Brandon Sedloff:

The way to bring products and services to market isn't for us to go and say, "Oh, we're great. We're the best at X, Y, Z." It's to actually have real clients who are really using your offerings, who can vouch for you in the market. And it forces us to hold ourselves to a really high standard because if we're not meeting their bar, then they're not going to vouch for us in the market. And if they don't vouch for us in the market, then it's going to slow the rate of adoption that we're going to get when we eventually launch.

Nancy Lashine:

Hello, and thanks for tuning in to Real Estate Capital. I'm your host, Nancy Lashine of Park Madison Partners. Capital is a lifeblood of the real estate industry, but the decisions on where, and how it's allocated are driven by people and personalities. Who are they? What motivates them? What can we learn from their experiences? On this show, we introduce you to some of the real estate industry's most influential thought leaders and decision makers, and we talk about what is important to them, how they make critical decisions, who has influenced them, and a lot more.

Our guest on this episode is Brandon Sedloff, Chief Real Estate Officer for Juniper Square. Juniper Square provides tech-driven solutions to help private investment managers streamline fundraising, investor reporting, and fund administration. Founded in 2014, today, Juniper Square has over 1800 GP clients and 500,000 investor users representing about a trillion dollars of equity commitments.

Brandon has played no small role in the rapid growth of Juniper Square. He joined the firm in 2016 as the founding Senior VP of Sales where he was responsible for expanding the sales team from one person to nearly 100 employees, meanwhile, growing revenue by over a hundred times during his tenure. Additionally, Brandon started and hosts Juniper Square's podcast, The Distribution where he interviews leaders in the real estate, private equity and venture capital fields. Brandon has incredible insight on how technology is reshaping the institutional real estate business, and our discussion touches on several of those themes, including data management, AI, and much more. Our conversation starts with Brandon describing the original mission behind the founding of Juniper Square.

So tell us what Juniper Square does for starters.

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah, so just by way of background, I'm the Chief Real Estate Officer of Juniper Square. I joined the business in 2016. So we actually started the company, or the company was started in 2014 by Alex Robinson and Adam Ginsburg, two of our co-founders. They were later joined by Yonas Fisseha. So there's three gentlemen who started the business, and the idea was how can we think about broadening access to private markets?

And when you start to think about what that means, our hypothesis when we started the business was that you have public markets that have tremendous efficiency. There's nearly zero cost to buy and sell a share of a public company. And then you contrast that with private markets and in particular private real estate where when we started the business, the process for marketing, as you know, an opportunity and to getting investors to subscribe to that or invest in that fund or that vehicle, and then all the reporting, it was all very analog. It was very manual. And as a result of that, the industry, specifically real estate, where we started, really had this information silo challenge. And so our end goal is, and always was to broaden access to private markets.

Nancy Lashine:

Sorry, just to be clear though, to be software that does that?

Brandon Sedloff:

Well, so at the core, Juniper Square, to answer your question, does two things today. We are a technology company that provides self-service administration and reporting software to real estate GPs. So what does that mean? It means our customers are GPs. They use us to manage the capital raising process, manage investor reporting, manage investor communications, and ultimately, to serve as the investor portal. So that's the first thing that we do.

The second thing that we do is we're in the fund administration business. So we're actually a third party fund administrator. We have about 500 people on our team, of which about 150 of them sit inside of our fund administration business where they're doing the fund accounting, and they're serving as the team that actually does the work on behalf of our GPs. Which is interesting, Nancy, because a lot of people who know me and who know the company still very much think of us as a technology business. And technology is our core. It's what we've always done. It's what we will always do, but it's the technology and that infrastructure that powers all of these other things.

And so just to give you a quick perspective, when I started in 2016, there was four people at the company. Today, there's 500. When I started, we had about 30 customers. Today, we support over 2000 GPs as customers of Juniper Square. And those GPs have roughly 500,000 investor or unique LP relationships. Some of those are institutional, but as you would imagine, because you know far better than anybody else, there's not 500,000 institutional LPs. So a lot of those investors are individuals or family offices, non-institutional capital.

Nancy Lashine:

When you started at Juniper Square in 2016, what would you have said then the mission of the company was?

