Thesis Driven Innovation 100 | #16-50
Thesis Driven Innovation 100 | #16-50
Meet the 100 people shaping the future of the built world, Part II
Innovation in the built world happens because talented and driven people make it happen. This week and next, we’ll be sharing the 100 people who are doing the most to push the real estate industry into the future.
As a reminder, our selection committee is:
Hiten Samtani, Founder, Ten31 Media
Daniel Schmergel, former Editor-in-Chief, LoopNet
Franco Faraudo, Founder, Propmodo
Brad Hargreaves, Editor-in-Chief, Thesis Driven
We shared numbers 51 to 100 earlier this week; you can check out that list here. Our final list, the top 15, will come out on Monday next week. Make sure you subscribe to Thesis Driven to stay in the loop:
Let’s dive in:
#41-50
Spencer Rascoff, Co-Founder, 75 and Sunny Ventures
Few people have had as significant an impact on real estate innovation over the past two decades as Rascoff, who co-founded Zillow in 2006 and led it as CEO from 2010 through its IPO until 2019.
Rascoff now leads 75 and Sunny, where he makes venture investments as well as co-founds new real estate technology companies. Pacaso, one of his most notable incubations, has emerged as a leader in fractional property ownership sector. Rascoff joined us on the Thesis Driven Leaders Series podcast earlier this year.
Stephen Smith, Executive Director, Center for Building in North America
Smith’s Center for Building in North America—established in 2022—has emerged as a leading voice for housing affordability and regulatory reform with a focus on the building code, traditionally ignored by housing advocates in favor of zoning reform.
Smith has led the charge highlighting how the building code itself presents unnecessary barriers to housing development in the US and Canada. He was an early advocate of single-stair reform—now gaining traction in multiple states—and recently published an influential New York Times op-ed detailing how regulatory capture has made elevators far more expensive—and rare—in the US than in peer countries.
MaryAnne Gilmartin, Founder and CEO, MAG Partners
Gilmartin is among NYC’s most impactful developers of the past two decades, leading the development of the New York Times Tower as well as Atlantic Yards in her prior role at Forest City Ratner. But in 2018 she struck out on her own, founding MAG Partners, which has since developed over $4.5 billion of office, multifamily, and mixed-use projects.
Her latest endeavor looks to reinvent Baltimore’s waterfront, tackling a 177-acre redevelopment alongside Under Armour founder and Baltimore booster Kevin Plank.
Pete Flint, General Partner, NFX
Former Trulia CEO Flint is among the top seed investors in real estate tech, backing renovation software tool Tailorbird, vacation rental platform Overmoon, and AI home search engine Tomo in recent years.
Carol Galante, Founder, Terner Center for Housing Innovation
Galante’s Terner Center at UC Berkeley has produced some of the most thoughtful and influential research on the housing crisis—and they’ve been doing so since well before the housing shortage was a popular topic of conversation. But it’s not a purely academic endeavor; last year the center launched Terner Labs, an incubator for innovative housing concepts.
L.D. Salmanson, Co-Founder and CEO, Cherre
While Cherre is best known as a platform to help real estate operators to organize their data, Cherre’s Connections marketplace—an exchange for real estate data of all types—now features 110 different data providers including Compstak, MRI, First American, and MSCI. Cherre is poised to benefit from the growing role of data in the real estate industry.
Arie Barendrecht, Co-Founder, WiredScore
For all the importance of internet quality and speed in an office environment—particularly in the Zoom era—connectivity and building technology remains a black box in the leasing process. Barendrecht’s WiredScore is taking steps to address that, offering a certification that’s actually worth paying attention to as they look to illuminate the digital side of real estate assets for owners, investors, and tenants.
Frans de Witte, Architect and Partner, MVRDV
De Witte was the lead architect on Amsterdam’s Matrix ONE, a building designed with its own obsolescence in mind. Over 90% of the building’s parts are reusable, with simple, prefabricated elements capable of being detached and repurposed at the end of the building’s lifespan. De Witte’s work pushes the boundaries of what construction “modularity” can mean, a potential model for new ways of approaching construction.
