Ezra Dweck is the co-founder and president at IceCap Group, a leading real estate lending firm with over $2 billion in deals.
Ezra faced a critical turning point at age 36, when he decided to start over after leaving a stable family business. He candidly shares how he navigated the challenges of stepping into the real estate world, his struggles, his breakthroughs, and the lessons learned along the way.
This conversation is packed with insights on resilience, entrepreneurship, and the importance of making bold decisions when life pushes you to pivot.
Enjoy!
Transcript
Victor M. Braca: Hi everybody, welcome back to Momentum, the show where we sit down with interesting and successful community members in order to have conversations that will inspire and empower the next generation on their journey to success. I’m your host, Victor Braca, and today I welcomed Ezra, AKA “Z,” Dweck to the podcast.
After studying Finance at Wharton, Z joined his father’s wholesale jewelry business and gained a ton of valuable experience. But it was only after many years pursuing different careers that he finally found his true calling and took the leap at age 36 to start his own real estate lending firm. Today, ICE is a thriving real estate lending firm, and they’ve done over $2 billion in deals, which is just insane.
In this episode, Z shared his insights on how he rapidly scaled his business utilizing his relationships and network. He also talks about the challenges he faced, the pivotal moments that defined his career, and his mindset of continuous growth and relevance. We wrap up with some advice for young adults on resilience, handling setbacks, and staying focused on long-term success. You’re going to love this episode. Let me know what you think in the comments below. Enjoy.
Z Dweck, good to have you on the podcast.
Ezra Dweck: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Victor M. Braca: Thank you for coming. Welcome to our permanent studio, as I like to say. We leave this here; we never take it down. But in all seriousness, thank you for coming on, and I’m very excited to get started.
So I want to start from the early days. I want to hear about your childhood. You know, where did you go to elementary school? How were you in school? Were you always entrepreneurial? I know you run a company now, and I want to hear how your early days fit into that.
Ezra Dweck: Okay, so we’ll start with kindergarten, I guess. Before that, we were in Ahaba Ve’Ahva preschool, but then from kindergarten until the end of 12th grade, I was in Hillel Yeshiva.
Victor M. Braca: Deal guy. You’re a Deal guy.
Ezra Dweck: You know, that was the only option, but it seemed like it was a good option for me. I’m happy to have gone there. And was I entrepreneurial? That’s an interesting question. I think so.
When we were in like fifth or sixth grade, we started recording mixtapes and selling them in school. That was the extent of the entrepreneurship. When in 12th grade, I ran for class president, and I’d say that I ran because I wanted to get into a specific college. I’m like, “Okay, I need this on my resume.” So I ran for class president for that reason. I don’t know if that’s quite entrepreneurial, but it’s kind of positioning.
Victor M. Braca: It is. It’s preparing yourself also, you know, to put yourself ahead. A lot of people won’t say that they ran for a specific reason or that they join clubs. I respect that you admit it because that’s not a bad reason—meaning you’re trying to put yourself ahead.
Ezra Dweck: I liked all the people in the class. I probably would not have run were it not that I said, “Okay, I need this to get on my resume.”
My dad, I’ll say, was always the entrepreneur and I always listened to his business advice and business stories and grew up with that in my mind. He was very transactional at the time. I remember ninth grade, my grades were not great and he said, “All right, if you get into Wharton, Princeton, or Harvard, I’ll buy you either one of two cars.”
I’m like, “All right, I’ll get in.” And he’s like, “Well, with your grades you’re not going to get in.” I’m like, “All right, now I know I have to work.” So my 10th, 11th, and 12th grade looked very different than my ninth grade, essentially because I was working for something.
No businesses in high school, though. A lot of us are children of at least some privilege where there’s no need to do very much. I think it’s nice, but it’s also kind of a weakness that we’re developing in our youth, even my generation, where everything you need you’re given. I had an allowance that covered my entire needs for the week—just enough money for whatever we want. I didn’t have constraints. I had a nice car, I went out to dinners, I went to the city and had what I needed.
So I’d say at that point, the killer mindset was unnecessary as opposed to some people I’ve spoken to—like at 17 years old they need to pay for college and had to figure out what to do. Just an interesting way reflecting back on it that I probably appreciated the entrepreneurship, but there was no necessity for it at the time.
Victor M. Braca: And raising your kids now, how do your thoughts on this topic play into that?
