This Company Is Reinventing Venture Capital | Ben Miller CEO at Fundrise

In venture. You make an investment, and the worst you can do is lose your money, but you can make 10, 20, 30, 50 times your money. The best decisions are the decisions that punish you personally the most. We were birthed out of the 2008 financial crisis.

The world blew up. It was like a COVID for finance: shut down the entire financial industry, and there was a lot of bad behavior of mainstream financial institutions. And so the birth of Fundrise was like a reaction to the institutionalization of, like, everything.

It's fully democratized; anybody can invest in it. So it's sort of like private equity for the masses. Traditionally, with institutions, you tell them what you're going to do, they give you money to do that,right? You have to do the thing they hired you to do.

And I think that's a recipe for underperformance in a lot of times, because I think great investing is like great company building. You want to go where the opportunity is, and what's true in theory is very frequently not true in practice.

And I missed some really good investments because I was more worried about losing money in the beginning. But actually, the deals you miss are the things you regret. And in tech and venture, it's more about relationships. People were willing to take our money even though we were new and unproven.

We have served a few advantages over traditional investors. And I think why we ended up being successful is we didn't—

Ben, welcome to NEW ECONOMIES. I've been wanting to have you on the show for so long, so I'm finally managed to make it happen with you guys. Super excited for this, and we have so much to cover. So much is happening in techright now, and what the journey of Fundrise has been on.

So welcome to the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

So people might not know about this, but Fundrise is actually a 10-year-old journey. What was the initial idea for starting this company, and why did you want to go down the route of really democratizing access to private markets?

Yeah, no, I mean, it's been a long journey. So, like, we were birthed out of the 2008 financial crisis. So in 2008, I was in real estate. The world blew up. Most people actually, at this point, most people were not in the business, were not really, like, in the, yeah, probably their career in 2008.

So actually, for them, it seemed sort of like more theoretical. But it was like a COVID for finance. And so it shut down the entire financial industry. And, you know, a lot of big companies blew up. There was a lot of bad behavior.

And most people who went through that came out of it like me, very skeptical of mainstream financial institutions. And so I was skeptical, I was jaundiced, I was pissed. And a few years later, I was just, you know, I was sitting there thinking about, isn't there a better way?

Isn't there a better system? Couldn't people own things outside the financial system? And, yeah, the birth of Fundrise was like the idea of creating, you know, direct investment into real things, like real estate or now tech companies. And so it's a reaction to the institutionalization of, like, everything.

And so you sold off in property,right, real estate. Is that that was kind of like the genre to kind of get going?

Yeah, we started with real estate. I mean, we did real estate for real estate and then lending for about 10 years before we launched tech.

The real estate side, how does that work? You were going out buying 5, 10,000 real estate projects at a go?

5 or 10,000 projects. So normally, you know, so we were focused on, you know, institutional real estate. And that's like apartment buildings, you know, warehouses, you know, hotels, things like that. And so we it evolved over time, but essentially we have what looks like a private equity fund, like a Blackstone or Starwood, where they have a private equity fund, and that private equity fund invests and owns and manages real estate investments.

But instead of it being only available to maybe 100 institutional investors, it's fully democratized to anybody can invest in it. So it's sort of like private equity for the masses.

And then you decide to go down the VC route, which is somewhat correlated, but then also a bit of a pivot,right? We are living now in one of the greatest times, I think, to be building. But when you decided to go down this route and you took the idea to your board, were they are you crazy, or were they actually pretty aligned?

Yeah, I mean, you got to remember that moment, which was probably 2021, 2022. It was a different era. You know, sort of COVID was like peaking. COVID hangover and stimulus was like probably the most bubbly at that moment.

And we felt like we wanted to expand into a new asset class. And we thought venture capital and tech investing made the most sense because, you know, the team, we have 100 software engineers and tech professionals. We built a platform with 2 million customers.

We built payment processing and all and apps and everything that, like, sort of a tech company normally would build. And we felt like we knew something about tech, raised venture capital, and I'd done a little bit of venture investing over the past 20 years.

So I felt like we knew something about it, but the board felt like it was

a large departure from the and they were very skeptical, very, very skeptical. And this is actually the magic of a good board is when they they can we can debate things, they can disagree, but they will support the entrepreneur even if they disagree.

