traded reeds. And then you saw so much selling that happened that Blackstone and others put up gates. You know, they said we're no longer letting, you know, the vast majority of people who want to get out, get out. And, you know, the reason why

you know, that happened in my mind was lack of insight and lack of education for a lot of people about how to think about, you know, these investment vehicles and the like. And so when you don't have standards of, you know, education or exceptional education, you're going to have these swings of momentum. You see it in crypto every day, you know, pretty much. And so I think that the biggest issue is the standards that are there around

maximizing access are not there around maximizing insights and maximizing education and maximizing, you know, the opportunity for people to know that these are investments that are going to change and variation and flux and maybe you shouldn't be in them if that's the case. And so I don't think it's rigged in so far as, you know, there's not the ability to participate as much anymore or not the ability to get in and out. It's rigged in so far as

It's still a very small percentage of our global economy that truly understand risk tolerance, risk appetite, and the right products to match that over the right time horizons. Because over one year, you can pretty much pitch almost anything to most folks and make it sound appealing. But over 10 years, it's hard for people to really understand that there's naturally going to be ebbs and flows. There's going to be yield-oriented years. There's to be years where there's no yield. And that's just...

part of capital markets 101. So that's what I would focus on more is like, how do we help level both the investing playing field, but also the education playing field too. So people know what they're signing up for. Okay, I got two questions for you. One of the things that Chris Lyons mentioned as he was talking was, we're talking about the future of what access looks like. And he was always excited about blockchain, crypto. Obviously that hit a peak, I guess you could say.

But the blockchain technology underlying it has always been something that he's been excited about. And he's saying that the now the merging of AI and blockchain is really going to be where the opportunity for ownership that is a lot more accessible to people is really going to blossom. What are some of the things that you're excited about when you think about the future state? I know you're also, first of all, you take an incredible time to go into stealth, into build, because what we're seeing right now is just a wide open field of opportunity.

So we'd love to hear what you're excited about and maybe if you want to share maybe what you're thinking about, what you're working on. We'd love to hear that as well. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's so much that I excited about, you know, and there's a lot that I'm excited about that I'm actually pursuing building now. I won't go into all the details of what I'm working on, but what I can say is when I look at private markets today, especially private credit,

I see a lot of the same trends and patterns I saw in the real estate world, you know, call it 15 years ago. Private credit, for instance, has exploded in size. It's upwards of two trillion, depending on who you ask. But in that space, the infrastructure is broken. You know, there's very, very poor reconciliation between fund managers and the administrators. Everything still happened in shadow Excel worksheets and spreadsheets.

Compliance reporting is incredibly manual and slow. Data's fragmented across all kinds of systems. Nobody's got a unified view. And the most sophisticated allocators in the world, they're still running on operational stacks that look like 2005 versus, you know, 2025 or 2006 versus 2026. And so one of the things I'm very excited about is finding some of these verticals where, you know, the operating infrastructure, the operating stack is...

very, very Jurassic relative to the innovation happening in other verticals or relative to the innovation that's happening on the investing side in some of these spaces, terms of growth as well. It's not just private credit. That's one of the verticals that I like a lot. look, private credit and lending is the lifeblood of our economy. know, and banks we know have fallen behind in a lot of ways on deploying that money towards the most promising companies because they've got pattern recognition deficiencies. And so I'm excited about

empowering new GPs and managers stepping into spaces like private credit with tools that allow them to scale profitably, scale efficiently, and literally diversify the wealth that's being created so that you eliminate financial deserts, which we know exist in way too many pockets in this country, not because of a lack of opportunity, but because of lack of foresight and innovation. So, you know, that's one theme, you know, to talking at a super high level.

that I'm pursuing with what I'm working on building, obviously in an AI native way. And, you know, there's a whole host of opportunities in private markets infrastructure that I think will be one of the most compelling wealth creation themes of the next decade. And a lot of that is because of AI, but a lot of it's because you can remove this operational drag that have historically made these spaces inaccessible opaque.

