Onward, a Fundrise Production

Onward, a Fundrise Production

Onward is a podcast from America's largest direct-to-investor alternative asset investment platform, Fundrise. Onward offers unique insights and perspectives from company co-founder and CEO Ben Miller and guests.

Episodes

54: Real estate AI is a revolution: The launch of RealAI

January 28, 2026 • 56 mins

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.

Ben unveils RealAI—a “real estate AI analyst” that Fundrise has been building for years—and explains wh...

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53: Building the largest multifamily lender in the nation, with Willy Walker CEO of Walker & Dunlop

January 20, 2026 • 49 mins

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 optimisti...

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52: How will AI impact the economy?

January 2, 2026 • 69 mins
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 ...
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51: Inside Justice: How the System Really Works, with Hallie Hoffman

December 2, 2025 • 51 mins
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.

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 f...
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50: The guy behind the guy, with Scott Plank of Under Armour

September 24, 2025 • 62 mins
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.

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 ...
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49: Data centers will be the largest investment in US history, with Kervin Pillay, former CTO of Cisco

July 9, 2025 • 60 mins
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. 

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For a deeper dive into these insights and more, be sure to listen to the full epis...
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48: Will AI Surpass Us? with Robert Nishihara, co-founder of AnyScale

May 27, 2025 • 53 mins
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 mak...
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47: How to break a country (and maybe save one), with Rob Johnson

May 8, 2025 • 55 mins
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.

You can also listen to Rob’s first appearance on Onward episode #19:
How we broke the ...
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46: Trump's Trade Roadmap: From Hidden Plan to Radical Reality

April 21, 2025 • 75 mins
Months before trade policy was on anyone's radar, Stephen Miran—now Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Trump—quietly published "A User's Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System." In this episode, Ben and Cardiff dive into Miran’s roadmap and assess how Trump's policies in practice have diverged from Miran’s original vision.

Ben and Cardiff explore three key scenarios for the future t...
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    45: How tariffs will impact the economy, with Anna Wong, Chief US Economist at Bloomberg

    April 7, 2025 • 52 mins
    Anna Wong is the Chief US Economist at Bloomberg and previously worked at the Federal Reserve, White House Council of Economic Advisors, and US Treasury Department. I can imagine few people in the world better suited to analyze and forecast the impact of the tariffs.

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    For a deeper dive into these insights and more, be sure to listen to the full episode of the Onward podcast.

    Have questions or feedba...
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    44: Rebuilding the World Trade Center, with Tal Kerret

    March 10, 2025 • 61 mins
    Tal Kerret is the President of Silverstein Properties, the company behind the historic rebuilding of the World Trade Center in New York City, and on the board of directors of Fundrise.

    Tal provides an in-depth look into the challenges and triumphs associated with redeveloping this iconic site, emphasizing its immense logistical complexity, symbolic importance, and economic impact. He shares his journey from the tech i...
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    43: Sell your tech company for $310M or $30B, with Auren Hoffman

    January 16, 2025 • 60 mins
    As a serial tech entrepreneur, VC investor, and expert in data-driven businesses, Auren Hoffman has been a player in Silicon Valley for nearly 30 years. Auren reflects on the pivotal decisions behind selling LiveRamp, the evolution of data companies, and how AI is reshaping industries. From the lessons learned in entrepreneurship to predictions about the future of technology, this episode is packed with insights for business l...
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    42: The greatest capital broker in the nation, Simon Ziff

    January 2, 2025 • 43 mins
    Over his 36-year career, Simon Ziff, President of Ackman-Ziff, has overseen more than $100 billion in transactions and witnessed the dramatic evolution of the real estate industry brought about by the Savings and Loan Crisis. Simon shares his journey from joining Ackman Brothers in the 1980s to seizing the opportunities created by the rise of CMBS and private equity in the 1990s. From personal anecdotes to expert insights, thi...
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    41: AI policy under the Trump Administration, with Neil Chilson

    December 20, 2024 • 51 mins
    The most important decision President Trump may face is how to regulate artificial intelligence (AI). Neil Chilson, Head of AI Policy at the Abundance Institute, is a policy insider with nearly two decades of experience inside the halls of power. Neil walks us through how to think about the tradeoffs and approaches to capturing the enormous potential upside of artificial intelligence while protecting against the downside risks...
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    40: From Bootstrap to Billion-Dollar Business, with Tristan Handy CEO of dbt Labs

    November 15, 2024 • 47 mins
    The data revolution is transforming every business in the world, and Tristan Handy sits near the center of it. Starting with a simple idea, he and his team built dbt Labs into a multi-billion-dollar tech company by understanding how technology is changing the world and what that meant for how people should change with it.

    This episode dives into Tristan’s journey, his thoughts about entrepreneurship, and the lessons he ...
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    39: The Rise of Build-to-Rent: A New Era in Real Estate, with Josh Hartmann CEO of NexMetro

    October 30, 2024 • 55 mins
    Build-to-Rent (BTR) may be the biggest innovation in real estate this decade and NexMetro Communities is arguably the originator. Since 2010, NexMetro has been developing BTR projects, with over 55 projects across the U.S., offering cottage-style homes specifically designed for renters. Hartmann provides insight into BTR’s growth, his unique business strategies, and the challenges in reshaping real estate for a new generation....
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    38: Are we vastly underestimating AI? with Dwarkesh Patel

    July 30, 2024 • 53 mins
    A couple hundred people in San Francisco may be on the cusp of inventing artificial general intelligence (AGI). Yet most people are not paying close attention, are skeptical, and are certainly not in the room. Dwarkesh pulls back the curtain so that the broader public can understand what people who are actually building AI think is going to happen.

    The conversation begins with Dwarkesh drawing parallels between the cu...
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    37: The Housing Expert Guiding the Homebuilding Industry, with John Burns

    July 23, 2024 • 57 mins
    John Burns is a renowned expert on the housing market. In this episode, John unravels the complexities of today’s economic climate and housing trends, providing a comprehensive analysis of the housing market, demographic shifts, homebuilding industry, and rental sector. Whether you're a homeowner, investor, or simply interested in economic trends, this episode offers valuable perspectives on the current state of the housing ma...
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    36: Breakthroughs in military technology: Lessons from history and future implications

    May 29, 2024 • 62 mins
    Artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionize warfare and reshape geopolitics. Professor Andrew Wilson, professor of Strategy at the US Naval War College, explores the transformative power of military technology throughout history and its implications for the future.

    In this episode of Onward, host and Fundrise CEO Ben Miller and Professor Andrew Wilson explore how technological advancements not only tran...
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    35: The 5 patterns of technology breakthroughs

    May 15, 2024 • 60 mins
    Although each major technology wave is unique—mainframes, the personal computer, internet, mobile, cloud, and now AI—the way they have played out has been surprisingly consistent. The core financial, product, and economic patterns repeat each innovation cycle and help define which companies go on to win or lose.

    In this episode, Ben and Cardiff identify and discuss the five most significant patterns: 1) waves, 2) bridgi...
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