He Doesn’t Regret taking a $150,000 Pay Cut to Become a CEO

Over three years ago, Alex Blackwood was working 100-hour weeks as a real estate investing associate at Goldman Sachs and making $250,000 a year.

Blackwood left that life behind to pursue mogul, a fractional real estate investment startup he co-founded with fellow Goldman Sachs alum Joey Gumataotao in September 2022. mogul allows users to buy shares in a home and receive the direct benefits of the underlying real estate, including dividends, on a monthly basis. Users pick individual homes and buy shares in those homes, earning rental income. The minimum investment required to start is $250.

Blackwood and his team select top properties, exclusively single-family homes, purchase the property and fractionalize the ownership of the property so that investors can receive monthly dividends in accordance with their level of ownership. There are over 13,000 investors on mogul and $40 million in assets invested through the platform.

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As co-founder and CEO of mogul, Blackwood, 29, makes about $100,000 a year — while still working 100-hour weeks. Despite the $150,000 pay cut when compared to his Goldman Sachs days, Blackwood says it is more personally rewarding to be a startup founder.

“It’s funny, everyone at the time thought I was the stupidest person they knew,” Blackwood told Entrepreneur. “To be honest with you, I didn’t really think twice about it. I jumped into it. It’s exactly what I wanted to do.”

Blackwood and Gumataotao each put $50,000 into the business in late 2022 and got another $350,000 of investment in their pre-seed round from Tim Draper of Draper Associates. They additionally raised about $3.6 million for their seed round, led by AY Ventures, in late 2023. Earlier this year, mogul raised a $4 million seed extension round, bringing its total funding to about $8 million.

Blackwood said that in an alternate universe, he would have continued working for Goldman or a private equity firm. Even though he acknowledged that the Goldman path was “a recipe for near-certain success” and a comfortable position later in life, he also knew that he would regret not pursuing mogul when he had the chance. His long-term vision for mogul is to build the company to “be bigger than Amazon.”

“We want to be the biggest platform out there, and building this has been so rewarding towards that,” Blackwood said. “I would rather be doing this underneath a bridge than not doing it and being kind of comfortable.”

Blackwood differentiates mogul from competitors like Arrived and Yieldstreet by claiming that mogul offers higher returns, between 15% to 20% annually. Arrived reports annual returns ranging from 6% to 12% per year, while Yieldstreet has a net annualized return of 6.6%.

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Blackwood started the company after buying a property for the first time and realizing how capital and time-intensive it was. At the end of the transaction, when he looked at the closing cost estimates, he saw countless fees that he couldn’t avoid. He knew that there had to be a better way to own real estate.

“I realized that there was something to be done in the real estate space,” he said.

mogul is now on track to do $3 million to $4 million in annual revenue by the end of the year, a fourfold revenue growth year-over-year. Next year, the startup is looking at another three to four times revenue growth on top of that.

The startup makes money by charging fees at various points in the investment process. For example, it charges a flat 5% onboarding fee when a property is added to the platform and earns a 2.5% fee on rental income generated by the invested properties.

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As CEO of mogul, Blackwood says he plays the part of a lawyer, an accountant, an investor and a marketer. About a year ago, he signed and delivered 400 postcards with a brief description of what the company was to every tenant in his apartment building. The postcards explained that he had started a real estate investment company, drawing from his expertise at Goldman, to allow anyone to invest in real estate and receive all the direct benefits.

At the bottom of the postcard, he offered a promotion where recipients could scan a QR code to receive $50 towards their first investment.

The strategy nearly got Blackwood evicted from his building for soliciting from fellow tenants — but it also led to 200 people visiting the site and 50 people signing up.

“That actually led to one of our highest-yielding marketing campaigns,” Blackwood said. “It was a pretty crazy marketing strategy.”

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Blackwood says that at the end of the day, mogul’s growth comes down to its high-quality supply of properties, which drives a retention rate of over 90%. The startup is also constantly improving, like testing different phrasing on its website, and hiring new team members who are sparking new growth.

“It’s the supply, it’s the iterating on the product and then our team members,” he said. “We’re starting to hit our stride, and it’s getting really fun to do so.”

Over three years ago, Alex Blackwood was working 100-hour weeks as a real estate investing associate at Goldman Sachs and making $250,000 a year.

Blackwood left that life behind to pursue mogul, a fractional real estate investment startup he co-founded with fellow Goldman Sachs alum Joey Gumataotao in September 2022. mogul allows users to buy shares in a home and receive the direct benefits of the underlying real estate, including dividends, on a monthly basis. Users pick individual homes and buy shares in those homes, earning rental income. The minimum investment required to start is $250.