AI, Commercial Finance, and the Road to Nasdaq with Blake Janover

0:02Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Latinx Power. Today, we'll be breaking down artificial intelligence, commercial finance, and the road to NASDAQ. To drop these value bombs, I brought Blake Janover into EO Fire Studios. Blake is the CEO of Janover, is a Harvard Business School alumni with billions of dollars of multifamily and commercial real estate deal experience. And today, on Foundation, we'll talk about a crazy IPO story, facing the challenges with debt and insurance, how you, Fire Nation, should be using AI in this realm, and oh, so much more.

0:42And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Blake and our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lands, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier. AI technology is transforming the way we do business, and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts.

1:16Blake, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What is up, Fire Nation? So grateful to be here. I would say it's that entrepreneurs know what they're doing. We are figuring it out as we go. Doesn't matter how far along you are. Some of the most successful people I've ever met that are worth hundreds of millions or maybe billions of dollars are still figuring it out as they go. And Fire Nation, where else do you want to be? I mean, this is a journey of surprise, a journey of discovery. It's not about getting to the finish line.

1:59That's when it's game over. It's about the journey, the progress there. That is the key thing. So we'll be talking about some of that today, but mostly focusing on artificial intelligence, commercial finance, and the road to NASDAQ. So I want to get into some really cool things that I know Fire Nation is going to love. But first, Blake, I want to talk about the story of Janover. Before I started Janover, I'd been at this intersection of multifamily commercial real estate finance and technology for most of my career. But I'd had some real failures under my belt. I kind of committed to not operating and owning and running a business again.

2:38But I was working on a project in Miami. It was like a$50 million apartment building. And I had to put together the debt and the equity. And it took me a couple of years to get it done. And it was a ton of work, as everything is and should be. And anything worth getting ought to be a ton of work. But it was really painful. And I said to myself, I said, well, maybe I could build a tool, a software tool, to make it easier to finance these large, complicated deals that are super eclectic and and what have you and that was kind of the the the the nexus of the company um and and you know kind of leading into its its growth or like a little bit more into the story um we i had pledged not to borrow money um and or run at high operational leverage like i had in the past.

3:38So we did it all with equity and we did it going into COVID. So we went through so many things before getting to the NASDAQ stage. So it was a combination of bootstrapped growth. And then we raised some money with crowdfunding and we did it on Republic and then Start Engine. And then we went to friends and family and institutional. But we did it all in a super tight timeframe. I think we turned the engine on in maybe July, I don't know, maybe it was like late 2019. And by 2023, we were listed. It's still a crazy ride. Now, I know that the dream of many entrepreneurs, many, many entrepreneurs, is to one day IPO, is to have that big event, is to ring that bell, so to speak.

4:30You have quite the IPO story during truly insane market conditions. So tell us more about that. Okay, going public was amazing. And it's not for the faint of heart. I think ringing the bell at the NASDAQ was probably even more fun. So I encourage everybody to do that. And you can ring the bell with a friend and not have to go through all the other things. So when we started the IPO process, the tech market, the real estate tech market was on fire. Capital markets were on fire. If you looked at stocks, they were kind of soaring. And we kind of had a framework for a deal in that market condition.

5:14And we went down that path. And then as market conditions deteriorated faster and faster and faster, both from a macro perspective, equity capital markets perspective, our business, commercial real estate, commercial real estate, finance, banking, these things were deteriorating faster and faster, but we were still on the path. So our deal changed a lot from when we started to when we finally closed. And it probably, I don't remember, it probably took us like 18 months. And I'll give one anecdote because I know that you run a tight ship here. um wait this deal probably died twice on its way to the ipo and there's enough stories to to fill up a dozen of these episodes but finally um i had a trip planned for a year to israel from florida so i was in israel uh and it was like hey it's road show time so i ran my whole road show at plus seven hours i just got home at like three in the morning every night uh on back-to-back zooms all day and all night.

