May 27, 2026 · 1 hr 8 min
With Adam Miller — Founder, 1P.org
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Adam Miller for LA Mayor: Tech Billionaire on Fixing LA's Housing Crisis, Homelessness & Government Inefficiency | No Vacancy Podcast Taylor Avakian sits down with Adam Miller — founder and former…
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Adam Miller for LA Mayor: Tech Billionaire on Fixing LA's Housing Crisis, Homelessness & Government Inefficiency | No Vacancy Podcast Taylor Avakian sits down with Adam Miller — founder and former CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand (sold for $5.2 billion) — who is running for Mayor of Los Angeles. In this wide-ranging conversation, Miller breaks down his bold plan to transform the city through operational excellence, accountability, and private sector innovation. From scaling a global education technology company to tackling LA’s most pressing challenges, Miller shares insights on leadership, incentives, efficiency, and what “good” governance actually looks like. Key Topics: - LA’s interconnected crises: homelessness, public safety, housing affordability, and economic decline - Why government needs a complete mindset shift on targets and expectations - His 7x7 Plan for immediate, measurable change as Mayor - Fixing permitting, recruitment, transparency, and infrastructure - Building affordable housing at a fraction of current costs - Leadership lessons from scaling a company from an apartment to 3,000 employees across 25 countries Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction & Government Mindset Problems 00:21 - Adam Miller Background & Cornerstone OnDemand Story 02:55 - Education, Overachievement & Early Life 05:00 - Was Building Wealth Worth It? 06:19 - Founding Cornerstone: Online Education Vision 11:52 - AI, Tech Bubbles & Cloud Computing Lessons 15:24 - Early Days, Pivots & Building the Business 18:04 - What Really Happens in Boardrooms 21:03 - LA’s Overlapping Crises & The 7x7 Plan 24:50 - First Week as Mayor: Immediate Actions 30:03 - Setting the Bar Higher in Government 32:28 - Changing Incentives, Accountability & Recognition 39:53 - Entering the Housing Space & Better Angels 43:46 - Building Housing at 1/3 the Cost 46:59 - Pitching Investors on LA & Predictability 53:28 - Waste, Fraud & Broken Incentives in Government 55:55 - Adam Miller’s Superpowers & Philosophy 59:12 - Purpose, Impact & Advice for Success 1:06:44 - Who Adam Miller Really IsAdam Miller is a tech entrepreneur, nonprofit leader, and candidate for Mayor of Los Angeles. This is a must-watch for anyone interested in the future of LA, urban policy, housing solutions, and effective leadership. No Vacancy Podcast with Taylor Avakian — Real conversations with leaders in commercial real estate, tech, and city innovation. Sponsor - Loan Titan Upscale your experience with https://loantitan.com/ Sponsor - AI for CRE Collective AI for CRE Community: https://www.skool.com/ai-for-cre-collective/about?ref=3b3ff2c0ccce44ba8039fafd54bf291a Subscribe and Stay Ahead! Stay informed and empowered in the multifamily real estate market. Subscribe to the channel for exclusive insights, rental updates, and expert analyses on the Los Angeles market. 🔔 Don’t miss out on the latest trends and tips to maximize your property's potential: https://www.youtube.com/c/TaylorAvakian 📈 Connect with me: Website: https://www.thegroupcre.com/ Email: taylor@thegroupcre.com X: https://x.com/TAYVAY_ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tayloravakian/#realestate #losangeles #business #podcast #entrepreneur #realestateinvesting #commercialrealestate #cre
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One of the challenges we have in government is people don't know what good looks like. The mindset is just completely wrong. The targets are totally wrong. The expectations are totally wrong. Adam Miller is a tech entrepreneur [Music] and non-profit leader
running for mayor of Los Angeles. He founded, led, and ultimately sold
[Music] Cornerstone On Demand for $5.2 billion. The reality is that a lot of the issues in LA become so big that they now overlap. Homelessness affects public safety. Public safety affects business, which affect jobs and economic opportunity, which goes back to the lack of affordability. If you're on a team that's not competitive and you're the best player and you have nobody that can keep you honest, your performance is going to go down. And that's true at every level of every organization. Let the private sector build the housing because the private sector knows how to do it profitably, and efficiently, and effectively, and that's going to enable much, much more building across the city.
