Founder's Story - He Left Goldman. They Laughed. Then He Built a $40 Million Real Estate Platform | Ep. 330 with Alex Blackwood Co-founder of Mogul

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

Daniel Robbins interviews Alex Blackwood about the future of real estate investing, why trust and access are the real moats, and how Mogul is building a more democratized path to generational wealth. Alex breaks down how mogul sources and underwrites single family rentals, how the platform uses blockchain quietly in the background, and why the biggest opportunity is giving people exposure to housing when buying a full home has become unrealistic for many younger investors. Key Discussion Points:Alex explains AI’s real impact in real estate is operational, using agentic workflows to streamline the chaotic vendor heavy process between purchase agreement and close. He argues real estate “deal finding” with AI is limited today because core listing data sits behind paywalls and MLS gatekeeping, making training and access difficult. They discuss why fractional real estate matters as home prices rise, positioning mogul as a way to buy “shares of a home” and earn dividends, appreciation, and tax benefits. Alex connects macro trends to micro markets, explaining mogul’s focus on supply demand dynamics, rent to price dislocation, and building a disciplined buy box that matches yield and appreciation targets. He shares mogul’s founder journey, from a garden leave thesis and a diner pitch to a rocky fundraising environment, early traction, and compounding growth driven by product performance, retention, and transparency. Takeaways:Real estate investing is becoming a flight to hard assets in an AI driven volatility cycle, because housing remains a core necessity with durable demand. Fractional investing can give younger investors access to real estate returns even when buying a one to two million dollar home is out of reach, especially in markets like California. Mogul’s growth inflection came from three levers: high performing assets, strong customer retention where repeat investors increase allocation, and radical transparency through memos, underwriting, and onboarding. The operational edge is systems, partnerships, and negotiated scale, including discounted property management and favorable lending terms that improve risk adjusted outcomes. Closing Thoughts:This Founder’s Story episode makes the case that the next era of wealth building may not come from picking the next hot stock, but from getting aligned with the assets people cannot live without. Alex Blackwood shows how mogul is turning institutional real estate access into a consumer experience, pairing disciplined underwriting with transparency so everyday investors can participate in the upside. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Something that I've been signed up for recently has been mogul. And a friend of mine told me, you've got to get this app. You've got to sign up for this club because it is the future of investing. So I've been signed up for a few months. And that's always excited to have the co-founder and CEO Alex. And Alex Blackwood, I mean, you're changing the game when it comes to investing and investing in a real estate. And we are in a really fascinating world right now.

I mean, there's so many ups, downs. It seems like everyone is searching for what is the next best thing and how to do it. So from your perspective, how is AI changing real estate investing? Yeah, so I mean, the way that we look at real estate investing in relation to AI, and of course, thank you for having me too, is you can bifurcate it into two buckets, right? The idea being that, number one, how is it actually helping on the real estate operations front and the invest. investing front. And then number two, why in this kind of AI doom loop society are people basically exiting the market and going into these hard assets. So if we focus on number one, really, whenever anyone talks about AI and real estate, their first immediate thought is, I'm going to use

AI to help me find real estate investment opportunities. However, AI models are only as good as the data you feed into it. And with real estate data being fraught with error and behind massive amounts of paywalls and paygates, largely in place because of the realtors associations. The idea that you could use AI to train on that data and get you acquisition opportunities is kind of a farce at this current state. Now, how you can use AI is in the agentic workflows. If you think about real estate transactions as a whole

and everything that occurs after the fact, after you put down purchase agreement on an asset itself, you think about the fact that there are countless vendors that are coming out of the woodwork, so to speak, to help you with the transaction. However, it becomes really a too many cooks in the kitchen situation, whereby they're all trying to extract information, whether it be the lender, they need underwriting requirements, the inspector, they need the us to actually pay them, us to order the inspection, all these different things. And so if you think about that, it's really just data transfer between different vendors. And so what is the best way to do that, agentic workflows.

And so for us at Mogul, we've really been pioneering a few different methods so that it's really low touch from purchase agreement all the way to close. The idea being that we cut down from 20 hours per property per person on a close, we actually cut it down from that to about 30 minutes now. And so that's the first thing is it really can help on the agentic workflows because there are a lot of manual tasks that are inherent with the arcade processes of real estate. I mean, everything is done in PDFs, everything is done over phone and over email. Nothing is really done in a streamlined fashion.

