Brandon Hance: From USC Football to Multi-Million Dollar Startups and LA Real Estate - EP15

At 22, Brandon Hance raised millions for his first startup.
He went on to build Audio Life — a music commerce platform serving hundreds of thousands of artists and some of the biggest names in the industry — and later Good Threads, which he sold to Zazzle.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonhance/

Today, Brandon is tackling one of the toughest real estate markets in the country, building affordable housing in Los Angeles through his company Angelino, with an ambitious goal of 2,028 units by the 2028 Olympics.

In this episode of The Wealth Clock with Steven Weinstock, you’ll hear:
- How Pete Carroll inspired Brandon’s first venture
- Lessons from scaling and selling tech companies
- The transition from tech entrepreneurship to real estate development
- Navigating LA’s regulatory challenges
- Why he’s betting big on affordable housing

A conversation filled with entrepreneurial insight, bold moves, and the mindset it takes to win in both tech and real estate.

🎙 About Steven Weinstock
Steven Weinstock is a real estate investor and founder of WeCapital and the Goethals Capital Fund. Since 2001, he has built a diverse portfolio of residential and multifamily assets while helping investors access passive income through strategic real estate opportunities. On this podcast, he shares real-world insights on investing, capital raising, and what it really takes to build and scale in today’s market.

📩 Want to invest or get in touch?
Visit: www.WeCapitalX.com

📱 Connect with Steven:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stevenweinstock1

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wecapitalx/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheWealthClockPodcast

Transcript

Steven Weinstock: 0:01

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Wealth Clock with Steven Weinstock. I, myself, have been investing in real estate for over 20 years. Started off with a single family launching my own investment fund real estate investment fund. We also own some multi-family in various markets. This podcast is not about me, it's about people who are building real results in real time. Today's guest is Brandon hance. At 22, he raised millions of dollars for his first startup. Since then, he's built multiple ventures including audio life and good threads. These are platforms that combine commerce, creativity. What makes Brandon stand out is his mindset. He writes about leadership, identity, failure, family, what it means to create meaning and not just profit. He is a true founder and someone who's seen entrepreneurship as an inside out journey. Brandon, I am really looking forward to this. Thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate it.

Brandon Hance: 1:05

Likewise. Thank you for having me.

Steven Weinstock: 1:06

Okay, I'm gonna start off so at 22 I guess you're either a middle of college maybe thinking about dropping out or going to grad school and you're raising millions of dollars. How'd that how'd that start?

Brandon Hance: 1:18

Yes. I actually, I, I did graduate. I wasn't a dropout. I probably wasn't smart enough to be a college dropout. I was actually a college football player. I played at USC and I was fortunate enough to be there for a couple of national championship seasons. And I began, I was an entrepreneur major and I began brainstorming ideas for a company at the beginning of my senior year. And our coach at the time Pete Carroll said, listen, this is gonna be your senior year. We're the number one rated team in the country. You should absolutely enjoy every single second. You'll have a time for business, but that time is not now. And so I took him up on the advice, enjoyed the laughter in the locker rooms and, an undefeated season. On the way back from Miami, after we won the national championship, he actually gave me a notepad and said, it's time like this. Meaning it's time to start brainstorming your idea, planning your future, and taking it from here. So literally on the flight home from Miami even though I was very hungover I began sketching out ideas from my first company.

Steven Weinstock: 2:11

What was the first company? Was it Audio Life? Audio? Was it Good threads

Brandon Hance: 2:14

audio? Yep.

Steven Weinstock: 2:14

Audio Life. Just tell everybody what audio life is.

Brandon Hance: 2:17

Man depends on how old your audience is. But at the time it was what we ultimately ended up being is a distribution platform for musicians. So MySpace had just, come on the scene that was like the biggest thing that was disrupting the music industry and really the beginning of its time from a social media standpoint. We created a widget, and it was the first widget that allowed a musician to sell their music and merchandise on their MySpace profile. And of course, over time, that expanded into a variety of other things that ultimately enabled the same idea for an artist to sell directly to a fan on the internet. So we ended up with. 500,000 independent musicians. But then three of the four major labels used our platform. So we were doing all of the kind of online and social commerce for Eminem, Rihanna, green Day Kid Rock, and all of the biggest bands at that time.

