Will office real estate be the driver for much of the economic growth across the nation’s Opportunity Zones?

Clint Myers is partner at Revolution’s Rise of the Rest, a seed fund that invests in startups located outside of locations that traditionally receive startup funding — an approach that has a lot of overlap with the Opportunity Zones policy.

Click the play button below to listen to my conversation with Clint.

Episode Highlights

• How job growth in the United States comes from startups.
• The case for investing in areas outside of New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Boston — and the challenge of getting investors on board with the idea.
• The importance of the real estate to Rise of the Rest — and the role it plays in developing an entrepreneurial ecosystem that forms the basis for economic growth.
• Revolution’s vision for the next wave of IPOs being much more geographically dispersed.
• Why Clint prefers office real estate to residential or retail as an economic driver.
• The potential for some Opportunity Zone areas to be overbuilt, and why this might be a positive for entrepreneurship in those areas in the long run.
• The impact that the second tranche of IRS regulatory guidance is having.

Featured on This Episode

• Clint Myers on LinkedIn
• Opportunity Zone Expo Las Vegas
• Revolution
• Rise of the Rest Seed Fund
• Rise of the Rest Bus Tour
• Steve Case
• J.D. Vance
• 60 Minutes episode featuring Steve Case
• Hines
• Revolution Companies mentioned: Convene, Cava, Sweetgreen, Mint House
• The Third Wave by Steve Case
• Miami Herald article: Former AOL head praises Miami startup scene

Industry Spotlight: Rise of the Rest

Rise of the Rest is a seed fund within Revolution, a Washington, DC-based investment firm started by former AOL founder Steve Case in 2005. The fund eschews Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston for areas of the country that have typically been overlooked. Rise of the Rest is planning an Opportunity Zone Fund that will focus on office and mixed use real estate.

Learn more about Rise of the Rest

• Visit Revolution.com
• Contact Revolution

About the Opportunity Zones Podcast

Hosted by OpportunityDb.com founder Jimmy Atkinson, the Opportunity Zones Podcast features guest interviews from fund managers, advisors, policymakers, tax professionals, and other foremost experts in opportunity zones.

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Show Transcript

Jimmy: Welcome to the Opportunity Zones Podcast. I’m your host, Jimmy Atkinson. Today I’m on site at the Opportunity Zone Expo at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. And joining me here today is Clint Myers. Clint is a partner at Revolution, a Washington DC-based investment firm that was founded by AOL co-founder Steve Case in 2005. You’ve likely heard of their Rise of the Rest tour, and they have a new real estate platform and an Opportunity Zone fund that will launch later this year. So, Clint, thanks for coming on the show and welcome.

Clint: Thank you, Jimmy. I’m happy to be here.

Jimmy: Absolutely. So, can you start by telling me a little bit about Revolution? What is it, and what makes it different from most other investment firms? I think a lot of people have heard about the Rise of the Rest bus tour and what Steve Case is doing and how he was featured on “60 Minutes” episode, I don’t know, a couple of months back. But tell me a little more about Revolution and what you guys are doing over there.

Clint: Yeah. Revolution is an investment firm started by Steve about 15 years ago. So, he famously started AOL back in the mid-’80s. It was, for a while, the most valuable company in the U.S. In the late ’90s, they had a famous merger with Time Warner, and then after that, Steve decided to spend his time investing on behalf of Revolution through a number of different investors. So, originally, they were a private equity fund that invested in large sectors. I think the original thesis of Revolution was that to make a big impact in the private investment world, you should invest in those sectors that really matter. So, thinking about sectors like agriculture, and real estate, and logistics, things that make up a large percentage of GDP.

So, I think Steve saw that as a hole in the market, especially on the tech side. So, Revolution originally started there. A few years ago, Steve created a new thesis, and I think…You know, he’s interesting, and what he would say is that he’s had a couple of big ideas in his life. The first was that people are gonna get on the internet and he was early but right, but wrong for a long time, of course, famously during the ’80s, and his second is this idea of Rise of the Rest. And in the world of venture capital, 75% of the VC money goes to entrepreneurs in California, Massachusetts, and New York. And when you sit back and think about that, you have to say that doesn’t seem right and it doesn’t seem like that’s representative of where the talent or the imagination or the startup activity is.