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah, it was very clear. The mission of the company was the same, but the pitch has always been let us help streamline the relationship between the investor and the manager. Ultimately, one of the big changes that we saw coming, this is in 2014 when the business was started, was this push for transparency. So investors were continually asking their managers to report in more detail, to be more transparent. And by and large, the managers were willing to do that. Albeit change is hard, and when you start to peel back the layers of the onion, one of the things that we found was that it was really hard for the manager to comply with the investor's request. So it wasn't a will issue, it was a skill issue.

And then when you figure out, well, why is it hard? This seems straightforward. And what we learned was that number one, the data is sprawling everywhere. And oftentimes, the source of truth was in spreadsheets. And then number two, was there was no good technology or organizational system to take the data that the GP has, and then translate it to what the LP wants. And so that's really where we started on the technology side.

Nancy Lashine:

No, it's such an age-old real estate problem. I remember, gosh, going back long before 2014 even, there was a gentleman named Grayson Sanders, and he was the Chief Real Estate Officer at Ameritech, and they had a fairly large, the Bells had big real estate portfolios, and they got a consulting firm run by a woman named Susan Hudson Wilson, this was a very long time ago, to actually go through their entire portfolio, put it on one system so they could figure out portfolio wide, how many office buildings they owned, and what the leases were, and what SIC codes they were in, and actually cut through the data. It seems silly now, but even as recently as 2016-17, we were marketing a firm that had for the first time figured out how to have a throughput of software from the property manager through to the pie chart that an investor sees, so that you didn't have to re-input data using Excel, etc. And it literally was one system, or they purported to be one system, and that was revolutionary in the industry.

It sounds like that's something that you're bringing to lots of different managers across lots of property types of different sizes.

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah. And this same problem exists in different forms across all of the alternative space, but yeah, for real estate, it's where we started and it's still a problem. I can tell you that we have 2000 GPs, meaning we've done these technology and data implementations and migrations, and my belief and-

Nancy Lashine:

Sorry, 2000 GPs? Wow.

Brandon Sedloff:

2000 GPs. Yeah.

Nancy Lashine:

So some of them are non-institutional,

Brandon Sedloff:

Correct. These are large institutional names. You can see them on our website, groups like BGO and Tishman Speyer and Hines, LaSalle, et cetera. And then many of them are what we would call middle market. Some have funds, some just raise capital deal by deal.

But across all of those managers, that's 30,000 some odd investment entities, we've never seen a GP come to us with a single system of truth. Meaning, here's all of our fund data, here's all of our investor subledger data in one place where you just take it, lift it up, put it down in a new database. It's usually this very complex data migration, data integration, data normalization process. And that's just, because of the complexity of our industry, and because the people in our industry, oftentimes, especially in the last run up in the Zurp era, things have been moving really quickly. And so taking the time to really focus on your operations has always been secondary to building and running your business.

Nancy Lashine:

Right. Right. So is that really what you're looking to solve for, is just a one-stop shop full integration of data information from the property level through to the end investor?

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah, that's the goal. But when that goal is achieved, the thing we're actually trying to solve for is to make it easier for managers to be able to raise that money, market their funds, report on the capital that's been raised. And so giving the GP a holistic view of their data is really, really important to enable them to be transparent, to give the investors confidence that this is a partner that they want to invest with.

Nancy Lashine:

Talk to us a little bit about the onboarding process for a client. How long does it take to weave your way through this tangle of data, and figure out how to systematize it in a way that's more efficient for the GP?

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah, we've done this a lot, as you can imagine. And so it really depends. I would say on average for a large institutional GP, at the low end, it's about three months. At the high end, it can be upwards of 12. It really depends upon how the GP thinks about resourcing the project, because at the end of the day, the technical side, we have great mastery of, and we can do very quickly. The delays and the challenges and the complexity come when organizations don't have people committed to this project full time, and they're being pulled in a bunch of different directions. And so really, the intensity of the initiative depends upon the team that's on it, where this sits relative to their priorities, and also obviously the size of the organization in terms of the amount of data that needs to be moved.

But it's interesting you ask how things have changed since we started. Back in 2016, all the conversations were around how is this going to happen? How much time is it going to take? Today, it's industry standard and commonplace that if you're doing a big enterprise migration or you're switching fund administrators, there's a change management process. And we've seen this positive shift in our industry where organizations, GPs in particular, are really focusing on managing for change management. So 10 years ago, very rarely would you see somebody in a GP whose job it is to shepherd a software or fund administration change. Today, that's a much more common role. And as a result, these implementations, integrations, switching of service providers is a lot less complicated, is a lot easier than it used to be. And by the way, now, people understand the power of technology, the power of efficiency. So it's no longer a question of, should I do this? It's a question of, when is the right time to do this?

