When the Doctor Said ‘Cancer,’ My World Collapsed | Veena Jetti

The doctor walks in and says, this is a hepatoblastoma. Great, let's give her the meds and be on our way. But then I look at my husband who's an md and he is in tears instantly. And I'm like panicking now.

Rock bottom moment in your life or in your business?

In September 2019, one of my daughters. So I have twin five year old daughters and one of them got really sick. She was 10 weeks at the time. So we go to the emergency room and ultimately they ended up treating her for a uti. But as part of the follow up, they kidney ultrasound and she was so small that they ended up picking up her liver on the ultrasound. And the doctor comes in and says, hey, there's like something on her liver. We need to check it out and see. And I was like, yeah, okay. It's probably like a spot clean the machine. You know, I'm like a lay person. I don't know. He's like, no, no, no, we need to do like an MRI or CAT scan or something. It was all blur. So we put her under anesthesia, she does the imaging and the doctor walks in and says, this is a hepatoblastoma. I'm like, okay, great, let's give her the meds and be on our way. But then I look at my husband who's an md, He's a physician and this man is like never emotional and he is in tears instantly and I'm like panicking now. I'm like, I don't know what this means. And doctors like, it's a really aggressive pediatric kid cancer on her liver.

So today I'm here with Veena Jetty, who is just an absolute powerhouse. And I'm super excited to get to know you more. I've seen you speak a bunch of times and you're just such an inspiration to me and so many. So just to tell you a little bit about Vena, she is the founding partner of Vive Funds, which is a commercial real estate investment firm that specializes in value add, multifamily assets in particular. And she's done over a billion dollars with a B in commercial real estate transactions and is also a well known philanthropist and is the owner of a community on Facebook called Multifamily Mastery.

And so he Mastermind. Close.

What is it?

Multi Mastermind.

Oh, okay. Also runs a Facebook community called Multi Mastermind. So thank you so much for being here today. I'm super excited. She's visiting from Texas.

Yes, thank you for having me. So excited to Be here and finally meet you. I've heard so much about you. We have so many mutual friends. I cannot believe we have not met before this moment.

Thank you so much. Yeah, I'm so happy to meet you too. And I know it's great. And it's funny. Oh, you invest with my ex. So funny. It is. It is a small world.

It is, for sure, 100%.

But yeah. So I would love, I don't know, a ton about you, and I wanted to keep it that way because I would love to hear just kind of your origin story. And I know, like, as entrepreneurs and especially people who are extreme overachievers, maybe, you know, there's usually a great story behind that and, like, what drove them to be who they are today. And so can you tell us like, a little bit about your childhood and what drove you and how you got here?

Absolutely. So I grew up in Chicago. Actually, I was born in Colorado. Grew up in Chicago. I'm the daughter of immigrants. So my parents came here in 1980 to my dad went to do his PhD in Colorado school of Mines. So fast forward to like 1990. I'm in Chicago, being raised there. My mom starts getting into real estate investing. And my mom started by investing in single family homes. And this was like back when you could just tell them how much you made. And you know, my parents are very much rule followers, so they like filled out the application and everything. And the mortgage broker was like, hey, we'll give you a million dollar loan. And my dad was making like $45,000 a year back then.

Wow.

And she was like, I don't understand the math here. And I was like, don't worry about it. We'll just, we'll figure it all out. So, like, I don't know if he changed, like the income amount or what, but my mom was like, so you're just gonna loan me a million dollars even though we wouldn't theoretically be able to afford the mortgage on this? And it was, you know, those loans that they were giving back then were just stated income. They were giving 110% of the home value for, like, redecorating budgets. Like, it was a crazy time. It was like the wild, wild west back then. And so he said, yeah, you're gonna get a million dollars in loan, and they'd excellent credit. They always paid their debts. And my mom said, can we buy more than one house or do we have to only buy one house? He's like, yeah, you can buy as many as you want. And she was like, oh, okay. And ended up meeting a really good family friend of ours. His name's Chris Cobb. He's a REMAX Realtor. And Chris was just starting out as a realtor. My parents were his first client.

