(Bloomberg) -- Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, is still not involved in the real estate company Cadre, said the company's Chief Executive Officer Ryan Williams during an interview on Tuesday.
Kushner was a co-founder of Cadre, along with Williams, in 2014, when Williams started the company as an investment platform focused largely on commercial real estate. The two had been friends in college at Harvard University. Since then, Kushner's political profile skyrocketed with the presidential election of his father-in-law, Donald Trump.
Kushner resigned from the company's board and sold some of his stake before Trump's inauguration, but his involvement in Cadre still generated some controversy, centered around whether Kushner disclosed his shares on government financial disclosure forms.
While Kushner is not involved in Cadre -- a point Williams made clear in June 2017 following the blowback -- Kushner still owns shares in the startup according to a recent financial disclosure form.
Williams said that he doesn't regret the decision to work with Kushner or the other early partners that allowed the company to scale. Today, the average deal size on Cadre's platform is more than $75 million, Williams said. The company allows investors to pool money to buy stakes in large real estate projects.
The year "2014 was a very different time from where we are today for a lot of different reasons," Williams said at Bloomberg's Sooner Than You Think conference in New York. "We were in a very different political environment, economic environment."
Earlier this year, Cadre was in talks to receive an investment from SoftBank Group Corp.'s $100 billion Vision Fund, a private technology investment vehicle that receives much of its capital from Saudi Arabia. But the deal fell apart over the summer. In September, SoftBank invested $400 million in real estate startup Opendoor.
To contact the reporters on this story: Julie Verhage in New York at jverhage2@bloomberg.net;Justina Vasquez in New York at jvasquez57@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Debarati Roy at droy5@bloomberg.net, Anne VanderMey
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