Steven Weinstock: 3:06

So besides playing football, did you have a background in music, entertainment, or in tech, or did you just see an opportunity and ran with it?

Brandon Hance: 3:15

I was just a dumb jock that really had no background. I never even had an internship before starting this company. I did read a book called The Operator, which was about David Geffen and he was a, an entertainment mogul, and that sounded fun and interesting. So I started studying the music industry, which was being completely disrupted through technology and social media, and I thought it didn't make much sense to start climbing my way up a structure that was fundamentally imploding. So why not come up with an entrepreneurial idea? And that was. I honestly was just too naive to know any better

Steven Weinstock: 3:46

what ended up happening with Audio Life.

Brandon Hance: 3:49

I sold audio life to Platinum Equity and the Gores Group in May of 2012.

Steven Weinstock: 3:55

Oh, wow. And talk to us about another company called Good Threads.

Brandon Hance: 4:00

So when I sold that company that I really had exposure to the nonprofit sector and nonprofits like Autism Speaks, American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, raised the majority of their money from big thons, walkathon, Johnathon, things of that nature. And I went to one of those because my Aunt Carol had recently passed away from breast cancer. So my wife and mom. Did this walk and I saw that everybody had custom merchandise. And long story short, a big part of our platform at Audio Life was at the convergence of social media technology and merchandising. And we had built a bunch of proprietary technology. So when I sold my first company, I retained rights to use that in the nonprofit sector, and I created a company named good threads. We used the proceeds of the sale of audio life to essentially capitalize the startup of good threads. And retained 23 of the top 30 nonprofits in the country, including those that I mentioned within the first 18 months, and then sold that business to Zazzle which is a billion dollar portfolio company of Sequoia Capital. In at the end of 2015,

Steven Weinstock: 5:06

when you built these companies, was your plan to sell it to a big private equity to a larger company?

Brandon Hance: 5:12

Yeah, listen, when you raise capital, you have to have an exit strategy. So you know, you can either go public, you can sell it to somebody, or in theory, own and operate it profitably. Nobody ever owns and operates it profitably. That's just not the way that venture is structured because you have to grow very quickly. It's very rare these days to go public. And yeah, if you need to create a, a return to your investors within a reasonable period of time, used to be five to seven years. Now at our U seven is even short. These tend to be decade long journeys. You are likely gonna have to find an acquirer. So I, from a founder standpoint, always wanted to just build a game changing company that I would own and operate indefinitely. But of course, as a fiduciary, I knew that an exit would be an inevitability if we were successful.

Steven Weinstock: 5:57

So you sold these companies. You are sitting pretty, I guess you're not worried about next month's rent or money for coffee. What was your next step? How old are you at this point then? What was your next step?

Brandon Hance: 6:09

Let's see. I sold my first company in 2012, seven, probably 28, 29. And then the next 1, 32, 33, something like that. And in between company one and two, I began investing with a childhood friend of mine who was basically flipping houses in LA where we grew up, and he was doing it successfully for the full seven years that I built My first company, he was doing four or five deals a year, and I thought, gosh, there's gotta be more to this like, how do you grow this business? Is there a way to gain a competitive advantage? So investing became advising. Advising became part-time. And then b before you know it, I ended up deciding to go all in on real estate. I was exploring some other tech ideas. Just nothing really quite caught. My full passion and real estate was very interesting to me because what I saw, at least in his sector is that everybody in the space was like him. They were mom and pop operators. It was really a cottage industry, over a trillion dollars of single family homes in Los Angeles, but all being transacted and built and sold from kind of small time operators. And so I thought if there was an opportunity to bring a more sophisticated approach, maybe we could, build a more scalable platform.