Wow.

And he helped my parents buy. I think they ended up buying, like five houses with that million dollar loan. And then my mom, you know, went to the library because this was before Internet days. And so she went to the library and was like, researching about real estate investing and all this stuff and found out that if you live in a house for two years out of the last five that you own it, you can sell it without the same capital gains liability that you have otherwise. And so every two years, we would move from house to house to house so that we could potentially sell. We didn't end up selling them. We just moved with the idea that we were going to sell them, didn't end up selling them. So ultimately, that was how I grew up. Was in a real estate environment where my dad worked at W2. My mom was a real estate investor, but she never owned multifamily. And I went to college for finance. That was what my degree was in. I graduated at 20 with my degree in finance. Went and worked at, like, some of the big firms. Ultimately left in 2012, started investing for myself in single family because I didn't know that people like you and I could own multifamily assets. I thought it was only for, like, billionaires and Blackstone.

Yeah.

And I ended up meeting a friend who's still a good friend of mine to this day. And he had a pretty big following and a good understanding at that time of multifamily. But he was still getting started a little bit. This must have been like his second, maybe third deal. And he reached out to me and said, hey, do you want to partner up on this deal? And I was like, yeah, what could possibly go wrong? And so we partnered up. Oh, and many things can go wrong, by the way. That's a spoiler alert. It's like everything can go wrong. I just didn't know what I didn't know. I was in my state of unconscious incompetence. And so ended up buying. It was a 200 unit deal. We bought it for 15.9 million in Dallas, which you absolutely cannot do at this point in any part of the market cycle. And we ended up selling it about three and a half years later, three years and three months later for 24 million.

Wow, that is so cool. That gives you goosebumps. I love that. And so Was it. Did you guys raise funds for that?

Okay. So I had committed to raising $1.2 million, and it was so hard. I literally cried every day for six weeks straight because I thought I ruined my family's financial future. And I didn't think I was going to be able to close it. I really thought I had lost. I think we had put up was either 100 or $200,000. And I was like, oh, I just lost, like, $200,000. Thin air and earnest money. And I cried every night. And thankfully, I was like, I just kept going, is the thing, because if you quit, you definitely are going to lose that money. But if I kept fighting and I kept pushing through, I knew there was still a shot that we could get it closed. And we ultimately did get it closed, and it did really well.

So amazing. And so what. What were the concerns that you thought you weren't going to get it closed?

Nobody wanted to write me a check. That was the big concern. Right. Because here's what happens when you first start to raise money. It's new. Right. And people don't really know you as this person who's in private equity who raises capital. Right. So people go, okay, how many of these have you done? And you can't lie to investors. It's not a good way to build a relationship. Do not lie to them. And so I was like, this is my first one. And they're like, what? It's my first one. Amazing. I totally believe in you. I think you're gonna be great. Come back to me on your second or third or fourth one. And I'm, like, sitting there thinking, how am I ever gonna get to a second or third or fourth one if no one's gonna give me a shot to close my first one? And so I thought I wasn't gonna actually be able to raise the funds. I mean, it was tough. It was really challenging.

Yeah, well. And that's relentless. That's the name of the podcast.

Yes, it was relentless.

And so had he had a track recorded?

He had just started, too, so he didn't really have a track record that I could leverage either.

Okay, and how did you ultimately end up being able to raise the funds? Was it just a bunch of small investments, or did you find one good partner? That was.

It was mostly small investments. I had one larger investor who I think he wrote us a check for 370,000, and everything else was 50k here, 25k there, 100k here. The most challenging part is because we were raising on a 506B. I could only use people I already had a pre existing substantive relationship with. And what I realized is I hadn't nurtured my network enough. And so for the next raise, I learned really quickly from that first raise and I went out and I started making relationships with people and building relationships with people before I had a deal on the table. So that way I had the pre existing substantiative relationship with them. In this case, what I had to do was I had to go back to people I'd already reached out to. And it's like walking this fine line of being like thirsty and being like, please give me your money. You know, nobody wants to give you money if you're doing that. But also just having more confidence. Once I had pitched the deal so many times, I must have talked to 700 investors one by one by one, just dialing day after day after day just to get that closed.

