Ryan Broderick is the Co-Founder & CEO of Darwin Homes. Darwin Homes is a real estate investment management platform focused on the single-family rental opportunity, enabling investors to invest anywhere simply with confidence. Darwin has raised just under $50m in venture capital from Khosla Ventures, Camber Creek, Fifth Wall, Canvas Ventures, Tony Xu, Ryan Graves, Ryan Roslansky, and other technology leaders.

Prior to founding Darwin Homes, Ryan was part of the founding team at DoorDash. During his tenure at DoorDash, he built and led the first Launch team, which was tasked with scaling the DoorDash operation from Silicon Valley to over 250 cities in the US. He then went on to build the Merchant Team responsible for Business Development, Sales, Merchant Products, and Merchant Operations. Before DoorDash, Ryan worked at JUMP Investors, an early-stage VC firm led by Randall Kaplan, the Co-Founder of Akamai Technologies. Ryan holds a B.S from the University of Southern California and an MBA from Pepperdine University.

In this episode, Chris and Ryan discuss:

• Lessons learned from being early at DoorDash and how he applied those principles to property management
• How they enter a market and all that happens
• How they've approached single-family property management from first principles to building revolutionary tools for owners
• Future opportunities that can be done when Darwin hits scale, including new resident monetization strategies

Learn more about Chris Powers and Fort Capital: www.FortCapitalLP.com

Follow Fort Capital on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/fort-capital/

Follow Chris on Twitter: www.Twitter.com/FortWorthChris 

Follow Chris on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/chrispowersjr/ 

Subscribe to The Fort on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuJ32shRt8Od3MxMY-keTSQ

Follow The Fort on Instagram: www.Instagram.com/TheFortPodcast

(2:58) - Ryan’s early career with Doordash

(16:40) - What was the initial thesis for Darwin Homes?

(26:55) - What does scale give Darwin that the local PM will never have?

(30:55) - What do you mean by the Surface Area in Property Management?

(32:40) - What does a great engineering culture look like?

(36:13) - How does the best idea win when you’re first building a product that needs to 10x?

(38:58) - What happens from Day 0 of entering a new market? 

(42:22) - How do you source vendors in a market?

(48:00) - What makes a good city for Darwin to enter?

(49:22) - Darwin’s Build-to-rent operation

(50:12) - Why do you have an acquisitions team within a property management company?

(56:38) - Ryan’s vision for Darwin

(1:01:30) - How big is the SFR & BFR market getting?

 (1:04:53) - What do institutional owners care about and what do retail owners care about?

(1:08:11) - Are we moving to a world where people rent homes sight unseen? 

(1:11:38) - Resident Monetization

(1:15:10) - Is there room for managing homes for homeowners?

 (1:19:31) - Do you have any desire to buy property managers in other markets?

 (1:21:06) - Are the people you’re hiring already in the PM industry?

(1:23:11) - Thoughts on construction

(1:27:03) - What are you seeing going on in VC given everything happening in the economy?

(1:36:29) - Thoughts on Blue Collar work

(1:47:19) - Shooting the shit and bouncing business ideas off each other

Josh Young is the Founder & CIO of Bison Interests.  Josh has built his career concentrating on deep value opportunities for investors. He has over 15 years of experience in investment management, 10 of which were focused on publicly-traded oil and gas securities. Josh became Chairman of the Board of RMP Energy in 2017. After refreshing the board and management team and rebranding the company (Iron Bridge Resources), it was bought out at a 78% premium in 2018. Josh is the author of numerous articles on oil & gas investments and the guest speaker at various energy industry conferences.  

He graduated with honors from the University of Chicago in economics. Josh was a management consultant to Fortune 500 companies and private equity firms, and then an investment analyst at a private equity fund.

Josh worked as an energy investment analyst for a multi-billion dollar, single-family office, which was nominated as Institutional Investor's Single Family Office of the Year in 2008

On this episode Chris and Josh discuss:

• A historical overview of energy markets from 2014 - present
• Macro themes that are emerging in the global energy markets
• A bull case for oil & gas
• What it will take to rebuild the oil & gas industry in America

Follow Chris on Twitter: www.Twitter.com/FortWorthChris 

Follow Chris on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/chrispowersjr/ 

Subscribe to The Fort on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuJ32shRt8Od3MxMY-keTSQ

Follow Josh on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Josh_Young_1

Bison Interests: https://bisoninterests.com/

(2:11) - Josh’s career and background 

(7:38) - How big is the investable universe of companies within Oil and Gas?

(9:22) - Where is your focus within the industry?

(10:54) - What was happening in the world after the crash in 2014?

(20:54) - Are the Saudis the largest producers in the world?

(21:18) - What do countries like Iran and Venezuela do with their oil when they are shut out of OPEC?

(24:53) - What started happening in the market in 2015?

(31:48) - As you think about that period of time, how much of it was driven by a lack of fracking knowledge?

(36:25) - Market overview from 2018 through the pandemic

(44:43) - How underinvested is the industry today?

(52:25) - Thoughts on the ESG movement

(1:00:39) - Is there anything on the horizon that the narrative around O&G will change either for the better or worse?

(1:03:18) - How much impact is the Russia-Ukraine conflict having on the oil markets?

(1:05:51) - What are your predictions for the next 4-5 years?

(1:19:37) - Thoughts on the current O&G market

The Fort is produced by Johnny Podcasts