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

Eric Dodds 00:05
Welcome to The Data Stack Show PRQL. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show, you’ll get to meet our guests 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. Cost is 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, you know, you know, off limits, or very difficult to get access to for your average person, right. So let’s think about, you know, 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 Sunrise. 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 is 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 steal a lot of PDF documents and other things like that. Right. So I’m interested to ask you about that. I’m also interested in the combination. I mean, how do you run up from that allows you to invest in an apartment building and Databricks. Which is crazy. So that’s what I’m interested in chatting with him about. How about you?

Kostas Pardalis 01:50
Yeah, I mean, we’ve been, okay, we, 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 then like to focus more than like the, let’s say, like, the technology side of things, and what is like really exciting 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 actual data we have, with been 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 like business also, it’s like unconventional in terms of like, how, like 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 like from the road data and wind up like and creating like really tangible value that we can see our dollar signs in our bank accounts, right. So that’s what really like excited me about this episode.

Eric Dodds 03:09
All right, that’s a wrap for the people. The full length episode will drop Wednesday morning. Subscribe now so you don’t miss it.