Gary Acosta is an entrepreneur, public policy advocate, and investor. He is the Co-Founder & CEO of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP ®). NAHREP is the largest Latino business organization in the nation. Mr. Acosta is also the co-founder of L’ATTITUDE, a major event he produces with international business executive Sol Trujillo, former United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz, and music superstar Emilio Estefan. L’ATTITUDE celebrates the key role of Latinos in business, entertainment, sports, tech, and politics. Acosta is also a general partner of L’ATTITUDE Ventures, the nation’s largest venture capital fund exclusively focused on Latino-led start-ups. Mr. Acosta writes a weekly blog about business and current events at garyacosta.com.
Click on the red play button to listen to the audio version. Last week, L’ATTITUDE Ventures closed its first institutional fund, raising over $100 million through a strategic anchor investment by JP Morgan Chase and initial investments from the Trujillo Group and Bank of America. Other key investors in this fund, which is aimed solely at investing…
Many of us know that Latinos were hit harder than any other demographic during the great recession of 2008 to 2012, but not everyone knows why. Those of us in the real estate business were taught that we should invest in real estate, because it is what we know. That makes a lot of sense.…
Last week, Mortgage Professional America Magazine published an interview with William Tessar, the CEO of Civic Financial Services, a little-known hard money lender in California. The article claims Tessar has been ranked as a top CEO by “women and employees of color”, although it does not cite the publications who supposedly recognized him in this…
The term “start-up” is one we all have heard hundreds of times, but I have never been totally clear on what the term actually means. I know it refers to companies that are relatively new, but I also know that not every new company is considered a start-up. I decided to ask a few people…
Late last year, Spencer Rascoff, the former CEO of Zillow, reached out and invited me to be part of a new advisory board for his latest real estate start-up, Pacaso. I knew Spencer when he was at Zillow and we kept in touch over the years. I don’t sit on many advisory boards, but I…
Doctors Marlow Hernandez and Richard Aguilar founded Cano Health in 2009 to provide quality end-to-end health care for underserved Latino communities in Florida. In 2016, their company generated $1.6M in revenue, but they had an idea to roll-up other smaller medical practices in their footprint to leverage economies of scale. With the help of my…
The stock market is near an all-time high, while unemployment is up and wages are flat. It begs the question: is the stock market overvalued? I’m not a stock market expert, I don’t follow the market like some people, but I do know a few things. A share of stock is a piece of a…
In the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the government launched the Paycheck Protection Program, a trillion-dollar effort to incentivize employers to retain their employees during the quarantine and maintain most of their compensation. The program was administered by the Small Business Association (SBA) and provided forgivable loans to eligible employers…
The stock market had a great week, at the same time a record six million people filed for unemployment benefits. It doesn’t take a genius to realize there is something incongruent with these two data points. Our economy succeeds when there is a healthy balance of buyers and sellers of goods and services. The cataclysmic…
Oscar Munoz, the CEO of United Airlines, and the only American-born Hispanic CEO of a major corporation, announced his retirement last month. He will step down as CEO in May and will take the position of board chairman. United is the largest U.S.-based airline and the 76th largest U.S. corporation according to Fortune Magazine. Under…
The NAHREP National Convention is moving to the Spring (March 16-18) and will take place concurrently with our Housing Policy Summit. The move is designed to bring more business content to the first part of the year, and make room for our new Fall convention focused on Sales Mastery, Real Estate Skills and Wealth Building,…
I spent the Friday in El Paso with my friend Beto Pallares. Beto is an amazing guy. He holds several degrees including a BA from Brandeis and a PhD from UTEP. He manages a $150M venture fund for one of the wealthiest families in all of Texas. He also sits on eight corporate boards, but…
In today’s evolving economy, many of the jobs that exist today won’t exist in the near future. Robotics and artificial intelligence are changing the world as we know it. If your job can be automated, it will be automated. For someone, fifty years of age or older, this may not affect you as much, but…
I recently read that 40% of real estate agents and loan officers will change companies in the next twelve months. This tends to happen when the market shifts dramatically. Real estate is a cyclical business and after one of the longest bull markets in modern history, it’s not a surprise that things are starting to…
Amazon announced this week that they will no longer locate a secondary headquarters in Long Island after receiving a wave of backlash from local politicians and community groups. Last year, the retail juggernaut completed perhaps the largest RFP process in U.S. history when they selected Long Island, NY and Crystal City, VA to house their…
This past week, interest rates on mortgages broke past the 5% barrier, the highest in almost ten years. The stock market had its biggest two-day drop since the collapse in 2008, and the projected deficit for 2018 was adjusted upward to nearly $1 trillion. Additionally, gas prices are spiking and Ford announced major job cuts.…
For whatever reason, I have never felt like I have learned all that I need to know. Learning is a constant in my life, and I think it has made me a happier person. I can’t think of anything more depressing than the thought of there being nothing left to achieve and nothing more to…
For those of you who follow NAHREP or myself on social media, you probably know that the L’ATTITUDE event took place two weeks ago in San Diego. I have been contemplating an event like L’ATTITUDE for about three years. It’s my passion project and my “moon shot”, so when the event finally came and went it was…
Sol Trujillo wrote a Labor Day op-ed titled, “The ‘Latino Factor’ Will Save America’s Economy”. The article was published in the Wall Street Journal on August 29th and was peppered with data points about the real state of our workforce and why the country should be grateful that we have a Latino population who is…
With a market cap of more than 940 billion dollars, Apple is currently the most valuable company in the world, but Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook are closing in quickly in the race to become the first company worth over a trillion dollars – that’s trillion with a “t”. In fact, these five platform companies…