So you can create your own streamlined fashion behind the scenes using a genetic workflows. Now, the other thing is obviously as you're looking at the market, you're seeing incredible volatility, especially if you look at things like the Citrina Research Report, whether or not you believe that that was incredibly far-fetched and keep. mind they even said that a lot of it is hyperbole and it's meant to over exaggerate to drive home the point that AI is basically coming for the entire workforce and the idea being that basically AI enters in this kind of doom loop where as AI startups and businesses become more profitable they then create more tools that then reduce the workforce which then makes the AI startups more

profitable and it kind of enters in this cycle and so if you look at all the equities out there a few that were named in that research report, whether it be the door dashes of the world, and I believe Zillow was actually mentioned it as well, a lot of these different equity stories are becoming too frothy and very, very hard to put your life savings into. And so when you look at things that aren't really going to be impacted by AI, it's the fact that we all need somewhere to live, right? It's one of the three main necessities of life, right? you need the actual shelter in place along with food and water.

And so investing in real estate has become now more than ever the single greatest way to generate wealth in the U.S. I mean, so many things to touch on there. But I don't see a world where real estate agents are really needed. Maybe if you're buying like a $30 million home and I understand like, you know, the 1% or 2% of homes sold, maybe need a real estate agent. Why do most real estate agents really even exist anymore? Yeah, so I mean, real estate agents exist because they almost have a monopoly over the real estate market as a whole.

People don't really understand this. But Zillow, for instance, when Zillow pulls in information, it's pulling it in from something called the MLS, the multiple listing service. That MLS is controlled by the Realtors Association. Not only that, if you are a realtor and you wanted to look, and let's say you're situated in Arlington, Virginia. You couldn't look at the MLS of, say, Dallas, Texas because every single local real estate organization under the National Association of Realtor owns its MLS within its specific jurisdiction. And so the idea being that they're not going away right now because they honestly are the gatekeepers for a lot of this. You see a lot of landmark things passing in obviously the Supreme Court, whether

the transparency around different fees when it comes to the buying and selling broker and actually listing that out. Now, I do think we're moving towards more of a trend towards a free market. However, there still are the natural gatekeepers in place and they're going to be incredibly hard to pull away, not to mention all the different vendors that I mentioned from purchase agreement to close, they're not necessarily colluding, but they all are working together. And so if one were to kind of break, then the others would kind of break. And then the chain link, so to speak, would almost fold in and of itself. But because they all agree that they're necessary in a real estate transaction,

it's pretty tough to just overhaul it overnight. Right. And so I do think realtors are necessary today because of what they hold, the information they hold. And ultimately, it'll come down to relationship-level businesses that will separate them from like a complete AI impact because they'll have relationships with potential buyers. I also think the knowledge barrier to enter, not to touch too much on the data itself, but the knowledge barrier to enter, I mean, when you were buying your first home, right,

it was near impossible to gather any sort of information. I actually got my realtors license because I was like, I want the kickback as being my own buying broker, but also I want to understand the full transaction life cycle from this perspective. Now, it was crazy hard to get any sort of information to actually feel comfortable and confident throughout the entire life cycle. Luckily, I got through it and it went incredibly well. And the asset appreciated tremendous amount, yielded a tremendous amount. However, at the end of the day, it's really the fact that we don't need to do it every single day that you need someone almost as like a, I don't want to say guru leading you through, but you need someone leading you through the transaction to feel comfortable. I've seen some countries that do flat fees, like low flat fees, where it's like $500 versus a 1% to, whatever the percentage is.

I had an agent at one time. I didn't know he couldn't smell. Like legit, this is a true story. I bought a home. I only went in at one time. I liked the home. I didn't really like pay too much attention. It was pretty quick.

I bought the home because the agent, he had gone back many times because it was kind of far away from where I lived at that time. And I couldn't go back there again. When I moved into the home, it smelled so bad. it was disgusting because they had dogs and they were urinating everywhere. But because my agent couldn't smell, like he legit couldn't smell. So he didn't know. So like it kind of got me thinking at that moment, like, how much value are these agents? When I was the one that actually found the home and then he's the one that did like some of the processes.

But I lost so much money on that house because I had to like take everything. I had to do so much work, which they should have done, not me. But anyways, you said before about investing. When I talked to someone in their 20s, 30s, they're like, look, price of homes, I can't even afford to buy a home in many states. I'm in California. Prices are, you know, a million dollars is like an average home. Do you think that what you're doing, where it's these fractionalized investments,

do you think this is going to be even more popular with these age demographics because it gives them a chance to invest versus like how many of them can buy? a one or two million dollar home. Yeah, I mean, I think it's exactly right. We are the solution for that, right? Our fractional investing platform is really think of it as almost buying shares in a home, almost like a Robin Hood for real estate. The idea being that you can come in and we've done all the diligence work leading up to it, meaning if an asset's on our platform, we fully believe in it. Hell, I'm usually the first check in. And it's either myself or my co-founder, we kind of jockey for poll position on that one. And so the idea being that you can pick and choose assets that we've already offered on our platform, you go over in mogul.com, and then you can buy into an asset.