Wow. And how did you build up your rolodex of those 700 investors?

So that was all people that were already in my network. And it was like everybody in my network, like Susie who sat next to me in second grade math class was on that list. And I had no way of filtering it. I was just like, literally every person that I have every, any kind of a relationship with, thankfully, I'm just like a relationship person in general. So before I even knew I was going to be doing this, I had always maintained relationships. And you know, some of my friends joke and they're like, veena, you collect people. Like that's your thing. I'm like, what do you mean I collect people? They're like, you have so many people in your network, like people from different backgrounds and walks of life. Because I think that diversity is such a big strength. And so I've always been drawn to people from, you know, unique or different or interesting backgrounds.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, I just, I kept reaching back out to them. And because it was a 506b raise, they didn't have to be accredited. So it made it a little bit easier. But I had to have the existing relationship with them.

And so what did you guys just. How, how did you find that deal and what, what was your like, exit strategy for it?

Yeah, so that was on market. So it came to us through a broker and like I said, my partner brought it to me. Um, so it was definitely an on market deal. And then as far as exit strategy, we were going to go in renovate. I think at that time we were trying to renovate 30 or 40% of the units and then exit to whoever the next buyer was. So we're going to prove that this business plan works and then be like, hey, Hannah, come buy this asset. We did 30%, we got this much return. You could do the other 70% and get a bigger return, or you could do 30% and then pass it to the next person. What ended up happening was 15 months in, we added a supplemental loan. So we pulled a lot of the equity out of the deal and we gave investors, I think we gave them 40% of their money back in month 15. And then we. And so investors were very happy. It was much easier to raise capital after that, by the way, because now I'm like, hey, I just gave you 40%. Give it back to me and let's go buy the next deal. And that's how I continue to grow. And then at month 39, we ended up exiting the whole deal and selling. It was early. We were supposed to exit five years. But sometimes the market just moves faster than you can imagine. I had another deal more recently. We bought in 2020 and we bought that for 80 million, ended up exiting that for 110 million 18 months later.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

Yeah, that's. That's so.

So you had a good, successful deal in your first one. How did you like, find your crews? And I mean, had you guys done any multifamily before at all? Or was this truly okay, first multi family? And did you just go out and find a general contractor that you liked or.

So property management companies usually have someone. If you're doing like third party property management, usually they'll have someone that they've used or like a few contractors that they've used on other assets. So what I didn't know at the time, that I know now, is that your property manager is really like one of your partners in the deal and you can leverage, like, their resume, their experience, their track record, their contacts, their insurance policies. You can like leverage all these things from the property management company, especially when you don't have that infrastructure yourself yet. So our property manager at the time, they had a construction person, like a GC that they worked with pretty closely. And so we got some better pricing on it and they managed the construction process.

Okay, awesome. And was that the manager that was already in place or did you find a new one?

No, it was a new one. We very rarely leave the same manager in place because a lot of our business plan is that we think we can come in and be more efficient managers. And if we think that it's really hard to keep current management in place and then also have this belief that we can do better. So we're really, really effective and really hands on asset managers. But typically, unless there's a very specific reason, we usually will switch out property management.

And are you still hiring third party managers or do you bring that?

Okay, yeah, as of now, we are. There's a lot of discussion to bring it in house and go fully vertical. I don't love property management personally. Like, I don't like being a property manager. I don't really like being involved in it. And so I just don't want to. I'm resistant to it. And I also think until you have about 2,000 doors in any one MSA, you really don't get the economies of scale you want to have before doing that.

Okay, and for the audience, what is an msa?

Oh, just basically the Metroplex. Right. So if we're saying like the Phoenix msa, that's going to include Scottsdale, Tempe, like just whatever that Metroplex is.

Yeah. Okay, awesome. And so I was reading about you and I've heard you speak and stuff. And so you at one point raised $50 million in eight weeks.

Yeah.

Is that true?

Yes.

How did you do that?