Nancy Lashine:

And is it cost-effective for a small operator who maybe just has a portfolio of a dozen properties to do something like this?

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah, it's extremely cost-effective. We have clients who have scaled from a few properties to over a billion of equity without adding a single person on their team. So imagine you start with us, you've got 50 to a hundred million of committed capital from friends and family in a single deal. And often to the right your business goes, you can scale up your investor base, you can scale up your EUM without needing to worry about adding headcount in order to do that. And a lot of that comes from the efficiency of the technology as well as the big thing that we're seeing now, and I'm curious to hear what you're seeing, Nancy, but a lot of the GPs that are in the market raising funds today, especially emerging managers, are being either required to, or strongly encouraged to outsource the administration of their vehicles.

And the reason is, I think, investors realize that the reason that they're working with GPs is because they're experts in the real estate. They're experts on the buy, the sell, the asset management, the operations. And not that they don't have expertise in accounting, but really, if you focus on how to maximize operational efficiency, you get a lot of benefits by outsourcing the things that you're not uniquely better than anybody else at. And investors like it because it gives them another set of eyes looking at the books and records of the fund.

So we're really benefiting, our business is benefiting from that trend where there's a big push towards outsourcing real estate. Hedge funds are 99% third party administered. I don't know what the official statistic in real estate is today, but I'd have to imagine it's less than 10% at max.

Nancy Lashine:

Yeah, it's relatively small, but that's largely because there haven't been good options, and they've been geared towards larger institutional investors. So for an emerging manager who maybe just doesn't have a lot of income, they've just been prohibitively expensive, and also frankly, the clients, the investors haven't demanded it. I think you will start to see that it just becomes something, it's not a nice to have, but a need to have in the same way that visual technology is a need to have. People are expecting you to do Zoom or Teams meetings these days, so you have to have the right setup.

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah, I think you're totally right. And the other thing that we observe in the continuum of change in our industry is that historically, when you use a third party, whether that's on the property management or the fund accounting, you feel like, if you're the GP, you're losing all control of your data. And the reality is that historically has been true.

I always give this description, it's like imagine a treasure box. Real estate investment managers have learned that one of their greatest assets today is their data. But when you traditionally have outsourced your administration, you're taking that treasure trove of data, you're sticking it in the treasure box, you're locking it, and you're throwing away the key, and it makes no sense.

And so when we looked at this problem, our entire technology business has been built around this idea of transparency, where the GP and the LP both can share information that they want to share on their own terms. We're not forcing it, but we're providing the tools.

And we've seen this same shift as we've built out our administration business. We've not looked to the traditional providers to seek inspiration, but instead we've listened to what the GPs tell us that they need and they need somebody that they can afford, somebody that understands the business of their size and scale, whether that's small, medium, or large. And then most importantly, what we hear over and over and over again is we need access and transparency to our own data. And so that's one of the areas where we have a fairly significant differentiating point of view relative to others, which is we believe that the GP, who is our client, should have access to their data, and we should be able to collaborate around that to serve their client, which is the investor.

Nancy Lashine:

Does Juniper Square have any ownership access to the aggregate data? And I'm asking that because for a long time, I know there's been a search on in the real estate industry for some of the software providers who either do appraisals or other things to figure out how you can create indexes and figure out what average returns are, and perhaps create an index to trade off that data in the same way that you trade off public market data.

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah, that certainly, there's a lot of companies out in the market who are thinking about those types of solutions. And the way that we think about it is the data is our customer's data. They own that data, but we believe that if we can build products or solutions, whether those are technology or otherwise, that benefit the GP, the GP will willingly provide that data in an aggregator anonymized format if it will help them become better at what they do.

And so one of our core value drivers as an organization is that in order for us to build a new product or launch a new service, it needs to not only be good for Juniper Square, but most importantly, it needs to be good for our customers. So there's this really strong alignment between what will benefit the customer and what will benefit us. And if it's only on one side, it's probably not going to get done. But when we find the things that benefit both parties, that's where we focus.

And so at the conferences that you and I both go to, there's a lot of discussion around how do you create a different benchmark or create investible indices? And these are all things that will happen as the quality of the data that we're all producing as an industry becomes better, more complete, it will enable these new services and products to exist, whereas historically, they just haven't. And it's mostly a data challenge.