Christine Wendell, Founder and CEO, Pronto Housing
As real estate tech boomed, the affordable housing sector saw little attention from proptech founders and investors despite serving millions of Americans. Wendell’s Pronto Housing is bucking that trend, building software to make affordable housing compliance easier for real estate developers and operators. We hope more entrepreneurs follow suit and pay attention to this critical—albeit tricky—sector.
Adam Segal, Co-Founder and CEO, Cove
Cove’s rise is among the most interesting stories in office tech today; Segal’s company pivoted from a middling co-working player in 2020 to an office experience SaaS platform, abandoning fractional office rentals for software. They’re now threatening to upend the commercial PMS landscape, winning clients including EQ Office (Blackstone’s office platform) and Nuveen by prioritizing the tenant experience.
#40-31
Mikki Ward, SVP Tech and Innovation, EQ Office
Ward is in charge of innovation for EQ Office, Blackstone’s office portfolio company with more than 40 million square feet under management. Ward sits on Blackstone’s proptech advisory board and led the firm’s adoption of Cove as a management platform.
Jodie McLean, CEO, EDENS
With over 125 properties, open-air shopping center pioneer EDENS is making a big push into clean technology, rolling out EV charging and solar across the company’s portfolio. McLean was also responsible for shifting EDENS’s portfolio toward a more urban focus.
Hala El Akl, VP Sustainable Investing and Operations, Oxford Properties
With almost $90 billion under management, Canada’s Oxford Properties has been consistently recognized for its sustainability efforts as well as quantification of its ESG deliverables. El Akl took over the firm’s sustainability efforts in 2022 after previously co-founding PLP Labs, the design research collaborative within PLP Architecture.
Sandeep Davé, Chief Technology and Digital Officer, CBRE
Davé leads the development of in-house tech for CBRE, the world’s largest commercial brokerage with more than 115,000 employees. CBRE has been leaning heavily into CRE data, leveraging its scale to produce market- and asset-level insights.
Cody Finke & Hugo Leandri, Co-Founders, Brimstone
Brimstone won a $189 million federal investment to decarbonize cement earlier this year, with the US government backing the development of the company’s first manufacturing plant. Cement alone makes up 2.4% of global carbon dioxide emissions, so finding sustainable alternatives to cement manufacturing is a top environmental priority.
Finke and Leandri developed a process to make cement out of calcium silicate rather than limestone, creating cement that is chemically and physically identical to traditional Portland cement without the carbon impact.
Michael Weisz, Founder and CEO, YieldStreet
With its acquisition of Cadre earlier this year—and $3.9 billion invested on its platform as of January 2024—Weisz’s YieldStreet is positioned as the consolidator in a fragmented crowdfunding market. With institutions still on the sidelines in many sectors, platforms like YieldStreet are playing an increasingly important role in the real estate capital markets landscape.
Rukevbe (Rukus) Esi, Chief Digital Officer, AvalonBay Communities
With one of multifamily’s top brands, AvalonBay is among the most tech-forward operators in the sector. And the firm is relatively willing to take risks, from its experiments with the “self-serve” Kanso brand to a forward-leaning stance on venture investing within proptech. As Chief Digital Officer, Esi runs all software efforts within AvalonBay.
Sue Yannaccone, President and CEO, Anywhere Brands
Yannaccone runs the franchise business for top brokerage Anywhere Brands, a portfolio that includes Century 21, Coldwell Banker, Corcoran, and Sotheby’s. While the franchise model is somewhat of a contrarian approach today, it could very well help Anywhere weather a historically tough time for the brokerage business.
Yannaccone joined Thesis Driven on stage at this week’s Blueprint conference, discussing how her firm is helping franchisees embrace AI and other software technology.
Stephanie Fuhrman, VP Corporate Development, Entrata
With $500M in capital from Silver Lake, Entrata represents perhaps the greatest threat to Yardi’s dominance of the institutional segment of the multifamily PMS market. And Entrata made a big move this summer with its acquisition of property automation platform Colleen AI.