So, what Rise of the Rest does is it intentionally invests seed stage capital outside of those three areas. Right? So, Steve, now through this Rise of the Rest fund, which he has been investing for a few years, is formerly run by JD Vance, has made about 120 investments in early-stage companies. And these are in places that are in small towns in America, in larger cities, but they’re really filling a hole in the market. And we have a belief that quite often the capital, the whole of capital is what you need to create opportunity in a lot of these areas, and the market just isn’t really that efficient in doing it at least in the venture capital side. So, the Rise of the Rest has been successful in doing these tours, helping build up ecosystems, shining a light on ecosystems in these cities that already exist, and helping get these areas to another level as we look forward in the future.

I think the data shows that really the job growth in the United States comes from startups. Right? Large companies is kind of a net zero. They add people, they lose people. Same thing with medium-sized companies. You need startup activity to drive economic growth in this country, and if it doesn’t happen broadly across the U.S., then we’re gonna continue to have very unequal outcomes across the U.S.

Jimmy: And it seems, like, the mission of Revolution overlaps a lot with Opportunities Zones, or at least the intent of the Opportunities Zones policy, which is to invest or incentivize investment in these overlooked areas of the country.

Clint: Yeah. Yeah. By chance it does. And when we first met with Steve to broach the idea of starting a real estate platform within Revolution, he actually introduced my partner and I to the concept of Opportunity Zones. We weren’t familiar, but you’re right. The objective of the Opportunity Zones legislation, in my mind, is to use market mechanisms, pricing mechanisms to bring capital to places where it would not otherwise go. And you’re exactly right. That’s exactly on top of what we’re aiming to do. And so, it’s very logical that we would use that legislation in the way it’s intended, I think, to just sort of supercharge what our original mission is which is bringing capital from other places and earn good returns in these areas where capital might not otherwise go.

Jimmy: Right. So, tell me a little bit about your background and how you got to be at Revolution. You just joined last year, I believe. What is your role there? How did you get to your position where you are today?

Clint: My partner and I joined Revolution, you’re right, at the end of last year, the second half of last year. Both of us were at a real estate development company called Hines before. And Hines is a large global developer, a great developer been around since the 1950s. And while there I had a few different hats. But I was in charge of global strategy, which meant devising new investment strategies, helping raise capital, helping raise new funds. And one of the things I found in that world is that from that seat, you meet a lot of investors, you meet a lot of global investors, and a lot of them have these same blinders on that we were talking about earlier, which is they want to invest in the U.S. in just a handful of cities, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Boston.

And then maybe if you’re creative you can talk them into Chicago and Houston. And we had these conversations over and over again. And I’m a data-oriented person, and I would attempt to go in and say, “Well, what about places like Pittsburgh?” Right? “Or Raleigh? You’ve got great universities, you’ve got tons of smart people. Those fundamentally we think drive economic growth and drive rents and values all other things you want as a real estate investor.” And they would sort of nod their head and then say, “Okay, let’s find something in New York where pricing is much higher. The competition is much higher.” And that was a constant source of frustration in my previous institutional life because I thought they were overlooking things. And I think it’s really, it’s these biases that we’ve learned about through economic research over the past 20 years, is there’s comfort in doing what other people are doing. And when you’re at a large investment firm, if you invest in New York and things don’t go well, you’re covered because you’re in a global city.

And so, I think a lot of it was that. I think a lot of it was just the comfort of investing along with everybody else. But as we know, that doesn’t lead to good economic returns. Instead, it just leads you to do what everybody else is doing. So, when I saw what Steve was doing with the Rise of the Rest, my partner and I who we shared a lot of these same views in our previous world, we said the Rise of the Rest, there’s a great real estate analog to that. Both the thesis is similar. But also if you wanna create economic growth in these smaller cities, then yes, you need capital. Yes, you need smart people. You also need real estate as a fundamental input to a city, because we think about it as real estate is a canvas in the city, and all of the economic growth happens on top of that canvas. But in a lot of cities the canvas doesn’t have enough good real estate.

And so if you think about it, if you and I were gonna start a company and we were gonna grow it in a city, one of the things we need is good office space. Assuming we’re in a sort of a knowledge-based company, you need good office space to grow into. And that exists in spades in New York and a lot of these places. You go to some of these smaller cities, it doesn’t really exist. So, there’s a chicken and the egg thing. How are you gonna have economic growth, really strong economic growth, startup activity, all these things we’re talking about if you don’t have the fundamental real estate, the base of it allowing for people to start companies and grow there? And so, that was one of the arguments we made, and it’s very logical that fits into the overall Rise of the Rest strategy, which is it’s all about the ecosystem.

