Groundbreaking Technology for Passive Investors
“There were a lot of challenges. I learned a tremendous amount around hiring, how to form expectations, how to vet for the right people. Now it’s more about taking what we’ve built, and figuring out how we can scale it and grow.”
Welcome to the Next Level American Dream Podcast. We have an inspiring guest for you today, but first please make sure you have subscribed, if you haven't already. We also love getting your feedback through likes, comments, ratings, and reviews. Today, Sean has a conversation with Jake Marmulstien. Jake is the founder of Groundbreaker, an investor portal platform. He talks about many of the portal benefits for syndicators and passive investors, as well as how technology fits into real estate. If you found any value from today's episode, then please share it with a friend and help us grow.
Key Topics
Tell us about your background
What do you think are the greatest benefits to investment portals? For both sponsors and investors?
How do you think technology fits best into real estate and syndications specifically?
Do you think there is a technology that is upcoming or something that has yet been created that is going to change the way the industry is now?
What does the American Dream mean to you?
Connect with Jake:
groundbreaker.co
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Abigail Thomson 00:01
Welcome to the Next Level American Dream podcast brought to you by Thomson Multifamily Group. Your hosts, Abigail and Sean will discuss how you can take your American dream to the next level through real estate investing, business practices, and personal development. Join us as we share our experiences as a father daughter duo who are trying to accomplish their goal of financial freedom. We hope you learn more about how to define and achieve your American dream. Here's another episode of Next Level American Dream. Welcome to the next little American Dream podcast. We have an inspiring guest for you today. But first, please make sure you have subscribed if you have not already. We also love getting your feedback, likes, comments, ratings and reviews. Today Sean has a conversation with Jake Marmulstein. Jake is the founder of Groundbreaker an investor portal platform. He talks about many of the portals benefits for syndicators and passive investors, as well as how technology fits into real estate. If you found any value from today's episodes, and please share it with a friend and help us grow. For more information on our sponsor, visit thomsonmultifamilygroup.com to start taking your American Dream to the Next Level through passive investing.
Sean Thomson 01:14
Hi Jake, thanks for being on the show. How you doing?
Jake Marmulstein 01:18
Doing great, Sean, thanks for having me.
Sean Thomson 01:20
Was it let's start off by just to give people a little bit of your background kind of where you come from, and then where you are today.
Jake Marmulstein 01:27
Yeah, so I'm from Atlanta, Georgia, I went to school to study Hospitality Management, real estate finance. And then I started working in distressed hotel investing and underwriting. And by that experience, that gave me kind of the seed for why we needed better systems to be able to manage investor relations, and capital raising. And so some years later, after working in capital introduction company with institutional investors and fund managers, I decided to start a technology company called groundbreaker with a group of others. And what we do now is help real estate syndicators and fund managers to be able to have a system that they can use on their own under their own brand, to be able to give them structure, security, compliance, and the efficiency to be able to raise capital professionally for their investors and manage them through the whole entire lifecycle of a deal.
Sean Thomson 02:32
Yeah, so we use ground breaker in our business. So just so everybody knows, the jig ticks a friend of mine, we, we do business together. That's why I wanted to have you on just to talk about kind of the reason we like it. The reason we really love using it and talk about some of the benefits. I think one of the things I see early syndicators doing is not adopting the technology earlier than they should really they wait till their deal is starting to happen. And it's a mad rush to kind of get everything put together and get to deploy a system like this really takes some time. And you know, you want to implement it over a you know, a little bit of time and not not be in a mad rush with it. We We were lucky, we got our started pretty early. And you know, we went through all that stuff early on, and it helped us a lot. But let's talk about let's talk about some of the benefits of using a portal, whether it's groundbreaker or whatever for both sponsors, and for the investors. I mean, what what what do you see let's start with maybe the sponsor side of it. What do you see is making it helpful for sponsors to do that. And then we'll talk about the investors.
