Adam Gordon doesn’t build what’s trending—he builds what’s missing. A fourth-generation New Yorker and founder of Wildflower Ltd., Gordon has spent three decades solving real estate puzzles most developers ignore: redefining urban luxury townhouses, building Amazon’s first NYC e-commerce warehouse, and now launching a vertical film studio in Queens with Robert De Niro and Bjarke Ingels.
In this episode, Brad Hargreaves talks with Adam about his narrative-first approach to development, the creative patience required to succeed in New York, and why great projects often begin with the question: “What shouldn’t exist—but must?” We cover the future of industrial space, how Wildflower Studios rewrites what a sound stage can be, and why serious developers should spend 25% of their time learning.
This one’s for anyone who builds with curiosity—and thinks beyond the blueprint.
You can see the full video here on Substack or watch and listen on any of the following platforms:
The Thesis Driven Leader Series is made possible with the support of Neutral.
Neutral is redefining multifamily real estate with a focus on sustainability, resident health and well-being. For example, Neutral is building the tallest mass timber and Passive House residential building in the U.S with a state-of-art wellness club in Milwaukee. Beyond environmental impact, Neutral offers investors access to substantial sustainable tax credits and deductions. Accredited investors can explore available opportunities at invest.neutral.us or connect directly with their team to learn more.
The following transcript is automatically generated. Please forgive us for any errors or misspellings.
Brad Hargreaves: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Thesis Driven Leader series. I'm Brad Hargraves, founder and editor-in-chief at Thesis Driven, and your host here. Thank you so much for tuning in today and joining us. So most real estate developers are lucky if they find success in one category of real estate. Maybe a second, maybe they get a second act and go from multifamily to office or office to industrial.
Today we're gonna chat with a real estate developer who is a true renaissance man of real estate, who has gone across multiple categories, seen success, and built some truly incredible things. We're excited to have Adam Gordon, founder of Wildflower, here on the show today. So Adam is quite different than most developers in that many developers maybe they come from a finance background, maybe a construction background.
Adam is a real creative. His main project right now is Wildflower Studios, which is an 800,000 square foot [00:01:00] high tech film production facility right across the river from me in Queens, New York, which he's building alongside his partner, Robert De Niro. Not often you hear that either. Someone saying, yeah, I'm doing a real estate deal together with my partner, the incredible Robert De Niro.
But that's not the only thing Adam Gordon has done. He's done a wide variety of real estate projects over the years, from town homes to EV charging, to building Amazon's first e-commerce warehouse in New York City. So you wanna hear what he has to say and what he's planning next. Before we welcome him to the show, I do wanna thank our sponsor for season two of the Thesis Driven Leader Series, Neutral.
Neutral is a multifamily developer that is really redefining the sector with a focus on sustainability, resident health, and wellbeing. They're building the tallest mass timber and passive house residential building in the US with a state-of-the-art wellness club in Milwaukee. So beyond environmental impact, Neutral offers investors access to sustainable tax credits, deductions, [00:02:00] and you can check them out at invest.neutral.us or connect directly with their team to learn more.
So thank you so much Neutral for making this season happen now. We are excited to welcome. Adam Gordon, founder of Wildflower to the show.
Adam, welcome to the Thesis Driven Leader Series. Thank you for joining us today.
Adam Gordon: Glad to be here.
Brad Hargreaves: One of my favorite things about your real estate career, is you've worked across so many different sectors, from residential, town homes to logistics, to film production.
How do you decide what to do next? What does that process look like?
Adam Gordon: I'd say a couple things. The first is I define myself as an entrepreneur in real estate. I'm not a townhouse guy, an e-commerce guy, a storage guy, a studio guy, and I find that very liberating because it frees me to think differently or act on ideas and I think are important and timely.
The second thing I would say [00:03:00] is this is like Bollettieri. So if you had a kid and the kid was an amazing tennis player, a 7-year-old, you might send him down to a place called Bollettieri. Bollettieri has spawned so many professional tennis players over the last decades, and that's because they're among other fantastic kids who are playing at a global level. I live in a Bollettieri world. My wife is a global hospitality designer. She formed a firm called Avro Ko with her college buddies. My pals are creatives like Phil Toledano, Andrew Zuckerman who did the photography for the Apple Book. If I'm out west, I might be hanging out with Bill Harlan, the wine guy who thought about a 200 year plan. This sort of hotbed of ideas, being adjacent with inspiring people, that's where it all begins.