How is it possible that we're now spending $800,000 a year?
That obviously makes no sense. If you're told the way you're going to make money is a cost plus model, your incentive is to let it cost whatever it costs. You ask what makes somebody successful, it's somebody that
has This episode is sponsored by Loan Titan, a leading residential financing loan company specializing in both conforming and non-conforming mortgage solutions. Loan Titan offers Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, non-QM, and private money, hard money loan programs, helping borrowers who need flexibility beyond traditional lending guidelines or speed-driven financing solutions. Whether you're purchasing, refinancing, or investing, Loan Titan is known for smart structuring, clear communication, and reliable execution. Visit loantitan.com and mention Taylor Avakian to get started. Thanks for Loan Titan for supporting the channel. The question I wanted to ask you out of the gate was, was it worth it to become wealthy? Like was the was the work that goes into it? Cuz I've felt it. I know what 80 hours, 100 hours feels like, right?
Like, as someone who's not there, who wants to, I remember when I was 14 years old, the I I don't remember what happened, but I was like, I want to become a billionaire. Like, that's my, you know, for every 14-year-old is like, that's what they want, cuz they see whatever you can get. And then when you become an adult and start working, it's a lot of work, and you get tough breaks, and you're like, am I strong enough to do this? In any case, was it worth it?
You're not going to like the answer. I'm not? All the most successful people I know Yeah. never did it for the money. Really? Including me. Yeah. Never about the money.
What was it about?
It was about the mission, the grind, the love of the game, and the desire to have an impact on something. It depends who it is and what they did, but for me, it was about the mission of what I was trying to do. In my case, trying to improve access to education on a global basis, and really living the mission of trying to educate people all over the world, and that's exactly what we did, and that's what got me up every day. That's what got me through the hard times. That's what kept me in the game, and that's what kept me committed. Layer on top of that, as a startup CEO, you're also beholden to the employees you've brought on board, the customers that you've picked up, and your investors.
And in many cases, for especially young entrepreneurs, those investors are your friends and family. So, you want to help them. You want to support them, and you really don't want to
fail. Why Why'd you go into education?
What was it about that that like was it Your mom was a teacher? Okay. I've always been told about the importance of education. And then as I was becoming educated, I observed that educated people by and large are healthier, more successful, contribute more to society, and generally have better lives. Mhm. And so education really is fundamental to advancing society because it's the educated people, right? Whether we're talking about the educated workforce, or educators, or we're talking about people who have the skills and competence to get things done. Mhm. Those are the people that are advancing society. And so education's at the root of solving literally every other
problem. Yeah. What was there What was the initial idea for the business that you ended up selling? I read that you started in your apartment building. Was there Like what was your idea of what you wanted that platform to be? And can you describe what the platform was, I guess, when you sold it?
Yeah, so the original idea was to use the internet to help educate people. That's pretty obvious today, but back then, this was 1999,
Okay.
not so obvious Mhm. cuz bandwidth wasn't there. There wasn't enough bandwidth to be able to actually deliver a class online. Takes too long.
You couldn't download it.
Got it.