Nobody can do this alone. And I think the ecosystem is even more important when you go to these smaller cities. You need to pull the different pieces together. The entrepreneurs, the venture capitalists, the government, the media, all of these parts, and real estate is just a logical fit of that. And so, that’s why we thought sitting within Revolution as another vertical investment made all the sense in the world, and it’s proven to be that way. I think we’ve been received very well when we go into these cities and with our venture team.

Jimmy: What are the different branches within Revolution? I know there’s a few different departments there. There’s the Rise of the Rest, and there’s a growth, or I think a VC section also. Can you break those down for me? I may have butchered those a little bit.

Clint: You were good. There’s a private equity fund that invests in later stage companies. So, they’ve made investments in companies like Convene, the space operator, which is very relevant, of course, of what we’re talking about. Some restaurant concepts such as Kava and Sweetgreen, so relatively well-established companies. Then there’s a venture capital fund, which is somewhat earlier stage. It just made an investment in a firm called Mint House, which is also relevant.

What Mint House does is they take space in apartment buildings and then run them like hospitality concepts, so competing directly with hotels. And so, another interesting part of our real estate strategy is we’ve got these other prop tech companies in the portfolio. Right? That we can go work with through time. We can work with Convene, we can work with the Mint House, you know, to the extent it makes sense. And so, that’s something that just a traditional stand-alone real estate vertical doesn’t have those. And so, those are the two, and then there’s the Rise of the Rest fund, which is $150 million fund. And then we are the fourth, the fourth vehicle, the fourth vertical in the firm.

Jimmy: Good. Good. I want to talk about OZ Funds and OZ Fund strategy for a minute here. So far, the majority of Opportunity Zone funds that have been set up are focused on real estate investment, and, you know, pretty much just multifamily real estate, by and large. And there’s a place for that certainly. But the Opportunity Zones program, the tax benefit is a capital gains tax benefit. And so, I’ve always felt, and I’ve said this on a few other episodes, like, the best use case for that is gonna be business investment where you can get a 10X or even 100X return and not paying the capital gains on that, at the exit. That’s huge.

You know, seed and VC investors are gonna be the ones reaping the largest investment from this program, and I think that’s kind of how Revolution can kind of play in this field. Am I wrong in saying that?

Clint: No, I think that’s right. I think that…If you stepped back to the original intent of the legislation, I think the original intent really was to drive new business creation in these areas because that’s what you really have the biggest payoff for. Right? The ideal is to have the new Facebook start in one of these areas, because what we’ve found is that the best way to stimulate a startup area is to have one of those big exits. If you have one of those big unicorns and then you start having a lot of angel investment throughout, it just creates this ecosystem on its own.

So, I think you’re right. I think that if we look back in 10 years and you’ve had a number of multibillion-dollar companies started in Opportunity Zones, I think that’s great. I think that’s really gonna be a win for the program. And so, I was having a conversation earlier this morning with a startup that we’ve been talking to, and they are reincorporating, and they’re reincorporating in an Opportunity Zone for exactly this reason, and it’ll change their location decisions as it should. Like, that’s what this is designed to do. And so, you’re right that the venture capital side is gonna be potentially the more interesting side. I think it’s early. This new guidance is helpful in clarification as to is it a revenue test, or is it a head count test? And I think we are pretty happy with what we saw that it’s a head count test. I think that makes sense, and you’re starting to see some venture funds that are targeting this. We’re not specifically. I think as time goes on, then it will be a part. I think a lot of the startups are kind of gonna come to it on their own, and recognize that it helps them, helps them draw more capital, and it helps their outcomes.

But I do totally agree. So, the real estate, in many ways is pretty boring. Real estate, the returns are gonna be between, you know, maybe it’s 8%, or maybe it’s 12% over this period, but there’s not a huge amount of variability. In real estate for the Opportunity Zones, is a little bit of a stay rich strategy as opposed to get rich strategy. The venture world is gonna be…That’s where you have those huge outcomes.

So, I do think just as a citizen, what I really do hope is that the next wave of IPOs that happens when we look back is much more geographically dispersed than the current one we’re in right now. Right? We’re in this little mini IPO wave, and if you look at all the companies, for the most part, they are San Francisco, New York. Look it over and look at…We work in all these companies, and that’s been the nature of this tech cycle, and that’s benefited the real estate in those areas.

So, our fundamental belief and Steve wrote about this in a book called “The Third Wave,” is that the way technology is evolving is gonna be more geographically dispersed. That the startups that are gonna start in this next wave of the internet need to be not just apps on your phone, but actual companies that solve big problems quite often in conjunction with already existing companies in big industries. Right?