6:17And when it was finally time to close the deal, I was in Bangkok and I was plus 12 hours and I got the call like, Hey, the deal's done. And I poured myself a glass of wine, but I didn't take a sip. Uh, and, and, and, and I'm glad I didn't because then the deal fell apart again. Um, and there was like six hours of putting it back together and it finally closed at something like 6am my time. The next day I was on like two or three days of no sleep. Um, and And the rest is more of history and a roller coaster. But I have a lot of stories from that. But it was all worth it. And Fire Nation, I like to say we usually only get to see from the outside perspective that Instagram moment, which is Blake ringing the bell.

7:02We don't really understand or see all of the hours and weeks and months and years that went in before that actually happening. You just kind of see that one perfect moment. So that's what we envision, but the reality is often much different. And I want to talk about the challenges, Blake, that both small businesses as well as commercial real estate entrepreneurs face with debt and with insurance. What is happening there? debt's affecting everybody as the fed raises short-term rates they make uh the cost of borrowing higher which which either um kills opportunity or qualification for for borrowers uh and makes it more difficult for lenders to lend because their balance sheets and whatever else i mean one of the fundamental amazing things about an open market a free market this like capitalist uh society is that we we have the opportunity to borrow and we can also take investment.

7:56We can also take equity investment, but all of that's a function of what interest rates are. So when rates get jacked up, entrepreneurs lose access to capital and it just sucks. So two years ago, capital was abundant. So entrepreneurs could easily raise money for a new business. Not easily, right? Nothing's easy, but they could much more easily raise money for a new business, get debt, borrow from the SBA, maybe rates were 8%, 5%, 4%, 3%. Now the cost of capital has doubled or capital has just vanished. On the insurance side of things, less for small business entrepreneurs, more for multifamily entrepreneurs, but insurance premiums have doubled, tripled, quadrupled, depending on what market you're in over the last few years.

8:48And it makes it impossible to run, uh, to effectively run a business based on your business plan. Um, so every entrepreneur is kind of having to go back to the drawing board, uh, bootstrap run smaller, um, and kind of rethink things. Uh, and not every entrepreneur, right. Uh, you're doing just fine, John.

9:09Um, so, so yeah, so I, I, it's a, it's a, it's a tough time to be, um, an ambitious, making big concentrated bets, taking risk with OPM, with other people's money. And not in a bad way, right? Bank money, lender money, this is money that's part of running a business. And Fire Nation, the world that we live in is cyclical in every manner. I mean, sometimes things are going to be hot. Sometimes they'll be cold. Sometimes they'll be easy. Sometimes they'll be hard. There's always this cyclical nature that you just need to understand and you to understand how to win in every part of that cycle because you don't know where you're going to be or where the cycle is going to be when it's time for you to press that green button.

9:54And we have a lot more to talk about around that topic when we get back from thanking our sponsors. The overwhelm that comes with choosing the right software and tools for growing your business is real. With so many options and so little time, how are you supposed to know which platform is best? You've got your email marketing platform, payment systems, content tools, the list goes on. It can sometimes feel like you're spending more time organizing all the moving pieces and places than actually connecting with prospects and customers. And this is where HubSpot steps in. HubSpot is the all-on-one customer platform for growing better.

10:30Imagine this. Marketers generate better leads. Sales builds tighter relationships with customers and closes more deals. and service supports your customers at scale with tools like HubSpot's AI chatbot and knowledge base. Plus, with built-in AI to answer common customer questions, brainstorm and write marketing content, easily pull reports and more, your teams can slash their busy work, meaning your marketers, sales reps and service teams actually have the time to be, well, marketers, sales reps and service teams. And when they grow, the sky's the limit for your business too. Grow better, faster with HubSpot's all-in-one intuitive customer platform.

