Ryan Williams (entrepreneur)

Ryan A. Williams
Born	Baton Rouge, Louisiana, U.S.
Alma mater	Harvard
Occupation	CEO of Cadre

Ryan Williams is a technology entrepreneur best known as the CEO and co-founder of Cadre, a New York-based technology company. He was named to Forbes' "30 under 30" list for 2018, “Crain’s 40 under 40” list for 2017, is one of Goldman Sachs’ “Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs”, is one of Commercial Observer’s “30 under 30” and has been profiled in Forbes, Ivy, technology and real estate trade publications. 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, his former employer.

Williams was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and founded a sports apparel company at 13. Williams matriculated to Harvard University, where he founded the Veritas Financial Group, the school’s largest undergraduate financial literacy group.

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. By using data about properties and neighborhoods, he was able to start a business purchasing deeply undervalued homes and restoring them to occupancy. This business "flipping" homes with classmates and others as investors was his first entrepreneurial venture.

After graduation from Harvard, he worked at Goldman Sachs and Blackstone before founding Cadre in 2014. At Blackstone he managed a large real estate business.

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. Williams currently serves as CEO of Cadre and has led it through a $65 million Series C fundraising round led by Andreessen Horowitz. 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.” 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") will expand the opportunity to build multi-generational wealth to many more members of the world by "giving people direct, deal-by-deal access to commercial real estate, like you would buy and sell something on Amazon."

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