Nancy Lashine:

Can you give us an example of a product that Juniper Square developed successfully that did come from tenant demand, or client demands?

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah, I think a perfect example of a new service that we've created as a result of customer demand is the fund administration offering. I remember we had a client who was on fund 11, and they were being required by one of their investors for that new fund to outsource for the very first time. And they came to us and they said, "Hey, do you do this?" And back then, we didn't. And so we graciously referred them to a peer in the space who did it. And after working through that fund for a period of time, the customer came back to us and said, "Geez, service provider X is fine, but it's nothing like working with you all on the technology side. You've built self-service administration tools for, at that time, five, six years, would you ever consider building a fund administration business, and administering our fund?" And ironically, that was always part of our plan and our strategy. We needed that initial lighthouse customer to help guide us.

And so we identified the need, which was our existing clients were working with other providers who weren't meeting their expectations around service quality, who weren't meeting their expectations around transparency, and data access. And so we were able to really hone our thinking on that.

And as a result, we quietly launched this administration offering. And when I say quietly, I think it's really important maybe we talk about some of the lessons learned at Juniper Square, but one of our core lessons is that build with the customer. Because at the end of the day, if it's us sitting in a room guessing what people want, that's not particularly effective. And so the reason that we adopt this approach is because it allows us to build incrementally.

And so for the last three, four years, we've been building our administration business, but it's really only in the last 12 to 18 months that we've started talking about it publicly, even though we've been serving clients for many, many years, because we believe that the way to bring products and services to market isn't for us to go and say, "Oh, we're great. We're the best at X, Y, Z." It's to actually have real clients who are really using your offerings, who can vouch for you in the market. And it forces us to hold ourselves to a really high standard because if we're not meeting their bar, then they're not going to vouch for us in the market. And if they don't vouch for us in the market, then it's going to slow the rate of adoption that we're going to get when we actually launch.

Nancy Lashine:

Sure. Sure. What is fund administration?

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah, it means a lot of different things to different people, but effectively, it is us as a third party doing your fund accounting, signing off on the books and the records of the fund. So all of the tracking, everything from the credits and debits of the fund to running the waterfall to handling the investor distributions. We also have a team that can handle some of the investor servicing, how to set up your investor portal, how to load the documents correctly, KYC, AML. There's a whole litany of things that are encapsulated in fund accounting and fund administration as a service.

Nancy Lashine:

Do you actually send out the K-1s and good at that level?

Brandon Sedloff:

We do. And yeah, that's been something that we've had in the technology since day one, is the ability to upload. We don't prepare the K-1s, but you upload the K-1s, the K-1s get organized and sorted by investor contacts. So if you have an LP, and somebody else at that LP needs to receive the K-1s versus who's on the investment team, the technology knows. And you can either use that yourself, or our team uses our own technology to help do that for the GP customer.

Nancy Lashine:

Right. How many software or engineers do you have at Juniper Square?

Brandon Sedloff:

Company's about a third, a third, a third. So we're about a third, what I would call technical on the software side, engineering side. We're about a third on the fund accounting, fund administration side. And then we're a third on the client facing and go to market side. So that's not just sales and business development, but we have a really robust customer success, or customer support team who's responsible for working together as a partner with our customers once they're on board.

Nancy Lashine:

And talk to us a little bit about the issues, or how you've thought about capitalizing the business from its initial launch, or when you joined a couple of years in to now.

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah, so we're a venture-backed business. We've raised three rounds of capital to date. And we're a little bit different than a lot of other technology companies that you may come across. Number one, we don't really fancy ourselves as a PropTech company. There's been this, we were talking about this at the ULI meeting, there's been this big shift to PropTech, and we started serving the real estate industry, but today, some of our largest customers are venture capital firms, private equity firms that don't have any real estate in addition to our core historical real estate base.

And so it's just really important to frame where we sit in the equation, because as a result of that, we've sought investors who can help us with the things that we need help with. And really, those are very complex decisions around how to build a marketplace, how to broaden access to an asset class. And these are things that there's not a lot of history from within the real estate industry, or at least successful history from within the real estate industry. So we've sought that expertise and capital from less traditional sources relative to some other technology companies.