. Steven Weinstock: 7:18

Most real estate across the country, across all asset of classes are, mom and pop investors for the most part. You might have 10 or 20% on the corporate level where they have, hundreds of employees. A billion dollars plus of assets. But for the most part you could have. A mom and pop who has, a $12 million portfolio with one employee. And it's I was recently asked on a panel why real estate owners are so behind when it comes to tech. And the reason is because we're so fragmented and lots of us are mom and pops, where we're not, quickly picking the next shiny object. Here you're coming in with a tech background. Definitely knew how to raise money. And when you first got involved, full-time what was your first project? Did you start continuing flipping houses with this partner? Did you move on to other assets or, had the first couple of years ago?

Brandon Hance: 8:11

Yeah, so we stayed in signal family flips became major additions, quickly became infill new construction spec homes. You know what I saw from a home building standpoint, if you think of any of the national name brands, Lennar, Pulte, whomever, they're all really built on suburban expansion. And the trend line that was more compelling to me was urban contraction. And LA in particular has a housing stock that over 80% of the homes were built pre 1950. So we have a bunch of post-World War II crackerjack homes in very desirable infill locations. So just that fact pattern alone made me think, God, there's gotta be a way to build a next generation home building company that would be focused on infill development. So that was the backdrop that, that in the original thesis I thought in order to really do that, we had to become a vertically integrated company. So I actually got my broker's license and my contractor's license. We hired six or seven software developers to build a platform. They ran the entire lifecycle of a project through. We, we really took more of a tracked home builder approach where you would define, 4, 5, 6, maybe seven model homes and value engineer. Those find production level efficiency. And instead of doing it like everybody else where you wait for a realtor to say, Hey, I got a great deal, and then you have to create a new spreadsheet and call an architect and call a contractor and try to figure it out on a one-off basis. We digitized every parcel in the city of Los Angeles and said, okay, we got six or seven, models, where do these exist? And then we ended up going directly to all of the homeowners through direct mail, SMS, email, door knocking, cold calling, you name it. And we're able to offer them an off market purchase. So if you wanted to sell and you don't want to take market risk or have people walk in through your home for open houses or pay. Dual brokerage fees. This was a great value proposition. So we vertically integrated the platform. We used a lot of technology to do that and we're really ramping up. We were doing about probably 25, 30, maybe 35 homes a year. So we started in 2017, I'd say full-time. By 2019, we were doing, 30, 35 homes a year. These were all like four to$7 million homes on the better neighborhoods west side of la. And obviously COVID hit and so COVID hit and our lines of credit were frozen in Los Angeles. You literally couldn't show a property open house for I think it was six and a half months. And I don't know that there was even a single person in the world, certainly not me or anyone close to my company who was like, single family home values are gonna go through the roof. This is an amazing time. You should go all in. It was the opposite. It was, let's get the hell outta here, cut our losses, move on. And so that was a very shortsighted decision because we know what happened. Single family values shot through the roof. Meanwhile we're fire selling them, cutting bait, losing EMD of properties that we had in the pipeline. So it was a really sad, unfortunate. Time because we were really peaking from an operational standpoint. We raised a ton of capital and, I think we were probably within a year or so from being the largest home builder in the city of la.

Steven Weinstock: 11:17

Oh, wow. Wow. So at this point you're, knee deep in real estate luxury homes, but it's, from what you told me, it sounds like you are selling everything you're buying, meaning you're not, are you buying any cash flowing properties? Are you strictly No, we're merchant builders. So you're paying taxes big taxes on a regular basis with all this? Yep. Got it.

Brandon Hance: 11:39

In LA you gotta pay all kinds of taxes. Yeah, sure, sure. Not just income tax.

Steven Weinstock: 11:43

Okay. Let's fast forward, let's fast forward today. Tell us what you're doing today.