And that's actually really unusual. Usually the board will tell the entrepreneur what to do, and the entrepreneur ends up being like running around doing what the board asks, which I think is a bad dynamic for a company. And a great board supports the team, even if they disagree.

So you universe the card back to your board and you go out and build this thing. What was the first 12 months? Is it around, first of all, actually getting appetite from your customer base and then actually figuring out who are the first type of companies we should start, you know, partnering with?

Yeah, this is also part of the magic, I think, why we ended up being successful is we didn't when you raise money traditionally with institutions, you tell them what you're going to do, they give you money to do that.

And so it's almost like they hire you to do a job. They hire you to mop the floors. They hire you to, you know, wash the windows. It's much people don't they see the venture funds as the or venture capital managers as like the principals, but they're actually in a way like they work for someone else, which is the unless you're the top, top, top and you can do whatever you want, most people work for their LPs, work for their investors.

And so investors hire them to do a job. This is also true in real estate. If you're going to raise a fund to buy workforce, multifamily, you can't turn around and buy a hotel,right? You have to do the thing they hired you to do.

And I think that's a recipe for underperformance in a lot of times because in 2022, when we launched the fund, late 2022, we launched the fund, what investors would have hired me to do was not AI,right? What happened was we launched the fund, we have a core set of investors who supported us, we raised probably $50 million out of the gate, and then we didn't invest it for 12 months.

And that is like not allowed in the institutional world. Like you raise money, you deploy it, you have to deploy it. You're paid to deploy, you're paid to do a job. But we didn't deploy. We invested in one company in 2023, early 2023, which is Vanta, their Series B.

But we really slowed it up because what was happening was, if you remember back then, stock market collapsed, interest rates went up, real estate, all things started to decline. And one of them was like software bubble essentially blew up.

And it was before the ChatGPT moment. And so we were, I was very uncertain how to invest into the next wave. And so we were slow. And actually, one of the things we did, this is just to throw back, is that like when Silicon Valley Bank blew up, we had $50 million in cash.

And so we went and like saved a bunch of tech companies who were like, you know, at that moment, that weekend, they were like not going to make payroll. And we came in and like gave like bridge loans for basically like, you know, very low cost to like a half, maybe a dozen companies, some of them quite famous.

Some of them were like, you know, very well-known companies. And so like, you know, so the point is that like I think great investing is like great company building. It's you want to go where the opportunity is, and that's usually not what you originally sort of what's true in theory is very frequently not true in practice.

How do you weigh out the opportunity? Because you've got the real estate side, and then you have the venture side, and the type of models are very different. When you look at the venture side, typically 90% of the companies are not going to make it over time.

Versus on the real estate side, 90% of the, you know, real estate projects will make your money back, but then the one or two projects will potentially blow you out of the water. How do you figure out and how do you diversify that so it doesn't, you know, go down downhill?

Yeah, I mean, they're just completely almost diametrically opposite industries where so venture, I mean, is you make an investment and the worst you can do is lose your money, but you can make 10, 20, 30, 50 times your money,right?

So actually, this is something I didn't really appreciate that I missed some really good investments because I was more worried about losing money in the beginning, but actually losing opportunities. The deals you miss are the things you regret in venture.

And in real estate, it's the deals you do that you regret, not the deals you passed on. And so, you know, real estate's a value investing business. It's about like low risk, moderate returns. You know, if you can get 10 or 20% returns, you're freaking home runs.

That's the best. And in tech, it's about growth. It's about growth, not about value. It's about explosive growth. And so they're just very, very different. But I feel like one of we have served a few advantages over traditional investors, and that is like more discretion, which is what I was saying earlier about being able to do what we think isright, which is usually not what we predicted before.

And then two is we I see a lot more of the world. I'm not in a bubble the way venture capital seems to be often. You know, we invest in real estate. We invest in like real estate across like 25 cities.

We have 2 million customers. So I have really I have a good sense of what's happening with like normal people. We invest in credit markets. We invest, we lend. So I'm in credit, asset-backed securities. I mean, I'm in venture.