Fuhrman, who runs Entrata’s M&A activity, is a multifamily industry veteran; she formerly led global innovation at Greystar, the US’s largest multifamily operator.
Brian Hanlon, President and CEO, California YIMBY
The YIMBY movement has seen tremendous growth and success over the past decade, culminating in Vice President Harris making housing shortages a recurring talking point of her campaign—almost unthinkable ten years ago.
Nowhere is YIMBY stronger than in California, where the movement originated, and California YIMBY is on the front lines of doing research, crafting model legislation, and advocating for better housing policies. Hanlon took over the organization in 2017 after previously running the California Housing Defense Fund.
#30-21
Alex Chatzieleftheriou, Co-Founder and CEO, Blueground
With over 15,000 units across 48 cities and over half a billion in revenue, Blueground appears to have escaped the malaise that has sunk many of its STR competitors. It is quite likely at this point that Blueground has surpassed Sonder ($603 million in 2023 revenue) to become the largest STR platform.
With $45 million in fresh capital earlier this year from Susquehanna and WestCap, Blueground and founder Chatzieleftheriou can stay in the relative tranquility of the private market for longer.
Robert Reffkin, Founder and CEO, Compass
Compass was the largest residential brokerage in the US in 2023 with $184 billion in sales volume—an impressive accomplishment for an 11 year old company even if most growth did happen inorganically.
Reffkin now must navigate Compass through the toughest time the brokerage industry has faced in decades, with new NAR settlement rules hitting at a time of historically low sales volume and agent frustration.
Ankur Jain, Founder and CEO, Bilt Technologies
Jain is responsible for one of the largest proptech raises in recent memory, securing $200 million in funding and a $3.1 billion valuation for Bilt, his multifamily rewards and loyalty platform.
While reports that Wells Fargo—Bilt’s credit card partner—is losing lots of money on the Bilt deal calls the long-term viability of the company into question, they’ve already had a major impact on multifamily by bringing hospitality-style rewards and loyalty concepts to the apartment market. Bilt claims that 4.5 million apartments now offer Bilt Rewards—a double-digit percentage of all multifamily units in the US and a serious threat to property management systems like Yardi and Entrata that have historically maintained tight control of rent payments.
Clelia Warburg Peters, Managing Partner, Era Ventures
While secretive—it doesn’t have much of a website—Era Ventures has emerged as one of the most active real estate tech investors at the Series A stage. Warburg Peters’s firm most recently led a $9.25M investment into home maintenance and renovation platform Honey Homes and is high on a short list of firms addressing the post-Seed funding gap for real estate tech companies.
Jason Fudin, Co-Founder and CEO, Placemakr
While Placemakr may not have the scale of other short-term rental operators like Kasa or Blueground, Fudin’s firm has emerged as an example of OpCo-PropCo done right. A commercial real estate veteran, Fudin chose to go deal-by-deal—capitalizing Placemakr’s projects individually—rather than raise a traditional “fund” or dedicated account.
Placemakr now sports over a dozen completed projects across seven cities, making it one of the few OpCo-PropCo successes in the space.
Bob Faith, Founder and CEO, Greystar
With almost a million multifamily and student housing units under management globally, Greystar’s scale is unmatched. In theory, an operator with Greystar’s market power could singlehandedly bring new property-level technologies into the mainstream. In practice, rolling out innovation across a massive portfolio—and a wide variety of ownership structures—is easier said than done.
But Greystar has taken meaningful steps to innovate in recent years; for example, they were an early adopter of Airbnb’s multifamily program and are making progress on modular housing under Faith’s leadership.
Nathan Berman, Founder and CEO, Metro Loft Developers
No one in real estate has more experience converting office towers to apartments than Nathan Berman, founder and CEO of Metro Loft. Berman has been at it since the 1990s and has successfully converted a number of Manhattan towers including 180 Water and 25 Broad Street.
