Ryan Williams (entrepreneur)

Early career

Williams began his career in real estate technology during his undergraduate term at Harvard. He was inspired to create a system to track foreclosed homes after seeing the impact of foreclosures during a trip to Atlanta.[2] By using data about properties and neighborhoods, he was able to start a business purchasing deeply undervalued homes and restoring them to occupancy.[2] This business "flipping" homes with classmates and others as investors was his first entrepreneurial venture.[26] In 2020, he highlighted the importance of Citizens Trust Bank, an Atlanta bank founded by five Black businessmen and currently a Black-owned bank, to his early success. As a young Black man he was denied loans by 10 other banks before the then-chairman of Citizens Trust personally called to say that he believed in Williams.[16]

After graduation from Harvard, he worked at Goldman Sachs and Blackstone before founding Cadre in 2014.[2] He worked at Blackstone in their real estate private equity division.[7]

Cadre

At 26 years old, he left Blackstone to found Cadre, a financial technology platform that seeks to make the real estate market more like a stock market.[11] Williams served as CEO of Cadre[27] and led it through its acquisition by Yieldstreet.

Williams led fundraising for Cadre including investments by Jared Kushner, Mark Cuban, Soros Fund Management (George Soros), Vinod Khosla[15] and a $65 million Series C fundraising round led by Andreessen Horowitz.[28]

He has been quoted as saying “Cadre’s mission is to create a more efficient economy, where we can connect the world’s buyers and sellers in opaque assets that have been inaccessible to many.”[29] He believes that increasing the ability of investors to participate in alternative asset classes (such as "energy, natural resources, oil, infrastructure or anything that’s historically been privately held or inaccessible"[30]) will expand the opportunity to build multi-generational wealth to many more members of the world[9] by "giving people direct, deal-by-deal access to commercial real estate, like you would buy and sell something on Amazon."[31] To him, that mission includes a secondary market and the ability of investors to select the deals they are most interested in, at lower cost.[24] The Economist compared Williams' Cadre to other tools that will "make markets for all kinds of assets as liquid as the stock market."[32]

In 2018 Williams announced a deal through which his company, Cadre, will receive at least $250 million (USD) in real estate investments from clients of Goldman Sachs.[33][34] In 2020, Williams published a widely-linked op-ed in CNBC recounting his experience being supported by a Black-owned and Black-founded bank early in his career, and his commitment to increase diversity among participating banks and real estate operators in the future.[16]

In 2021, Williams further announced the launch of the Cadre Direct Access Fund, one of the largest real estate funds raised during the pandemic and for a digital real estate investment platform.[35] It is a $400 million fund investing in commercial real estate and backing minority operators and partners to help produce greater economic equity.[36][37] Williams later announced that his alma mater, Harvard University, invested in both Cadre and in the $400 million fund intended to drive diversity through democratization.[38]

He followed with the Cadre Direct Access Fund II, a value-add real estate fund.[39]

In late 2021, Williams publicly announced that Cadre sold three buildings for a total of approximately $312 million, providing $95 million in returned capital to investors and an internal rate of return of approximately 17%. Williams described one of the sales as the largest-ever digital real-estate transaction (i.e., a property bought, sold, and managed using a digital platform).[40]

In early 2023, he led Cadre to secure a spot on the Forbes Fintech 50 for a seventh consecutive year.[41]

Later in 2023, he led the company to a liquidity event with its merger with Yieldstreet, a global alternative investment platform focused on credit investments. The company’s combined assets totalled $9.7 billion.[42] At the time of the merger, Cadre and Yieldstreet together had produced more than $3.1 billion in returns for clients with a total investment value of $9.7 billion. Williams continued to serve as the CEO of Cadre, which will operate independently, as well as lead global institutional client relations and business development partnerships for the combined business. The deal makes Cadre one of the most significant exits in fintech and, according to Fortune, positions the merged company to IPO in the coming years.[43]

Subsequent ventures

Future companies

In early 2025, Williams was interviewed by Jeff Berman on the podcast Masters of Scale, an interview-format podcast covering leaders from Barack Obama to Mark Zuckerberg. Williams indicated that he would be starting another growth venture.[20]

Jay-Z and Caesars Palace Times Square partnership

In 2025, Williams joined a group with Jay-Z and Al Sharpton to promote inclusive ownership of a potential Caesars Palace Times Square casino. The stated goal of the project is to allow underrepresented communities to own a portion of the casino, including permitting investments as small as $500. The project's backers describe it as offering "tangible investor education and meaningful equity investment opportunities for everyday New Yorkers."[44] As of mid-2025, Caesars was one of several companies bidding for a downstate New York gaming license.

Other activities

Williams is a regular speaker at conferences and in news programs regarding real estate technology.[23][45][46][47]

In 2020, he published a plan to help increase economic opportunity for diverse communities through "formal mentorship programs to provide hands-on guidance, and ... comprehensive skills-training programs that help people of all ages get a start in careers that will allow them to succeed in a fast-changing economy." He was interviewed by CNBC's SquawkBox,[48] Forbes,[49] and others in response to his call for proactive steps to increase economic equality. Later in 2020, he reiterated the importance of remedying racial wealth and power disparities in the United States, noting for example that only 21 of over 4,700 banks in the United States are Black-owned or Black-led.[16] He further committed to partner with diverse operating partners and lenders, as well as committing at least 10% of Cadre's cash holdings to be held in minority depository institutions to empower them to lend into underserved communities.[16] In 2020, he and Robert Smith kicked off a Forbes hackathon by discussing their collective commitments to help build transformational businesses that expand economic opportunity for more people.[50]