I'm across so if you look at AI, AI crosses all this with data centers, powered land, infrastructure, power, the opcos, the application layer, the customer, all those things actually are the whole lifecycle of AI today. And that's like so I have a much broader vista, broader understanding of what's happening than I think if you're only investing in one of those parts of the life or the supply chain of AI.

Yeah, you have to make sure it's diversified. And you mentioned earlier around Vanta, how are you getting access to these companies? I mean, Vanta has been an incredible, you know, story with Christina and what they've done. What does that access look like?

Yeah, yeah. So this is also probably the only sector that is more about access than any other. Most other investing sectors, real estate or lending or credit or, I mean, private equity, it's much more of an auction and it's much more driven by who's willing to pay the highest price or combination price and confidence in closing.

And in tech, it's more about relationships. But it's even that I think is a little overblown in venture because the relationships are quite arbitrary. Like it's like so surprising to me, like the relationship is, oh, I knew this guy and, you know, my two jobs ago, I like I'm a neighbor, you know, it's a friend of a friend.

It's so random and so access is about having relationships. And so like, you know, if you look at some of these incredible companies, like who invested in the C or the A or the B, there's lots of random people, like lots of random people.

And so that's like if you're in venture, you kind of know that, but it's sort of like if you're outside venture, it seems more like gatekeeping. It seems more like more like what's theright word for this? Like it seems more institutional than it is like arbitrary.

It's arbitrary. I mean, it's just you happen to get to you happen to know somebody who knows somebody. And so that's how we got into so many companies. We just like with Vanta, you know, Vanta, we just happen to know somebody.

And at the time, you know, like there was no money in venture. Venture had gotten fallen out of favor. And so, you know, when there was no money, people were willing to take our money even though we were new and unproven.

So a combination of market luck and, you know, random relationships is how I think all investing works.

It's so true. Like the venture game is just about relationships,right? I mean, as long as your reputation is noted, then hopefully, you know, you'll do fine. But also like just figuring out how you are being supported with these companies, I feel the venture world is changing this aspect as well.

It's no longer just about providing capital. It's potentially about the distribution. What actually can you like give them on top of the capital? How do you guys think about that? And is it actually important to you?

Yeah, I mean, this is true with all things, definitely true with the investment business is that if you are in a business, your business is to sell your product. And so you tell a story and the story is your narrative and your narrative is what gets people to buy your thing.

And so the venture industry's narrative is that they have special access and they provide special value. And mostly if you're a founder, if you build a company, that just doesn't matter. Like if I were to go and talk to

any great founder building company, I'd say, okay, of your success, what percentage of your success was the South Venture guy gave you above the money? Like, okay, allocate, okay, how much to your team, how much to the founding team, how much to the money, and how much to the like.

And it's going to be like maybe 1%

to the, you know, the value add, maybe zero. It's so small. The people who build the company are the team who the team. Team builds the company. Team builds the company all the way. It's axiomatic that the team builds the company.

And I think that like I basically think that nearly 100% of it is because the team

made the company successful. But the venture industry takes a lot of credit for what the entrepreneurs do and build. And I think that like there's occasionally good advice, occasionally, but mostly 80 to 90% of venture, at least 80 to 90% of venture, it's just the money that you get and nothing else.

That's, you know, now is the greatest time to be building. There is so much innovation happening. The pace of innovation has been so fast just in the last three years. With everything happening in AI, what is the one thing that has surprised you the most that you didn't quite anticipate?

Yeah, I actually think it's a really difficult time to be a builder. Other than the top, you know, 10 or 20 companies, I think it's actually more challenging than it was before because essentially the, I mean, Anthropic in particular is eating the AI, eating the software application layer.

And so if you're building software, you probably are obsolete 12 months from now. And we built, you know, we built a real estate AI application called Real AI. You can check out realai.com.

And it's great. It's amazing. Essentially, it's a real estate analyst. If you wanted to get an artificial analyst who could do advanced financial analysis as good as a, you know, $200,000 a year MBA, Real AI can do that for you.

But Anthropic's eating the application layer where Claude is. And so it's making it very hard to have a roadmap that makes any sense because I'm seeing the customer move their work. Instead of working inside Microsoft Office, they're going to start working inside of Claude.