There wasn't streaming video back then. Yeah, YouTube was not 2004, I think, was when YouTube
Yeah, this stuff didn't exist. So, you had to have some vision that this was going to happen. And I was convinced this was going to happen, that bandwidth was improving, Mhm. that you would be able to take a class online, and that by having online education, you would level the playing field, right? If you had more classes online, classes would become cheaper, they'd be more accessible. Adults are at work usually when school is happening. So, this would be asynchronous. You could do it whenever you wanted. You can have all different types of classes, and you weren't limited to where you were living. Right, depending on where you live, that would determine what school you would take, especially as an adult. In this case, you could take classes anywhere because it was online. So, the question back then was, do
you create the content or do you distribute the content? That was the first big decision for the company. And having seen what happened actually in LA with the CD-ROM business, believe it or not, what became companies like Activision and EA Sports, back then, it was the distributors that won that space, not the original developers. Those companies were publishers. They weren't developers. And so, I thought the same thing was going to happen here. So, I want to be the distributor, not the creator of the content. Interesting. And I thought the same thing that happened in that space would happen in this space, which was initially the people creating the content would do better. They would get the recognition and maybe some of the funding, but ultimately it would become about distribution. We were distributors.
Now, ultimately Cornerstone became everything in the education space. We created content, we distributed content, we were building systems for corporations, schools, governments to be able to optimize how they were delivering training and education to people. And being able to do it not just online, but also in the classroom, and managing that whole process. Including things like determining what training people took based on how they were performing, based on what their goals were, based on whether or not they would become a leader in the organization, based on if they were on an executive track to become a future executive of the organization. Which are big company things in many cases. But we built the tools to enable all those processes.
And that became Cornerstone, which I ran initially out of my apartment by myself. And ultimately 10 years as a private company CEO and then 10 years as a public company CEO. And by the time I was done, we had 3,000 employees in 25 countries. We had delivered over 2 billion classes to over 100 million people around the world. Jesus. And had really transformed the way people were getting developed.
Are you technical by trade? I am. So you know how to code and do all that kind of
used to. I went to I could do it. Well, now although now you don't have to.
going to say, yeah. I I'm coding and I have zero technical and it is freaking sick what I can build. So I can only imagine when you were actually able to do it and you built something that worked, you're like, "Whoa. I just created something."
It felt like that for you.
Well, cool. I really enjoy it. I'm I'm doing all the cloud code stuff and building certain applications which is I think going to change obviously AI is going to change the landscape forever. Um I have that fundamental
Already happening.
Oh. It is a it is a very insane time to be in, which feels like to me late 1990s, 1997, 98, 99. That feels like right? Yeah. And I also think there's going to be a bubble where all these companies that are raising a bunch of money
like There's a 100% a bubble. Right? Yes.
100%. From your experience, like can you dive into that in terms of what you see or the patterns I guess that you see that tells you what's going to be successful or what company is versus what's not?
Do you know how do you a big difference now than then. So, back then the transformation was from client server, Yeah. where you had to install your software to cloud computing, where the software was in the cloud. The way I used to explain it to people was it was the difference between Microsoft and Google back then. Microsoft, you had to deploy on your desktop. You had
to literally insert the disks to your computer back then Mhm. and load Microsoft Word and Office. Yeah. But Google, you would just go to a web to a URL and be able to access Google. Today, obviously, everything is online. Yeah. But that was the pattern that software replicated. This idea that you could do it online. There was a tremendous amount of resistance Mhm. from corporations, in particular from IT departments, because people thought it wasn't safe. Mhm. And back then I would say, "Look, you think it's not safe for your company in the same way in 1995 you thought it wasn't safe to put your credit card on Amazon." Mhm. And now you realize it's safer to have your credit card in Amazon than to use your credit card at the gas station. Mhm. Of course, now I'm really aging myself cuz people have electric cars,
they don't go to the gas station. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nobody uses their credit card, they just use Apple Pay Yeah, that sounds or their phone. Yeah. And obviously, there are 100% of software companies are now using cloud computing. Yeah. But back then that wasn't true. So, you had to be really committed to this idea Mhm. that the world was changing. Mhm. And I remember there was a tremendous amount of resistance. So, my sales team, my sales people would say, "We can't just deliver it online. We have to be able to give them the disks. We won't win this deal with this big bank or this big retail company if we don't let them install it behind their firewall. Mhm. And I had become convicted with the idea that the only way you would be able
to preserve the purity of the company Mhm. is if we only had one version of the software that was delivered online. And that was the only way we would be able to make it truly scalable and have a business that really was all recurring revenue. Mhm. And that was a huge fight back in the early 2000s because we needed the capital. We needed the money. We needed that next sale. Yeah, you need to win the deal. And so every single deal was a fight. Yeah. But at the end of the day it turned out I was right because everything had moved online. And having one version without the need to maintain all these different versions of the software made it so that we could build much faster Mhm. than the competition. Made it that it was much easier to maintain than
what the competition was doing and allowed us to out innovate everyone else. And that enabled us to build the business that that we ultimately
created. What uh what was the first year like? Do you remember? Oh, absolutely. What was that like?