You choose the assets you want to invest in. And as a result, you'll get monthly dividends, appreciation, and tax benefits at year end. So 10% yield might stay 10%, might be passive loss for income reporting purposes. Now, I say all that. And I do think that the younger demographics are very attract to our product. However, due to our, when we started out and we were going after that kind of Robin Hood for Real Estate nomenclature, we thought that we would cater more towards the mass public where people would come in and invests a couple thousand if that. However, as our returns have really increased over time, people are coming in and we've attracted an older audience that invests 15, 25K per property. So they might be investing hundreds of thousands of,

of dollars with us across multiple properties because we've been generating that incredible risk-adjusted return. So people go to our website at mogul.com and come in and basically can actually experience the generational wealth building that real estate afforded the ability to do. Well, I've heard there's like, it's like somewhere around like $30 trillion of real estate is about to be moved over from the older, from people, you know, 70, 80s and above as they're passing. away to younger generations. And I had somebody from a head of Raymond James on, and she says they're looking at $80 trillion of wealth transfer that's going to happen within the next 10 years, just in the U.S. And a lot of that obviously is real estate. How do you think this will,

what do you think this will do to markets and changes? Have you thought about this yet? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's what we think about on a daily basis. And not to mention, we typically look at things when you're looking at a $40 trillion marketplace, you've got to understand that each individual microlocation is what you've got to concern yourself with, especially in the five to seven years. You've got to look at the macro economy to say, okay, is the economy heading towards more profitable times? But on top of that, is a microlocation going to sustain any sort of volatility in the next five to seven years as a real estate investor? And so I do think there is going to be a tremendous amount of volatility. One of the things that we've kind of explored is there's this guy,

Henry George, he was a political philosopher or economist in 1800s. And basically he came up with a theory that said, as supply becomes more constrained due to regulation on the government front, then basically because real estate's an inelastic good, meaning the demand basically stays constant regardless of the price shift because it is a utility necessary for living, then the idea of that let's say supply constraints mean that supply is not growing. If demand even increases by a percentage point, it'll lead to price increases of 20% plus, but with wage gaps and or with wage increases only increase in the same pace of inflation around 2 to 3%, then the idea being that a large majority of the population will not be able to afford homes in the future. And so wealth will be

concentrated in a select view of landlords and the wealth gap would widen into an inexasurable margin. So the idea being our platform is combating that, offering up ways to for anyone to invest in this incredibly high quality, high risk-adjusted return. Is that wild that something from the 1800s because it's almost more true now than ever? That always fascinating. When I read a book for like 200 years ago, I'm like, or whatever it is, like, wow, how is it that this, humans don't change. That's my perspective.

Technology changes and things change. But I do hope that the people that are receiving this money, they will be investing it, like you said, generational wealth. Because I guess there's a, what is the law of two or law of three? It's like the second generation will normally squander whatever wealth has been transferred down. I guess that's what I was told. So let's go back to when you were at Goldman Sachs and you're sitting in this chair or wherever you were. And then you think about this idea of mogul. Or I don't know if it was. be there or whenever the beginning ideas phase came and then it obviously launched. Can you take me through that time? Yeah, of course. And so are you familiar with the term garden leave by any chance? I like gardens, no. And I like to leave. So garden leave is a pretty unique opportunity where it's

throughout the entire financial industry, but especially from investment banking when you go from the quote unquote sell side with more private level knowledge, you take a month off in between that and go into the buy side in real estate private equity as I did. And so I actually had a unique opportunity and it was meant as a period to rest, relax, recoup rate, but also to let MNPI basically fade away. However, I use that as a time to form a thesis behind the fractional investing platform as a means to scale up in a completely capital efficient manner. You flip on liquidity in a secondary exchange. And the idea being that once an asset enters your platform, it'll scale up incredibly fast and you won't actually have to have it exit because you'll have

secondary liquidity on the market or you could technically exit it outside the platform. And then once that happens, you start deploying products up and down the supply chain of real estate. Now, this came about because as I mentioned earlier, I got my realtors license. I did my first real estate transaction and I realized just how manual archaic the process was. I grew incredibly frustrated with it. And when I moved out to Dallas, my role was I want to invest in properties outside of my day job, but I really couldn't find a way to do that in a completely headache-free manner,

meaning everything would take 40 hours plus in a week. And I just couldn't do that with a job that demanded 70, 80, 90 hours per week. And so when I crafted the thesis, I thought, okay, great, that's something I'll come back to way later on in life. However, when I met my co-founder out of Dallas, I was just blown away by his background. I joked who's the residential Boonderkind, so to speak, having grown Goldman's single family runs a platform from zero to a billion in under 12 months with three to four individuals. And I basically said, listen, any chance he can meet me in a diner. And I pitched him on this idea.