Jake Marmulstein 03:27
Also, one of the main reasons why this even came up for me as a problem to solve was that I was doing a lot of the administrative work of having to format my PowerPoint presentations and send them out to investors. And the PowerPoint would change, the assumptions would change, investors would come back and write different emails, different questions have different commitment amounts that would update constantly. And I'd have to the recognition of all that data, like write down how much they were investing and everything in an Excel spreadsheet. And I'd have to switch back and forth between tools, from email to PowerPoint to Microsoft Word to excel. And there was just a lot of a lot of chaos in that process of preparing the documents, communicating with people and then making sure that I had the right information stored. So it's time consuming, it's also prone to human error. And it puts a lot of work on the individual, where really you're the bottleneck in the process. Because the amount of time that you can spend communicating and handling these different workflows is going to block other people from moving forward. What we do with groundbreaker is we give the real estate deal sponsor a system and it's available 24/7 365 to the investor. Investors can log in and look at the deal. You can update any of the terms in the deal in real time. So that eliminates the need to send email. There's all the information you need to fill out in the software for the deal. So it eliminates your need to do any kind of formatting. And when the investors want to invest, they can do it on, they can put in the amount, they can sign the documents to the accreditation, send the funds, and you're just on the receiving end, and the information is actually flowing into your CRM, all in the same place. So you're not maintaining multiple systems. And those all combined really make the process a lot easier. It gives you an, you know, a structure to follow, especially if you're early and you're starting out, you have, you know, fewer moving parts to have to manage and you can focus more on just doing the deal.
Sean Thomson 05:39
Yeah, I know, for us the the experience our investors have with us has to be you know, I'm I'm trying to provide a top shelf experience, right, a white glove experience, I don't want to have chaos in the in the in the process at all. And having one central location where you can go to to have information from the investor side, so that they can get you know, all their K ones, or any of those sorts of important documents, but also, just going through the deal information, signing up to be an investor. All that stuff is very simple. And then for me, I can just post videos or I can, you know, post changes or anything like that updates on how the deal is probably progressing in the portal and all the investors have access to that anytime they want it. Right. So that's that's kind of what you just said, but just re emphasizing that's kind of what we love about it. Let's talk about some of the things maybe some of the technologies that you see people using in real estate specifically, that are that are helping syndications. How are people using the portal to kind of raise their game?
Jake Marmulstein 06:36
Well, one of the big things that we do that helps the real estate deal sponsor a lot with their time and also gives investors satisfaction is just the ability to use ACH. So typically, you know, even the most advanced real estate deal sponsors, they're having to upload a NACHA file to their bank account, and send out distributions to investors. And when investors are investing, they're sending you wire transfers. And you might have some kind of redundancy where you send them a text message or email to really verify who you are before you get that wire because groundbreaker is password protected, and it has the two factor authentication redundancy. It, you know, stores all the information in an encrypted format, the security's there. And then we also offer the ability to connect your bank account. So sponsors who sign up their investors with ACH form of payment, for transferring money into a deal. And then also being able to receive your cash flow distributions through direct deposit, Ach, those people are really taking advantage of the ease of the functionality, because when it comes time to send funds, you're saving money. And you're also saving time investors. I think I mean, a lot of these investors these days, like just getting the money into their bank account, they don't want to have to get a check and scan it or go with the bank.
Sean Thomson 08:12
Yeah, smooth, smooth process is always critical. So let's talk about some of the future technologies are you working on maybe something that's that's coming down the road that's going to that's going to, you know, change the game a little bit or improve the experience a little bit.
Jake Marmulstein 08:27
Our concept when we got into this was let's help to modernize the way that real estate investments are being managed, and how investor relations are being done. But as we got into it more and more, and especially among the kind of sponsors that we see frequently, coming to groundbreaker folks that are newer into the business and folks that are scaling and growing their company, they don't really have a well established network. And they're trying to build that network, build their service provider network and build their team as they go as they're doing deals. And as a company, we'd like to go one step further than just be a software provider, we want to be able to help people in any way that we can, so that they're doing less of the work carrying less of the overhead. And they're focusing their expertise around finding great deals and executing on them. So having to do with some of the top things that we're working on handling in the future would be helping with the financing. If you have to get either debt or equity for a deal, and it matches the threshold that we work with. We can help to prepare you to be able to get financing, and do so at a better terms because we're offering volume pricing, through the many relationships and also the volume that we have at our disposal through the groundbreaker network. We're also looking at ways that we can even help with deal flow and connecting sponsors with deals. So there You're constantly able to look at things. And also, there's a possibility to fill in other expertise gaps, we're analyzing those. And these are, you know, we're doing the financing thing now, it's just been taking off, we're gonna, we've got several deals in the pipeline that we're actively working on. But there's all these other areas where we see sponsors who have expertise gaps, and we want to just fill those so that we're focusing your time more on doing the deal.
