The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Fundrise's Data-Driven Approach to Investment in Real Estate and Tech with Ben Miller

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Ben Miller of Fundrise.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show. You'll get to meet our guest and hear about the topics we're going to cover. If they're interesting to you, you can catch the full-length show when it drops on Wednesday. Costas, today we're talking with Ben Miller, who's the CEO and one of the founders of Fundrise, which is a really interesting company. It democratizes investment opportunities for assets that are typically off-limits or very difficult to get access to for your average person. So let's think about a big corporate real estate development

on one of the spectrum, but fascinatingly, venture capital investments in tech on the other end of the spectrum. And you can do both on Fundrise. And there's more. And I'm really excited to talk with Ben. One, because they're an extremely data-driven company and he's a CEO.

So he's very technical, but he doesn't have a day-to-day role in the data space. But they're extremely data-driven. And one thing that I'm personally extremely curious about is with a portfolio of assets that diverse, you're dealing with

pretty different types of data, pretty different types of data modeling, very different data formats, right? If you think about the real estate space, probably still a lot of PDF documents and other things like that, right? So I'm interested to ask about that. I'm also interested in the combination. I mean, how do you run a platform that allows you to invest in an apartment building and data breaks, you know, which is crazy. So that's what I'm interested in chatting with him about. How about you? Yeah.

I mean, we've been, okay, we've talked like with many people, like all these years about architectures, technologies, like how we use data, like how we process data, you know, like we tend like to focus more on like the let's say like the technology side of things and what is like really exciting uh going on there and we take for granted like the connection with how like value is like created out of data but that's what like i find like so fascinating about like the episode that we have with Ben recorded that we literally have like the one of the best examples here of how like data directly connects and working with data directly connects like with value creation and of course like the financial sector in general is

like a very good example of that but here we have like a person who can take us like through more unconventional uses of data. As a business also, it's unconventional in terms of how it offers access to investment. And yeah, that's what I'm really excited about. I really would like to hear more about how we start from the raw data and we end up creating really tangible value that we can see as dollar signs in our bank accounts, right? So that's what really like excites me about this episode. All right, that's a wrap for the prequel. The full length episode will drop Wednesday morning.

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