And so I started saying, okay, we started shifting our roadmap to trying to serve the customer through Claude. The problem is that Claude doesn't really have the types of like, you know, App Store.

There's a missing infrastructure layer sitting on top of Claude that would sort of enable us to customize Claude

for a real estate customer. You have skills, you have plugins, but it's all really half-baked. And so, or just it's just immature, if you will. Like it's not really where they primarily have been focusing. So, and so it's actually, so I think it's a hard time to build a company unless you're in like doing like maybe one of the few things that is like if you're building an AI lab, if you're building AI infrastructure like, you know, Fluid Stack or something.

But even that, like, you know, the whole thing is about getting a deal with Google or getting a deal with OpenAI. It's like there's three to five customers that matter. It's so concentrated at the moment.

It feels like, and it's changing so quickly, you know, back in December, November 2022, when ChatGPT came out, it was very much the AI models. Then it went to generative AI, then it went to AI agents. Now it's kind of vibe coding.

Now it's like a free-for-all. It's all changing so quickly. But what do you actually think happens next? What is that next category shift?

It's highly contingent on how advanced the next models are from Anthropic and OpenAI. I've never seen Mythos, so I don't know like how much more agentic Mythos is than, you know, Opus or whatever the 4.0 models are. I'm assuming it's going to be more agentic.

And I'm hopeful that you sort of unlock, finally unlock the consumer applications. And so you start having AI shopping, AI assistance, and just the Mythos-class models create the AI experience everybody's been waiting for. And you have explosive growth on the consumer side like you already have on the enterprise side.

And then building the application or the App Store on top of Mythos, like for real estate or for law or for accounting, you know, they hope they build a little bit of structure on top of it so that it's more conducive to build on top of.

It's just not, they just, they make it hard for third-party software companies to build on top of their product. It's just not like, it just doesn't seem to be up till now really a priority for them. But I think it does become one.

So you end up with this like kind of like 2012 period where you have Uber and you have Airbnb and all this like proliferation of apps. That's what I'm hopeful and I think likely happens next.

You know, we have potentially two, maybe three of the biggest companies about to go public in the next few weeks and few months. Obviously, SpaceX, we've got Anthropic and OpenAI most likely at some stage. From what you can share more generally, how important is it for the market to respond to these companies going public in a positive way?

I don't think that they're, I think they're so different. I think SpaceX is very different than the AI labs. And I think that like the market

will actually treat SpaceX differently. I think people group them. I don't think that, I think they're not similar. I think that SpaceX will be much more complicated in the way the market accepts it. And I think the other two were, because they have like explosive growth, explosive revenue.

They're fundamental companies. They're just fundamental in a way that like we haven't seen in 20 years. And so I think the market is going to respond very, very, very positively to the AI labs. Because I actually think at the valuations that they're, you know, saying publicly, they're really well priced.

They're like maybe cheap. And I think that like SpaceX is like sort of fully valued. So that's very different.

It's going to, for sure it's going to be, it's going to be interesting rise. And we've got the likes of Canva. We have others who are about to go public. Do you think there's going to be a correlation that these AI models do potentially do well when they do go public?

Does that benefit the other companies who are potentially going public?

No. No, I mean, the challenge, which I think people who look at the market, they think of it as like this, like this like giant black box or something. Like it's like, but it's actually a very defined system.

And there's trillions of dollars that are going to be sucked out of other asset classes, other investments to allocate over to, I mean, I expect that across the three companies going public, it's at least $10 trillion of value.

I think they're $10 trillion of market cap, you know, within the next like year or two. And so that's going to like force capital away from other sectors. And on top of that, the government will borrow another, you know, let's say $10 trillion over that same 18 months.

And so there's going to, this capital reallocation across the market is going to have like a, I think the people are going to be shocked by the consequences. I'm not exact, I don't know exactly what they are, but I'm seeing it already.

You know, you couldn't raise money for, you know, building housing if your life depended on it. All that money's going to data centers. You know, data center build-out is probably $5 trillion in the next like four to four years or something.

So there's a finite amount of capital and the capital starvation of other sectors will cause like, you know, credit card rates will be really high, mortgage rates will stay high. You know, it's going to be kind of a two-tier economy.

