Compass Co-Founder Robert Reffkin In Prime Position To Become America’s Next Black Billionaire
The real estate firm Compass went public recently at $18 per share. By the end of the first day of trading the stock was at $20.15, giving the growing company a market cap of $7.9 billion.
We obviously have no idea where the stock will go over time, but the public listing puts its 41-year-old co-founder, Robert Reffkin, in prime position to potentially become America’s next black billionaire . If all goes to plan, Reffkin would also be the youngest black billionaire in the elite group.
Reffkin co-founded Compass in 2012 with Ori Allon. He formerly was an executive at Goldman Sachs. Reffkin owns $480.7 million worth of Compass shares currently and has another $186.5 million that will be disbursed to him over the next four years. So at today’s prices, Reffkin is essentially worth around $670 million on paper right now.
Reffkin’s stake in the company makes him one of the most successful real estate entrepreneurs in the country after nearly a decade of being a fringe player in the industry.
Reffkin got his bachelor’s degree and MBA from Columbia and went into the world of consulting with gigs at McKinsey, Lazard, and in the administration of George W. Bush (he was fellow in the Treasury Department). While with Goldman Sachs he rose through the ranks to become chief of staff to firm president and COO, Gary Cohn.
Compass is not yet profitable. Since its 2012 founding, the company has lost around $1 billion. Compass lost $270 million in 2020 alone.
That said, the company’s revenue has also grown by more than 20 times since 2016 when it had $187 million in revenue. Revenue in 2020 topped $3.7 billion. According to the comapy’s S-1 filing with the SEC, Compass’s market share rose from 1% to 4% from 2018 to 2020. Compass is growing roughly 10 times faster than the average U.S. real estate company.
Reffkin was inspired to found Compass by his mother, Ruth, who is a long-time real estate agent. She now works for her son’s firm. On a personal front, he has raised more than $1 million for charity. One of the charities, America Needs You, (he is the founder) aims to help young people who live below the poverty line and are the first person in their family to go to college.
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Here’s what drives the success of Robert Reffkin, who left Goldman Sachs to take a chance on real estate and is now poised to become America’s youngest Black billionaire
- Robert Reffkin grew up in Berkeley, CA, with his mom, who is now a Compass agent.
- After graduating in two years from Columbia, he began his career on Wall Street.
- Reffkin took Compass public Thursday, making him one of just 8 Black billionaires in the US.
Robert Reffkin may soon be the youngest Black billionaire in the US after taking his real-estate startup Compass public on Thursday.
The 41-year-old cofounder and CEO has risen to prominence quickly. From growing up in Berkeley, CA with a single mom, to becoming a White House fellow and rising through the ranks at Goldman Sachs before launching Compass, here are some things to know about the up-and-coming executive.
The women in his life have inspired him
Reffkin grew up in Berkeley, CA, as an only child with a single mom, who is now a real estate agent for Compass. In a LinkedIn post Thursday after his company went public on the New York Stock Exchange, Reffkin said, “I started Compass because of my mom, Ruth, a single mom who embodies the entrepreneurial spirit.”
Today, Reffkin lives in New York City with his wife, Benis Reffkin, who is a business and life coach. He dubbed her the “most important person” in his life and an inspiration, in a LinkedIn post from Mother’s Day 2019 that documented how she lived the American Dream. The couple have three kids together.
He’s been a founder before
Reffkin started his first business when he was just 15 years old, according to an article from Columbia College Today. Backed by babysitting and bar mitzvah money, the young founder started a DJ company called “Rude Boy Productions” that brought in a total of $100,000 by the time he graduated from high school, the article said.
In later years, Reffkin founded two philanthropic educational groups prior to starting Compass. One is Success Academy Charter Schools, a school system for low-income Black and Hispanic students in New York City that helps diminish educational disparities.
The second is a 501c3 non-profit called America Needs You, which according to its website, “fights for economic mobility for ambitious, first-generation college students.”
He’s turned his running hobby into a way to help others
Though he founded two philanthropic organizations, Reffkin’s generosity doesn’t end there. Even his running hobby is helping others.