And thank God he did not call me crazy because here we are let. And so it's been about four or five years since that diner meetup. And it's been a crazy journey ever since. I hope you got the breakfast, but not at breakfast. because that's my favorite thing about diners. Breakfast all day long. Like, it should just be called something else other than breakfast. Because eggs and bacon for dinner is incredible.

So you start the company. You have your co-founder who's obviously done a tremendous amount. Now, how did you go about getting your first 100, 500,000 people? What did you have to do? And did you continue as a side? Was this like a side? hustle or side company while you were still working. So it was kind of outside of Goldman entirely. And the idea being that we we actually quit our jobs in August of 2022 to jump into it full time

saying, all right, we're going to just raise some capital and it'll be incredibly easy to raise capital. However, it was definitely not at all. And it was a very hard time, especially given their tremendous amounts of Black Swan events, especially in the blockchain space because we are based on blockchain. And so we struggled quite a bit. We were fortunate enough to have backing by Tim Draper, Draper, Draper Associates, legendary VC, who was the first check into Robin Hood, one of the first checks into Coinbase as well. And he backed us initially. And we weren't taking a salary or anything like that. And we really launched the platform, I would say, beginning of 2023, we sold out our first asset. When that happens, we were able to raise a seed round. And then it kind of snowballed from

there. But I would say, while on the surface, it looks entirely successful. It couldn't have been a rockier journey, right? The idea being that you're like a swan. You've always got to present yourself incredibly well, but below the surface, you're churning the entire time. And so in the initial few years, you're constantly, constantly grinding at this opportunity. And you're basically, I would get on calls with people for like six hours on a Saturday just to walk them through an underwriting for an asset we had on our platform, hoping they'd invest maybe like 2K. Now, since we've gotten on this call, we've had multiple 20K checks because we're launching a property this morning. And so it has, and I haven't talked to that person at all. We just present the

analysis. It's a crazy thing just keep snowballing, right? You just got to keep pulling at the thread. And we first started out as just let's just reach out to anyone that would listen. And now we've gotten to a point where we actually have a growth engine in place and things are constantly moving and we're growing at almost hockey stick like momentum, adding at least three to four assets per week. We've nearly doubled in size since November of this past year. And this quarter, for instance, we've done, this quarters are technically our best quarter yet. It's not even done yet. And we surpassed last quarter's revenue in the first five weeks of this quarter. So it's just a crazy journey that we're on right now. It's really just pulling the thread along. I can go more in depth on how we

got that first customer, but it was a lot of willing to talk to whoever about whatever hopping on phone calls with them on Saturdays to go through a model only to have them back out at the last second because they didn't like it. And so, yeah, it was a trying time for sure. Yeah, let's go to the switch that flipped recently because I think this is always a big thing, right? Like you have a product or service and you've got to go to anybody. I mean, I mean, like you're saying, if I look at my price sheet of what I charged six years ago, I would laugh like, I can't even believe I even charged that low for me. I'm like, oh my gosh.

Like I was looking at something from 2022 yesterday. And I was like, oh, I can't believe I sent this to somebody. First, it was ugly as heck. And then, too, the pricing was horrible. Like, I don't think I made any money on that sale. But like you're saying, I just needed to get customers. I needed to get clients. I need to prove the model.

