All Forum Posts by: Jerry Shen

 Thanks for the advice Anh, but this doesn't seem like a good leverage of my time. 

Appreciate the advice Shaniqua. But I haven't revealed anything that you couldn't gather from a quick google search anyway, comes with the territory when you are part of a high profile silicon valley tech acquisition.

Re: other forms of investment yes I have considered quite a few options. You won't believe the amount of free inbound advice from top financial firms (Goldman, etc) you get when a tech acquisition becomes public. From that I became pretty good at filtering inbound requests. 95% of advice I got was pretty worthless, but 5% were absolute gems. I'm doing the same thing re: real estate.

At the end of the day, I believe that real estate fits my investment/risk/lifestyle goals the best. There are certainly safer investments, and there are much more lucrative investments that I've been offered (albeit with much more risk). But there is nothing I've come across that matches my own personal goals.

Cheers!

Thanks for the input Mike. It's always valuable to hear the other side of the coin. I'm pretty overwhelmed by the sheer amount of disparate advice on this thread. I love all the differing opinions. 

Slightly off topic, but one of the things I've learned in the business world is that everyone dispenses advice based on their own personal experiences, which can be skewed. When I started in the tech business, all of the advice I got was to go big and raise a lot of VC funding. But I chose to go the opposite route, bootstrap my own company and travel the world while coding. Did I end up creating the next facebook? No. But I did end up doing decent and I enjoyed the process. What I ended up doing is quite unusual in the tech industry, forming a one person company and then being acquired by a public technology company. There are probably only a handful of others.

Point being, I like assimilating all available information on a topic but at the end of the day the main question I ask myself is: What is the ROI on life for this decision? I don't seek the maximum ROI for my money, or even my time, but how will this benefit the lifestyle that I want to create? When I started my company, I wanted to travel the world and meet interesting people. I did that for seven months and my decision to bootstrap and be a single founder company allowed me to do that, even if the eventual end result wasn't a silicon valley super-unicorn or whatever they call it these days.

In terms of RE investing, my lifestyle goal isn't to become a great investor and make my bones in RE. It's a means to an end of achieving my lifestyle goal: to start more tech companies at my own pace, work with my friends, be able to have maximum flexibility and freedom, and essentially have an infinite financial runway for the quality of life that I want.

That being said, while I really appreciate some of the advice on this thread about getting my hands dirty and starting small to learn the ropes, I'm not sure that's the best approach for me. Any complex field, be it politics, finance, technology, medicine, or real estate always comes down to a few core principles that successful people follow. Everything else is either 1) a corollary of a core principle or 2) noise and artificial barriers to entry.

While I certainly appreciate being scrappy and hustling and trying to get into deals with nothing, it's just not something I'm interested in doing. There are plenty of very successful investors in high tech that have not built their own companies but understand the principles of high tech investing. I have to imagine the same thing is true of real estate.

 Open to other cities. Would definitely have to be an investment that doesn't require a lot of hands on maintenance though.

@Account Closed I just read your post after posting my own thoughts but yes my thoughts line up very well with your advice. Why invest in a syndicate when I can get into some of the syndicate deals myself?

@Brian Burke @Jay Hinrichs thank you so much for your advice. Funny enough one of my good friends called the RE crash in 07-08 to the YEAR and everyone made fun of her but I listened and saved myself a lot of headache in buying my first single family home. So I can see the wisdom in working with someone who has weathered the storm =)

As I'm processing all the valuable advice here, one thing that is turning me away from syndication is the fact that I'm not really taking advantage of the fact that I have more capital to spend than most in a syndicate. 

My investment goals are two-fold:

1) Generate a 10% yearly cashflow to support my lifestyle (200K/year on 2M capital invested)

2) Be a relatively passive investor, as my time is much better leveraged doing technology (which is my passion and expertise) versus actively managing real estate.

With all the great options you guys are presenting, there definitely seems to be a continuum along both of those options.

With a syndicate, I wouldn't be getting the same returns as owning a property outright, but it's much more passive (sort of like being an LP in a VC fund to use an analogy to the tech world). 

One BP member I talked to turned me on to the idea of commercial real estate, and I think this matches my investment philosophy in a lot of ways.

1) In larger deal sizes (Starting 1.5M - 2M down) the interest rates and management fees are lower, providing a better cap rate and CoC return. Why not take advantage of my capital and get into deals that have less competition because of the price?

2) Much more passive compared to a large apartment building. Instead of 100 individuals, you have one large business.

3) I get the satisfaction of 100% ownership of a particular piece of property. When I started my tech company I took no investment and had 100% ownership up till the exit, so I just have a natural affinity for total ownership.

Anyways, that's just some stream of consciousness thoughts that I have right now. Any feedback, as always, is appreciated.

@Joel Owens thanks for the advice and yes you are right I am not interested in spending a lot of time managing real estate I would rather get passive cash flow that I can invest into my next tech startup. And no that is not my entire net worth just the amount I would like to earmark for RE investing 

sounds good

@Bill S. I'll definitely have to check out that meetup

Wow thanks so much for the advice guys, gold mine of info here. I'm definitely going to look into syndications, as I'm not looking to do RE as a job but use it as an investment vehicle that can throw off cash for starting additional technology companies (my real passion). I suppose the trick will be picking the right syndicate =)