Sean Thomson 10:29
So kind of having a central hub for some of the maybe vendor type relationships that you need that you need as a sponsor, and bringing those into the groundbreaker system. Right.
Jake Marmulstein 10:39
Yeah, and bringing them in with providers who are also vetted, and providing some level of an additional perk or discount for our customers.
Sean Thomson 10:52
Well, let's talk about so you this is kind of how long have you guys been in business a couple years now, right?
Jake Marmulstein 10:58
Yeah, we formed the company in like, 2016. And we launched the software, we were live in, like 2018 in beta, and then we've launched our new platform in 2020.
Sean Thomson 11:10
And how is everything going is everything is everything on track at this point? As How is your experience manage? Because you're, you're you've started your business from scratch? It's been I'm sure it's been, you know, there's been trials and tribulations, but you're, as you're seeing tremendous success now. And you're probably starting to kind of hit a pace. That is that's, that's fun, right?
Jake Marmulstein 11:28
Yeah, the, here's more good days, then there are bad days. But yeah, when you when starting it out, there were a lot of challenges, I learned a tremendous amount around hiring, you get on board and how to form the kind of expectations that you need, how to vet for the right people, how to set expectations, you know, now it's, it's, it's more about like taking what we've built, which is provided a great foundation for the company, and figuring out how we can scale it and grow it faster. So that's another, you know, another challenge that I'm having to take on and the rest of the team is taken on. But we have a really good foundation around our practices for building our technology, we know where we're going on our roadmap, we know how to take the customers on board them and make them successful, the software, customers are really happy now and renewing the software and also providing us with case studies and testimonials. So everything is good, and it's on the right track. Now are thinking how can I how can we really expand and grow from that core business to be able to do even better faster?
Sean Thomson 12:37
Right. So that's so that's your future is just refining what you're you're you're you're building now, and rolling out some of your technology, I guess some of your technology updates and things like that as you go, right?
Jake Marmulstein 12:48
Yeah, that's going to always continue, we're thinking about how can we help our clients in a way that's going to be differentiated. And so that's kind of as I go into some of the other avenues of you know, financing and deal flow, know some things that are going to be very unique to our platform that create more of a holistic service and product experience, than just being really a tool, we want to morph the business into being more of a platform. And in order to do that, we'll need to find some key partnerships. And also develop the technology to be able to support those partnerships and develop the team to be able to support those partnerships. And that's going to create additional revenue streams for groundbreaker. But it's also going to make us a more attractive platform. Because we'll have different things that we can use to help our clients at various stages of their maturity curve as they grow and get from not having a deal to doing a deal to wanting to do you know, multiple deals a year. Right.
Sean Thomson 13:56
So Jakes we always ask everybody the same question. It's, you know, the name of the podcast, Next Level American dream. So I always I'm always curious what people define for themselves as their American dream?
Jake Marmulstein 14:05
Yeah, you know, it's a tough question. I think I'm constantly in search of of the answer. But today, I would say that, you know, being able to be in control of your time is really the American dream. Because that's the one thing you can't, you know, you can't you can't buy or you can't get back. And it's also a mentality, it's more of a mentality than it has to do with any material possession or, you know, number of commas in your bank account. You know, it is what you make it and I've talked to so many people around the world who have achieved varying levels of success. And most of the time, it's always about their time and their lifestyle. So you just have to decide what's good for you. And then set a goal and go after that. And I think for me, that's having A certain level of, of financial freedom in order to give me that, that set of that mindset, and I'm working towards it.