What was the switch, though, that? happened the last maybe year or less than a year where it just like catapulted. Yeah, I mean, I think it comes down to almost two prong, right? The first prong being on the supply side. Our assets had or actually three prong I would break it down to on the asset front, we've only listed assets that we firmly believe in, which has led to a product that are actually achieving the returns similar to what we were getting at Goldman. And so we're the highest performing single-family rental investing platform out there right now. We're nearly double, if not triple, of our next best competitor in terms of average return. Our yields are strong. Our appreciation

dynamic is strong. And so when it comes to the product itself, our team is the New York Yankees. And I'm a New York Yankees fan. So this is a compliment to our team. Our team is the New York Yankees of single-family rental investing. Right. And so the quality is incredibly strong as a power user myself having invested in every single asset, I can speak exactly to that quality, which has led to the next part, which is on the demand front. Customer attention is incredibly strong. People typically invest, if they're going to invest with us, and they invest once, they typically invest at least like 80 to 90 percent again with us. And typically it's about 3x their first investment. They try it out and then they come back for a tremendous amount

more. Not to mention two, we've been incredibly transparent in our operations. meaning we have onboarding calls with all of our investors. They get chances to ask us any questions. We present them the entire risks that are associated with real estate investing, as well as how we kind of mitigate any risks, how we look at assets. We obviously just kind of walk them through what real estate investing is, how they can actually experience it themselves. And then I would say the third thing is, obviously, on the development front,

our UIUX is second to none, in my opinion. It's very streamlined, very unique. we give more information in a more digestible format than we would have needed to make decisions in Goldman Sachs' investment committee. And so the idea being that you can come onto our platform completely transparent, see all the underwriting on an asset, every single assumption. You can play around with your own assumptions. You can play around with the investment thesis behind an asset. On top of that on a monthly basis, not only will you get dividends, but you also get memos with the performance of the asset that month, what happened, why did it happen, how did it happen?

So it's complete transparency to the end user. So I'd say in those three prong is how we've really seen a complete 180. I love the transparency trust. I didn't even realize that you have something that you're powered by blockchain. Are you doing things with blockchain? So that's, I always feel like that's like the best use of blockchain is that nobody knows that it's really involved. Otherwise, it just gets confusing. I did a blockchain event, a large scale one a few years ago.

and I realized like it was better that people didn't know anything about it versus like when they do that it just complicates things. And it makes it very hard for people to make decisions when they want to know everything about blockchain when it doesn't really matter. You obviously are great at picking things and you're picking like these houses to invest it and such. Is there something that you look for or something that that you, when you see it, you're like, okay, I think this is the one. Yeah. I mean, the way that we've built out our system is really.

we partner up with infrastructure partners, so inventory partners throughout the entire life cycle of an asset. So the idea being that we, if I take a step back, right, the idea being that we look at a market and we say, okay, is there an investment thesis to invest in this market? We look at kind of target markets. If so, what are the operational strategies that can work here? When we look at the actual market itself, we look at the net new supply on the horizon. versus the demand that we think would absorb up that supply. And if it's in our favor, then we look harder at the market itself. In addition to it, we look at markets that have high rent to price dislocation,

especially in the operating models that we look after. And then from there, we start to craft the initial thesis around the market and further downstream the initial assumptions that are necessary in an asset to be believable for us, as well as the kind of pencil. And so when that happens, we craft our quote-unquote, buy box. The idea being it needs to meet this sort of yield. It needs to meet this sort of appreciation, given the market dynamics that we see in our research. And then outside of that, what leverage terms can we achieve? What environmental hazards are in place? What insurance hazards are in place

for that specific? What is the licensing in place? We DD that fully. And then when our buy box is crafted, we basically send it out to our inventory partners. The idea being that a lot of times we'll partner with property managers that are also investor brokers. We say, listen, on the buy side, you'll get your fee as our buying broker. You'll get paid at this closing table by the seller. And then on the other end of it, you're going to manage our property. And of course, because we're negotiating across whole swaths of assets, we're able to negotiate wholesale discounts from both a property management fee. We get discounted fees there, 50% below market. And then if you think about on the lending front, we're getting 5.99% interest only loans, right?

now 10-year fixed interest rate. And so from that is how we kind of craft our initial thesis and then it moves through the entire closing transaction. And that's when we start to list it on platform is after it's met our criteria, after it's met the inspection criteria, after it's been negotiated any closing cost credits, we offer it out on platform. People can go to Mogadococ club and invest. Man, future billionaire. Alex Blackwood, I'm going to look back at this. I'm very impressed by your processes, your procedures. You guys have really crafted something amazing. It's something I've been using.

But definitely one day I'm going to look back and say, I remember Alex Blackwood. He is now the fifth richest person in the world. And I knew him at some point. And so I appreciate your time, Alex. Incredible. I am always excited for how technology is enabling people, which what you said in the beginning,

generational wealth. investing, getting different people, different age groups to be able to get access to things. I think it's incredible. It's a wild time to be alive. And I think it's a great time to be an entrepreneur. It's also like a really hard time to be an entrepreneur all at the same time, which is fascinating. But Alex, great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.