Brad Hargreaves: Would you agree with the sentiment that you're the average of the five people you spend the [00:04:00] most time with, and that's part of your inspiration in the real estate game?
Adam Gordon: I hope so. Given the level of talent that I've been fortunate enough to surround myself with and cultivate over many years, it has had a dramatic input on the way that I think about nearly everything.
I'm a New York focused developer. This is my home. It's where I was born, it's where I raised my children. It's a city that I feel most passionate about, and I see a problem and a problem where I can act and have a point of view, I can perhaps build a building or a business or infrastructure with scale and impact.
I'll start exploring and considering undertaking that challenge.
Brad Hargreaves: Just to get a little more tactical here, you built and leased the first Amazon warehouse in New York City. Are you telling me that you're hanging out with your friend who's really into wine in San Francisco and your wife who runs a design firm gave you the idea to build Amazon's first warehouse in New York City?
Adam Gordon: Take, [00:05:00] Bill Harlan's a great example. There's a lot of people who call themselves visionary, not many of them accomplish much. They may write books. They love to give talks. We overindex for people who are articulate or glib. Bill gets stuff done. There's a bravery in that.
When I first started reading in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and then began doing a deep dive about modern e-commerce warehouses, I looked around New York City and saw we didn't have any. I thought, that's a new building typology, the modern high throughput warehouse. I can build one of those because I've built self storage to very precise specifications. I began exploring and I went down a very scientific, I would call due diligence process, which resulted in, once I was able to find the appropriate siding capital, building the first. Amazon came. They liked it.
They were actually a little surprised that we had figured out what they wanted. And then it began a dialogue. We've now done [00:06:00] 10 deals with Amazon and working on 11, 12, and 13.
Brad Hargreaves: This was a while back, right?
Adam Gordon: This was six or seven years ago. Literally their first.
Brad Hargreaves: Pre pandemic. Before people were thinking about this in quite the same way that they are today.
Adam Gordon: We met with a broker when we first acquired the site, and he was trying to pitch me on what he thought was the most exciting tenant to come into the market. It was a bouncy gym. And I said let's kinda hold off on that idea because I think there's more impactful tenants available in the market.
The education needs to be 360 degrees. First me, then capital, then leasing brokers, then partners, then contractors. In all this, being able to understand what everybody's needs set is and then communicate in a way that people understand has value.
Brad Hargreaves: I want to talk about New York for a second because you are a New York developer. I'm a New Yorker. I've lived in the city for more than 20 years. I think I can call myself that now. There is a sense to which New York is ahead of [00:07:00] everywhere else in the country in many respects, but there's another sense to which. It just, it's behind in so many ways. I see what some people are doing in the Sunbelt - they're building, multifamily, logistics, et cetera and like they're living in the future and you have, your broker here, you're building a high-end, modern warehouse and they wanna put a bouncy castle in it. What's your take on that? Do you think New York real estate is living in, in some respects, living in the past, in the future, simultaneously?
Adam Gordon: New York has always been, a big, hot, sloppy mess for all the reasons that we love it and can find it frustrating. Unlike a lot of the guys in the Sunbelt who didn't start with fortunes, New York, historically home to people whose grandfathers did something very well.
When these people had money, inherited money, the one concern they had was losing it. And with that fear went away, all their [00:08:00] inspiration, desire, willingness and compulsions to grow. I didn't begin in this business with any money, and so I had to figure things out, and I find that very healthy. And so therein lies a lot of the challenges that New York has.
There's also a tremendous amount of momentum because of our restrictive zoning environment and the political atmosphere. It's very difficult to get something done here, particularly something novel. I'm hopeful that the city of Yes, over time is gonna continue to be an instrument of innovation.
I think the people at EDC are particularly able right now, and i've enjoyed my interactions with them, I look at a city full of hope and these frustrations also for me are the same frustrations any other developer has, and they create a series of moats, which make it much more challenging for competition to come in here and succeed.