I mean, look, the first days are fun. You're trying to convince people to join the company. Mhm. You're trying to convince people to give you money. You're trying to figure out what the product is. You have no constraints. Mhm. But we were building the wrong thing early on. Early on we were building something that was direct to consumer. It was a B2C Mhm. idea where we were aggregating all the online training that was out there and delivering it to adults at home. And there's a whole long story I could tell about it, but the reality is when the internet bubble burst, which was soon after I started the company within a year, we had to transform. And we pivoted to start selling to
corporations. So, you took it from going D2C, which is obviously different kind of advertising, to then probably hiring a sales team cuz
you have to go to B2B. then we only had one sales guy, but yeah.
I'm sure you were doing a lot of selling, too. Right? Right? You're like, "Hey, this is what's valuable to you. Here's the ROI, all this kind of stuff." Was there a company that you tried to model the business after after?
Or like, what was your No, we didn't we didn't know what we didn't know. So, back then we weren't getting advice. And part of the challenge was I was living in LA. Mhm. And at that time, LA had no tech industry. So, there was nobody to talk to. Mhm. There wasn't anybody to get advice from. There had been MySpace, but that kind of was it. And that obviously wasn't on the enterprise side, that was on the consumer side. Mhm. So, there wasn't a whole lot of help. Now, that's completely changed, and I've been a mentor literally to dozens of CEOs as they've started their companies and they've built their business. I also helped build the tech ecosystem in LA to what it is today. Mhm. But it was very different back then. So, we didn't know who to learn
from. Ultimately, as a public company CEO, I got a lot of help. I had on my board the CEO of Concur, which is one of the biggest cloud computing companies in the world. I would get advice from people like Marc Benioff, who is CEO of Salesforce. I got advice from people running the other big software companies, and that really helped me grow the business and learn from their mistakes and understand what to think about for the future. But early on, I didn't have any of that help. Yeah.
And so we stumbled our way into figuring it out. What goes on in the board room meetings? Like what do you guys I don't I've never been in a board room meeting. What do you guys do?
You know, a good board room it depends on the stage of the company. Okay. I've been in a lot of board rooms for three decades. Yeah. I've been on the CEO side and I've been a director, I've been a chairman. I've been in every spot in a board room. Mhm. And it depends on the stage of the company. Earlier stage companies, meetings tend to be very tactical. Later stage companies, the meetings tend to be very strategic. Meaning are you going to move in a new product direction? Should you go into a new market? Should you be focused domestically or internationally? Do you buy another company? Do you discontinue some of the things you were doing?
Do you grow the business or shrink the business? All these do you focus on growth or profitability?
These are all strategic questions that depend on the time, place, and type of company. Yeah. And what the trajectory is of the business. Smaller businesses, it's about the grind.
How are you building your pipeline? How are you closing the next deal? How are you expanding your market? How are you thinking about your product footprint?
A lot of times, early stage CEOs want to go broader when they actually need to go deeper. That that it's too early to go into multiple product lines. It's too early to expand into multiple markets. Perfect one and then move on.