and a liquid and unlock countless, countless opportunities. So look, the same way the, the, um, internet flat in sort of the public markets in a lot of ways, making information cheaper and execution instantaneous and access universal AI is going to do that for private markets as well. And I think we're at the beginning of that arc. Um, and if you're an owner or a builder, um, I think the lesson is the same one that I was taught 15 years ago, which is infrastructure is the gatekeeper. And if you build it,

You change, you can get in. It goes back to the ownership theme, you know, really that's driven my whole career to date. We'll definitely stay tuned and to close out, I want you to leave kind of like some parting words for the audience here. Many of them, as I mentioned, you know, established professionals, but it's an uncomfortable time to have to learn really quickly, maybe a lack of security in the corporate job. And I'm going back to this theme that in hearing your story really pops in my mind, which is like this idea of super agency, which is...

It's not about the circumstances that you're in. You create your own circumstances and opportunity by taking action, right? And having a clear vision of what you want to create. I think you really embody that. Thank you, In the last summit, we were talking to Samir Goel, I don't know if you know Samir already. yeah, I know. He's a good people. You tell this story about how they're in their grind years trying to get this thing going. And they had this one relationship with this guy at Related Companies. And it was a huge account. And he put them through the wringer. He was, you need SOC 2 compliance.

whatever you need, whatever you need, we'll get it done. And ultimately, that guy ultimately became their first client, which really unlocked all the opportunity that they saw moving forward. What is that, what, you know, from your perspective is the highest leverage thing that you would advise the audience to focus on now? I think what you mindset is a big thing. In some cases is one relationship that really is, you know, overly impactful in terms of what it can do. Or sometimes it's just learning and really focusing on the growth piece.

For you in closing, what would be like your one piece of highest leverage advice that you would tell the audience or advise the audience to really lean in on as a way to navigate through these really kind of fast changing times? Yeah, look, I mean, there's a lot there, but in closing, what I would say is, if you're looking at investing and allocating money, which I think everybody should consider,

Don't start with a deal. Don't start with, you know, a company. Start with a thesis, you know, write down things that you can in your heart of hearts believe, you know, start with how much of my net worth am I going to put into liquid investments in the next 10 years and be honest about it too, you know, and, don't overstate it. Cause a lot of people do that. And what, what do I actually need to return? What's my actual return objective and over what time horizon do I want to achieve that?

Not as much as possible, but what's a real number? And then three, where do I have an edge? Where do I have a unique insight? Where do I have some kind of passion or some space that I really love? It could be anything. It could be sports. could be crypto. It could be anything. What industry and asset or geography do I feel like I really care or understand about? And once you have those answers, and I did this exercise myself, pick a category to get really deep in.

And get deep over the course of a few months, read literature, listen to the audible, talk to operators, go to conferences, build relationships with people in that space. then most people skipped a step and go straight into putting money out. And then really, really think about what that first allocation is going to be. And I'd say make it small enough that you can lose it because a lot of people...

don't take that step and I think it should be something that you're willing to lose but large enough where you can learn from it. And it depends on everybody's in different places in life in terms of how much they can do. That's an exercise I went through when I first started investing and it helped me anchor on a few themes that have really moved the needle for me. And it's something I wish people would have told me when I was in my early 20s because the journey from doing what I was doing, earning to owning is...

You know, it's not a transaction, it's discipline. it's all to the trust question, all these decisions that happened over a long period of time. what I've learned dealing with the most wealthy people in the world and working with the most powerful folks in the world is that the people who are winning at the game, they're not the ones who pick like the best first deal, the best for thesis. They're the ones who keep showing up. They keep learning. They keep realizing, you know, where opportunities are. keep refining.

They keep building relationships with the people doing the work and they keep coming up for what's next. And so that's how everything compounds. So trust compounds, access compounds, that's how wealth compounds. You just got to keep showing up. You know, you don't give up. You realize like this is a marathon truly. And you'll pick your head up if you stay consistent and you stay focused and you realize, you you're surrounded by wealth in so many different forms and fashions.

that was unimaginable for so long, but is now your new reality. So that's how I would think about, you know, the long game. Brother Ryan, round of applause, virtual applause for Brother Ryan. Thank you, my man. Thank you, Best of luck with everything. We know what you're building. Thanks again, and we'll talk to you soon. Thank you, man. I appreciate you.