And I think people's jobs are going to be impacted too by AI. And I think that's going to create like a really difficult sociopolitical environment.

I think for the job side, we've had a few people on the show over the last few weeks and, you know, we've been having different types of conversations like actually what that means. I don't think anybody knows what's going to happen.

I think that's just the reality,right? We have an assumption, but the reality is we're not going to know for the next maybe 12 or 18 months. But when I think about this, it's like, you know, the people coming out of university or colleges today, what does that actually mean for them?

Are universities going to be relevant in the future? What does that mean for healthcare? Is there a big opportunity to build, you know, healthcare companies within AI? There's just so many new opportunities now, but I just don't think anybody knows where all this is going to go next.

Yeah, I mean, no one never knows, but

I think there are things that are much more likely. And I think of like the internet. The internet fundamentally was a communication tool, distributed communications, information distribution, and that undermined newspapers. It changed how commerce was done. You know, probably half retail in America went bankrupt over 20 years.

Real estate, retail real estate also had a very powerful reckoning. And so you look at the internet and a lot of predictions, but if you got to the core of what it was, it did what you would have expected.

And I think that AI, fundamentally AI is

artificial intelligence. And so it's going to reduce jobs. Like I don't know if it's two years or five years or 10 years, but it's going to reduce the dependence on white-collar jobs. That, like I think that's like, I don't think that I would be, I would say there's 90% chance that you just have a huge amount of displacement.

Not displacement in the sense of layoffs, but like our company, anybody who's on the leading edge of AI like we are, you know, we just hire less people, way less people, way, way, way less people. You just don't need to hire to grow anymore.

And most job creation is new companies hiring.

Exactly. And you know, there

is so much opportunity, I think, for the micro builders, you know, people who could never use to code before, they're spinning up these projects, getting to a couple million dollars in revenue in the space of weeks and months.

That's been like just so interesting to see. I think what's happening in healthcare is really interesting. There are a whole, you know, bunch of opportunities around that from like wellness, is it cancer prevention? Again, like just so many interesting opportunities to explore.

What are you most excited about outside of the AI models? And where are you spending a bit of time, you know, focusing on some interesting trends?

Yeah, we invested in a company called Loyal, which is a...

I love Loyal. I was just speaking to, I was just speaking to Rahul, he's the founder of Superhuman last night, and he also mentioned Loyal.

Yeah, it seems like everybody inside the Silicon Valley Circle knows the founder of Loyal, Celine, and invested as an angel. Like she's, like every time I talk to somebody at a company, it's like, oh yeah, I invested an angel in that company.

So Loyal is a biotech company developing longevity drugs for dogs. So dogs would live years longer and they would be healthier. So I have a great Dane, maybe she lived till eight or 10 years old and said she lives to 15 years old,right?

That is really the promise of technology. And I think that like, I think it's going to be a blockbuster drug. I think that like every dog owner in the world probably ends up buying it. And then I think that it opens the phase two, which is then trying to make that, once people see that you can have longevity for drugs, it's kind of like ChatGPT.

Once people saw it, they want it for people. And I think the idea that you could have 20 more years of healthy living is, that is just such an insane idea. I mean, so, I mean, that's like we're talking about like Fountain of Youth, you know, things, holy grail type stuff.

So that's what I'm excited about. I think that Loyal will become like one of the most famous companies in America within a few years.

It's exactly what Rahul was saying last night. You know, I think it's the first company to have FDA approval for kind of, you know, longevity. And if you think like the analogy I make is, if your house is burning down, as well as your kids, you're going to take your dog.

People love their pets. And if they crack it for dogs, what comes next? Maybe it's cats, maybe it's like farming animals and potentially humans next.

Yeah, humans. It's like, you know, within 10 years, humans. That's what I think is going to happen.

You know what's interesting about longevity also? Three of the biggest CEOs are doing their second act around the same space. You have the former founder of Whole Foods, he's now tackling longevity. The former co-founder of WeWork, Miguel, he's also tackling longevity.

Brian Johnson. You have Danny Ek from Spotify. So it's clearly like an opportunity there. Would you, are you guys investing as well as like Loyal? Are you investing in longevity and health more generally?