Ezra Dweck: Raising my kids now, I think it’s interesting. We all want to give our kids the best lives that we can and we want them to not really need and not have to be in these uncomfortable positions. I’m guilty of that too. But the uncomfortable positions sometimes really propel people to do great things.
So me, I’m making my kids as comfortable as I can make them and having them enjoy their childhood and youth, but pushing them without the need for money to be successful in what they’re doing. I had a conversation with my son Moshe when he was in school and I said, “Look, I’m paying for everything. Your job is school. You need to do well in school.”
He said, “Okay, what’s well?” I said, “Well is when you work hard enough that you did what you need to do, and the grades that you get, you’re proud of. Whatever the grade is, you have to tell me, ‘I worked hard for this, I accomplished it, I’m proud of it.’ If you get that, you did well.”
Victor M. Braca: For sure. I love it. My parents always say no matter what grade you get, as long as you know that you worked your hardest and that the grade you got was the highest you could have gotten.
Ezra Dweck: I’ll say something else. One of the things that I grew up with was being told that I was smart. It was an interesting thing. I always knew I was smart, but I always knew I was kind of—I don’t want to say limited—but like, “Okay, I’m not as smart as that guy.”
I went to Wharton and I knew that one’s smarter than me, that one’s smarter than me. So we were limited by how smart we were, and it got me far enough where I was able to get into the college I wanted to get into and do well in school. But relying on being smart… my daughter—and I hope she doesn’t get upset with me for saying this—she had a situation where she was moving from Barkai to Flatbush and she was nervous. She said, “What if I’m Barkai smart but not Flatbush smart?”
I said, “You’re plenty smart, but that’s not what makes you succeed. What makes you succeed is that you focus and that you do the work and that you don’t stop until you know your material. So if Flatbush is harder for high school than Barkai was for elementary, just put in a few more hours. You can do it. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.”
She said, “Okay,” and she got it. She ended up in an advanced Gemara class in Flatbush and she said to me, “Aba, it’s too hard. I can’t do it. I’m not made for this.”
I said, “Okay, you can quit. But first you have to get grades in the high 90s.” She said, “What?” I said, “It’s not too hard. Work. Show yourself that you can get this done. You can quit, but I need you to know that you can do it.”
So she worked hard. She got her grades up to the high 90s; she was getting the highest grades in the class. She said, “I can do it. I don’t enjoy it enough that this is the thing I want to work on, though.”
I said, “Now you can quit.”
Victor M. Braca: I respect that she was able to make the decision after knowing that she could do it, after trying it.
Ezra Dweck: She didn’t have the option. She had to get the grades. She wasn’t going to sit back and let herself have poor grades, but I also wasn’t going to let her step out of this thinking, “Okay, I failed at this.” Deciding something isn’t for you isn’t a failure. Deciding “I can’t do it” could be.
Victor M. Braca: I want to shift gears a little. So you’re in Wharton. How was that experience? Was that obviously tougher than high school, but was it something that you would expect?
Ezra Dweck: I’ll say similarly, I finished Wharton in three years. It was generally pretty easy. I took the classes that I was good at. I had a double concentration in Finance and Entrepreneurial Management. I liked the entrepreneurship stuff, so it came to me easily. I liked math and the finance came to me easily, and I got good grades in both of them.
The ones that I struggled in were like Southeastern United States Literature, core classes. Introduction to Film was like one of the harder classes for me. It was kind of like, “Oh, I have to work now,” and the working part was where I found the challenge. But my main classes were really easy.
I feel like for me that put me at a disadvantage. I had a friend who I went to school with and we were taking the same class and that specific material didn’t come as easily to him. I’d spend like 15 minutes after doing the homework and the studying and I’m like, “Okay, I’m done,” and he’d be like four hours. We ended up getting the same grade in the class, but he got something out of the class that I didn’t. He got that ability to just kind of take something that seemed insurmountable and own it.
Victor M. Braca: After college, where are you?
Ezra Dweck: After college I had a bit of an interesting path. I wanted to go to Israel before college. My dad said no, first you’re going to Wharton, go to school. So I was regretful of not having gone. I worked for a year and then I said, “I didn’t go to Israel, I want to go back.”
I ended up going back to Israel after college, after a year of working. Stopped working, went to Israel for a few months, ended up in yeshiva in Mir for the rest of the year and got my post-high school yeshiva education, which was fun and intense. When you do it as a 21-year-old versus doing it as an 18-year-old, it’s a very different experience. When you do it as an 18-year-old, it’s kind of just what the boys were doing and you were going to have fun. When you do it as a 21-year-old, you’re doing this because this is what’s important to me.