Do you have an example of something like that or example that came up where that was the scenario?
A ton of companies. I mean, whether it was my own or others, where the the business hadn't fully saturated the market they were in, but the CEO wanted to move to the next market. So, timing is a big deal. You want to saturate your market first cuz you have limited resources. No matter how big a company is, even when Cornerstone was a multinational public company, you still never have enough resources for everything you want to do and and everything you could do. And so, you always have to make decisions about how to optimize your resources. By the way, the same thing's true for governments. You have a set budget. You don't have an infinite amount of capital. You have a set number of people working for the organizations. True in corporations, it's true in nonprofits, and it's true in governments.
So, you have to figure out how do you allocate those resources and how do you optimize your spend? And that's really about experience. It's about operational management and it's about understanding how to be efficient and leverage your people, your processes, and your tools to maximize your
opportunity. Is there enough public information, I guess, to understand what the main focus points would be for you when it comes to the political landscape in Los Angeles? Like, have you identified, okay, we can do all this stuff. There's a lot of that's broken, right? Clearly, if you've lived in LA, you feel that way. But, like you said, you have to be able to focus on the most important or impactful things. The bottleneck theory, I guess you could say. What's the bottleneck that if you solve that, the rest of the issues would either be less important or solve themselves?
Yeah, it's a great question. The reality is that a lot of the issues in LA have become so big that they now overlap. It's more of a Venn diagram than separate discrete issues, right? Homelessness affects public safety. Homelessness affects your industry, real estate. Yeah. Yeah. Homelessness affects business. The trash affects business. Public safety affects business. Which all affect jobs and economic opportunity, which goes back to the
lack of affordability. Lollapalooza effect as Charlie Munger likes to
say. It's all these things are interrelated. So,
how do you solve it?
Well, you need an operating plan. Every single business I've ever run, every nonprofit that I've run, has an operating plan, right? You have goals that you set out. You want the goals to be as quantifiable as possible. And then you need tactics to achieve those goals. I put together something I call the
7x7 plan. Mhm. It's seven specific goals for the city. These are big goals, big objectives with a need to stretch to achieve them all. Mhm. With seven specific tactics to achieve each goal. So, it's 49 discrete specific things that I would do in the city. And most of them can be done by the mayor starting day one without needing approval from anyone else. Mhm. Because in any organization that you have, if you're the leader, Yeah. it's not about excuses. Mhm. The buck stops with the boss. Yeah. And that means yes, you There are certain things you need city council approval for. There are certain things you need the county board of supervisors to approve. But you can't base your plan on those things. Yeah. You have to base your plan on things you could control. Just like when you're
the CEO or chairperson, you have to be able to leverage the resources that you have. Mhm. Not new things that you might want to have or wish you had, but the actual opportunity you have to make change. And that's exactly what I would bring to City Hall. So, these are 49 discrete things that we can do to bring about real change. And it starts by doing simple things that change the trajectory of the city. Right? We're on a downward spiral.
We need to reverse that.
So, we need small wins. And you could do that with transparency. You could do that with accountability. You can do that by simplifying permitting. You can do that by adding more law enforcement patrols. I want to double the patrols. But, let's start by getting more. You could do that by modernizing the way the city is operating. Let's bring the city into the 21st century. All of these things are totally feasible to do. A lot of them could be done with the less money than we're spending, not more money. So, some of these things actually reduce cost. Which frees up dollars to do other things that people really care about, like fix infrastructure. Let's fix the streets and the sidewalks and the street
lights. Yeah. Give me like a tactical thing that you would do first week in office. Like, what's the number one thing you do?
