Ryan Williams is one of the most successful 30 Under 30 honourees ever, a tech founder reinventing real estate investing via Cadre—and building a $160 million personal fortune in the process. The only hitch: His most critical backer, Jared Kushner, is one of America's biggest lightning rods—and won't divest his big chunk. The inside story of how a startup functions amid the Trump soap opera
Just before Christmas, the Associated Press published an article on the ways Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, might personally profit from the generous new “opportunity zone” tax breaks they had championed as advisors to their father/father-in-law, who happens to be the president of the United States. The very first path cited in the widely read story: Kushner’s investment in the real estate startup Cadre, a stake worth up to $50 million, according to his most recent federal financial disclosures.
The collective groan emanating from Cadre’s headquarters in Manhattan could probably be heard all the way to the White House. “I would be lying if I said the political angle wasn’t frustrating or concerning,” says Ryan Williams, CEO and founder of Cadre. “There are people who won’t work with us [because of the Kushner connection], and we get that. But we have over 80 investors in the company. Jared is a passive investor who has no operational control.”
Driving home the point, he gestures toward the dozens of employees toiling in Cadre’s office, maintaining a website where qualified investors can view detailed information on apartment and office properties, with video walk-throughs, maps, lists of tenants and long memos packed with data points. “It’s a normal day, and everybody is executing,” Williams insists. “It doesn’t distract us.”
Yet the issue surrounds him. Literally. The office he points across, in the historic Puck Building in Manhattan’s trendy Nolita district, is owned by the Kushner Cos, run by Jared until he decamped to the White House. Williams developed and incubated the Cadre concept with Jared and his brother, Josh. In today’s startup world, where the term “co-founder” can signify little more than buying coffee for everybody during stealth mode, either of the Kushners could have taken that title with full justification; Williams has even referred to them as such. Many of the big real estate players who adopted the Cadre funding platform came through Jared’s introductions; Josh’s venture fund, Thrive Capital, made the key early investment. Josh sits on Cadre’s board—and works two floors above. In other words, it’s extremely hard to detach the Cadre brand from the Kushner one.
A lot has been written about the self-enrichment going on with the Trump administration. Ryan Williams, however, suffers from the opposite problem. He’s the American Dream personified. (Mark Cuban, a Cadre investor who emails with Williams weekly, describes him thus: “Smart. Focussed. Learns and reiterates continuously.”) He has a product that promotes transparency, liquidity and lower costs: With the click of a mouse, investors can buy stakes in properties without the ridiculous double fees charged by traditional property investment firms and also exit via a new secondary market. Yet Williams pushes his startup forward, dragging along his relationship with the White House like a two-tonne anchor.
Last April, Williams flew alone to Tokyo to meet Masayoshi Son, the Softbank billionaire who has flooded the startup market with the conglomerate’s tankers full of Saudi government petrodollars. Williams has raised $133 million to date for Cadre, at a valuation, most recently, of $800 million. Over dinner at Son’s palatial home, Son demonstrated his knowledge of Cadre’s model and threw out a $500 million investment—a figure, a source familiar with the talks says, that would double Cadre’s current valuation.
(This story appears in the 29 March, 2019 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)