Announcing Fifth Wall’s First Entrepreneur-In-Residence, Landon Tucker

Fifth Wall is extremely pleased to welcome Landon Tucker as our first Entrepreneur-In-Residence.

Landon Tucker

We first met Landon through one of our portfolio companies, States Title. We were immediately impressed with Landon’s intellect, ambition, deep financial experience, and nuanced understanding of the opportunities and challenges of corporate innovation. Previously Landon was a Senior Analyst at Trian Fund Management, an investment management firm, where he helped deploy approximately $6 billion in capital. He co-led Trian’s $1.5 billion investment in Sysco Corporation, the largest foodservice distributor in North America, and worked on the firm’s investment in InterContinental Hotels Group PLC (NYSE: IHG), one of the largest hotel companies in the world. Landon also has experience in the financial services sector, co-leading investments in BNY Mellon Corporation, the largest trust bank, and Lazard, a global investment bank and asset manager. Prior to joining Trian, Landon worked at Credit Suisse in investment banking in the Mergers & Acquisitions group, where he worked on Airgas’s defense against Air Products hostile bid.

Bottom-Up vs. Top-Down Venture Investing

So why is Fifth Wall launching an Entrepreneur-In-Residence in the first place? In contrast to many venture capital funds, Fifth Wall has a unique investment model that grants us rare insight into which technologies will be adopted by the largest owners and operators of real estate in the world, many of whom are strategic LPs in our fund.

A good deal of generalist funds take a “bottom-up” approach to investing. That is to say, they look at a particular team, technology, product, vision under a microscope and then speculate on whether or not that technology will be adopted by the market and achieve scale. Fifth Wall takes a “top-down” approach to investing by leveraging proprietary access to our strategic LPs and broader real estate network. We’ve established deep, high-trust, insight-driven relationships with the largest customers of Built World technology, and have an intimate understanding of both the pain points and opportunities they’re looking to address. Fifth Wall is then able to effectively evaluate all of the potential (often competitive) technology solutions in the market to address these needs, usually finding one standout company and structuring game-changing partnerships, commercial agreements, etc.

Addressing Technology Gaps

However, there are times when we’re evaluating potential solutions to a particular strategic LP’s need where we’re unable to identify a suitable technology solution in the market. Sometimes this is simply because a solution just doesn’t exist yet. Sometimes, this can be attributed to existing solutions only solving part of the problem, or perhaps they lack the team & technology to craft a long-term, viable product. In these circumstances, we found ourselves contemplating if it might make sense to begin incubating new companies; specifically in situations where we identified an acute and unaddressed pain point from one or more of our strategic LPs. Fifth Wall’s ability to build a company from scratch that is significantly de-risked by launching with one or many large contracts with our strategic LPs provided too compelling of an opportunity.

And so the idea behind Fifth Wall Entrepreneur-In-Residence was born.

Landon is joining Fifth Wall to work collaboratively with our strategic LPs to launch a new company. After 11 years in New York, he’s thrilled to be on the West Coast (and living a bicycle ride away from Fifth Wall’s Venice office). We’ve already begun to gestate a few new ideas and we couldn’t be more excited to see what we develop together.

Welcome to the team Landon!