Victor M. Braca: So your life has already begun at that point.
Ezra Dweck: Life has begun, so you’re pausing life. Then I went back to work and I worked in my dad’s business. That really for me was an easy transition into his business. In summers in high school after being a camp counselor, the following summers I ended up working for him for the summers.
It was a business that was easy to get into. My dad owned it and it was making plenty of money. It was enticing because you have a good enough family business, but without really saying, “Is this the best, most fit place for me? Is this type of business going to be something that’s going to be able to support me in 15 or 20 years?”
Victor M. Braca: Did you go into it not asking yourself that? You just kind of—it was a natural progression?
Ezra Dweck: Look, I went into it enticed by the fact that it’s a profitable business and I’m going to go into it and we’ll figure out what needs to happen.
My father actually had a wholesale jewelry business. My dad was in finance at some point; he was a stockbroker on Wall Street and worked with some big guys. At some point he decided he had to get a real job and bought into a wholesale company, kind of the Syrian way.
It’s interesting because I think about it in retrospect. I loved working with my dad—lunches with him, spending time—that was great. But was it the right thing for me? Was it the right business? A lot of the business was color gemstones, and I’m actually colorblind. So getting into a business, you have to think about: is it the right thing for me? If it’s color gemstones and you’re colorblind, maybe this is not the perfect fit. But it was a good experience while I had it. I learned a lot. I learned selling. I had a management background from Wharton in terms of the educational part, but then I had actual management experience—managed a team, managed ups and downs of a business. I definitely wouldn’t be who I am as a business person today without those experiences.
Victor M. Braca: How long did you work there for?
Ezra Dweck: Probably about 13 years. When I was like 35, I was, I’d say, treading water in that business. It was a wholesale business, and for those people who have families in the wholesale business, it wasn’t a licensed wholesale business. So it was kind of like you’re just competing on either price or being able to finance retailers, and the retailers we were working with were going out of business. A lot of our accounts were just disappearing.
A friend of mine from college came and said, “Hey, we’re going to start a private equity business in the United States. Do you want to run it?” It was an enticing idea for me. All of a sudden, I get to go from just being in a small entrepreneurial business to saying, “Okay, now I can look at new businesses, apply the finance and entrepreneurship degrees together.”
Spoke to my dad. My dad’s like, “Yeah, sure, 100%.” So I was winding down our business and stepped into that with them. I was building up a team, looking at different companies, and it ended up not being a great fit. A year later, I was looking for something else to do.
Victor M. Braca: Oh wow. So you were pretty quickly in and out of that.
Ezra Dweck: At 35 I was in, at 36, pretty much almost to the day, a year later I was out. I was looking for something else. It was a family office and the dynamics for me weren’t good. It just didn’t work out. I learned a lot from that as well and built up a network there and said, “Okay, now I’m 36 years old. I have yeshiva bills to pay.”
Victor M. Braca: And you’re worried at this point?
Ezra Dweck: Oh no, I am not worried. I am—wait, what’s the next level up from worried? Like distraught. I’m like, “Okay, now what do I do?” 36 years old, I’ve been winding down my business. It still exists, I can go back to it. I’m in this PE business; I understand it a little bit, but I don’t think it works to scale. I can’t walk into it with like a million or $2 million and start scaling it up.
I had a conversation with my dad and we said, “Look, why don’t I start looking at some real estate?” That I believed was able to be scaled. That was really the first time I had to step out of my comfort zone. It wasn’t by choice; it was by, “Okay, you need to survive. You need to pay your bills, yeshivas want to get paid, the mortgage wants to get paid, the children want to be fed and clothed.” And rightfully so. That fell on me.
I started looking for some real estate. My dad said, “Look, I’ll help you out in the beginning. I’ll give you a full salary for the first year so you can have kind of a smooth transition in.” He gave me a salary for the first year, the second year tapered it, and the third year I was working a little bit in the family business but mostly in real estate.
I was looking around and then I ended up where the guys—Albert Dweck, Eli Z., and Adam Sultan—they were redoing Duke Properties. They called me and said, “Hey, we heard you’re looking for real estate. We need someone like you. You have a bit of a finance background, your Excel modeling we’re assuming you’re really good at, so come on in, join us.”
So I joined them. This is like 37 years oldish.
