Onward, a Fundrise Production
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Will AI do your job? with Raza Habib, Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic
<p>Raza Habib, Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic (creators of Claude and Claude Code) unpacks what “Artificial General Intelligence” even means, why the pace of AI progress still looks steep, and what that implies for jobs, companies, and public policy. Raza shares how his own “AGI probability” evolved from PhD-era skepticism to today’s conviction that we’re on a transformative trajectory. </p><p>—</p><p>For a deeper dive into these insights and more, be sure to listen to the full episode of the Onward podcast.</p><p>Have questions or feedback about this episode? Drop us a note at Onward...
IPO Roadshow: VCX is the public ticker for private tech
<p>IPO Roadshow: VCX is the public ticker for private tech</p><p>The number of public companies has been cut in half over the past 25 years. The best private companies are staying private longer than ever. As a result, ordinary investors have been locked out of the biggest wealth-creation opportunities of this generation. With AI threatening to drive wealth inequality to new levels, Ben calls this a fairness problem as much as a financial one.</p><p>His answer: take the Fundrise Innovation Fund public under the ticker VCX, creating the first publicly traded venture capital fund and a...
Real estate AI is a revolution: The launch of RealAI
<p>Real estate is about to get disrupted by technology, again. AI is coming for the core workforce of the industry—acquisitions, underwriting, asset management, market analysis—and it’s going to separate winners from everyone else. If you’re not adopting it, you’re not just missing upside—you’re putting career and company risk.</p><p>Ben unveils RealAI—a “real estate AI analyst” that Fundrise has been building for years—and explains what the first generation of real estate “AI analysts” means for investing and the future of work.</p><p>Check out RealAI (https://realai.com/). It really is amazing.</p><...
Building the largest multifamily lender in the nation, with Willy Walker CEO of Walker & Dunlop
<p>Willy Walker joins Onward to share how he scaled a small, local mortgage shop into a national real estate finance platform—what he got right, what he’d do differently, and the leadership lessons he learned the hard way. We talk about the pivotal decisions that unlocked Walker & Dunlop’s growth, how to lead through a crisis (2008 and COVID), what it really means to be a public-company CEO, and why he’s cautiously optimistic heading into 2026.</p><p>—<br>For a deeper dive into these insights and more, be sure to listen to the full episode of the Onward podcast.<...
How will AI impact the economy?
Let's move past the tired “Is AI a bubble?” debate and ask the bigger question: What happens after the buildout—when trillions of dollars of AI data centers translate into real economic output. Co-hosts Ben Miller and Cardiff Garcia frame AI as a new kind of factory—massive capex producing tokens that can be converted into real white-collar work. Then Ben grounds it with concrete Fundrise examples—AI handling a large share of customer support, strengthening cybersecurity workflows, reshaping marketing/copywriting, and boosting engineering productivity—before zooming out to the macro implications: faster growth, disinflationary pressure, shifting labor vs. capital dynamics, an...
Inside Justice: How the System Really Works, with Hallie Hoffman
Hallie Hoffman is a career federal prosecutor, former General Counsel of the DEA and Criminal Chief of the Northern District of California. She knows how the justice system really works behind the scenes.<br><br>Hallie explains why justice moves slowly, what breaks when massive institutions have to scale, and how individual agents and prosecutors drive the most meaningful cases. She shares lessons from prosecuting everything from the largest corporations to a prime minister of Ukraine, reflects on her leap into biotech entrepreneurship, and offers a clear-eyed view of the crime and public safety challenges ahead. Despite decades spent confronting...
The guy behind the guy, with Scott Plank of Under Armour
Scott Plank—who helped build Under Armour from the ground up, was the largest angel investor in WeWork, and is a seed investor in Fundrise—joins us to share what it really feels like to bet everything, lose big, win bigger, and keep moving forward.<br><br>In this conversation, Scott traces his path from building homes as a carpenter and selling bracelets in Guatemala to helping Under Armour grow from a family startup into a billion-dollar public company. He explains the financing strategies that kept the company alive in its early days, the lessons of scaling operations under intense pres...
Data centers will be the largest investment in US history, with Kervin Pillay, former CTO of Cisco
Data-center veteran Kervin Pillay walks us through the coming AI infrastructure boom. Pillay argues the U.S. is about to sink 10x the capital it took to create the Interstate Highway System into new data center capacity, racing toward “hundreds of gigawatts” of compute—each gigawatt-scale campus drawing more power than a major city. <br><br>—<br>For a deeper dive into these insights and more, be sure to listen to the full episode of the Onward podcast.<br><br>Have questions or feedback about this episode? Drop us a note at Onward@Fundrise.com. <br><br>Onward is hosted by Ben Mil...
Will AI Surpass Us? with Robert Nishihara, co-founder of AnyScale
Rob Nishihara is the co-creator of Ray, the open-source software now used by OpenAI, Amazon, DeepSeek, and Nvidia as part of the essential stack for building AI at scale. Rob offers a rare insider’s view of the bottlenecks, breakthroughs, and practical limits shaping AI today. The discussion ranges from the philosophical to the technical—covering synthetic data, future policy, career resilience, and how AI might ultimately make us think better, not just faster.<br><br>—<br>For a deeper dive into these insights and more, be sure to listen to the full episode of the Onward podcast.<br><br>Have q...
How to break a country (and maybe save one), with Rob Johnson
He helped break the British pound and Swedish krona alongside George Soros, Stanley Druckenmiller, and now–Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Rob Johnson shares extraordinary insights into currency warfare, reflects on his time inside institutions of power, and assesses the Trump administration’s bid to rebalance the global economy.<br><br>You can also listen to Rob’s first appearance on Onward episode #19:<br>How we broke the British pound, with Rob Johnson – March 17, 2023<br><br>—<br><br>For a deeper dive into these insights and more, be sure to listen to the full episode of the Onward podcast.<br><br>Have quest...