So I think one of the most important things about a venture-backed company is that the founders control the board and the direction of the company today. So while we have outside capital, we very much are in control of our destiny, and-

Nancy Lashine:

Can you share who any of your outside capital partners are?

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah. The investors that led the first three rounds are Felicis, Ribbit, and Redpoint. And there's websites like TechCrunch and elsewhere where you can go to find them. These are industry-leading, venture capital, FinTech, Finserv investors who have a lot of experiences scaling companies that you and I use every day in our daily life. So very impressive individuals.

Nancy Lashine:

There's a lot of chatter about AI disintermediating software businesses. How are you thinking about all that today?

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah, I think the first way we think about it is, how is AI going to change the industry that we serve our customers? And I've been very vocal, I actually contributed to a recent IREI article that should be out by the time this drops, talking about the fact that in order for real estate investment managers to truly leverage AI, we must first get access to all of our data. And then second, we must have that data be validated, or at least be verified as being accurate.

AI, a lot of these big models are trained based on the data that you put into them. And if that data is not correct, then we've heard about things like hallucinations. So I'm a big believer that AI is here to stay. It's not just a fad. But I also think, based on the last decade of experience helping to build Juniper Square, we have some foundational areas that as an industry we need to focus on, which is data access, data integrity, and data governance.

The second thing that I think about as it relates to real estate investment management writ large, is that even the largest real estate investment manager is still a relatively small company in the scheme of things when you think about the amount of data that they can contribute. And so I don't know how this is going to play out, but I think that the more that the industry can collectively come together to share data, whether that's in an aggregated and anonymized way, whether it's directly, however it's going to happen, it will basically improve the underlying quality of the data, increase the size of the data set, and eventually, really help enable AI to do what it's best at, which is leverage massive amounts of data to help us be more efficient at our jobs, and then maybe in the future, even more predictive about certain outcomes.

Nancy Lashine:

Well, needless to say, there's a real disincentive for people in the private markets business to make it more efficient, because that's why you're in private markets, right?

Brandon Sedloff:

Totally. And today, that's absolutely true, and I think it's a philosophical question of what do you believe the future of private markets is? And is it this shift towards more transparency, more efficiency, or is it more of the same? And we won't know until we're looking backwards. So that's how I think about it as it relates to our clients.

As an organization, like most technology companies, we're very intently watching and following and leveraging some of the AI tools. It's very hot in Silicon Valley to say you're an AI company. And I would never sit here and tell you, Nancy, that we're an AI company, because we're a company that's really focused on a core technology problem that is foundational to being able to leverage AI. And so can we use it in engineering? Can we use it in customer support? Can we use it in sales? Yeah, absolutely. There's some incredible Copilot efficiency type use cases, but I don't think we've seen the transformational nature of AI in private markets writ large, and specifically, in real estate just yet.

Nancy Lashine:

Sure. Well, you put your finger on it right up front saying that you can't really use AI if you don't have clean data and you don't trust your data.

Brandon Sedloff:

One thing I'll say about AI, which you've probably seen the same, is technology used to be something that somebody in your back office does, and you call them when your Blackberry's broken. And I say that facetiously, but it was a pretty undervalued-

Nancy Lashine:

But it was true.

Brandon Sedloff:

It was true. It was true. But fast-forward, a lot has changed. And today, the role of data, the role of technology inside of real estate investment managers in particular has really been elevated. We have customers who have Chief Technology or Chief Innovation Officers who sit either as observers or active participants in the IC. Think about the change from where we were just 10 years ago where come fix my computer and my phone line to how do we use data as an asset?

Nancy Lashine:

Brandon, I'm embarrassed, what you're saying is so true, but I want you to not tell the world this because a dozen years ago when one of our kids went to work for Google, and she looked at me, she said, "Mom, if you don't go to a meeting with data, you're just kicked out of the meeting." So we're finally catching up.

Brandon Sedloff:

We are. We are. And it is great, and I think AI has a lot to do with that. This has taken technology from a back office problem to top of mind for every CEO, every CFO I talk to, same question. Tell me about AI, what's happening with AI? How do I leverage and use my data? What does the future of real estate look like when we realize that data, not just our people, and our deal skills is one of our core competitive advantages?

Nancy Lashine:

So take that trend line and project it forwards, what interesting trends do you see amongst your clients in terms of how they're changing, how they decide what to buy or when to sell?