Brandon Hance: 11:47

So that evolved into, we started transitioning the platform into apartments and more of a long-term build to hold strategy. Again, on the, in the heels of the pandemic, we had almost unprecedented compression of cap rates, obviously very affordable debt, so this is like 21. Very quickly. In 22, it began moving in a different direction, which made. Penciling market rate, apartment development very challenging. So we were in some ways pretty desperate to find a thesis that we had high conviction around. It was really difficult to do. The one area, almost ironically that we found it was around affordable housing. So there's a program in Los Angeles called ED one executive directive number one. This is what our mayor Karen Bass did on her very first day in office, was essentially create a bundle of benefits that said, Hey, this is. A huge incentive for private market developers to build affordable housing in the city of la. And we, for the most part, I'm oversimplifying, went all in on that. So I actually wound down Avenue homes still in the process of doing that, but decided to wind it down about two years ago and winding up, if you will. Angelino is an affordable housing developer and that's what we're working on now.

Steven Weinstock: 13:00

And you're developing houses or apartments that are apartment buildings and you're holding onto these?

Brandon Hance: 13:05

Yes.

Steven Weinstock: 13:06

Got it. Okay. Just to go off topic a second, you mentioned Karen be was a boom to your, real estate career as somebody who is not from la the only Karen Bass I know is what I heard the last couple of months on the news. I'm glad to hear that she was good for you. So yeah,

Brandon Hance: 13:21

I'm not, I actually didn't say that exactly in terms of being a boon. I think that there were so many challenges, so many landmines in the field, so to speak, that she did throw out kind of one bone that we did have to pick up and run with. I got a long laundry list of other gripes, but this one idea is one that was pretty compelling.

Steven Weinstock: 13:41

Sounds like a five stars. Thumbs up for real. Okay, good. Good. Yeah, I live I'm born and raised and I'm sitting right here in Brooklyn, New York. I'm well aware of regulation housing regulation, and every once in a while we get thrown a bone. We have something called the 4 21 or 4 21 a. And everyone here in New York loves to talk about it. I, myself am afraid of New York. I haven't invested here since 06 and it's a lot tougher since then. But mostly I've been in New Jersey, across the pond over here and the last seven, eight years in Ohio and Kentucky parts of Pennsylvania. But yeah, New York City regulation they could really they could really make it very tough. So when they, like you said, when they throw one bone or they remove one of the landmines. All of a sudden it becomes a boon.

Brandon Hance: 14:30

It does. Yeah. And these are, multi-year, if not even potentially decade long investment horizons. And yet, the goalpost is being moved, what feels every few months. So it's very difficult to make investment decisions in markets like LA and New York. You're smart enough to to be scared and move on for whatever reason. I'm one of the lonely few that have doubled down and even name the company Angelino as almost a counter thesis because everybody. Both GPS and LPs alike have seemed to have fled Los Angeles. So the sun is still shining. And there's a lot of demand. We're probably chronically, the most undersupplied submarket in maybe the maybe the country. For those reasons and more, we still believe long term. This is a great place to build and hold real estate, but there's no question that in the short term, it's a very challenging environment to operate in.

Steven Weinstock: 15:20

When people ask me, how come I don't invest in New York? I always say that New York, and especially Manhattan, that is good investments for extremely talented operators. You got a regulation compliance building departments as a. As opposed to other areas where it's, collect the rent and if you don't pay, you're out in 45 days. And I always say you have to be very talented to buy in these markets. Here's a compliment, but if you're in LA and you are building and operating apartments and doing okay. You're obviously very talented I'm really happy to to be talking to you, but to make it in la is definitely something I don't really hear about too much at least from smaller operators. It's a real kudos to you. It's a real kudos to you.

Brandon Hance: 16:10

Appreciate that. And and yeah, we all try to build our networks and I've got a fairly, established network of people in LA and we of other developers in la. And we'll get together from time to time for lunch. And just commiserate on how challenging it is. Yes. It ain't easy, that's for sure.

Steven Weinstock: 16:26

So you're born and raised in la. I

Brandon Hance: 16:28

am. Yep. Okay.

Steven Weinstock: 16:29

Very nice. And what do you do when you're not working? Anything fun? You're binging Netflix, you're scaling mountains. What's your deal?

Brandon Hance: 16:35

I've got three young daughters, oh, wow. That's, that consumes a lot of my time. They're all very active in sports. I coach a bunch of their teams. We live down the street from the beach, so we're at the beach all the time. Mostly family stuff.