You know, that's a good question. I. I built a lot of relationships up until that point. It certainly was not my first deal. That was back in 2022. Since then, we rate last year we raised 66 million. 67 million for a deal here in Phoenix. Yeah, that was my largest raise to date. I will say it was much easier to raise capital back in 2021, 2022 and earlier because everybody was doing well and investors were just like blindly throwing money at the market. And we're kind of seeing some of that fallout now. But really it was building relationships with people long before I had a deal. And then also just having a track record of the relationship. So about 80% of our investors are in two or more deals with us. So we have a significant number of investors who just repeat invest with us and then they have inevitably will refer their friends, their family, whoever, so that we can, you know, continue growing that database.

Yeah, and have you stuck with retail investors, like accredited investors? Or did you ever go family office or funds or institutional?

So it's funny, I was just talking to my securities attorney this morning. So we work with Nick McGrew out of LA at Polymath Legal, and I was talking to him this morning and I was like, gosh, everybody's talking about Like a fund of funds. He's like, yeah, it's crazy because he and I were the first to do it in this industry. And he's like, I was thinking about that the other day. We kind of changed the way the industry operates. And so we were, we were the first to do a fund of funds. And we did this back almost. It's been a little over five years. No, it's longer than that now. Gosh, it's already 20, 24. Right. So yeah, it's actually been almost eight or nine years now that we've been doing a fund of funds model. And so we call it like the Cinderella method. But basically we pioneered this structure, now everybody's using it. So to answer your question, yes, we do fund of funds. We do have family offices that invest with us. The vast majority of our capital is retail investors, but we don't typically have like one large institutional LP that comes in and takes down 90% of the equity and then we bring the other 10%. Though I do think that that is a shift that we're going to start seeing in the next 12, 24 months.

Yeah, just bigger checks and less control.

But yes, less control, bigger checks. The, the downside is that I want to still make sure we're serving our investors and we just may not have as much room to do that if we were to take like an institutional lp. But also too, I think it's important to note that in this part of the market cycle, institutional funds, family offices, ultra high net worth individuals, they're the ones that are moving into the market. They are, you know, it's that Warren Buffett saying, be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. And right now retail money is scared. And institutional funds, high net worth, sophisticated investors, they're not scared. They're being greedy right now. And so I think if people actually followed what Warren Buffett says, I think more and more retail investors would be moving into the market. But they just simply are not. Like psychologically they're too scared. So we have a lot of investors that historically have invested that are now pulling back.

Yeah. And so, you know, I, I own a commercial brokerage here in Arizona and then more recently I'm just starting my debt fund now. Just been doing my own capital lending for the past few years. But I know it on the multi family level and just in the investment sale market in general, it's been really tough to find deals over the past few years since rates went down. Have you experienced that same thing? And how have you guys Managed to like keep deal flow.

Yeah. So we are not a group that has a deal every month or every quarter even. I would love to have that many deals. The reality is is there's just not enough deals that we feel comfortable saying yes to. And you know, my JV partner and I, we co invest we with all of our investors as LPs alongside them and we invest significantly into our own deals. So if I'm not willing to do that, I really can't in good conscience put this deal in front of my investors. And so to answer your question, we just don't do that many deals. This is the. I'm closing on a deal day after tomorrow. It's the first deal I'm closing all year.

Okay.

So we're just patient investors. Last year I did the one deal here in Arizona. That's the only deal I did last year. Um, so we're patient, we're waiting both of those deals. So the one I did here last year and the one here were both all, sub 3% interest rates and we assumed the debt on it. So it was almost a no brainer to do it that way because here, this deal has a 2.77% fixed interest rate for 12 years. Wow. Yeah, can't really mess that up too much, right? Like it, it's such a no brainer to that the one I'm closing day after Tomorrow is a 2.59% interest rate.

And what kind of cap rate are you getting these at?

So this one we're. Our entry cap rate is a little, it's like a 5.26% entry cap. I don't know what our entry cap was last year, probably around 4 and 3/4 5%.