So, if you’re gonna start a healthcare company, don’t start it in San Francisco, instead, start it in Nashville or start it in Baltimore where you’ve got these institutions that are already there. Partner with those healthcare systems. And we think that is just gonna be the next wave. And so, we want to position ourselves to do that. We think Opportunity Zones just add to the incentive to start those companies there.

Jimmy: Absolutely. I completely agree. And you said real estate was boring, by and large, but you’re a real estate guy. So, I want to hear a little bit more about you, and if you could talk about real estate’s role at Revolution, and talk a little bit about the Opportunity Zone fund that you’re looking to launch later this year. And how real estate plays into developing an entrepreneurial ecosystem within the emerging markets that you’re targeting. Not just Silicon Valley and New York, but secondary and tertiary markets all over the country. What is real estate’s role there, and how are you getting involved in that?

Clint: Yeah. Well, like you mentioned earlier, if we go to these conferences, both the conferences at the past couple of days, what I see most people trying to do is build multifamily in Opportunity Zones. And I think that’s because it’s the easiest thing to do, and it’s easy for people to understand. Everybody lives somewhere. I can understand that. It’s easy to finance with Fannie and Freddie, and it’s the most liquid asset class. So, because of that, we don’t find that quite as compelling. And we think it’s actually better to do the things that are a bit harder, and we think those are more valuable.

Granted, residential has its role in the strategy, but what we believe is that within a city, really the driver from a real estate standpoint is office. So, we’re generally in a knowledge-based economy, and in the cities, we’re targeting are generally service, and knowledge work is being done. And because of that, the most important real estate then is the office building because that’s where the wealth in these cities is being created.

So, multifamily, and retail, and hospitality, all these things are nice. But the money that’s being spent there is really a derivative of the money that’s created in the office buildings. So, if you don’t have enough good quality office space, the rest of it kind of doesn’t matter. And so, those folks that are starting with the retail, and I heard this stated earlier today, they said they’re investing in retail because it creates the most jobs. And I think that’s a short-sighted way to think about it. I think if you really take a long-term view and you want to help cities grow, then you build more high-quality office that has some creative office space, probably some incubator space and coworking space, a whole mix of different options. And within real estate, the most interesting thing I think that’s happening now is the change in office, the change in how people work. Because, for decades, tenants in office buildings weren’t given options. They were given the option of a seven-year lease or a 10-year lease. That’s it. And that’s kind of crazy if you think about it because everywhere else the consumer rules. Right? And everything else has changed because of the consumer. But in office, that’s how it’s been.

Jimmy: And that’s been a really high barrier to entry for a lot of startup individuals who just wanna test out will this business even be successful? I don’t wanna sign a seven-year lease.

Clint: Of course. And who knows? I mean, the future is so uncertain. If you’re a company, how do you know how much space you’re gonna want in seven years? Right? Recessions happen. You shrink, you grow, and it’s just the nature of that asset class that they just weren’t given those options. But what’s happened is the property sectors are starting to meld together a bit, and office is becoming a little bit more like hospitality in many ways, where there’s a lot more services offered in the buildings because tenants are demanding more services like they didn’t before. And so, it’s starting to have a little bit more of that concierge feel. And just like hospitality, there’s a lot more flexibility on the lease rates, and that’s what…You know, we work as the most famous example, but there’s a lot of other coworking firms out there that are providing some of these services. So, we think that’s a big trend that’s good. We think this is a good thing because the more flexibility you offer to these companies, I think the better for them.

So, I think if you look at the data, the amount of coworking as a percentage of overall office space is way higher in New York and San Francisco than it is in Pittsburgh and these other places. It’s actually hard to find good coworking space and creative space in a lot of these smaller cities. I was in Pittsburgh, and I visited one of the more well-known coworking spaces. It was in a strip mall. I couldn’t find it. It was so tucked away in a strip mall. And so, that hurts the city like Pittsburgh’s ability to attract companies and to grow. And so, if you’re gonna start a company in Carnegie Mellon and you’re gonna grow at a Carnegie Mellon, you don’t really have good space to grow into. And so, again, what do those people do? A lot of times they leave. Right? They go to New York. Right?

Jimmy: They go to New York.