Berman now looks to expand his efforts as office-to-resi conversions gain importance; he recently partnered with Silverstein to convert 55 Broad Street, a 30-story tower in Lower Manhattan, to 571 market-rate apartments.
Larry Silverstein, Founder and Chairman, Silverstein Properties
Silverstein is one of New York City’s preeminent real estate moguls; he famously led the redevelopment of the World Trade Center over the past two decades. And at 93 he has no plans of stopping any time soon, as he recently launched a $1.5 billion raise for office-to-residential conversions.
The firm also has an eye toward technology through Silvertech Ventures, Silverstein’s proptech venture arm.
Mihir Shah, Co-CEO, JLL Technologies
JLL Technologies is the tech arm of real estate services behemoth JLL. The firm’s dozen or so technology products include Building Engines, the largest commercial property management system with many thousands of office buildings on the platform. JLL-T’s scale gives Shah and his team a unique opportunity to shape the future of office from a technology standpoint.
Laura Hines-Pierce, Co-CEO, Hines
With a presence in over 200 cities and 25 countries, Hines is among the largest private real estate investment managers and developers in the world. And the firm’s focus on Class A office has put it—and co-CEO Hines-Pierce—in a prime position to define the future of office in an era of hybrid and remote work.
They’re partly tackling this through last year’s launch of Hines Global Ventures, which aims to back existing venture firms—such as Fifth Wall, where Hines is a major LP—as well as incubating their own technology startups.
#16-20
Scott Weiner, Senator, State of California
California has a massive housing shortage, as the state lacks at least 2.5 million homes after decades of under-building. Weiner has been the most prominent state legislator leading the attempt to force cities—particularly wealthy enclaves—to allow more housing to be built.
He has sponsored more than 76 bills in the California Legislature, new laws that have done everything from speed permitting (SB 35 and 423) to accelerate student housing development (SB 886) to override low-density zoning near public transit (SB50). Several of these laws are seen as a model for pro-housing legislation nationwide, making Weiner’s impact reach far beyond California’s borders.
Chris Vonderhaar, President of Development, Tract
Few have seen as many sides of the data center world as Chris Vonderhaar. After over a decade at Amazon in which he led AWS’s global data center fleet—which includes over 100 centers globally—he took on a similar role at Google Cloud.
As of this August, Vonderhaar has left his role at Google to join Tract where he’s “developing master planned data center parks.”
Anne Hidalgo, Mayor, Paris
Anne Hidalgo is not in the real estate industry. The Mayor of Paris is, in fact, a socialist and may at first glance appear out of place on this list.
But no public official has done more than Hidalgo to reimagine what an existing city can become when people are prioritized over cars. Paris has redesigned a number of streets to dedicate more space to pedestrians and cyclists and is rolling out a “limited traffic zone”—banning most through traffic—later this year. Other cities are watching Paris’s example closely as officials and designers look to reverse mid-20th century planning mistakes.
Ryan Freedman, General Partner, Alpaca
Freedman’s Alpaca has emerged as one of the most complete—and prolific—real estate technology investors in the market. In addition to its venture arm, Alpaca launched a real estate investment platform late last year led by industry veteran Carr. Alpaca’s real estate platform seeded a $300M build-to-rent strategy earlier this year.
Dave Eisenberg, Founding Partner, Zigg Capital
Eisenberg’s Zigg offers a similar dual-threat platform, with Zigg making venture investments while affiliated Watchung Capital leads on the real estate side. Zigg has been among the most active proptech venture investors of the past year, leading a €11M round into European home sales platform Zefir earlier this year and a yet-to-be-announced construction tech deal this summer.
Eisenberg joined an episode of the Thesis Driven Leader Series earlier this year.
Check back in on Monday for our final list: numbers 1 through 15 of the Thesis Driven Innovation 100! As always, please subscribe to stay in the loop.
—Brad Hargreaves, Franco Faraudo, Hiten Samtani, and Daniel Schmergel