But there's enough value add upside. And that's the thing is a lot of investors, especially novice investors get so like you're paranoid about the cap rate, but the cap rate doesn't really mean anything because it's all about the upside. Like you could have a 2% cap rate, but if their rents are 100 below market value, then that it means nothing.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I love that you said that because I think so many investors get caught up in the cap rate too. And they'll ask me these like endless questions and I'm like, tell me more about what you're trying to understand here. Because what people don't realize is like there's the buyer's entry cap rate, there's the seller's exit cap rate, there's your operating cap rate, there's your projected exit Cap. Like, there's so many cap rates, and it's just one piece of a much larger puzzle. You can't do everything based on just purely what the cap rate is when you're buying an asset, like the Arizona asset, For example, at 2.77% debt, I can pay a lot lower in a cap rate than I could if I was putting fresh debt on it, because I. I'm not negatively leveraged. I'm positively leveraged. And so, yes, absolutely, if you're a new investor, do not get hung up on cap rates. Look at them, understand them, but don't get hung up on it. Because what if you can buy and you flip one switch and now you're operating at a much higher cap rate? That's a win.

Yep, exactly. And what has been your main source for deal flow? Like, are you guys going direct to these ownership groups? Are you mostly having brokers bring them to you? So.

So it's a combination of the two. So we'll have a lot of deals that are brought to us from broker relationships. A lot of, like, soft or pocket listings we'll get from broker relationships. But also. So this deal in Arizona, that was completely off market, and the way we got that deal is there was another deal that this group was selling that we bid on, and we were, like, third or fourth. We weren't the highest bid, and we're not always the highest bid when we buy an asset. But. But our terms weren't aggressive enough on it. So we went back to them, we said, hey, look, we really want this deal. And they're like, sorry, we can't sell it to you, but we'd love to do business with you in the future. And we were like, great, let's do business, like, right now. And so we went to their portfolio. We pulled all the data on their portfolio, underwrote a bunch of their assets, ended up identifying the one that was here in Arcadia, and we underwrote it, and we said, hey, we'd like to buy this deal. Here is what we'd offer. And they just loved working with us. They knew we're young or hungry. We said, let us close this deal, and then we'll buy more from you. So it's. It's a lot of it is your, like, relationships with other owner operators, too.

And what would you say are the top five keys to raising capital for real estate or any capital raising?

Okay, top five keys. First, call your securities attorney. Do not raise capital without one. There are so many people on the Internet that will give you the worst advice, like broker dealer violations galore. And they'll be like, oh, it's a loophole. No, it's not. It is illegal. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Call your securities attorney first, like I said, we work with Nick McGrew. He's fantastic. I've been working with him for over 15 years now. He's awesome. Highly recommend working with him. Second would be mindset. I didn't do this when I first started, and I really wish I had. I coach with a woman by the name of Rosie Noel. She's based out of Chicago. She specializes in cliftonstrengths, which is amazing. And I actually coach with her now. I try to coach with her five days a week.

Wow.

I try to start every morning with her. I don't always get her because she has to have, like, other clients or something. Rosie, if you're listening to this, I'm not happy about that. I want all the time in the mornings, but I at least coach with her three times a week at a minimum. Because if I can manage this real estate, then I can manage all the other real estate. This is the hardest real estate I manage. So. And raising capital is scary and it seems easy until you try it, and then you're like, wow, this is hard and it's never going to work, but it will. You have to be persistent. So one is lawyer. Two is mindset coach. Three is build your relationships and raise your capital before you have a deal on the table. It is much different for me to come to you and be like, hey, Hannah, this is what I'm working on. This is what we target. Are you interested in something like this? And you go, yeah, that's amazing. And then I go, okay, great. I don't have a deal for you right now, but when I do, I'll come back to you. It's a very different conversation than, can I have this deal? And I really need another million dollars in capital. Do you want to invest in it? No, that's not how any of this works. So build a relationship beforehand. Once you have the deal on the table, then all I have to do is show you the deal, and then you can make a much easier, quicker decision. So build those relationships. Four is communication. Communication. Communication and then communication. You know, a lot of people shy away from bad news, and that is absolutely the wrong way to build trust and integrity with your investors. So deliver good news fast and bad news faster. It's the only way. Pick up the phone and call your investors if you need to but you have to treat them the way you would want to be treated if you were in that situation. And investors are very, very supportive and encouraging. When something's not going right and you communicate with them and you proactively communicate with them, you will get so much support and great ideas from your investors that you wouldn't even imagine until you make the hard phone call. So that is what I would say is number four. And number five is just keep going, keep going. You're gonna fail if you quit. If you never quit, you'll eventually get there. It might feel impossible, but you can do this. You just have to keep going. And it'll be hard. If it was easy, everyone would do it. But it's gonna be hard, but it'll totally be worth it.