Clint: They go to New York because the ecosystem is better there. But the ecosystem, including real estate, becomes better through time. More of those people at the margin are gonna stay. And I think that’s really the goal is that, just like it’s easier for a company to keep a client than to get a new client. It should be cheaper for cities to keep those people than to attract new people into them. And so, I think economic development broadly is kind of changing, and I think there’s been a bad…I think Amazon was an example. I think the Foxconn deal and Madison was an example of these things where cities took the big approach as opposed to the small approach, and I think they’re gonna be better off if you say, especially these areas that have really good universities, “How do we keep those people? How do we keep people in Madison and in Ann Arbor, so they don’t move to Chicago?” And I think that’s sort of our bet is one of the things we can help with that is create the space for them to live. And I think that’s a big part of the draw to the places like New York, is just a better amenity base, housing base, and just a more fun, livable environment. And I think a lot of these smaller cities are catching up to New York. They’ll never get all the way to New York, but they’re getting better.

Jimmy: And what types of properties specifically are you, and is the Revolution Opportunity Fund targeting? Is it just coworking space, and incubators, and accelerator-type space or is there mixed use or anything else going on with the deals that you’re trying to land?

Clint: Everything we’re working on has at least some office piece of it. I think a mix of use is… we found tenants prefer. Right? And it’s interesting when you have the mix of uses, you can…It’s economically better too because you’re getting more density on the space. You’re able to share the amenities. If you have multifamily and an office, then you can put some amenities that they both can share. So, it actually lowers your costs as a developer and the tenants on both sides appreciate that, and we think that’s the way of the world.

So, generally, most things we’re working on or that, are going to be some sort of mix of uses, but with high-quality office space that doesn’t often exist in a lot of these cities, and I would say in the parts of the city where we think entrepreneurs are going to continue to want to congregate. So, we think density really matters, and especially in these smaller cities, you’re gonna be better off as opposed to having five different parts of the city where the entrepreneurs are to have just one or two that they are, and you’ve got the service providers nearby, the venture capitalists nearby. We think that’s a better outcome. And so, generally, most of the areas are in the city centers or in the emerging neighborhoods. And like you alluded to earlier, the Opportunity Zones have been fairly favorable in most of the cities we’re targeting where their situations we would have been doing anyhow, they happen to be in Opportunity Zones. And that works out to our benefit. But we’re certainly not, you know, chasing Opportunity Zones. We want the strategy to lead everything we do, and the strategy being, you know, creating space for economic growth to flourish.

Jimmy: Of course. Yeah. But there is a lot of overlap with the Opportunity Zones program and Revolution’s mission. Since you’ve joined Revolution almost a year ago now, what’s been your biggest challenge there so far?

Clint: Well, I think that Opportunity Zones themselves, when we originally conceived of starting a platform, Opportunity Zones were out there, but they were a pretty small part of what we were thinking about. Right? We were thinking about a fairly traditional real estate platform blending venture in real estate. That was the angle. And certainly, the cities we were targeting was different. Opportunity Zones have been such a huge item in the news, and given the overlap with our strategy, they’ve kind of been the focus, and that has been good, and it’s also slowed us down a bit because you’re beholden to the IRS, or you’re beholden to Treasury because…

Jimmy: You’re waiting for those regs to come out. And now we’ve got 250 pages of regs to read through.

Clint: So, you know, we would have wanted to work at a certain speed in general. You kind of have to alter your speed based upon the government. And so, that’s been a bit of a frustration. But I think the Opportunity Zone legislation is a net positive. It sort of slowed us down to maybe where we wouldn’t have been if we had a traditional vehicle.

Jimmy: Sure. But the payoff on the back end, you’re hoping makes it all worthwhile, right?

Clint: We hope so. We hope so. You know, it’ll be interesting to see the outcome of Opportunity Zones. We were just watching a panel where one of the panelists was pretty negative and stating the view that he thinks a lot of bad projects are gonna get done, at least the projects that they’ve seen. That might be true. But one of the more maybe controversial takes I would have on Opportunity Zones is that I think if you look historically, there have been situations where equity capital has been mis-invested through different cycles. Quite often, you have bubbles. Right? And the last bubble of the tech boom in the late ’90s, I would argue, was actually a positive outcome. And the reason I think it was a positive outcome is because the bubble sends a signal to the market to create more supply like the high prices do. And when that happened, you had a lot of new supply in that situation being like fiber optic cable laid. There was a company called Global Crossing that the stock was crazy, and so they used that money, and they kept going to the market raising more money and laying fiber optic cable across the Atlantic Ocean.