Well, there's not a number one thing. There's a lot of things I would do starting day one. One of them is I'd launch a Fix LA platform that would immediately make everything in the city transparent. Every issue that residents have. Whether it's a broken sidewalk or graffiti or trash pile on the corner of the street, I would ensure that every permit that's outstanding in the city is listed with how long it's been sitting there. I That would transform the way the city is thinking about permitting. Well, not in a way that's easy to access for everybody to see. And certainly not any way to visualize that data. How about listing every single construction project and where it stands, when it's supposed to be done, how much it's supposed to cost, and where we are against that plan. Mhm.
There are a number of things that we can immediately make transparent for the city. Second thing I do, I'd focus LAPD on more patrols. Everything we can do to drive more patrols, immediately start hiring more officers, immediately work on transforming the way we're doing recruitment for all city services, for LAPD, for fire, for emergency management, for sanitation, really across the board. We have failed at recruitment. It's 2026. You can't recruit the way you recruited back in 1980. You have to do it in a modern way. You have to have better onboarding, better training and development for the people that are working for the government. All of it really straightforward if you know how to operate. We should be eliminating permitting time.
Our permitting should take 80% less time than it does today. It's one of the main reasons it's hard to build, whether you're a real estate developer or you're small business owner. It's really hard to do business in this city. Super hard. And permitting is a huge problem. Also a problem for the film industry. Right? It affects entertainment, it affects real estate, and it affects all types of businesses. We could immediately move to parallel processing of permits. We could immediately move to online permits with AI validation of the permit. So, you don't have to wait 3 months to find out that you made a mistake on page 27 of the permit. You'd find out in 30 seconds and resubmit a minute later. not already exist then? It should exist, but we have antiquated systems in place. Yeah. When I filed to run for mayor,
it literally took three full days to do the filing. And actually, it didn't work. They had put in some antiquated system. It didn't work. There was no way to upload the data. It makes no sense how we're operating. You were talking about Vibe coding. Yeah. Right? We're in a new world. crazy. There's a lot of things that we could do that are so much more streamlined and automated than the way the city's operating, which not only make it easier for businesses and all Angelenos, but it also makes it way cheaper to operate the city. Mhm. Which then allows us to reallocate those costs to the things that matter, public safety and infrastructure. We can also eliminate some of the things we do from permitting perspective, move to self-certification when we're talking about real estate by licensed architects and
engineers. Other cities do this. And then you audit 20% of the projects instead of reviewing 100% of the projects. It works. It's done all over the place. We could eliminate permitting requirements that don't make sense. You want to do a non-structural remodel of your own home? Go ahead. Yeah.
Why do you need a permit?
You want to move a non-structural wall or you want to repaint and change out the windows? Who cares?
Go ahead and do it. It's crazy to me some of the things like washers and dryers and and it's like, oh my gosh. And then they make you tear it out. And the home the like you could there there could be so many more units. A lot of owners, they'll put up these kind of like units and whatnot. Uh bootleg units. And um if you could just get a permit like the it could be done in three weeks. Like, hey, we have this extra space. We're going to put up a wall. We're going to put up a window. Like come over here. Check it off. Here's my uh contractor who's certified, self-certified that the work's done well, right? Like it just doesn't make any sense to me when you think about it from a speed. I had a Reno Kaplan on here who was one of the co-founders of Akamai
and he does some private investing and stuff and he was talking about how um the companies like the tech companies, they just think differently. Like they think differently about speed. There's like five things that they're worried about and all the other things are less important, right? It's like these are the five main things we have to focus and we'll do whatever it takes to get there because if we hit those then everything else doesn't doesn't really matter. And it's like just come on, like think think about this stuff. I want to ask you how how'd you get into housing?
Well, just on that point, one of the challenges we have in government is people don't know what good looks like. You were asking me before about the evolution of a CEO over time. Part of the reason you need mentors over time is you need to understand what good looks like. What does it mean to be efficient?
What is a reasonable standard?