Brad Hargreaves: It's certainly a double-edged sword in that it is hard to get things done, which [00:09:00] also means it's hard for other people to get things done, which means if you are able to get something done, you have a natural advantage and a defense there. And you look at people building similar things in Dallas and other Sunbelt cities, and not much is preventing someone from going to the empty lot across the street and building the exact same thing and especially in five years when your project starts to get a little age on it. There's a blessing and a curse to being in and operating in the city.
I do wanna talk a little bit specifically about building a film studio in New York. What was the case for building Wild Flower and tell me a bit about that journey of getting like a modern scale film studio built in Queens?
Adam Gordon: It's a big subject. It's important to understand what motivates anybody. For me, I'm motivated by trying to be helpful. Of course, there's an economic opportunity that is associated, hopefully runs in parallel with that.
But for me and for my [00:10:00] partner, in this case, De Niro, we want to help because we build infrastructure to create a more friction free environment and a novel environment in New York City. We also build buildings and infrastructure that attract and hold the kind of people that make our city diverse and unique and interesting and compelling.
This was the latter. This was an idea of creating a permanent home for artists. As I explored the business, just the same way I explored the modern e-commerce warehouse, I saw that studios that creative people spent their careers in were not very creative. They were these dull, tired warehouses, not built to any particularly careful spec and they were also really dehumanizing buildings, and we're all affected by our environment, particularly creative people. I thought if we could, and it evolved in this theme of performance meets poetry.
I thought if we could create a high performance studio building for production the same way we did in [00:11:00] e-commerce, and we could create something high design and high poetry, so people would look forward to coming to New York and working at Wildflower. We would have something incredibly valuable and beneficial to the city and to filmmakers who come here.
Brad Hargreaves: So tell me a little bit about working with the city. Did you have to go through any special zoning special process? On the flip side, I assume you know the mayor's office, they have a big office of media and entertainment, would probably be excited about this. Would love to hear just what about your relationship with the city as you went through this process?
Adam Gordon: Working in New York City is like my first day at school as an undergrad at University in Michigan. There were 17,500 undergrads. I was one of them. And you're on your own. It's like a Greek and Roman city-state. New York, you're pretty much on your own, and you gotta go figure it out.
We were planning on building our studio right next door to where Amazon's HQ2 got turned down a year earlier. Long Island City. It's the rise of [00:12:00] AOC. It was very hot, and in fact, AOC has refused to meet with us to this day, really, even though we're the largest new employer and certainly the most creative employer in her entire district. So that tells you the fragmentation. It's wild. And the hostility in New York, on the other hand, because oftentimes people are misunderstood.
The unions working in the studio were the teamsters. Incredibly helpful to us, helpful in design, helpful in navigation. We started off in this process, really parallel to our design, going out and explaining what we were doing and, Rafael De Niro, Robert's oldest son and our other partner and close friend. Rafael and I held over 40 meetings to share with people what we were doing, to listen, and to learn. And so we got into a process and develop some momentum where people understood that we were trying to create a home for filmmakers and that we were creating [00:13:00] lots of good jobs in New York City, and that we had thought about developing the studio in a way which would minimize the detrimental impacts of a big structure like this on a neighborhood. We were fortunate in having a partner and a partnership who's already done so much for New York City.
You think about Robert De Niro's contributions to the city and their, they're numerous.
Brad Hargreaves: So tell me I do wanna drill in for a second on your partnership with Robert De Niro had, did you know him previously? Did you kick around like the idea of building a big studio in Queens? How'd you get him excited about it? I'm just curious.
Adam Gordon: I would say a couple things about Robert. The first is, he has secret skills. He's actually a fabulous designer. He understands the psychology of space. He understands how to create environments that make people feel loved and protected. He is a foodie, very passionate about it.
I [00:14:00] remember the first time I told him that we had found this site off market in Astoria. I said, I'd love to go see it with you. We were down in Tribeca at his office, and he said let's go. I said, when, and I was thinking, a week, two weeks. He goes now. And we went downstairs, we hopped in his car, we went to the studio. He loved the site. We drove back. His partner Jane Rosenthal was there. He said, Jane, you've gotta see this and Jane said, sure when? He goes now, he would've left again. That's him. I would say the other thing about him, which I've noticed now spending five years as a business partner is everything he does points true north. He always wants to do the right thing, and that informs every single decision. So we were friends for 20 years before this started. But I've really enjoyed my working relationship with him immensely.
Brad Hargreaves: That's incredible story. And he went back out to Queens?