Well, that was terrible for those investors in Global Crossing, but it was great for us now because they created all that capacity. So, part of me thinks that Opportunity Zones might lead to some bad investments made, which would probably mean too much real estate being built, and I think that would be the mistake and some areas you get overbuilt. As long as you’re not an investor in that, I think it’s positive. I think if you have overcapacity of real estate in a lot of these areas, it keeps the rents low, and so I think that could actually be a good thing. Jane Jacobs said long ago that interesting ideas require cheap real estate, and a lot of these places that’s kind of what you want, is these areas where you want pockets of success but you also want pockets of cheap real estate for people to do their work and to live in, and need these things to change. So, I was actually listening to him say that and kind of going…In some regards, I kind of hope that’s right. I hope some areas do get overbuilt because I think that’s good for people that need to need cheap real estate.

Jimmy: Yeah. It’s interesting. It’s a kind of perverse way of thinking about things. But, but, you know, I can see what you’re saying. You know, 10 years from now or 15 years from now, if we realize that some of these areas have been overbuilt, well, at least now these cities have some capacity to grow into those buildings.

Clint: Yeah. The last period of overbuilding, and this is what some people point to, is you had the ’86 tax law change, and there was a massive overbuilding in real estate in the early ’90s. And that changed the lens of real estate developers for a long time in a negative way, because then what you had was you had massive overbuilding of office for a lot of cities which led to high vacancy rates and rents fell. And that comes back to that dynamic that I was just talking about, which in many ways was good because it allows companies to take space cheaper. But it also scared developers away and lead to less development in the future. So, it could alter cycles. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out, but we’ve seen some of that before.

I would say the interesting difference with Opportunity Zones compared to other pieces of legislation is that it’s really is market-based. Like, they’re really laying out the principles and saying, “Given that, now let’s let the market work.” And for that reason, I think it’s gonna work far better than other pieces of legislation that have been enacted to try to solve some of these same problems.

Jimmy: Yeah. Letting the private market, letting free market capitalism try to determine where this capital should go. I agree with you. That’s one of the things that drew me to the program. I like that philosophy behind it. And we spoke a little bit about the regulatory guidance that came out in April, I wanted to get a sense from you. Did it answer the questions that you had personally about the Opportunity Zones statute, or did it answer questions that Revolution had? Did it kind of get you off the sidelines here in the last few weeks? Or how are you proceeding since those guidelines came out?

Clint: Yeah. I think the main, I’d say the main question we had, there were a few technical issues that it did help clarify. I think the clarification on investing in companies was the big one, and I think for, generally, the projects we’ve been spending time on, aren’t that controversial, meaning they’re ground-up developments. They’re clearly in Opportunity Zones. And so, we felt like everything we were working on was fine, was gonna work.

I think the impact it had was on the investor side, and I think a lot of investors, maybe through their service providers, were kind of a little bit skittish and said, “We know there’s more guidance coming. We’ve heard. It’s not prudent for us to move until that comes.” Even if realistically, they felt comfortable too. So, I think for us that’s been the bigger piece, is getting comfort with our partners that this is pretty much what it is now. And like I said, I think on the company formation, I think that was good. That was good guidance, but it didn’t really impact any of the immediate projects we were working on.

Jimmy: And one final question for you before we go. I ask this to a lot of my guests that come on the podcast. What’s the most memorable investment that you’ve made in your life? Is there anything in particular that stands out over the course of your career?

Clint: Well, I’m a fan of the guidance to invest in yourself. Invest in yourself wherever possible. And, you know, I think when we took the leap to start this platform, that’s kind of betting on yourself and investing in something into the great unknown. And leaving a great firm like we did, a lot of people thought we were crazy to do it. And the hope I guess, maybe this will be a future me talking, my hope is that this investment we’re making right now is gonna be the best investment we make.

Jimmy: I love that answer. The current project you’re working on. Right? That should always be the best one anyway, I think.

Clint: Right.

Jimmy: Clint, thanks for joining me today. Can you tell our listeners before we go where they can go to learn more about you, and Revolution, and Rise of the Rest?

Clint: Absolutely. The website is revolution.com, and for Rise of the Rest, a quick Google will take you to a number of stories, especially on our last tour in Florida. There’s some great stuff that’s been written about that.

Jimmy: Good. Well, for our listeners out there, I’m gonna have show notes for this episode on the Opportunity Zones database website. You can find those show notes at opportunitydb.com/podcast, and I’ll have links to all of the resources that Clint and I discussed on today’s show. I’ll have links to Revolution and Rise of the Rest, and maybe I’ll include a couple of good articles on there as well. And, again, that URL is opportunitydb.com/podcast. Clint, thanks for joining me today. This has been great. Thank you.

Clint: Thank you.