His “primary philanthropic undertaking” has been running a marathon in each of the 50 states in the US to raise $1 million for youth education and enrichment programs, he said in a bio on America Needs You.
Reffkin graduated from Columbia University in just under two years, according to Fortune, which placed him on the 40 under 40 list in 2014. He then became the youngest business analyst ever hired at McKinsey & Company where he spent two years before returning to his alma mater to get his MBA and then going back to Wall Street as an associate at Lazard.
He then rose through the ranks at Goldman Sachs, eventually becoming the chief of staff for Gary Cohn, the former president and chief operating officer of Goldman. But he left the storied Wall Street firm in 2012 to start his company.
Reffkin left his banking career to start up Compass with the tech entrepreneur Ori Allon. But sources told Insider previously he didn’t actually know much about the industry he was trying to disrupt, saying he had a rudimentary knowledge and didn’t know the difference between a co-op and an apartment.
Doing things he’s uncomfortable with is just part of his personality, though. One person said he’s lacked experience in almost everything he’s ever done but that’s part of what makes him an “extraordinary person.”
His former boss, Cohn, said Reffkin just has an “aura of confidence.”
He has big ambitions for his career, which could include public office
In 2005, he was a White House fellow under the George W. Bush administration, where he served as the special assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury, John Snow.
He’s always had big ambitions for his career, sources told Insider previously. Those close to him have said he has talked about someday running for public office, such as mayor of New York City.
How Robert Reffkin went from being a C-average student to the founder of Compass
‘I believe that to be truly successful, you can’t have a Plan B.’
CEO and founder Robert Reffkin / Compass
In April, real estate tech company Compass forged ahead with its initial public offering and is now valued at several billions of dollars.
At that time, TechCrunch Senior Editor Alex Wilhelm caught up with founder and CEO Robert Reffkin to chat about his company’s debut in the market’s suddenly choppy waters for tech and tech-enabled debuts.
This week, I caught up with Reffkin on a whole other topic: his path to entrepreneurship as a child raised by a disowned single mother whose father had died homeless. Reffkin is so passionate about inspiring others from nontraditional backgrounds to pursue their dreams that he wrote a book about it.
In our discussion, Reffkin shared what he believes are the secrets to his success (hint: one of them involves lots of listening) and his advice for his young entrepreneurs, especially those from non-privileged backgrounds.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
TC: As the mother of a teen who is already trying to start his own business, I’m intrigued by your DJing as a teenager. What finally got you motivated to care about school and how did you manage to graduate in such a short amount of time?
Reffkin: Well, I think your son might just be on the right track! Please give him a word of encouragement from me, from one entrepreneur to another.
My mom says that a lot of other parents thought she was crazy for letting me launch my DJ business. But starting a successful DJ business in high school helped me learn about myself and my passion for entrepreneurship — and it ultimately helped me get into Columbia, forming the core of both my personal statement and the relationships I built with several members of the admissions team.
I believe the first step is always to dream big. For me, my big dreams for my college future started on a trip to New York City. I toured Columbia and fell in love with it, but I knew it was going to be hard for me to get in. In fact, my high school guidance counselor said, “Don’t even apply. It wouldn’t be worth your time and money on the application fee.” In that moment, my desire to go to Columbia went from strong to absolute, because suddenly it felt like it was about something larger than myself — not just where I went to school, but about a broader struggle for opportunity for people like me. So I poured myself into my SAT prep to show that even though I had a C average, I had what it took to keep up at a top school. And thankfully, it paid off.
In high school and college, I was a C-student in part because I didn’t see how studying calculus or Western Civilization related to my life or my dreams. I knew that excelling in school wasn’t going to be the way I was going to distinguish myself in the world. At the same time, I was energized by my entrepreneurial efforts and my summer internships. I moved as quickly as I could to get through school and have my real life begin, because the real world made so much more sense to me.
TC: How do you think being raised by a single mother without privilege helped shape you as a man, and entrepreneur? How would you say being a person of color impacted your path?
