POWERS

This week Chris sits down with Ross Perot Jr., Chairman of Hillwood and The Perot Group. Ross founded Hillwood in 1988 and built Alliance Texas, his masterpiece, a 1 of 1 27,000-acre development. They discuss:• Why Trammell Crow told him to just build warehouses• How Hillwood developed Alliance Texas• How a rare earth company got its air permit in three weeks• How President Bush helped close Scoti...

In this episode, Chris sits down with Woody Hunt, Chairman Emeritus of Hunt Companies, the El Paso holding company that grew out of a hardware and building materials business his family bought in 1947. Woody joined in 1968 and watched his father take the company public when he was 23. Five years later, fixed-price contracts in a year of runaway inflation cost it about 25% of its equity, and by 197...

This week Chris sits down with Shlomo Chopp, Founder of Case Equity Partners. His job is helping real estate owners get out of or restructure loans they can't pay. Shlomo got into this after an attorney told him to read the CMBS loan documents, and he read them cover to cover. Today his clients range from owners with a couple million dollars of debt to an $800 million capital stack. They get into...

This week Chris sits down with Terry Montesi, Founder and CEO of Trademark Property Company, a Fort Worth developer of retail and mixed-use real estate he started in 1992. Terry was last on the show in 2019, in the middle of what the business was calling the retail apocalypse. They have closed four retail deals in the last 30 days, more than they have ever closed in a month, and Terry now says ret...

This week Chris sits down with Adam Blake, Co-founder and CEO of Mavria. Adam spent a little more than a year leading the DOGE team inside the Department of Energy. He has been a private person for 15 years, and last week he broke his silence with a tweet that got over 2 million views. Chris has known Adam since 2004. They met shortly after Chris arrived at TCU, and the school paper named Adam Ent...

This week Chris sits down with Zane Hengsperger, Founder and CEO of NOX Metals, a metal supplier in Detroit he started in 2025. NOX buys metal from the mill, cuts it to the exact size a machine shop needs, and ships it out. The whole operation runs on software the company writes itself. Zane is 26, and his first job was scrubbing the floors of his dad's machine shop at 14. He went into software, t...

This week Chris sits down with Lucy Billingsley, Co-founder and Partner of Billingsley Company, the Dallas development firm she started with her husband Henry in 1978. Lucy is the daughter of Trammell Crow, who built the largest real estate development company in America. She left the family business because she did not want to be a minority vote. She and Henry built their own firm instead, and to...

This week Chris sits down with Jim Cantrell, Co-founder & CEO of Phantom Space. He co-founded Phantom Space in 2019, where he is now trying to mass produce rockets. He was employee number four at SpaceX and its first VP of Business Development. Jim is one of a handful of people who was actually in the room at the start. They discuss:• How getting arrested for espionage in Russia is the reason Elon...

Today Chris sits down with Justin Lopas, Co-founder & COO of Base Power Company. On Monday Base announced a $1B Series D at a $13B post money valuation. Justin spent his early career at SpaceX, where he helped lead the Brownsville site that became Starbase, then ran manufacturing at Anduril. Base puts large batteries on homes, owns and operates them, and uses the fleet to support the grid. This is...

This week Chris sits down with Michael Levy, CEO of Crow Holdings, one of the largest private real estate firms in the country. This one goes far beyond real estate. Michael runs a major firm, but he opens on the big macro picture and works his way back down to real estate. They start with where the economy and the country are heading, and they end on what it means for how investors should be thin...

This week Chris sits down with Jonathan Glick, founder of Incucap and one of the most active fund placement agents in the country. Over his career he's helped place more than $10 billion into real estate funds, and he says raising one has never been harder than it is right now. There are 600 to 1,000 funds chasing a shrinking pool of capital, real estate has lost a decade of ground to private cred...

In this episode, Chris sits down with Mark Gibson, CEO of Capital Markets, Americas at JLL. He sits at the center of how capital moves through commercial real estate, which means he sees the data long before the narratives catch up. Chris and Mark get into why the world's largest investors are looking at real estate again after four years of underperformance, the signal in late 2024 that told his...

In this episode, Chris sits down with Steven Campisi, co-founder of Hillpointe, one of the largest developers of attainable housing in the country. Most apartment developers design a brand new building for every project. Hillpointe has built the exact same building 800 times, which creates advantages that compound over time. That repetition plus their material and labor strategy is how Hillpointe...