You know, the question among venture people is what happens after

these major companies go public? Like what's the next wave to invest in? And like everyone else, you know, we're exploring the, there's probably like five or six categories that could be the breakout. And, you know, my whole theory is, it doesn't work in theory, but it works in practice,right?

And so I focus on practice. And so the best way to know what to do is to do it. And so we, you know, I'm out there looking at biotech, looking at quantum, I'm looking at like, you know, AI for physics or real things.

Looking at AI for, you know, services, like the service-enabled AI. There's only like, I mean, at the moment, there's only like five or six categories. And you need to be talking to the people, maybe writing small checks. The best way to get to know somebody is actually just write a check, invest a small amount, and then if it works, invest more later.

Because it's like if you have a billion-dollar fund and you invest a million dollars and it goes to zero, you know, nobody cares. But if you invest a million dollars and it gives you opportunity to make a hundred million by investing the next check, great.

So it's the ability to write checks into these other sectors and build relationships is a great way to sort of open up the next phase.

Where do you think the least opportunity is now? I think consumer is still pretty hard. Consumer is making a bit of a comeback, but notoriously it has always been pretty hard. Any other, I mean, would you agree? Are there any other categories you think are just difficultright now?

I don't, I mean, I think that like competing with the big AI labs, that's difficult. You know, like.

A little.

Like, yeah, I mean, like the thing that was hot was investing in like, you know,

really highly valued companies, essentially competing with an AI lab in a vertical. You know, there's a vertical, the company's worth $10 billion on paper and they're competing against Anthropic. I think that's difficult because

you're also paying like a high valuation. Like, I mean, this is, when we invested in some of these like big companies,

it was funny, we could have invested in these verticals, but the big companies you could invest in at 20 times revenue, forward revenue, and these small companies that like, I mean, small, like $10 billion, you know, you're investing at like 50 times or 100 times revenue.

And it just didn't make sense to me that you would say, okay, do you, you know, do you think that the big company, or I mean, I think Google, I don't invest in Google because we don't invest much in public companies, but like, you know, Google is so much cheaper on a multiple basis than these startups.

And so like, I think it's challenging. I think it's a very challenging space.

What do you think of these Vibe Coding Tools? There have been so many of them. I mean, there are a few, now there are so many. You know, what happens with them? Claude and ChatGPT are now basically doing similar products.

Do you think they're going to last?

You know, this is where I feel like my predictions are always poor. So I don't know. I think that like, I'm not going to be surprised if some of them end up evolving. There's going to be a, we're about to go through another evolutionary phase,right?

The Mythos-level models are going to change everything. And it's going to open up new opportunities for great entrepreneurs. But like, so I assume somebody will, they'll figure something out, but it's, again, like I think it's much more of a venture investment, but they're valued like they're mature businesses, you know, $10, $20, $30, $40, $50 billion.

And I think that they're, you know, it's more risky than I think that it's priced to be.

If I was to, one of the questions we love to ask on the show is around actually getting inside the companies of all these incredible founders that we speak to. If I was to join as your chief of staff for a week or for a day, what does that day typically look like if I was to work alongside you?

Yeah, a day is not going to necessarily be representative because like, I work with this guy who's an engineer, one of our senior engineers, worked with him now for, God, more than 10 years. He was an Army Ranger.

He did deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's the best, the guy's the best. And he's, you know, so this is an analogy from the military, but you know, when you're trying to take an island, you send in the Marines and then if you want to hold the island, you send in the Army.

And if you want to govern the Army, sorry, govern, if you want to govern the island, you send in the police. And so I'm a Marine. And so my job is to take the islands and then like ultimately try to hand it off to the governance teams.

And so my day, which island is the thing to take, whether it's a real estate AI application, it's venture capital, it's data, you know, investing in data centers. Like I'm mostly like forward deployed, if you will. So my days vary a lot.

And how are you using AI today? Is it, are you using the typical things? Any core like things you've been using that maybe other people don't know about?

At this point, I mean, we, you know, we Fundrise adopted AI across every major department. So for, obviously for real estate, we use real AI. For customer service, we use FIN. TINES, I don't know if you ever heard of TINES or RIZOTO.

RIZOTO's for IT. TINES is for cybersecurity.