Adam Gordon: Back out from Tribeca to Astoria.
Brad Hargreaves: Back across the bridge or tunnel and wow. That's [00:15:00] amazing. So tell me a little bit about like where it's progressed? What's the state of the project today?
Adam Gordon: We opened last fall on time on budget. It's 17 jobs in a row for the Wildflower team, bringing budgets and projects in on time in New York City.
The studio is now filling up with tenants. It's been a slow start in the industry after all the strikes. We're excited in the people who come through the studio, who have spent decades working in the business, say that it's a revolution. I love the way they're stealing a lot of our IP and it's starting to fertilize new studios around the globe.
Brad Hargreaves: So the tenants are film production companies. They're film production companies, and they're signing long-term leases for chunks of the studio space?
Adam Gordon: I love hearing you talk about it because this is exactly the way I talked about it we started in the business. We had the advantage of two partners, one who knew everything about the business and the other who knew nothing. I'm not even a [00:16:00] film nut. I actually have very lowbrow taste in movies. I won't even bore your audience, but, I could ask questions from first principles because I didn't know anything about the business, and Robert could bring all the experts to bear, so we could approach this very forensically.
But if you think about what's filmed in New York City: it's everything that you would watch on Netflix, Amazon, or Apple. Any serial TV. Companies come in, sell a production to one of what they would characterize the media companies or the streamers. With that budget, they would go out and rent space from three to 10 months, typically, in order to film their production episode by episode.
Brad Hargreaves: Interesting. We did just have a episode of Law and Order filmed at our house, which was like a totally bizarre experience. It's the only thing I know about this. Otherwise I know nothing about this. But they came in, they took our house over for a week and they filmed it. There was like a fake bomb in our living room, and there was like a kid who found. It was the [00:17:00] craziest experience. So that's the only thing I know about this.
Adam Gordon: So they toggle between filming at a home like yours and a studio like ours. All the location shoots, it's one of the many reasons, beside talent in front of and behind the camera living in New York, but also all these great stage sets, which are our city.
So they'll come in and shoot on location and then come back and shoot on sound stages.
Brad Hargreaves: I know I'm going to get asked this, so I'm going to throw it out to you. The long-term view on the studio space market in a post AI, post video generated world, what's your take? In 10 years are we gonna all be watching like AI generated video, or is there still a role for studio space and actors out there?
Adam Gordon: I think a great analogy would be the office market. The office market post-COVID is a number of different markets. Nine West 57th Street is always gonna be full.
[00:18:00] The GM building, new buildings in Hudson Yards always gonna be full, but if you're a side street building in Midtown, you are in real trouble and ought to think about other uses. I'll say exactly the same thing about the studio business. AI is gonna significantly reduce the amount of production shot anywhere other than on a laptop.
The best studios, our studio, Steiner Studios, a few others, will always succeed. You always need to bring actors into sound stages, but not at the volume and velocity they have in the past.
Brad Hargreaves: Yeah, it's the same as the office market. I love that. I love that analogy of it. If you have great space, there will still be actors who are at the top of their game that people want to see. It's the middle and lower rungs. It does make me wonder what does the talent pipeline look like in the future? If there are no jobs for B-list actors, how do we get a list actors? It's probably a conversation for [00:19:00] another thing, but I'm curious your take on it?
Adam Gordon: It's fascinating. People talk to me a lot about getting in the business, getting in a business. Getting into e-commerce, getting into storage the conversation, which is as important is why do I get out and when? How do I think about that? Because, to me, my skill is as much in knowing when to leave the party.
For example, in e-commerce, I handle all the leasing at Wildflower at a high level, meaning I have those relationships with Amazon, and from those conversations and Amazon is not telling me any secrets. They're a publicly traded company. But I could see the momentum shifting in Amazon early on because I was on the phone with them all the time.
I was talking to their teams. I was working on leases, and I could see that they had become the biggest base occupier in history in America, and that their appetites were being satiated. And at that moment I stopped. So we built our last Amazon e-commerce [00:20:00] warehouse just as many people were getting into the business.
But they were reading the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and talking to their friends at Real Deal conferences and Bisnow conferences. They weren't really close to demand, and they had no idea that business was about to capsize.
Brad Hargreaves: And that, was 3-4 years ago, turned south really fast.