Victor M. Braca: Pretty much starting new at 37 with kids at home.
Ezra Dweck: Very stressful. Very stressful. I started with them and there was a lot of learning that was happening there. I was building up a strong network in real estate. I was bootstrapping, which was different than the family business. Family business was always flush. This business was like, “Okay, we’re going to have to be very entrepreneurial about how we’re making things happen.”
I relearned a lot of the skills from school, like my Excel skills. I spent a long time on YouTube being able to build out the models for the company that we wanted. I built skills, I built a network, and then about three or three and a half years in, I said, “Okay, I’ve learned enough here and this is not where I need to be.”
I told the guys, “Guys, I love all of you. It’s been a pleasure working with all of you. This is not going in the direction that I want for myself and I’m going to have to move on.” They were supportive of that and they said, “Look, take your time, look around, we’ll be helpful for you.”
And I said, “Okay, at 41, now what am I doing?”
Victor M. Braca: This was more by choice.
Ezra Dweck: This was by choice. This was a decision that I said, “Okay, I’ve now gotten out of this situation where I was in a dire position where I didn’t know what I was going to do. I now know I’ve built up skills in a new field, I have a network, I know how to operate, I’ve built trusting relationships where people know that when I say something, it’s going to get done.”
Victor M. Braca: Do you think that’s the most important part of all of your experiences, those relationships?
Ezra Dweck: Look, I think that relationships and network are super, super important. I think this Syrian community network is—it can’t be imagined how valuable being in the Syrian community and having access is.
Right now my partner is Joe Oved, and my son Moshe has access to Joe Oved. In a normal situation anywhere else in the world, that would be that person’s most important contact that he can get to in life. Just because of the situation he has Moshe. And I love Joe obviously, but there are so—Moshe can get probably four or five billionaires on the phone and pitch a business idea. He can get people in almost any field to hear him out, help him out, give him a leg up, partner with them, talk about ideas.
This is something that regular people don’t have. It’s not something that exists. I went to Wharton and people go to Harvard, people go to Columbia, they talk about the network that they have afterwards. If you go to one of these schools and you end up going through Goldman Sachs or one of the big investment banks, fine, you have something similar in terms of power. But for a regular person, this is the equivalent of that and it’s open, so to speak, to everyone in the community.
So for me, when I said at 41, “I need something new. I need people who are going to appreciate my life, appreciate where I need to start, appreciate my—and be on a similar mindset. I know that I can trust them, they can trust me.” I ended up having a very small search and I found the Oved family, and for me that wouldn’t happen without being part of this community. It just wouldn’t be. What I would have done at 41 saying, “Okay, I need to change gears,” it would have looked very different.
Victor M. Braca: Hi guys, sorry to interrupt in the middle of the episode. I’m going to make this really quick. I just want to tell you, please share the podcast, like, subscribe, comment on Spotify, Instagram, YouTube, Apple Podcast—we’re everywhere. We’re trying to get the podcast to the entire community. I’m talking as fast as I can so we can get back to the episode. Please let me know what you think of this episode. I need your feedback. Okay, back to the episode.
So you took that risk and you ended up finding the Oveds. Where does it go from there?
Ezra Dweck: Where does it go from there? I mean, it went from really just being me and Joe together with his family’s support to having an organization now of like 80 people.
Victor M. Braca: Which is amazing, by the way.
Ezra Dweck: Which is amazing. I feel really grateful about that and it’s been an amazing ride. I have an additional family that I didn’t have before. My closeness to them is amazing. Joe and Jack are to me brothers. I only have sisters; I have brothers now too, and closer even.
It starts off with paradigm changes. It was kind of cool because at Duke we had to do deals to survive. The business is predicated, the syndication real estate business is predicated, on doing deals to survive. When I started with the Oveds, it was kind of like, “All right, take your time. We’re giving you a two-year commitment from us.” Now it’s just me and Joe thinking about what we want to do. No rush. If we don’t do a deal for two years, it’s okay.
Victor M. Braca: Interesting how you didn’t feel the sense of urgency at that age.
Ezra Dweck: I felt the sense of urgency. You have a salary, you have to suppress it. Joe was 26 years old at the time. He’s like, “We don’t need to do a deal.” He’s like, “Your salary is significant, but as far as the overall scope of the businesses go, it’s not a make-or-break thing for us. So let’s just go slow and figure out what we need to do.”