This is what I think will happen. It depends on how, if Claude becomes, you know, AGI or if it becomes more like AI. So there's a question of how far the AI models get in terms of like autonomy.

But

it doesn't really work today to have an AI product without an AI application layer around it. Like whether it's for accounting, you can't just have Claude Vibe Code accounting. You need an application layer that wraps it. Like, or for law or for any of the sectors, you just need the application, the vertical application layer today.

And yeah, I mean, so we, you know, we build it for real estate, but I mean, if you want to like, I would say like RIZOTO is a good one for IT. It's like, and we did invest in them, just so fully disclaim that, you know, one of the things we do is we adopt products.

It's how we got a lot of these products. We use Vanta as one of our diligences or one of the ways we do diligence of the company is I, we adopt it and the engineers basically always hate everything.

That's one of the things about engineers. There's two kinds of engineers. Engineers like Guilfoyle,right, from the show. They pretty much hate everything and there's engineers who love everything. And so you have to find that you kind of have to know what the engineer's, you know, bias is.

But adopting it is a really good way to get comfortable with the investment.

You know, like just so much has been changing in the last really three and a half, four years. And this is for sure the greatest technology shift that we're experiencing. I'm really, like I'm 28 now. I'm excited to see what does the next technology innovation look like in the next 10 years if we have one,right?

Maybe it's going to be super boring.

Boring? No. No, I mean, I think quantum, 10 years is, I mean, we'll see quantum within 10. That space is definitely 10 years, but 10 years is a long time for venture. So you need like, you want to be focused on three to five realistically.

Quantum might be five, but I think it might be 10. A lot of the AI applied to real tech, like physics and, you know, biology. I think that's actually, it may be a lot harder. Like the, you know, the reason LLMs work is they had a lot of data.

And there's not a lot of data about how cells work today.

No, yeah. I kind of feel for you guys though, for Fundrise, there are so many like new avenues and verticals you could go down,right? If you were to look ahead in the next, you know, couple of years, what's the next big act?

Oh my God. I mean, this is, what would be something great? I mean, I want to build a real estate AI application. That's what I want to do. Like I feel like I know a lot about all of the pieces.

And I like, and mostly I just like to build. Like I'm not like, I don't get excited about finance in the way that like there's investors and they really just, they love investing. For me, investing is just a way to build things.

And so,

I mean, like when I started looking at quantum, like it's fun because I get to learn new things. And learning is fun. Quantum is fascinating. I mean, it's fascinating what's happening. But it's like, yeah, if I'm not building, it's just like, it's not ultimately like what I enjoy doing.

So I think we end up building something new that seems like an out-of-left-field thing. And then later, hopefully later people are like, oh, that was so smart.

Are there any demographics that you're also excited about? I think, I mean, obviously what's happening in the US is really interesting. I think what's happening like in India, for example, is super interesting. I mean, a billion and a half people who live there have access now fully to AI.

That's going to be a huge market. Any others you're particularly excited about?

Actually, I think the demographics are one of the biggest negatives today. Demographic shifts in America and most Western countries are very challenging because we can only really grow with immigration.

And the country, the Western world hasn't had a sustained period of no population growth since like the 1300s. And so

what does it mean to have growth without population growth? And immigration, I think, is becoming untenable in most of the Western countries because, I mean, if you look at the stats, some of the Western nations have like 20% immigration, 20% of the population immigrants.

And they're obviously having kids more faster. And so it's creating like a lot of cultural friction. And it's happened in America too, obviously. So what is growth without population growth is so different. And I think it's like almost like the laws of gravity will change.

And I think a lot of businesses will be shocked by that. I mean, take education,right? There's been a growing population of kids who, more kids apply to school, more kids go to college every year for a hundred years.

Now it's going to go into decline. It peaked this year and it'll decline every year for the next, probably forever, but definitely the next 20 years. And so that's like an example of how an entire sector will hemorrhage.

I mean, it'll go through a crisis as a result.

For sure. I mean, now for sure is just to be, you know, it's the best time to be building,right? So many new opportunities that can kind of, you know, come out of this wave. If you weren't building in financial services, which category would you actually go and build in next?

I'd be curious to know.