Adam Gordon: Sure. But it wasn't really fast if you were close to leasing and you understood that was happening. So we stopped long before that.
Brad Hargreaves: When was it? When did stop? When did you say, when did you call it and say this, we're gonna see a shift in warehouse demand?
Adam Gordon: A couple of years ago, we saw a shift in demand. We also saw too many people running in the market. We saw a lack of product market fit, which unfortunately also has evidentiary problems. People say this building is empty. I'll say that's because they built two stories of warehouses. No one wants that, or it's the wrong size. Amazon doesn't want a million square feet in New York City [00:21:00] in one building. It's not the way delivery works or last-mile delivery. So we saw that, and we also saw too many people pushing in and driving prices up to the point where the margins weren't there. It was very obvious to us that we were ready for a pivot.
Brad Hargreaves: So I wanna shift to. The kind of development you actually did prior to even getting into the warehouse business, which is townhouses. You're a renaissance man of real estate development. You've been in a lot of things, and really been at the top of your game in a lot of different real estate sectors, which is one of the reasons I'm excited.
Townhouse development is a little bit of a lost art. Feels like that to me of you look in the history of New York, Philly, Boston, any of Chicago, any of these cities. And the townhouse, the row homes, it was the staple of how these cities were built and now we barely build them at all and so I'm curious your take on kind of a bit about your time in townhouse development and your take on that typology?
Adam Gordon: For many years, I was moonlighting. [00:22:00] My day job was developing urban infill self storage, and my evening job was building townhouses. That was really because, like many people, I've got some secret skills. I designed the architecture for our house in California, which was in Architectural Digest. My wife and I do our interior design. It's been widely published.
So I have these other skills and interest and things that intrigue me. And I long enjoyed kind of having very design driven evening hobbies. The other part of it was when I began in the townhouse business, there was a tremendous arbitrage from going from multifamily vacant townhouses to single family developed townhouses, and the relative price per square foot was significantly lower than an apartment of equal location and equal size, and I liked them.
I got into the townhouse world. I bought a 24 foot wide vacant house at [00:23:00] 92 Jane Street for what everybody thought was the obscene price at $3 million. You could renovate a house for $300 a square foot to a high level. I sold that townhouse to Steve Ells, who founded Chipotle Grill for, $13-14 million.
And it was my evening job, I loved the design. I lived in the homes, so from the time older son was born until he went to college, we lived in nine homes. We packed and unpacked a lot, but it also gave me kind of an expression for my design jollies and some good money in the evenings and it was a big part and chapter of my life that I've enjoyed very much.
Brad Hargreaves: It's just remarkable going in the New York real estate market and looking around, how much at a very high price just does not come with a strong design sensibility. And I get to an extent, it's built for other people and but it's remarkable the alpha you can get from just having a good design eye on this kind of thing.
Adam Gordon: People are typically either left or right brain, [00:24:00] and that's great. You just have to know it. They're incredibly talented designers, and it's an art form finding them, and it's then it's another art form getting them to do their best work. And so it's something to be cultivated if, if one has an interest, but there is a lot of bad design out there. One just has to walk down the High Line and see some of the best architects with the worst buildings.
Brad Hargreaves: I'm curious, given you've worked across so many different asset types, so many different categories. You worked with cities in a lot of those dimensions and a lot of those projects. What do you think cities could be doing better right now to make for a better built environment and to enable people like you that are going and creating good projects out there?
Adam Gordon: It's all about zoning and capital. We need more statewide zoning and national zoning because the nimbyism, the community groups, the local zoning is so inhibiting for [00:25:00] development that we're at a position with a great city like New York where we're plus or minus a half a million homes short.
A friend of mine was just telling me how proud they were to find a one bedroom for $7,000 in Manhattan. That's just absurd. And what that does also is it keeps out a lot of the most interesting people who work in creative businesses who don't find themselves earning monster amounts of money and I think that's sad.
Brad Hargreaves: It has to be a huge headwind to the film industry in New York that so many people who make the film industry work and frankly make the most interesting creative content out there, just cannot afford to live in the city anymore.
Adam Gordon: It used to be that artists would just go out one more subway stop. Now you've gotta go past the end of the subway line because of housing costs. There aren't that many problems that can't be solved in the city by housing, the homeless crisis can largely be solved, right? [00:26:00] The creative crisis can largely be solved, like people raising their kids in the city can, like you all of these stem back to the cost of housing. And the only way to solve that is through zoning.