First day I came in, I just made a list of things that we might do. Joe and I knew we were going to do it together—and I’m not mentioning Jack because Jack was still in college at the time—but we knew we were going to do it together but we didn’t know what it was.
Had a list, looked at a bunch of different things, started looking at some real estate deals. What we quickly realized on the real estate deals was that we were bidding against people who were playing with other people’s money generally, and we were starting off playing with just family money. We said, “Okay, this is not going to work.”
One of the things we had on our list from day one was lending. Because I was with the Duke guys and we had deals that worked well, deals that worked not as well, but in every single deal that we did, the bank got paid. I’m like, “Oh, how do I get into this being the bank position where the deal has to just be relatively good and I get paid?”
One of the first deals we looked at, someone came to us and they outbid us by a few hundred thousand, and then they put their fees on of a few hundred thousand and brought us a deal to invest in as LPs, limited partners. Joe and I looking through their prospectus, we said, “No thanks, we’re not doing that. But we see that you have a hard money loan for like 70% of the purchase for 12%.”
We were interested in buying the building, let’s say, for three. You’re getting it at 3.3. You want two and change as a loan. We’ll do the loan. It was an interesting way of us getting a toehold into real estate.
Victor M. Braca: And you’re putting yourself in a bank position.
Ezra Dweck: Putting ourselves in the bank position. All of a sudden, now you can scale. Because if you’re doing a deal as debt, I put out the debt and I’m betting on horses. I believe that this person is going to be able to execute on this deal, I believe they’re going to pay us back, but now I don’t have much else to do other than collect the mortgage payment.
As opposed to buying the property in the end, we loaned it to the eventual buyer. It took us, I think it was like four years or five years for that deal—that deal got hung up in court. We said, “Okay, we like this. We would have put money out on this one. Let’s see what else we can do.”
I tapped the network that I had previously and said, “Hey guys, you know I was buying before, now I’m interested in putting out money and we have the money ready to go, so bring me deals.” They started to bring us deals and, fast forward again four or five years later, that first deal came back and we put out a loan on that deal. I said in one of my LinkedIn posts, “After a thousand loans, we just completed our first transaction.”
Victor M. Braca: Take me to the early days of running the company. You took it slow in the beginning like you mentioned. How did the momentum pick up? You started getting deals pretty quickly or did that take a couple of years?
Ezra Dweck: We scaled up, I’d say, like super fast. The numbers went from 2017: 3 million; 2018: close to 100 million; 2019: like 400 million in deals. We were rocket propulsion.
Victor M. Braca: And if I’m not mistaken, you recently hit 2 billion maybe about a year ago?
Ezra Dweck: We hit 2 billion—well, that was annually—but we’re over like 2.6 billion now in total origination.
Victor M. Braca: That’s amazing.
Ezra Dweck: Thank you. It was interesting because I think it was a really good partnership because Joe and I are both hard workers, dedicated people, but people who are looking for a committed business relationship. For me, one of the great things about it was I was always able to look forward. When you have the people around you who you can really believe in, you don’t have to spend a lot of time watching your back. Just look forward and say, “Okay, I’m going to do everything I need to do.”
One of the things that I was able to do was continually make myself irrelevant. One of the goals in business for me is continued irrelevance and obsolescence. Something I do—whatever I’ll do, pick Excel modeling. Okay, I’m really good at that. Let’s find someone. This is not what I should be doing, though. Dealing with brokers. Okay, I have some broker relationships. Let’s make myself irrelevant.
Continue to get people who are going to be experts at that thing that I was pretty good at, which allows me to keep growing, saying, “Okay, what’s the next thing that has to happen in our business?” as opposed to me being stuck running around going to building and building and checking things out. I used to go to every single building and now we have other people who do that. But it’s scary if you have partners. “Okay, but now I’m irrelevant.” But think of the next thing you’re going to do.
Victor M. Braca: How do you go about delegating that in the proper way?
Ezra Dweck: It’s really bringing in people that you know are going to leave you if you don’t give them the right opportunities. If you bring people that you think, “All right, this person is going to only get to here,” fine, they’re never leaving. That’s what’s going to happen. But they are only going to get to there and you’re only going to make that much off of them.
But if you say, “Okay, I want to bring in people—the challenge for me is going to be continuing to create for them a platform where I’m going to empower them and make them great and make them have more money and give them better skills and give them more responsibility.” They’re not going to want to leave because this is going to be the best place for them to be.
