housing
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Zena Chaudhry and the small details that make a home
A family friend needed help. Zena Chaudhry discovered how much could stand between a woman and a safe place to stay - then built Sakeenah Canada around the details others had missed.
Shannon Brooks and the art of fewer surprises
Since entering real estate in 2001, Shannon Brooks has built a Twin Cities practice around explaining what happens next. Her work with the Brooks Team, housing organizations and fellow agents puts that habit to work beyond the closing table.
Ryan Marshall and the education of an operator
Before he ran PulteGroup, Ryan Marshall owned a gas station off Interstate 80. The distance between those jobs is considerable. The questions about cash, customers and people are surprisingly familiar.
José Manuel Villanueva and the business of starting again
He helped turn discounted fashion into an international business at Privalia. With 011h, José Manuel Villanueva and his longtime partner Lucas Carné have taken on a slower, heavier proposition: how homes get built.
Tiffany Pang-Cadengo and the problem between the agencies
She left an engineering job at Instacart to help cities respond to homelessness. Outreach Grid began with a deceptively practical question: how could the people helping the same person share what they knew?
Ankur Jain and the Rent Check That Became a Business
He learned to make introductions before he could legally rent an apartment. Now Bilt’s founder is trying to turn the monthly payment that vanishes into a landlord’s account into a passport for the neighborhood.
Elizabeth Emmons Has Spent a Career Making the Invisible Part of Homebuying Visible
After more than two decades at Radian, Elizabeth Emmons sees marketing as translation: make the mortgage system legible, connect employees to a shared purpose, and earn trust one useful explanation at a time.
Jason Ballard Is Selling Builders a Different Way to Build
A conservation biologist followed the environmental problem into the walls of the American home. Now ICON’s co-founder is moving robotic construction from company showcase to builder-owned tool.
Courtney Keating Wants to Make Data Feel Human
The CMO of Acxiom spent twenty years in mortgages, fintech and real estate learning to translate complicated things into plain language. Now she runs the brand at one of the most data-heavy companies in marketing.
Allia Mohamed
Allia Mohamed is the co-founder and CEO of Openigloo, a New York City rental-review platform she launched in 2020 to bring transparency to one of the most opaque markets in America. A Canadian-Egyptian New Yorker who came up through Wall Street capital markets and venture capital, she turned her own miserable experience renting from a neglectful Brooklyn landlord into a crowdsourced 'Yelp for landlords.' Openigloo has grown into a leasing marketplace used by well over a million NYC renters to review buildings, vet landlords, and find verified apartments, while Mohamed has become a public voice in tenant-rights fights like the FARE Act.
Neil Rubler
Neil Rubler is the founder and CEO of Vessel Technologies, a New York company that mass-produces small, prefabricated, solar-ready apartment buildings and sells them through the housing industry's first franchise model. After two decades running large multifamily real estate firms - Vantage Properties and then Candlebrook Properties, which oversaw more than $3 billion in assets across seven states - he left conventional development behind in 2017 to attack the so-called Missing Middle: people who earn too much for subsidized housing and too little for market rate. A Wharton MBA and magna cum laude Cornell graduate, Rubler treats housing like a manufactured product rather than a construction project, aiming to build higher-quality homes faster, cheaper, and more sustainably.
Jamie Almanza
Jamie Almanza is the CEO of Bay Area Community Services (BACS), a 70-year-old Oakland nonprofit she has led since 2010 - scaling it from a small mental-health agency into a 500+ person, $100M+ social impact operation that houses, supports, and prevents homelessness for more than 20,000 Northern Californians a year.
Joe Garcia
Joe Gebbia co-founded Airbnb in 2008 out of a San Francisco living room - air mattresses, breakfast included - and turned a half-crazy idea into an $85B company. His current venture, Samara, builds factory-assembled, solar-ready backyard homes (ADUs) that go from permit to move-in in under seven months. In early 2025 he became America's first Chief Design Officer, tasked with redesigning the federal government's 27,000 websites. A Rhode Island School of Design graduate with dual majors in graphic and industrial design, Gebbia approaches every problem - housing affordability, government UX, refugee shelter - through the lens of democratic, empathetic design.
Shawn Mullahy
Shawn Mullahy is the Chief Executive Officer of Zumper, North America's largest privately-held rental marketplace. Promoted to CEO in March 2026 after serving as Chief Revenue Officer and before that General Manager and SVP of Sales, Mullahy brings a rare combination of legal training, real estate brokerage experience, and tech-company operational chops. He leads a company that has raised $178M+ in funding and is pushing the rental experience toward a future where finding an apartment feels as seamless as booking a hotel.
Joe Gebbia
Joe Gebbia is the co-founder of Airbnb and a designer-turned-billionaire who helped reshape how humanity thinks about trust between strangers. He graduated from RISD with dual degrees in graphic and industrial design, then turned air mattresses and a breakfast cereal stunt into a $100 billion company. After stepping back from Airbnb in 2022, he founded Samara - a prefab housing company - and in 2025 became America's first Chief Design Officer under the Trump administration, tasked with redesigning the federal government's 27,000+ websites to feel as intuitive as the Apple Store.
Brian Potter
Brian Potter is a structural engineer turned writer who publishes Construction Physics, a Substack newsletter with 72,000+ subscribers covering industrial technology, manufacturing productivity, and why buildings still cost so much to build. A Senior Infrastructure Fellow at the Institute for Progress, he spent 15 years in construction - including a front-row seat to the $2B collapse of Katerra - before channeling his frustration into some of the most rigorously researched long-form writing on industrial systems published anywhere. His first book, The Origins of Efficiency, was published by Stripe Press in October 2025.
Noah Smith
Noah Smith is an independent economist-turned-writer best known for Noahpinion, one of Substack's largest economics newsletters with over 414,000 subscribers. A former Bloomberg Opinion columnist and ex-finance professor at Stony Brook University, he writes about technology, macroeconomics, geopolitics, and domestic policy with a techno-optimist, center-left lens. He also co-hosts the 'Econ 102' podcast with Erik Torenberg and is working on an English-language macroeconomics book.
Matt Yglesias
Matthew Yglesias is one of America's most influential political writers - a Harvard-trained philosopher turned media entrepreneur who co-founded Vox and then bet on himself by launching Slow Boring, a Substack newsletter that earns him over $1.4 million a year. Known for his contrarian, rigorously argued takes on housing, immigration, economics, and American governance, he occupies a strange and productive niche: too wonky for Twitter, too heterodox for legacy media, and too prolific for anyone to ignore.