In this episode, Chris sits down with Riley Meik, co-founder and CEO of The American Housing Corporation, a company building factory-made row homes for the kind of city lots we've stopped building on. For 70 years we got great at putting single-family homes on the outskirts and basically quit building family-sized housing in the places people actually want to live. Riley's bet is that you fix that...

In this episode, Chris Powers sits down with Chris Koerner, a serial entrepreneur and host of The Koerner Office, one of the fastest-growing business podcasts in the world. Koerner has gone all-in on media: 1.4M on Instagram, a 270k newsletter, and a YouTube channel he grew to 600k subscribers in a year. They get into how he cracked short-form, why he thinks attention is the only moat left once AI...

In this episode, Chris sits down with Ben Nowack, co-founder and CEO of Reflect Orbital, one of the first companies building satellites that redirect sunlight from orbit to specific spots on Earth, with the goal of delivering sunlight on demand, 24/7. Why would you want sunlight 24/7? Agriculture and farming, construction projects, rescue missions, military operations, powering solar panels closer...

In this episode, Chris sits down with John Owen, President and CEO of Airshare, one of the largest private jet operators in the country. Airshare started in 2000 and spent over twenty years as a regional Midwest operator before going national in 2023 by acquiring Wheels Up's aircraft management business. They get into how the business actually works, where operators make and lose money, and where...

In this episode, Chris sits down with Josh Zegen, Co-Founder & Managing Principal of Madison Realty Capital, a $25 billion real estate private credit firm he started with his college roommate in 2004. They dig into how he built one of the largest private lenders in the country starting from a desk in his dad's law office - and why he still thinks of himself as a businessman first and a real estate...

In this episode, Chris sits down with John McQueeney, State Representative for House District 97 in Tarrant County, Texas and member of the State Affairs Committee covering power grid and electric policy. In the last six weeks alone, John's committee has run three interim data center hearings. He is also drafting the Data Center Responsibility Act for the January 2027 session - the bill that will...

In this episode, Chris sits down with Bryan Perkins, Founder & CEO of Novaria Group, a Fort Worth-based aerospace manufacturer he started in 2011 and sold to Arcline last November for $2.2 billion. Bryan didn't set out to be in aerospace. He needed a job. But once he was in, he saw a niche nobody else wanted - high-mix, low-volume, esoteric parts that go under the radar - and spent 15 years rollin...

In this episode, Chris sits down with Rex Glendenning, founder of REX Real Estate and the man known across North Texas as the "King of Dirt." Rex is a fourth-generation Celina native whose great-grandfather homesteaded 160 acres in 1887. Over the last four decades he's brokered billions in DFW land deals - including the $130M public-private partnership that brought the Cowboys to Frisco - while qu...

In this episode, Chris sits down with James Beshara - founder of Magic Mind, angel investor in 150+ companies (Mercury, Alchemy, Gusto, Halo Top), and a Dallas native who built Tilt and sold it to Airbnb. James spent two years tinkering with Magic Mind before he ever called it a business. Today it's a $100M CPG brand and the #1 health shot in natural retail - run with 10 employees, no Slack, almos...

In this episode, Chris sits down with Nat Eliason - founder, writer, and now launching Founders School, a new entrepreneur high school in New York City. Tuition is $150K a year. The promise: every student hits a million dollars in gross profit by graduation, or the family gets their tuition refunded. The first class is around 20 freshmen. The day is split between AI-driven academics in the morning...

In this episode, Chris sits down with Matthew Ogle, Co-founder & CEO of Legacy Knight, a $2.8B multi-family office in Dallas, TX that he co-founded in 2019. We dig into how you build a world-class multi-family office from scratch - and why so many wealthy families out there don't actually have one yet. Matthew's path into wealth management didn't start in a boardroom - it started on a tennis court...

In this episode, Chris sits down with Austin Tunnell, founder of Building Culture - a real estate development and design-build company based in Oklahoma City specializing in structural masonry construction and walkable, mixed-use urban infill. Austin's path to real estate is one of the more unusual ones we've had on the show. He grew up a football player in the suburbs of Houston, went to work at...