Brad Hargreaves: Yeah. City of Yes, obviously you mentioned this earlier, was a big reform passed by the New York City Council in December of 2024 ostensibly creating or legalizing 82,000 new homes did a lot of good things. It significantly cut parking minimums in a lot of places.
It upzoned these kind of transit oriented centers. But it was also cut back a lot from what Mayor Adams originally wanted to do. And I'm not a huge Eric Adams fan, but I give credit where credit is due. He's a YIMBY, he wants to build more housing and it was a New York City council that reigned him in there. I think that was a miss, but I hope some good things come outta it.
Adam Gordon: Yes. That's why we need state and national zoning because, people like [00:27:00] Mayor Adams, city of Yes, people operating with oftentimes the best of intentions cannot make progress because they don't have the authority to.
Brad Hargreaves: I'm really curious what national zoning would look like with the current administration, but maybe we'll leave that thought exercise to another day. So are there any cities you look at and say, wow, if New York could model some of what that place is doing, we'd be a lot better off?
Adam Gordon: Every place I've traveled and spent significant time, Copenhagen would be my model. I go down, have an incredible breakfast. There are so many options. There's lovely community. The pace of life to my timber exactly right, I'd hop on a bicycle and ride around along with 40 or 50% of the people in Copenhagen. The bike lanes are protected. I'm a bike commuter in New York City now, but it's not without some risk. And there's just a life there and a lifestyle which is satiating and happiness [00:28:00] inducing for so many people, so I really admire all the things they've done right there.
Brad Hargreaves: I just, I have so much respect for you commuting by bike in the city. I can't do it. I want to see my kids graduate high school and when I feel like every time I hear about a peer of mine dying at some unnaturally young age, it is always a car running into and running over a bicyclist. And it's a tragedy. It's terrible that we don't have better infrastructure in a place like New York where, frankly a bike is the best way to get around just from a geographic standpoint.
Adam Gordon: 99% of those accidents are avoidable at low cost. And again, it's all politics. There are many people who will not give up their car or their free parking on the street, which for me makes no sense. I don't understand. You have to pay rent, you have to pay taxes, but you can park a car on the street forever and not pay for that privilege.
Brad Hargreaves: It's absurd. I live in Manhattan and people just [00:29:00] storing their cars on the street forever the same I walk down the street, the same cars are parked in the same places. They're not cleaning the snow off, they're storing them. There's nothing else in the city where we just give space away, Completely unmonitored for free. It's insane.
Adam Gordon: Yes. And then when we try to have garbage in containers, which is a pretty simple and logical thing, so that it's not a rat festival at night, walking down streets, people are up in arms because they don't want to give up a single space for the car they barely use.
Brad Hargreaves: I don't understand it at all and I talk about why I am not a huge Eric Adams fan. A lot of it comes back to that kind of thing of feels like there is a better world at hand and we are simply choosing not to go there.
Let's just take a step back. You've obviously worked across a lot of different real estate projects. A lot of our listeners are real estate developers at the beginning of their careers, what advice would you have for a real estate developer, [00:30:00] someone who looks to you and says, wow, that's a career I would love to have. What advice would you have for them today?
Adam Gordon: It is both a wonderful and a terrible time to have a career in real estate. It's a wonderful time in that it's never been easier to attract capital for good ideas. The ideas, in broad scope, geography, have never been more inviting.
People are much more receptive to novelty and evolution than they've ever been. In the sense that, and you see it on your podcast, the venture community and mindset has infiltrated real estate as never before. The bad news is, if you think you're gonna have a career doing the same thing that people used to do before, you are gonna get run over.
People are getting disintermediated. Banks, private equity firms will pay you only one penny more than they have to, certainly none of the upside. The analyst, associate, and a lot of the vice president class at the investment banks is going to [00:31:00] be gone in favor of AI because it's natural and normal.
And so this idea that the innovation economy is innovation only is not the mindset that I would recommend that you spend time in. I would say this is the only way for you to find, not only Alpha, but to find a stable career, is to think about what's next because embedding early and right comes opportunity.