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah, we don't have the best access in terms of the buy or the sell, but in terms of the capital raising side of things, we've seen some pretty significant changes underway. I think the first is one that we read about in the headlines every day, which is this wave of private wealth and private capital that's looking for, or many people would like it to be looking for access to alternatives. And I think as a result of that, the process around how you raise capital, how you manage capital, how you report on capital changes, not least of which is you might go from an average check size of 25 million or 100 million to an average check size of 25,000 or 250,000. So that creates its own set of complexities, which we've largely solved through technology. So that's one big shift that we're seeing that's not so much institutional.

The other shift is around structures, and maybe you can share with me what you're seeing real time, because we're seeing a lot more open-ended vehicles, at least historically, that are being raised. And that has increased complexity around how do you administer those, how do you report on those, what's the expertise that you need? And then we're seeing this proliferation of feeders and other types of structures that enable managers to be able to track and be flexible around the sources of capital and the requirements of those capital providers.

So those are a few things that we see in addition to the trends that you and I talk about all the time, this desire to go direct and for more control and things that it's not necessarily a new trend that we're seeing, but it impacts the day-to-day landscape for, I'm sure, for people like you who are working with investors to help guide them and working with managers to help them attract that capital.

Nancy Lashine:

Yeah, I think the trend towards open-end is so interesting. Obviously, when the industry first started, open-end was the major portion of institutional fundraising from the big insurance companies and some banks. That stymied during the 1990s, and when the initial meltdowns, but then open-end funds grew in popularity again, as recently as seven, eight years ago, we had a proliferation of open-end funds. And then the last two years with what's happened with pricing, they've been completely stymied again.

So everybody, and I'm talking about on the institutional side and the retail open-end fund, if you will, the BREIT structure and others who have that structure, GPs started to realize how very profitable they are and how well those vehicles can perform. This has been a really interesting test for them.

So the growth, everybody wants to form an open-end fund because it's permanent capital. And obviously it seems like it's a great idea. Very, very few folks will be successful in doing it long-term, in my view. And so we, for every group that comes in, for every 25 groups that come in wanting that, maybe one can actually get it done. And it's a combination of factors, and it's really, really hard to do it on the retail side.

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah.

Nancy Lashine:

But even on the institutional side, it's been a particular challenge, especially since we now essentially have one appraisal firm. There's a monopoly on the appraisal process, and that's so key to the whole process of figuring out what price institutions are buying and selling.

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah. And I think it's an important distinction. Keeping in mind that we work with GPs across the institutional and non-institutional space, I completely agree with your assessment.

I think the last trend that I would share that's less related to institutional, but we see it in institutional quite a bit, is this idea of business recapitalizations, enterprise value. How are you thinking about the durability of your business, and how are you thinking about the value of your enterprise? And part of that is how do you recapitalize or find alternative sources of capital at your OPCO level, but the other part of that is how do you create space for succession and retention of key staff?

And we're seeing that both in the institutional space where we've seen it now take in stakes investing in other types of OpCo PropCo endeavors. But we're also seeing that in the mid-market where a lot of firms throughout the last cycle hit escape velocity, get to call it a billion of equity, or three quarters of a billion of committed capital. They're vertically integrated, but the markets have changed and their investors have changed. And so how do you think about the survival or the success of your business through this next cycle? And oftentimes it comes back to you need more consistent perpetual sources of capital. And so that's another trend that we're seeing as people look to give up a little bit of the ownership of their business in order to get some capital in return.

Nancy Lashine:

Couldn't agree more. I think the whole OpCo PropCo structures, for a whole variety of reasons, there's a proliferation, there'll be a lot more, but it makes a ton of sense given how capital formation has evolved right now, so I agree that will be, and for us, that's an important aspect of the business.

Brandon Sedloff:

Absolutely.

Nancy Lashine:

So let's wind up with a few rapid questions for you, Brandon. Tell us who's had the greatest influence on you, personally?

Brandon Sedloff:

I think besides my parents on a professional basis, I always come back to a conversation that I had with Steve LeBlanc, who at the time was at Texas Teachers, and we were on a bus ride at ULI talking about how beneficial it's been, and I was talking to him about my career long before Juniper Square, and he said to me in his own way, he asked me, "What is your personal genius?" And I looked at him, I said, "I have no idea what you're talking about, Steve. I'm not a genius. Those words don't go together." And he unpacked it and he said, "What is something that you're better than anybody else at?" And I stumbled. He said, "Okay, go home for a month, do this exercise. Every day, write down the five things that happened that day that give you energy, and the five things that happened that day that suck your energy."