People in government might think 16 months that's pretty good. I'll give you a very specific example. Karen Bass, who's the current mayor, said that she's doing a great job because police recruitment right now on average if you were to apply for the police department it takes 12 months to get hired. She thinks we're making tremendous strides because now our goal is to do it in 6 months. But if you were in the private sector you would know that that's absurd. If you're working for example in a technology company and you're trying to hire an engineer, you have 48 hours max to get somebody the offer and get them in the seat. Yeah. You don't have 6 months. You don't even have 6 days. So the mindset is just completely wrong. The targets are totally wrong. Mhm. The expectations are totally wrong.
Mhm. People might think 16 months for a permit, well, that's not so bad. Used to take 3 years. It's absurd. It should take 16 days. Maybe 16 hours.
Yeah.
We can do so much better, but we have to have the right expectations. And you see that all the time, whether you're talking about nonprofits or for-profits, the CEO sets the bar, Mhm. and people jump over the bar, wherever it is. If the bar's on the floor, don't expect them to jump too high.
Yeah.
Yeah. And that's the problem we have. Our bar as a city is incredibly low. That's why you have you hear Mayor Bass saying things like, "Oh, crime is down." Nobody feels like crime is down. People in the city feel unsafe in their neighborhood, they feel unsafe in their business, and they feel unsafe even in their own home. She says, "Oh, homelessness is down." But anybody who walks down the street knows that homelessness is everywhere. We have to do better, and we have to set the bar higher to actually transform this city and be in a better
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They've They've had some quotes about, you know, how I can change a government as you change incentives. How would you change the incentives for government, government workers, people in government? Because right now it doesn't feel like the incentives are aligned with the job, which is, you know, helping the constituents or helping the people live in the city. How do you think about incentives?
So, it comes back to transparency and accountability. Yeah. Right now things are so obscure. Nobody knows who's responsible for what. There's tremendous redundancy in the government. There's tremendous overlap. If you look at something like homeless services, there is incredible redundancy in the ecosystem of how services are delivered, and therefore nobody's actually responsible. So, it's very easy to do whatever you want because other people are equally responsible, and therefore nobody is responsible. If you have transparency and accountability, you suddenly get the results you want. But you have to be able to measure outcomes. You have to be able to set specific goals and tie people to those goals and hold them accountable for results. But if that doesn't happen, then what you end up with are
people that don't care if they perform Mhm. because they don't get any credit for it anyway. One of the things I found that was very interesting in sales was that you have a lot of people in sales that are former athletes. Sales people tend to be very competitive. Mhm. And I didn't understand this at first because people always said, "Oh, sales people are coin operated." They only care about how they can make the most money. So, your incentive plan matters tremendously because people will do whatever it takes to get the maximum commission. But what I found was that's not true. What motivated them more than anything else was the leaderboard. Was being considered the best. Mhm. Was being compared to their peers and being able to get credit when credit was due and being recognized for doing great work and that was a much bigger motivator for
people than whatever dollars were on the
table. So you basically I assume you had a a live dashboard or dashboard of of this person closes deal or this person is leading this month or
Absolutely and we had something called Presidents Club where only the top performers were allowed to be in Presidents Club and it became a huge motivator for people. Yeah. So I had for 20 years as CEO of Cornerstone I had an employee of the year. It was very controversial as the company got bigger because so many people were impactful to the business. Yeah. So we had runner-ups, we had finalists and we had the employee of the year Mhm. and I would say every year this is my decision. You will you do not have to blame anybody else. If you don't like the choice, you can blame me. Yeah. But this is who I think contributed the most to the company over the course of the last year. And that recognition resonates tremendously with people. Mhm.
And that's the kind of thing we need to bring to government. Right now people have no recognition for the work they do. So whether they do amazing work or no work there's no consequence. Yeah. And what happens in that situation is that ultimately if you are starting to look around and this is true at any organization and the other people aren't working as hard as you and they're not getting anything done but there's no consequence you start to think well I'm the schmuck here. I need to stop working as much. Mhm. I'm the one not doing what I should be doing. I need to lower the bar.