11:10Visit hubspot.com to learn more. Employers are raving about our sponsor, ZipRecruiter, like how quickly it helps them find great candidates. Take the CEO of Walls Need Love as an example, who said, typically when I use ZipRecruiter, I can have someone hired within two to four weeks. I found my lead graphic designer within just a few days. So if you're hiring, find out how fast ZipRecruiter works when you try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash fire. How does ZipRecruiter do it? Well, ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology identifies top talent for your roles quickly. In fact, immediately after you post your job, it starts showing you qualified people, just like it did for the HR director for ADMA Biologics.

11:53She said, within hours of posting on ZipRecruiter, we got two candidates that we're going to hire. See why ZipRecruiter is the hiring site employers prefer most based on G2 ratings. Try it for free at this exclusive web address, ziprecruiter.com slash fire. Once again, go to ziprecruiter.com slash fire to try it for free. Zip Recruiter, the smartest way to hire. Blake, we're back and we were talking before the break about the challenges that entrepreneurs, small businesses, commercial real estate entrepreneurs are facing when it comes to debt and insurance. What I love about this and why I have you on the episode today is that you're solving that problem.

12:34Tell us more. It would be my pleasure. So Janover, NASDAQ JNVR, by the way, we started in the debt business building a marketplace for multifamily and commercial mortgages. And it quickly expanded into small business, SBA and what have you. You see, the thing is like unlike a residential mortgage, like if you're buying a house in Florida, it fits in a box. It's super homogenous. It's this is your DTI. This is your LTV. This is your term. This is your amortization. This is your rate. And all the lenders are kind of the same. But once you need to get a loan for your small business, once you need an SBA loan, once you need a multifamily loan or a commercial property loan, there's 5 ,000 banks, 4 ,000 credit unions, 3 ,000 other lenders.

13:18Every single one of them offer a different product. And if you walk into a bank, you can have one guy that does one product has no idea what the other guy does. So it's just this really long tail problem. It's kind of like how Etsy organized all the artisan soap manufacturers in the world. So we've done that. So we now have more than 10 % of the banks in America logging into our platform, giving us their data, more than 1 ,000 other multifamily commercial property and small business lenders on our platform telling us these are the deals we want to do. This is how we want to do them. So now somebody could go to janover.co, J-A-N-O-V-E-R.co.

14:01I don't need to put a plug in there. It just happened naturally. But you could go to our website and talk to our AI chat or AI voice or kind of like fill out a form, and an advisor will get you – will build your deal on our back end and match you on the debt side. Now we're building the same thing for the insurance business. We launched a Janover Insurance Group as a wholly owned subsidiary of Janover, and we're solving the same problem. It's a marketplace to be aggregated so that you can get access to the money that you need, to the money or the insurance that you need as an entrepreneur, as a multifamily commercial property owner, or as somebody looking for insurance.

14:45because now more than ever, you need access to everything. It can't just be my buddy that works at the bank down the street or my buddy that's an insurance agent. Fire Nation, I really hope you're understanding what's happening here. Blake identified a problem that didn't have a great solution. And he's going into that and saying, I'm going to become the number one solution to a real problem in this world. And I'm going to win as a result. because people, Fire Nation, they'll be a path to the doorstep of the number one solution to a real problem that they are experiencing, and they will ignore the second best solution to infinity.

15:22So how are you doing this in your world? And I'll tell you one way that people are doing it a little bit easier these days, although there's some challenging complications thrown in with that, is artificial intelligence. So Blake, how is Janover using AI, and how would you recommend Fire Nation making use? So AI is invented through our whole ecosystem. So if you went to any of our websites, and there's a ton of them like sba7a.loans, multifamily.loans, commercialrealestate.loans, janover.co, janoverinsurancegroup.com, all of them have active AI agents on site. So in chat, on voice, you could pick up the phone, call, you could chat, you could text.

16:02So right now, we use AI for a lot. It's for front-end service, qualifying sales leads, answering very complex questions, solving complex problems for complex situations, getting people matched to the right folks. And those are like some more advanced tools. But I think it's really important, and this might be repetitive or might not work for some people, but I think for everybody, it's really important to recognize that GPT-40, not a 3.5 or whatever the free version is. You have to spend the$20. It's the cheapest employee you've ever had. But GPT-40, Opus, or actually I think Anthropic has a new one now.