Victor M. Braca: I like that. Going into it with that win-win mindset. It’s a win for you as the employer and it’s a win for the employee; they’re growing.
Ezra Dweck: It has to be that way. Look, I think that it’s interesting for me because that’s really how the Oveds in all of their businesses have managed this tremendous success. “We’re going to bring people in, partner with them, they’re going to be the best people, and we’re going to give them this great platform.”
Not everyone could be a partner, but everyone who you’re going to bring in that you’re expecting to do great things has to have a great trajectory. “You’re not limited. I’m investing in you, I’m trusting you, I’m giving you things that you’d be like, ‘Oh no, are you supposed to hide that from me?’ No, I’m not hiding. Here you go, here’s the whole thing.”
And if you leave me, that’s my failure. It’s my failure for not being the best place for you, for not challenging you enough. It’s challenges and opportunities. Especially with guys within the community, I know where they have to get to. For us, it’s figuring out, “Okay, we want to put you in a position where you can get where you need to be and continue to work and be here in 15 years and not having to go somewhere else.”
Victor M. Braca: I like that. I think that’s a great mindset to have in hiring.
Ezra Dweck: Well, it’s a mindset to have in hiring, but it’s also a mindset for me. Because if I can bring in great people who can do amazing things—maybe I can do amazing things too, but I can’t do the same amazing things as 15 people can. So if I bring people who are skilled and talented in ways that maybe I’m not exactly the same way and have them do things that I was trying to do and now they’re doing it and they’re soaring, and I’m just interacting with them and giving feedback and helping them grow… my tentacles are spreading.
Victor M. Braca: And so in the early stages of the company, did you find yourself continually changing your job so to speak—your position, your role—because you’re hiring people to take on the previous roles?
Ezra Dweck: Yes, there was a lot of that. First of all, it took a little bit of me letting go, like saying, “Okay, it’s a little scary in the beginning, giving up control.” You’re going to give up value. Meaning like, “Okay, this was my relationship before, now it’s yours. Now you handle that relationship.”
You have to give that over in a good way. That can’t be easy. I’ve spoken to people who have other businesses where they watch people, they train them, they spend time on them, and then they leave. “I don’t understand, why are they not loyal to me? I spent all this time training them.” I said, “It’s not that they’re not loyal to you, it’s that you have failed your job to them. You’re not loyal to them.”
I say even guys thinking about starting a business, when you’re going to go to a business, what’s the mentality of those people? You got to say from the beginning, “I need to get here in six, seven years or 10 years.” Is that part of your plan too? Are we on the same page? Is this the place where I’m going to be worth a million and a half dollars a year? Am I going to get that here? Am I going to have to leave to get that? You want to be in places where they’re going to figure it out together with you and say, “No, no, we want you to stay here. We’re going to figure it out and that’s where we want you to get to.”
Victor M. Braca: Awesome. I love that. So you know, in talking about the early stages of the company, what can you attribute a big portion of your success to? Because you’re starting a company from scratch. You do have those connections that you built up and those relationships over the years, but you’re starting a new company. How did you stand out?
Ezra Dweck: A few things. One thing is I learned lessons from the previous place where I was. In real estate, people often sign up for deals that they don’t have the money for and then scramble and raise the money for those deals. That puts you in an uncomfortable situation.
For me, how we started was we’re never going to commit to a deal that we don’t have the money in the bank for right now. That was my original thought. We need to be 100% secure. You’re doing a $2 million deal, we have $2 million in the bank, it’s reserved for you, that money’s there. Zero desperation, zero weakness, zero hesitation.
I was coming from real estate equity where you put down a deposit and now you go out and you’re running around trying to syndicate. So I knew that’s good, but you’re limited in the size of deals and you’re limited in how many deals you can do because you only have so much money to start.
What we did was we said, “Okay, we’re going to syndicate deals.” What I learned from syndication though was that the syndication story is a long story and you go to people and say, “Okay, I want you to invest in a deal and you’re going to see what happens in 5 years.” I said, “That’s not going to work here.”
And because of the nature of debt, I would tell people, “Okay, you’re going to invest in our deal. We’re going to be a bigger investor than you are generally. We’re not going to take investors who are more of the deal than we are going to be. So we’re going to leave in X% of the deal and you’re going to start getting returns next month. You’re giving me $100,000, your return next month is going to be $1,083.33. It should come to you by the middle of the month. If it doesn’t come to you by the middle of the month, something has gone wrong.”