Sean Thomson 15:09
Yeah, so speaking of that, so you you're in a tough industry, technology's a tough business, and starting a new business in that in that realm is difficult. And you've had a great amount of success to that. What do you think is maybe one or two things that you that you've do, that has made the difference for you kind of in your startup and getting things going and the successes you're seeing?
Jake Marmulstein 15:32
Well, one of the things that is really core, and it's, it's, it's super obvious, but just don't give up, you'll get hit with a lot of stuff. And it'll be hard and you'll lose, you know, you'll lose employees, you'll lose investors, you'll lose deals. But if you know that the startup doesn't fail, the company doesn't fail because of something external, it really, you know, it's really about you and your mentality, to be able to keep going. So I think persistence is the way you can overcome anything with that persistence. And then, you know, the other thing is being clear on your objectives, your goals, and kind of your vision of where you want to take things. Having that be really well defined, sets up a story, because also having to do with persistence, if you know what it is that you want. And you can believe in it and get passionate, but that'll set the foundation for all of the relationships that you're going to form in order to be able to build your business, because you're not going to build your business alone. So you have to be able to be really clear on your vision and what, what's driving you. And typically, it's about your ability to, you know, learn new skills, your ability to create impact. And then there's the financial aspect. And the financial aspect is not going to be the only thing that drives you. So if you can divine your vision, around the impact, and the things that you're going to learn and how you're going to grow personally and professionally out of the things that you're doing, that will translate to other people who are going to join you. And that'll be something that can help you get through some of the trials and tribulations of starting the company to begin with.
Sean Thomson 17:23
Yeah, so set a strong vision, believe in it, and just just don't quit, right.
Jake Marmulstein 17:30
Yeah, good summary.
Sean Thomson 17:32
Yeah, I think that's those are, those are very good words to go live by, I think if you're trying to start your business, so what you just said is exactly, I think, I think that's the foundation for everything that gets started. You have to you have to have a dream, you have to believe in it, and you got to go get it done. Right. And just keep going.
Jake Marmulstein 17:52
Yeah, and it's and if it's only about capital, it's only about earning money, then it's going to be hard, I think, personally, for me to get through the tough stuff. Because you're often going to be delayed in making any money when you start a business. So
Sean Thomson 18:09
yeah, we're finding now that the money is fine, but it's it's more about developing wealth strategies. It's more about contributing to your communities. It's more about it's more about giving back to kind of everybody in our orbit, right? It's it's not necessarily about making money making money, it's really not the challenge anymore. It's, it's about doing something greater, right. So we're we're always looking for in our vision, at least, we're always looking for how can we contribute, you know, on different levels of different ways. And so anyway, that's that's kind of what we look at, I know you're doing the same thing you've got, you've got employees all over the world, you were just telling me about how much your your how much your employees enjoy working with you and the benefits they get to being you know, working with an American company. And so I know you're kind of thinking of those things as well in your business. And that's, I think that that's, that's good to help you keep moving forward for sure. Expanding that expanding that community around you. Like Like you said, as well.
Jake Marmulstein 19:03
Yeah, it's the impact side right. That's what really drives people the most.
Sean Thomson 19:08
So Jake, so how can people kind of reach out to you get more information about groundbreaker you know, kind of connect with what you have going on things like that. Is there a website they should go to to get started?
Jake Marmulstein 19:18
Yeah, anybody can can request a demo from our from our sales team through groundbreaker.co And you'll be able to find us there. You can also email me jake@groundbreaker.co, or you can call me through 128-475515. And I'll pick up the phone.
Sean Thomson 19:40
Yeah, awesome. Well, thanks, Jake. I really appreciate you coming on the show and talking about some of the technology you've got going on and building your business and, and all those sorts of things. It was great to talk to you.
Jake Marmulstein 19:50
Yeah, thank you very much. It was a pleasure, Sean.
Abigail Thomson 19:53
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Next Level American dream. If you would like to learn more about what we talked about. Today I want to contact the team directly or interested in passively investing and being a part of our deal room. Head over to our website at www.thomsonmultifamilygroup.com Before you go please leave a review your comments help us create more episodes for you to enjoy