Steven Weinstock: 16:46

Okay. Very nice. Yeah, I I'm a family man also. I have seven kids same wife. Six sons, one daughter wow. Yeah. No family

Brandon Hance: 16:54

vacations for us.

Steven Weinstock: 16:55

Yeah. We, we just did one this past Passover and we actually had to book the tickets on two separate locator numbers.'cause it only maxed out the five or eight or whatever it was. So that was pretty interesting. And yeah, every trip every airport trip becomes two Ubers. Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely takes, a village to to run my household. And kudos to my wife for that. Yeah. You're investing only in la whether it was before COVID, after COVID. Have you ever ventured outside of LA or outside of California?

Brandon Hance: 17:23

I've not. I've certainly, dreamed about it and I've spoken to, smart people like you who have found success in other markets and. I almost begged me like, you have no idea how much easier and more profitable and less competitive and, the list of benefits and I believe they're true. So it's not that I'm that I think that those are invalid reasons for me. I honestly just don't know how. So for me, I've mentioned we've digitized every parcel in la I know the zoning code extremely well. We have a very robust network of agents. We are the contractor. So I have an, an entire construction company and my whole team, that's how we gained some advantages that allow us to compete on price, just'cause of our execution capabilities and in economies of scale. So I started going through my advantages, which are significant in LA and in spite of those significant advantages, still have a hell of a time, running a profitable business. I think about going into a new market with none of those things. And it just seems, I don't even know where to start.

Steven Weinstock: 18:19

Yeah. You have a lot of New York or Northeast Money that started buying in the Southeast. But you have a lot of the big players that, like I said, they're talented and, they're staying in New York and they're doing well. I have a friend of mine, a personal friend of mine who's buying 70, 80 unit buildings in Queens. And he's operating them despite all the regulation despite everything. I asked him, why, how? And he says, honestly, it's what I know. It's my backyard. Similar to what you're saying, this is the area I know, and for me to start over in, suburbia, USA would be too much of a learning curve. Yeah. And he says to me, he says to me, honestly, like this, he says, it's very bad for landlords here in New York, but if I can make the deal pencil in. If any if we do get a Karen Bass bone thrown to us all of a sudden my single becomes a triple or a home run. He's, a smart operator and like I said, the talented ones could do it well in these high regulated cities. I've seen a lot

Brandon Hance: 19:19

of sorry to cut you off. I have seen a lot of people, even LA people, LA developers who have fled for the, yields chasing secondary markets and look like geniuses in 21, 22, and then came back home crying with their tail between their legs in the last, 12 to 24 months. Yeah, there's something about being in very large. Mature markets that are undersupplied and have almost guaranteed long-term demand that make me feel a little bit warm and fuzzy. And to your point, like if you're playing the long game, at some point along that journey I have conviction. Maybe hope that there'll be a moment of opportunity that I'm grateful that, that was our choice.

Steven Weinstock: 20:00

What are you working on like now? Are you buying a deal? Are you building a deal? Are you focused on just collecting rent or section eight? What's your, what's your, what was your nine to five three days ago?

Brandon Hance: 20:14

So all of that, right? I'm still winding down avenue. So we've got about 40 or 50 condos that are on the market for sale. We've got whatever, 4, 5, 6 apartment buildings for sale. Another 4, 5, 6 that we're bringing to market to lease up and put perm on. So there's kinda an operating business that's happening there on Angelino side. We are we've acquired 10 properties. We have two in escrow. The 10 are all in the entitlement phase. So lots of obviously design and expediting work. Our very first one got approved literally yesterday, so we're gonna put our first shovel on the ground on Monday. So obviously getting the financing lined up for that. And we have a, an institutional capital partner there, so all of the T's crossed and i's dotted to really stand up. That platform is, a her Herculean effort. So yeah, so I'm bouncing between all of those things on a day-to-day basis and. Thankfully I have a team but leading and managing a team is a job in 'EM itself.

Steven Weinstock: 21:12

Did you have any real estate background growing up? Meaning anybody in your family in real estate was your.