Also aside from that, I’m not making any money on the deal on your money until you’ve gotten back all of your money and an 8% preferred return, and then we can have a conversation about how much we’re going to make. So we made aggressive fees but it was only after success. You’re going to know if the deal is working right away and you know I’m not making any money on the deal except for the direct investment that we’re making until you’ve gotten back all of your money plus a return that we’ve agreed to.
All of a sudden now, we’re doing these deals and then people are seeing money right away. They don’t have to wait five years. Two months later people were calling us up and saying, “Okay, we’re ready for the next one.” We ended up then saying we can produce higher returns if we get leverage. We also did the same thing, though; we wouldn’t close the deal even though we were expecting leverage without enough money in our bank account to close that deal.
Quickly our reputation got out there that we can make fast decisions and we were reliable. People knew me from when I was buying that I made fast decisions, that we’d close. Now it’s like, these guys have money, they won’t say yes unless they actually are going to close, and they’ll say yes or no fast. Stringing people along is the worst thing. Being able to say yes or no quickly and then doing what you say built a reputation for us that people just kept coming back.
Being fair with people… not every deal works out well, and people understanding that we’re actually looking for their success as well. Just like I said with people who are working for us, with our borrowers, we need them to succeed. We do small deals; we need them to do deals over and over again. So I don’t want to crush them on any one deal and all of a sudden they realize, “Oh, these people actually care about us, they want us to succeed.” So they want to work with us generally. It helped us when there were problems because they said, “Oh, these are our friends, people we work with. We don’t want to hurt them just like they don’t want to hurt us.” I find it very offensive when that isn’t reciprocated.
Victor M. Braca: Is this a new practice so to speak in the industry or something that other real estate lending companies have done?
Ezra Dweck: I don’t know if it was new, but when we entered the space, what I felt like was there was a hole. You have your rich uncle who will lend you money, then you have these big institutional shops, like a couple hundred million dollar hedge fund that you can borrow money from. Rich uncle: it’s fast, easy, but he runs out of money. Big institutional shops: hard to get deals done, took a long time, lots of brain damage. But the good thing about those big institutional shops is they generally don’t run out of money.
I said we need to be able to bridge that divide of rich uncle and not running out of money and we wanted to make the best of both worlds. So we made the best of both worlds. That was really the difference for us. Go to these big institutional shops, they had money, but they didn’t have a human touch associated with them. They weren’t able to close a deal in a day. I was 41 and needed to make things happen. I said, “Okay, you need to close tomorrow? I’ll go out to the property tonight.”
We’re ready to work hard. The secret of the success is where we look at the deals and say, “Okay, it’s not too small.” We’re going to work very, very hard on this deal. If you have an emergency, we’ll treat it like our emergency as long as not everything is an emergency. Relationship matters.
Victor M. Braca: What sort of one character trait stuck with you the entire way?
Ezra Dweck: I’ll give a lot of credit to the people around me. It’s hard for young people to get into this and say, “Okay, I need to figure this out.” It’s harder when you’re older and you already have these expenses built up; you have to figure it out again.
I think just saying, “This is what I need to do,” being able to look your situation in the eye and saying, “I have to make this work. There’s no other choice. This is going to work and I’m going to be all in.” The ability to be all in. My wife was supportive, my dad was supportive, my mom was supportive. Everyone was supportive saying, “Okay, we have confidence that you could do this.”
And not just getting back up. Because I did it at 37 and then at 41 I’m like, “Okay, I need to move again.” And saying, “I don’t have another option. I’m not giving up. I’m going to succeed. All the tools are there. Acknowledge that you have the ingredients and say, ‘Okay, I didn’t put the ingredients together right last time, maybe I missed a step in the recipe. I’m going to do it again, learn from my mistakes.’”
Getting better. I can only bet on myself. I think resilience is super important. I think being able to trust the people around you and saying, “We’re going to do this together and be great at it,” is super important. And I think not setting yourself a limit is important.
Victor M. Braca: I like that one and that ties into also going all in. You know, you’re giving it your all and you have to be ready for anything to happen.
Ezra Dweck: There’s a line by Eminem about success is my only option. I’m not going to quote the whole thing because there’s an explosive in there, but it really is the only option and I’m going to make it work. I’m going to put everything I have into it. I’m going to learn from whatever mistakes I made last time. It doesn’t matter. Learn, go, and make it happen.