Brad Hargreaves: I love what you said around earlier, maybe I'll bring that in, getting to understand and no demand as a competitive advantage. The future of real estate is innovation in these novel asset categories. You can't do the same thing you've always been doing. But how do you identify them? Is it about knowing demand and where demand is headed?
Adam Gordon: I spend 20 or 25% of my time learning every day, and people think maybe that's because I'm lazy and unfocused. Possibly. I'm not sure that would be the outcome from those facts. I would say that I'm [00:32:00] investing in myself and the world and trying to understand and intercept where demand is, where ideas are, how to execute better and different and develop relationships. And also because it makes me happy on a daily basis. And I think for anybody considering a career in real estate, to think very carefully about how to compose your day because out of that composition is gonna come the outcome.
If you just go into work, grind it out, go home. Barely talk to your significant other. If you have one, nudge your friends new and old, or not have any new friends, you're gonna have a very different life than if you invest in yourself. And also take advantage if you're fortunate enough to live in a great city, and there are many in the states take advantage of this city because you're paying for it, but you wanna make sure that you're getting the benefit of the barter.
Brad Hargreaves: You spend a quarter of your time learning, what does that look like? I assume it's not doom scrolling on Twitter how do you define [00:33:00] learning?
Adam Gordon: This morning's a great example. I listened to your podcast on the way down this episode with former president of Warburg.
Really found it fascinating, and I took a couple notes of things I'm gonna Google later. Then I listened to Catherine Kissler do a podcast on their winery, Occidental, and it got me thinking about that. I raised Japanese Wagyu beef ninth Valley Wagyu that we just got the slow food snail of approval a couple of weeks ago as honorarium for the work that we're doing in the restoration and support of local food communities.
I texted a buddy of mine who I'm gonna see later in the week to get together and hang out. I exercise, and then I go and I'm certainly reading the New York Times every single day. I love the Post. It's my guilty pleasure. And then I go and start to do deep dives. I'll read Monocle. And no day really looks the same for [00:34:00] me, but I'm gonna be if I were gonna count the hours, I'm gonna be reinvesting that way or focusing that way certainly 20 or 25% of each and every day.
Brad Hargreaves: I love that. It's everyone, people talk about learning, but understanding like tactically, what does that mean to you? 'cause for some people they're like, oh, I'm learning. I'm scrolling on Instagram and like Twitter or whatever. I don't know if that counts. It depends on who you follow, perhaps.
Adam Gordon: If you sit around and your social life is going out every Friday night with three lawyers and two bankers, and you wonder why you don't know anything other than maybe what the hottest restaurants are in St. Bart's, it's no surprise, you can choose what you invest your time in, and there's never been a better moment to learn because the resources are effectively free and u biquitous.
Brad Hargreaves: I look at this and I see what's available out there to learn. Whether you're talking about more listening to a podcast or Hey, I'm going to go onto YouTube and pick up some skill. It's more just [00:35:00] like it's a cornucopia and it's only limited by our own time and need to sleep.
It's an incredible moment in time. So last question before we jump into the lightning round. You've obviously done a lot of interesting things and jumping between different real estate sectors. What's next? You're obviously still in the thick of it with Wildflower, if you were to pick another sector to tackle, what might that be?
Adam Gordon: We developing the largest electric vehicle charging center in New York City at JFK Airport. We are about to open a second one at LaGuardia, anchored by Rebel. We're on our third at Hunts Point. Developing EV infrastructure to power the clean energy transition is incredibly important work for the planet, for the city, and therefore for us, it's smaller scale than other programs I've been involved in.
But it's absolutely as big an impact as anything I've ever been involved in. And we're very focused there. I have been [00:36:00] quietly for the last seven or so years. My first meeting with Amazon, I asked them one question to kick it off. I said, how do we keep you happy for 40 years instead of 10 years?
They said, EV charging. It's not here yet, but we're gonna need it. When those delivery vans come in, we need to charge them up. And so the first parking lot that we developed with Amazon on Flatlands Avenue in East New York, if you go by and see it, you'll see that they're now charging delivery vans there and so that sort of set me off to thinking about the future of parking and charging.
Brad Hargreaves: It's my view and it's, I've written about this a bunch on thesis driven, and, so this is not a hardly a secret, is the one technology trend that everyone in real estate is sleeping on more than anything is autonomous vehicles.