And I did that. And as a result of that, I was able to shift my mind from thinking, oh, I want to be a real estate developer when I grow up to my personal genius or something that I'm really good at is building and managing professional relationships. And it was that unlock that gave me the perspective and the permission to expand how I think about my own career. So I've told Steve this a lot, he knows it, but he's had an incredible impact on my life from a professional perspective.

Nancy Lashine:

Oh, I love that. That is wow. So fortunate and fantastic advice. I love that. The five things that give you energy and the five things that suck your energy, that would be a great exercise for anybody.

Brandon Sedloff:

It really is. You'd be surprised at the things that suck your energy and how often they come up in your day to day. And if you start to think about how do you eliminate some of those things, it gives you a lot of space to innovate on how you can evolve your own professional self.

Nancy Lashine:

All right. We might have to make a date in a month. That would be fun.

Brandon Sedloff:

Look forward to hearing back. Yeah.

Nancy Lashine:

Who do you look up to? Innovators or leaders in the tech space other than obviously Juniper Square?

Brandon Sedloff:

I just think there's so much to learn. I don't know that there's a specific individual that I look up to, but I seek knowledge, and inspiration from a lot of different sources. Podcasts like we're doing right now are hugely impactful for me and a way to quickly learn. I look at, in terms of existing leaders, I'm fascinated by Jeff Bezos and the Amazon story, mostly because of their obsession with customers. And they've been really core to that customer focused value, customer focused obsession from day one. And I just think when you put the customer at the center of everything you do, there's a tremendous amount that you can learn just by observing and listening to what they want, and then building for them versus trying to create something in a vacuum, and hope you can get people to change. So I think the Amazon model and story has been truly remarkable. And obviously, Bezos is a very impressive entrepreneur.

Nancy Lashine:

Absolutely. What do you read? What do you listen to every day for your industry news?

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah, there's a few things that are on my podcast playlist. One is the Founders Podcast by David Sonora. He reads books, biographies, and autobiographies of famous and successful people, really incredible. I just listened to the advertising one with Ogilvy, which is great. There's a few episodes with Les Schwab, that's great. And then he's done a lot with Bezos, so I really like that podcast. I love your podcast, Nancy. I've listened to, I think, almost every episode.

Nancy Lashine:

Oh, that was a shameless plug. Thank you.

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah, so everyone should listen. I have a podcast as well, so I re-listen to those episodes. I don't know about you, but as a podcast host, I often find it takes me re-listening to an episode, once it's gone live, to really process what was being said, because I just find myself getting stuck in the conversation, and it all, you blink and its over.

Nancy Lashine:

100%.

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah. Yeah.

Nancy Lashine:

Yeah. Yeah. And I'm often shocked that that's my voice on the podcast. I'm like, "Wow. Did we talk about that?"

Brandon Sedloff:

Yeah. Yeah. There's one last one that I think some of your listeners may like. It's called The Knowledge Project by Shane Parrish. And he talks about repeatable lessons that you can learn from successful entrepreneurs. And I think there's a lot that you can learn from the people who have come before you and who are willing to share their successes, but most importantly, their failures.

Nancy Lashine:

Well, it's clear, Brandon, you found a niche in a spot that really energizes you, and you're learning every day, and having a lot of fun doing it. You always seem to be very energized whenever I see you. And Juniper Square has been just a great success story.

Brandon Sedloff:

Well, it's been a fun journey so far. We're just getting started, and it's because of people like you, and the work that you're doing in the industry, Nancy, that enables us to do what we're doing. So I think there's a lot more to come for private markets and real estate, and I appreciate the opportunity to join you today.

Nancy Lashine:

So happy you could. Thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.

Brandon Sedloff:

Thank you for having me.

Nancy Lashine:

I hope you enjoyed this episode of Real Estate Capital. Before you go, I have a quick favor to ask. We put a lot of thought and effort into this show, and making sure we bring you insights from real estate leaders that you don't normally find in the mainstream media. So if you're enjoying the show, please remember to follow it on your favorite podcasting app so you never miss an episode. We'd also love for you to share it with others, or give us a review on Apple Podcasts so others can find us. Thanks again for tuning in. For more information about our firm, please visit our website at parkmadisonpartners.com.