Victor M. Braca: Having started a company at 40 years old, what do you say to 18 or 19-year-olds who are graduating high school or graduating college worried about what they’re going to go into?
Ezra Dweck: Look, I think that at 18 and 19, worry isn’t helpful. Worrying isn’t going to be what’s the motivator for you. It isn’t going to make your life better. Understand what you have to do. Set your life up for that. Set yourself up to succeed. Do the things that you need to do. Don’t waste your own time.
One of the things I see people getting caught up on… Moshe started working for us. I said, “I want at the end of the week from you every week—I know you worked, you put in however many hours you put in—that doesn’t matter. What did you do that’s productive? What did you learn? What did you accomplish?”
If I could tell these people: don’t worry about worrying, focus on learning and accomplishment. If you can do those things… because you can do busy work and feel like, “I worked hard, I did everything I need to do.” You worked hard, but what? It doesn’t matter how hard you work. You can push against the wall of your house for 40 hours; the house isn’t moving. You didn’t accomplish anything. What did you accomplish? How are you better than you were last week?
Focus for yourself on getting better, focus on accomplishment, focus on building your network, your skill set. Being a different person than you are when you’re 18. Because at 18 years old very few people are going to succeed because the 18-year-old doesn’t know anything, the 18-year-old doesn’t have this history of accomplishment, the 18-year-old doesn’t have people who say, “Oh, this person’s reliable.”
Build that around you and then the success will come more easily. Even when I started, I didn’t just start from scratch. I started with knowledge sets that I built up, relationships that I built up, skills that I built up, and I was able to apply that in a new role and figure out with good people what I was going to do.
Victor M. Braca: It gives me a little reassurance that my first job out of college, for example, is not the end-all be-all.
Ezra Dweck: In life there will be setbacks and the road will lead you to interesting places and it will be different than your plan most likely. And if you feel knocked down, do not stay down. You need to get up.
There was a boxer who was fighting Mike Tyson and his mother said, “I want to see you beat Mike Tyson.” His mother died right before the fight and he’s like, “I’m gonna beat Mike Tyson.” Mike Tyson knocked this fighter down—it was the only fighter to ever get up after being knocked down by Mike—and he got back up and he won and he beat Mike Tyson in that fight.
There’s going to be setbacks, there’s going to be things you don’t expect. How you take them, learn from those things… take those experiences that are painful or challenging and how they make you better is going to be how much you can grow from them and how you can develop into the person that you want to be.
Victor M. Braca: And you hear that a lot, but if you approach it with intention… if you approach your life with intention of, you know, sort of take a step back, look at what you have in front of you, what’s around you, and think about how you can improve your circumstances based off of what you have.
Ezra Dweck: It’s easy to brush off. I also don’t want to leave with the impression that I was in these super challenging circumstances. Thank God I was blessed my whole life, I was always in a good position, I was never really insecure. But in order to be successful on my own, there were things that I needed to do.
Victor M. Braca: I love it. Thank you for coming on.
Ezra Dweck: Thank you. It’s been great speaking with you.
Victor M. Braca: And until next time. You made it to the end of the episode. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Z; I know I definitely did.
There are a ton of insights that came out during the conversation. To give a quick recap, we went over Z’s entrepreneurial journey from his days at Wharton to his time working for his father to eventually starting his own company at age 37. Starting from humble beginnings and now managing over $2 billion in annual deals, Z emphasized the importance of building strong relationships, delegating efficiently—that’s a big one—and maintaining a growth mindset throughout your journey.
Z also offered practical advice for young adults on resilience, taking setbacks and improving based off of them, and taking calculated risks to achieve long-term success. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a like, a comment, share it with your friends. We’re trying to spread this podcast as big as possible. And if you didn’t enjoy the episode, also let me know. Give me your feedback. We’re still a fairly new podcast, so please let me know what you think. I would really love to hear from you.
If you enjoyed this episode, you’re going to love my conversation with Elliot Horovitz. Elliot, just like Z, started a company at a fairly late age after working on Wall Street for decades as a broker and a trader. In that episode we discussed the hardships and pitfalls of building a business from the ground up when you have to put food on the table.
If you’re watching on YouTube, you can click somewhere in the screen to watch it. If you’re watching on Spotify, I’ll leave that link below. If you’re watching on Instagram, you can check that out on our story highlights. As always, thank you for watching. I really hope you enjoyed, and until next time.
Momentum 
Leave a comment