Reffkin: Growing up, it was just me and my mom. She’s an Israeli immigrant, disowned by her parents because I was Black. My father abandoned us and died, homeless, when I was young. What shaped me most as an entrepreneur was learning from my mother. She embodied the entrepreneurial spirit and taught me one of the most important principles: every time you get knocked down, you’ve got to bounce back with passion. I saw her face bad relationships, bankruptcy and the stream of daily rejections that comes from being an agent. And she always bounced back. So when the world told me I couldn’t do something or that I was destined to fail, I was ready for them. Thanks to my mom, I already knew how to bounce back.
CEO Robert Reffkin & mother, Ruth / Compass
Being Black and Jewish, I’ve felt out of place my entire life. In most classes in high school and college, I was the only Black person. In almost every meeting early in my career, I was the only Black person. When I was raising capital for Compass, I almost never saw someone Black on the other side of the table. But I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve been lucky to get terrific advice along the way from so many Black mentors, from the late Vernon Jordan, to Ken Chenault, the former CEO of American Express, to Bayo Ogunlesi, who is lead director for Goldman Sachs. There’s a really strong community of people who’ve all supported each other.
TC: You’ve had some impressive mentors over the years. How did those relationships develop? How have they been valuable besides the obvious?
Reffkin: Growing up, I was hungry for advice. Coming from a single-parent home, I looked for guidance and wisdom on how to create a better life wherever I could find it. My mom connected me to several nonprofits when I was in high school that helped open my eyes to how much opportunity and support there was out there in the world.
The most important lesson I’ve learned in my life is that feedback is a gift. Even when it’s hard to hear, feedback is a gift. My relationships with many of my mentors deepened because I started asking them for really tough, candid feedback — the sort of things they thought other people wouldn’t tell me. And then, I’d actually take their advice, apply it in my life and let them know how it had helped me. That did two things: First, it led to more honest and practical advice that helped me get better faster. Second, it made the people who had given me advice feel far more invested in my success and the success of what I was working on.
The other thing my mentors gave me was the sense that even though the world was telling me I couldn’t be successful, I could be. Meeting someone like Vernon Jordan who advised presidents and CEOs alike, had a profound impact on me. He was a father figure to me. I met him when I was 23 years old, and at that time, it wasn’t clear to me that you could be successful in the business world as a Black man. I just hadn’t seen it before. When I started at Lazard, Vernon Jordan was the only other Black investment banker there. He was not just a senior partner, he was a legend, widely known for serving on more Fortune 500 boards than anyone in history. He took a strong interest in me, and with his support and advice, he made me feel like I belonged and helped me see a path where I could be as successful as I wanted to be.
I founded a nonprofit in my twenties called America Needs You that has provided mentorship, career development and college support to thousands of students. I wrote my new book, “No One Succeeds Alone,” as a way to pay it forward by making the lessons I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from so many remarkable people available to everyone — and it’s why I’m donating all of my proceeds to nonprofits that help young people realize their dreams.
TC: What advice would you give to young, aspiring entrepreneurs, especially those from non-privileged backgrounds?
Reffkin: Here’s the advice I’d give to someone from an underrepresented group who just graduated college and is in their first job:
1) Don’t let anyone get in the way of your dream. Not society, not your colleagues, not even yourself. Whenever anyone tells you to slow down, speed up.
2) Spend the next 10 years learning as much as you can from the smartest people you can. Find mentors in your job and outside that will give you the honest feedback that others won’t. Feedback is a gift. It’ll be hard for you to hear, but it’s actually even harder for them to give it to you. So you may have to ask for it directly and let people know that you can take it.
3) Learn how to turn negativity into positive energy that fuels you. There will always be skeptics, doubters and haters telling you that you can’t do something or that you don’t belong.
TC: What’s next after Compass?
Reffkin: I believe that to be truly successful, you can’t have a Plan B. As a CEO, you have to be all-in, and that’s what I am for Compass: 100% dedicated to our 23,000 agents and employees. One of my mentors told me about the “shower test” once — that if you’re not excited enough about your job to think about it in the shower, you’re probably not in the right job. And I’ll tell you: I’m so passionate about the company we’re building that I’m still thinking about Compass in the shower. At Compass, we’ve accomplished much in the past eight years, but we’re truly just getting started.