Awesome. And what about a like rock bottom moment in your life or in your business that. Did you ever feel like quitting and, and how did you.

Yeah, I'm like, I want to quit today. This is like a daily thing for me. And you can quit every day. You just have to start again tomorrow. Like, that's the key is once you quit, you have to start back up. And it's because there are so many people relying on me, right? Like my investors, my family, my friends that are invested with me, my tenants, my staff. Like everybody is relying on me to continue going. So yeah, I want to quit all the time. All the time, many times in a day. But you just keep going and you do the hard thing. For me, the rock bottom moment in my whole life was in 2019, September 2019. One of my daughters, so I have twin five year old daughters. And one of them got really sick. She was ten weeks at the time, eight pounds, teeny, teeny, teeny. And she got sick. So we took her to the ER to see. You know, I was like, new mom, a fever was like, oh, we have to like go into urgent care or whatever. So we go to the emergency room. And ultimately they ended up treating her for a uti. She ended up being okay from that, but as part of the follow up, they do a liver ultrasound and the liver ultrasound. She was so small that. Or, sorry, a kidney ultrasound. And she was so small that they ended up picking up her liver on the ultrasound. And the doctor comes in and says, hey, there's like something on her liver. We need to check it out and see. And I was like, yeah, okay. It's probably like a spot clean the machine. You know, I'm like a layperson. I don't know. He's like, no, no, we need to do, like, an MRI or CAT scan or something. It was all blur. So we put her under anesthesia, she does the imaging, and the doctor walks in and says, this is a hepatoblastoma. I'm like, okay, great. Let's give her the meds and be on our way. But then I look at my husband, who's an M.D. he's a physician, and this man is, like, never emotional, and he is in tears instantly. And I'm, like, panicking now. I'm like, I don't know what this means. And doctor's like, it's a really aggressive pediatric cancer on her liver. And the problem with liver cancer, and anyone who's ever dealt with this knows what. Once cancer gets to the liver, it spreads everywhere because your liver takes, like, different nutrients, blood, I don't know, something to the rest of the body. And so it was the single moment that was the most traumatizing moment in my whole entire life. And, you know, to say it was rock bottom would probably be an understatement. But we ended up having friends and investors in our network who rallied together. And one of them, her name is Dr. Kate Mangona. I would give her anything she asked me for, forever, for the rest of my life, because she intervened and she said, hey, I want to. Like, I want to share with you, and I want to share this with other radiologists. It's a radiological diagnosis. So shares with other radiological. Radiologist comes back to me and says, I want to share with you that we think that this is an infantile hepatic hemangioendothelioma, which is a tumor, but it's a vascular tumor, and it's benign. So I was like, great, I'll take that one over this malignancy. And she ended up being right. We, you know, we had to take a little bit of a risk. We had to put a lot of faith and her that she was absolutely correct about this. And I know she was nervous about it, and I'm so grateful she said that and we did this because now Vivana is, you know, five and a half years old, and she's healthy and never had to do anything beyond those few steps we took. No chemo, no surgery, nothing. So it was great.

Thank God. I can't even imagine what that could have felt like.

Yeah, I don't recommend it.

Oh, well. Well, thank you so much for being here today. I know we're running short on time. I would talk to you for, like, 10 more years.

We'll do it again. Yeah, we will do this again.

Awesome. Well, thanks for hanging out with me. Thank you all for being here.