I used to want to go into government.

The slowest possible category you could choose.

Yeah, well, it's slow, but like the thing that I feel like I've learned about whatever our team and like me is that like the best decisions are the decisions that punish you personally the most. Where I suffer the most, the more I suffer, the better the decision is.

And I feel like the problem with most people in government is that they avoid the hard decisions.

And I'd rather go into government, make hard decisions and get fired than just sit on the outside and watching government just collapse. It's just, I feel like it's just like nobody wants to go into government anymore. It's so horrible,right?

There's like, you get assassination attempts. You become like hated by one side or the other. And so I sort of thought, okay, well, I'm willing to basically make everybody unhappy in exchange for trying to have some good outcomes for the country.

So that's what I used to want. But I'm not even sure I have that in me anymore. I'm not sure. I think I'm too old.

I'm just saying.

Too tired. Yeah. It's brutal.

What do you say, Wayne?

Yeah. I mean, yeah, but who's going to do this? Somebody needs to do this for God's sake. Just not, probably not me. Probably I'm just going to go like, you know, live in a cabin somewhere.

That sounds a bit more reasonable and a bit more fun.

Yeah. Get a bunch of books and live in a cabin.

So rapid-fire questions. Who is your favorite AI companyright now?

My favorite AI companyright now, if you're not invested in, is Periodic Labs. And they're trying to build AI for the, you know, for physics, for the real world. And I think that is like really exciting, building materials. And it's finally, the AI industry, finally the technology industry is trying to change the physical world, not just the virtual world.

And I'm really excited about that.

I agree. I'm super excited for them, the whole physical world. Massive opportunity there, you know. Who is your favorite or which AI founder do you most respect? Actually, it doesn't even have to be just an AI founder. Is there a founder out there you really respect?

I really respect Dario. I mean, I know that he's become controversial on theright, but I feel like they're genuinely worried about AI risks in a way that people just don't believe them. They think they're disingenuous. They think that they're hyperbolistic.

But I know enough people at Anthropic. I really think they're worried about it. I really think that they are trying to do theright thing. And because you're trying to do theright thing, you're going to be unpopular. And he's willing to be unpopular.

And that's been, to me, it's gotten, you suffer on behalf of other people. That's what it means to be a leader.

You've already spent some time with these AI founders and especially with the likes of Dario. And if you have spent some good time with them, what do you think is the one characteristic that makes them so special and unique?

Yeah. No, so I've not spent any time with like these top AI leaders there. I mean, I'm not that level. I do know a few. I know this guy who started AnyScale, which is, he's probably the one I'm, what's Robert Ichihara.

And

they're just genuinely the smartest people. They're just genuinely like so smart. And I love being around people who are 10 times smarter than me. It just makes me like optimistic for the world. And so, and then I just listen to them explain things.

I mean, I just, nothing makes me happier than finding people who understand things I could never possibly understand.

I love that. The one founder characteristic that you have that perhaps other people and not even your own team might not know about.

Yeah. I mean, I have said this sort of, it's a running theme for me, but I think the willingness to take pain, the willingness to suffer, the necessity to suffer,

that seems to be more like our, my identity and our team's identity. You know, over time, the team, we filter out people who don't want that. And it seems like that not always work out for us because I see a lot of companies who make a lot of money and they seem to have a lot of fun.

But there's no fun in Fundrise.

No fun.

No.

Just hustle.

Just grind.

How do you spend your time outside of

work and outside of Fundrise?

I would say I'm mostly an introvert outside of work, which is funny because I have to do constant extroversion. But I, so basically when I'm not at Fundrise, I'm trying to be alone, read, reading books, mostly like maybe learning, like, you know, watching random YouTube videos about like, you know, if you ever read, ever watch Three Blue One Brown, that's one of the great YouTube channels.

I haven't seen that.

Oh, if you want to nerd out on math and you want to understand, if you want to understand how LLMs work, go watch Three Blue One Brown's explanation of how the models work. It's phenomenal. It's phenomenal.

There you go. I'll do that on my 10-hour flight next week. Awesome. Ben, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been awesome and so many cool insights and super excited, obviously, where Fundrise goes next and let's keep grinding.

Yeah, thanks for having me.