They're not just coming they're here in a lot of cities. You go out to west side of Los Angeles, you go out to Phoenix, you go out to Austin and you can [00:37:00] request a Waymo, and that will drive you anywhere in more or less in the metro area certainly in Phoenix, that's true.
Less so in LA. It's here. And those are electric. And they need a place to charge, and that doesn't necessarily have to be someone's home or office. So I think these electric vehicle charging stations, and frankly the need for utility hookups on those are gonna be a bounty on those in the next five to seven years.
Adam Gordon: The biggest single theme, if I were 21 or 22 coming out of school today, and I wanted a career, let's even put aside a career in real estate, is climate change. Climate change infrastructure, adaptation. That is the most important, impactful, and profitable work any of us can do over the next lifetime, forgetting even my lifetime and certainly over the next lifetime.
This is one aspect of it. It's going to inform PropTech, it's gonna inform real estate. We see it every single day in the [00:38:00] newspaper. Our weather's becoming increasingly volatile, and one item that we've barely seen, we saw a couple buildings collapse in Florida. The average age of a building, for example, in New York City, is approximately 53 years old.
We're going to see building collapses. We're going to see issues with our aging infrastructure. We're gonna see bridge collapses. And I don't mean to be dark about it. Out of these problems are gonna come opportunities for people that are well-positioned.
Brad Hargreaves: So that's a note to end on for sure. And move into the lightning round. Quick questions, quick answers. First question, what's a startup, developer or entrepreneur you're watching closely and why?
Adam Gordon: Urban Rigor in Copenhagen. Floating Housing. So imagine water being a new form of land, a place to build housing at scale. I was asked, I serve on the Board of Urban Rigor now to hopefully bring them to America, but I can't imagine a more novel idea. [00:39:00] Bjarke Ingels was the architect who built the first one, which is in Copenhagen.
If you go there now, you'll see a very underutilized piece of waterfront became a home for riggers, a community. And then within two years, coffee shops and restaurants opened up to support that new found community in life.
Brad Hargreaves: I love that you're gonna see a floating community on Jamaica Bay.
Adam Gordon: I hope so. Many of them.
Brad Hargreaves: That'd be fun. Next question, when you and I are recording this podcast in 10 years, in 2035, what's the most important real estate tech topic we'll be talking about and why?
Adam Gordon: Clearly, climate change adaptation, and so e everything related to them. I think another company that I admire tremendously is Icon 3D Printing. What those chaps are doing is brilliant and is so incredibly important. And I went down to Austin to see them. They're literally printing a house in four days. And the product and the delivery is sensational.
Brad Hargreaves: Next question. We talked about this a bit earlier, but what's one city or place you would bet on?
Adam Gordon: In [00:40:00] terms of the place I would always bet on is New York City. If you look during COVID, for example, in VC you saw a dispersion where people went everywhere and then a reconstitution. VC is Silicon Valley and New York City, and it's because it's a kind of city that has it all for people, right? Educated workforce, incredible restaurants, vibrant nightlife infrastructure. Kind of the works.
Brad Hargreaves: Very hard to over overcome agglomeration effects. Frankly, the benefit of New York's awesome legacy infrastructure that would be impossible to rebuild today. Last question. What's your favorite app on your home screen?
Adam Gordon: There are two apps. One is Bring a Trailer, which is a car auction website. I'm a car nut. And I find myself scrolling. I would never say doom scrolling because is cars. And the second is Headspace. It's the app that I use on a daily basis to slow down and take 10 minutes and just do a reset with a meditation.
Brad Hargreaves: I love that, Adam, thank you so much for joining Thesis Driven Leader Series today. [00:41:00] Great conversation. Really happy to have you on.
Adam Gordon: Thank you for having me.
Brad Hargreaves: Thank you all for joining this episode of the Thesis Driven Leader Series. I really encourage you to check in next week as well. We have a really exciting episode dropping an interview with Minna Song, the co-founder and CEO of Elise AI. We just profiled it in Thesis Driven a couple weeks back. It's one of the most exciting and successful AI companies in real estate today.
Minna and I are gonna talk about a wide variety of topics from the role of AI in real estate, her journey, building a prop tech company in 2025. What does it all mean? So we're gonna hit a bunch of things. Gonna be a fun conversation.
Really encourage all of you to join in and hope to see you next week. Thank you.
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