Brandon Hance: 21:19

Yeah, my father was a real estate agent and been in the escrow business. I don't even know if you know what escrow is in New York, but we, I think we literally only have it in Southern California. Even central and Northern California don't do escrow the way that we do here. So I have exposure to it from that standpoint, but nothing about investments or development construction or any of the things that I'm directly involved with now.

Steven Weinstock: 21:43

Yeah, I find a lot of operators, didn't necessarily have the background. Yes. I bump into a few where they're, parents or somebody in the family, but I see a lot of there's a lot of investors who are like truly entrepreneurs and they went from a job that even if they liked. Or you have a lot of people who became like an accidental landlord, they couldn't sell their house when they were upgrading. They kept it. Next thing they're happy to collect rent, and the numbers start clicking and hey, why just one, why not two? I could leverage it, OPM, all that stuff. And it actually brings out the, the entrepreneurial spirit and a lot of people just by simply falling. Backwards into a piece of real estate. And next thing they're, they're full-time landlords. Yeah. Yeah, it's really nice. Where do you see yourself in, I don't know, 20 years? Let's let's see how you take that one

Brandon Hance: 22:34

20 years. So in a shorter timeframe than that, we have a big milestone event in Los Angeles in 2028, which is the Olympics. Oh, okay. We have a relatively short term goal to build. 2028 units by the 2028 Olympics when the torch is lit here in la. So that puts us on a pretty meaningful trajectory. We'll see, what, where that trajectory extrapolates beyond that. But for the next, three, four years, I think we have our work cut out for us in a pretty clear and ambitious plan.

Steven Weinstock: 23:05

When your kids are older, are you gonna steer them into real estate or are you gonna let them find it on their own? What's your game plan?

Brandon Hance: 23:15

My, I think my job amongst other things with, as a father is to help cultivate passion and then invest heavily in their passion so that they have the ability to, create their own dreams and have the skills and discipline and pursue those with all of their might. I could care less if it is in real estate but I sure as hell hope they find something.

Steven Weinstock: 23:37

Sounds good. Sounds sounds like a good father. Brandon I had a very a very good time here. This was a great conversation. I just wanna thank you very much for coming on. I know there's a time difference here, but it's what, four or five o'clock where you are in California? I'm here in New York. But thank you very much. I know you're busy. You sound like you're busy but you are very gracious to come on. So thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Brandon Hance: 23:58

You're welcome. I imagine it's dinner time. You've got seven people sitting around the dinner table waiting for you.

Steven Weinstock: 24:03

So I'm actually I'm actually driving to the Catskills. My family is about two hours north for summer break. They're there all summer. I show up for four day weekends and come to the office when I have to record a podcast.

Brandon Hance: 24:15

Understood. Thank you for making that happen. It was a pleasure. And hopefully we'll be in touch.

Steven Weinstock: 24:19

Sure. Where can where can people who are listening follow you, connect with you, reach out to you?

Brandon Hance: 24:25

So I literally never posted on social media until about six weeks ago, and I just started posting on LinkedIn. And it's, it is been a lot of fun. I've been writing on there and enjoying the process. I really haven't spoke much about real estate on there. It's been about, leadership and culture and performance and things of that nature that things that are really passionate for me. I don't even know what the handle is. I assume linkedin.com. I slash brand enhance. Maybe you could drop it in the show notes, but that's it. That's the only place you, I can give you my email if you'd like.

Steven Weinstock: 24:53

Yeah. So I'm gonna drop everything into the show notes. Yes, I've seen you on LinkedIn. It's been very fun, very engaging. I think now that you mentioned the coach I did see you posted about that. Am I correct? Was there a picture of the coach? Oh

Brandon Hance: 25:03

Yeah, exactly. Yep.

Steven Weinstock: 25:04

Yeah, so I did see that. Brandon, thank you so much for coming. I'm gonna put all your contact info in the show notes. That's it for today's episode of The Wealth Clock. If you got any value from this please subscribe, like forward share with your friends. Brandon, thank you so much for coming on. Awesome. Thank you so much.