16:50I forget the name. But start with GPT-40. It's a personal MBA, CEO, scientist, physicist in your pocket. You can log in. You can program it to exactly what you want it to be. It's a really easy user interface. And you've got expertise in your corner. Oh, I want to bounce strategy. I do this all the time. Here's my strategy, but here's a Harvard Business School article. Can you help me frame it better in the context of this article? Help me build a graph for me doing a calculating CAGR over X period of time for my shareholder. There's three million things you could do, and I hope everybody's doing it.

17:35We're building really advanced, customized applications with generative AI for servicing multifamily commercial property and small business owners and for servicing our advisors and our lenders, helping them onboard, collect data and everything else. But there's so many applications, and I just hope everybody's out there using it because if you're not, you're falling behind. And I have no benefit from that, right? you know chat open ai is not paying me anything so i just want to make sure everybody's using it now one thing that i love doing is finding successful people having conversations with them which we're doing right now i love finding successful companies and seeing what the secret sauce is so obviously you're doing a lot of things right blake what's next what are you looking at right now what is just over the horizon what is the front of the envelope for you we've built an unbelievable backend software that our internal salespeople and advisors use.

18:33And we're in the process of beta testing that and offering that software as a service out to the end users. So we're productizing our backend. We are building an institutional insurance practice. So we just announced that we're launching our public company D &O practice we're focusing on large financial lines so we're moving into a bigger middle market excuse me bigger middle market and institutional execution on the debt side on the insurance side and now rolling out our SAS and I'll tell you we are very actively building our M &A pipeline we have a huge funnel where we get a hundred million impressions a year a million of some of the highest value multifamily commercial property and small business owners in america coming to our websites and uh and giving us their data and we're helping them we're servicing them it's what we do we're we're fanatical about fanatical we're fanatics about delivering value to our customers but we want to be able to provide more products to those customers so we're actively doing mna building our pipeline um and we and you know we aim to acquire both insurance and b2b sas companies that fit into our funnel over the next year.

19:54And I'm really excited about all of it. And I'm having a lot of fun. Blake, having fun is a recipe for success. Fire Nation, you need passion, you need excitement, you need enthusiasm, but that's not it. You also need knowledge, skills, value that you're adding to the world. It has to be a combination of the two. Blake's found his zone of fire, as I like to say, what is yours? So Blake, of everything we've talked about here today, what's the one message, the one thing that you really want to make sure our listeners get from our conversation today? That's a good question. Selfishly, it's follow our journey.

20:33We're Janover. You can find us on the NASDAQ at JNVR. You can follow me on LinkedIn. My name's Blake Janover. If I was going to be, and I'm going to do a two for one here. Altruistically, everything's going to be okay. Keep grinding. It's our resilience and ability to fall down and get up again that separates us from the pack. So keep going. And Fire Nation, you are doing the right thing. I mean, you're listening to podcasts like this. You're consuming content like this. You're surrounding yourself with the right people because guess what? You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

21:14You've been hanging out with Blake and JLD today, Fire Nation, so keep up that heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Type Blake in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And Blake, one more time, where can Fire Nation go to connect with you? Grab me on LinkedIn. It's Blake Janover. Search my name. I'll come up on LinkedIn and I'm pretty responsive. So I'll see you there. Blake, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute your brother and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you, brother.

21:44Thank you for having me. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Blake for sponsoring today's episode and to Fire Nation. Over the last decade, I've interviewed more than 4 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs and I've created a revolutionary 17-step roadmap to your financial freedom and fulfillment. I put it all into my first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, personally endorsed by Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk. The Common Path to Uncommon Success is the step-by-step guidance that you need to achieve the lifestyle of your dreams. Visit UncommonSuccessBook.com.

22:19I will catch you there or on the flippity-flip side. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolfe and Nathan Lance, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts.