How Ryan Williams built Cadre and a network of mentors

Executive overview

Most founders struggle to access the networks and capital that make real estate investing possible. Ryan Williams solved this by building Cadre, a tech-powered platform enabling fractional ownership of commercial real estate — starting with a $250M Goldman Sachs partnership to establish trust, then opening access to retail investors.

His path runs from selling custom headbands at 13 to founding Cadre at 25, surviving political controversy, and exiting in a landmark fintech acquisition. The through-line is deliberate mentor-building: treat advisors as partners, not transactions.

The best networks are built on reciprocity, not asks.

From Baton Rouge to Harvard: early entrepreneurial instincts

• Grew up in Baton Rouge, saw opportunity in adversity from early age
• Age 13: bought wholesale headbands, added custom embroidery, sold across the state
• Won a national NFTE business plan competition — $10,000 grant, and first mentors who "saw more in me than I saw myself"
• Mentors urged him to apply to Harvard; first in his family to attend

The origin of Cadre

• At Harvard, identified a gap: no way for undergraduates without finance backgrounds to learn real estate investing
• Cold-approached HBS professors until two or three agreed to teach a curriculum he designed
• During the 2008 financial crisis, visited a classmate's Atlanta neighbourhood — saw homes in foreclosure
• Raised money from classmates, bought homes, rented them back to the community, sold one back to its previous owner at 3x return
• Spent years buying rental units as a side business while working at Blackstone to pay off student loans
• At Blackstone, saw the scale of institutional real estate investing and concluded he had to build the alternative himself

Building Cadre: the go-to-market strategy

• Founded Cadre in 2014 to democratise fractional commercial real estate investment
• Started with a wireframe MVP built nights and weekends while at Blackstone
• First asset secured through relationship with Jared Kushner; early investors came from personal network
• Counterintuitive playbook: start at the top of the customer pyramid — target the most sophisticated, analogue institutional partners first
• Rationale: winning Goldman or JP Morgan as a partner creates social proof that unlocks every investor below them
• Secured a $250M commitment from Goldman Sachs, distributed across ~1,000 sub-advisors and clients
• Long sales cycles required clear meeting-by-meeting playbooks, in-person relationship management, and dedicated domain experts
• Once institutional credibility was established, reaching independent advisors and retail investors became "infinitely easier"

Navigating political controversy

• Jared Kushner was an early partner and investor; when Kushner joined the White House, Cadre attracted intense media scrutiny
• Williams had personally known Kushner and his brother Josh before the political spotlight; the relationship predated the controversy
• Investor base spanned the full political spectrum — Soros family, Mark Cuban, and the Kushners
• Kushner voluntarily extracted himself from the business when he went to Washington
• Key lesson: over-communicate with stakeholders during a crisis; Williams ran daily one-on-ones with staff when stories were about to break
• Advisor Vinod Khosla's core insight: the most important entrepreneurial skill is knowing who to listen to for which type of advice

Building a mentor network

• Built a "cadre" of advisors, each strong in a specific domain: Vinod Khosla on team management; Michael Ovitz on navigating controversy and staying focused
• Mentor relationships must be symbiotic — bring insights and value, not just asks
• Practical tactics: weekly email updates on business progress, sharing emerging trends, making introductions to other founders
• Consistency and follow-through compound: one strong engagement leads to warm introductions to the next advisor
• Avoid treating advisors as transactional; people in senior positions often value learning about emerging trends and operators

The decision to sell

• After a decade, faced a choice: raise more capital to build adjacent product lines (credit, private equity, farmland), or partner with a complementary platform
• Building path was longer, more expensive, and less certain given market conditions
• Chose to merge with Yield Street, which complemented Cadre — retail-focused, credit-oriented, with mission alignment on broadening access to alternatives
• Transaction was the largest fintech deal of that year
• Core filter for any acquisition: mission alignment — selling to a large institution risked losing the founding purpose

What's next

• Planning a new company at the intersection of financial services and technology
• Applying learnings from Cadre — both what worked and what didn't
• Prioritising partners who share values and incentives, financial and mission-driven
• Describes the zero-to-one phase as where he feels most fulfilled