And it's a race to the bottom. It's like a contagion. Like what I've I've been in different offices and different I'm I'm in sales technically, right? A service-based business, but but sales at the end of the day. And when people around you are like working really hard, it motivates you. I have this call it ego, call it whatever you want to do, competitive. I was an athlete, so I resonate very much with what you were saying. Um in that I just want to win. Like I just want to be the best at whatever I'm doing. And when you're the best by not actually working your best because everyone else is not working to their best, you like lower your bar because you don't have to you don't have to keep pushing it cuz no one's pushing you. It's the same thing in sports, right?
Yeah. If you're on a team that's not competitive and you're the best player and you have nobody to keep you honest, your performance is going to go down. 100%. true at every level of every organization. So, it starts at the top. It starts with setting the right expectations. And it's about motivation. But the other part of it is it's about purpose. People want purpose in their work. The work I do at Team Rubicon, for example, which today is the largest veteran service organization in the country, was built with the idea that when vets come home from war, they often lose purpose. So, how can we give them purpose when they come back home? And we said, "We'll use the skills and competence of vets to do disaster relief. Because if you think about disasters or
humanitarian aid, you're operating in a very chaotic environment, just like the military trains people to operate." So, these people are very well equipped to do humanitarian aid. And in so doing, they have purpose when they come back home. They're helping other people on their worst days do better and get back on their feet. People want purpose in what they're doing. So, sometimes I hear, "Well, if you bring LA into the 21st century, aren't you going to automate jobs away? Aren't you going to change things?" Yeah, we're going to change things, and we're going to get rid of administrative things that nobody wants to do, and give them things that are important that the city needs. Give people purpose in their work. That is a huge motivator. Give people recognition for doing
a great job. That is a huge motivator. Set goals that people can see and feel. That's a huge motivator. But, it's about leadership. And this city has not had the right leadership to get us in the right direction, and that's what we
need to bring to LA. What, um, I want to talk about housing. So, you got into housing, I don't know, couple years ago. Um, why did you decide to go into housing? What was it about that? And I don't know if it was first you did the the investment stuff, or it was like, what was the first foray into housing for you?
So, I got very involved in homelessness. When I sold Cornerstone, we took it private in 2021. So, I'd run it for 10 years as a public company CEO. We performed very well in the stock market. The company grew exponentially. And I thought after 20 years it was enough time of doing anything, and sold the business. We took it private with Colony Capital. And at that point, my wife and I decided we're going to work on intractable problems. The most intractable problem in LA, of course, is homelessness. So, we did a tremendous amount of research on why do we have such a huge issue despite literally $10 billion and thousands of and thousands of people working on the issue for years. What we found is it's very complex problem. There's no silver bullet and it requires a holistic
solution. And so for us that holistic solution meant doing something that included prevention, services, shelter, technology, but also of course housing. Mhm. And so we built Better Angels, which is the non-profit I run today, Mhm. that is addressing all of those things. On the prevention side we've kept 4,500 Angelenos housed who were below 50% area median income. They were already poor, many of them below 30% AMI, who had a financial shock and who had already received an eviction notice. And we were able to keep them housed for 98% less than what happens once they're on the street. We transformed the way people are delivering services across the county. We created the first directory of comprehensive database essentially
of shelter in LA, which believe it or not did not exist. Wow. We've built technology for the whole ecosystem and we got into housing. So I started investing with affordable housing developers including Model Mhm. Z development. So I would started initially with Sola Housing Mhm. and working with Sola Impact on their projects and then Martin Muoto came to me with the idea for Model Z. I became the lead investor Mhm. for Model Z
with the first check written. I thought it was an incredible idea to build a modular manufacturing facility in South LA Mhm. to do affordable housing in LA. Yeah. And that's been a really effective program that I think is transformative for the space, which will dramatically lower the cost of building affordable housing and thereby enable much cheaper rents as it comes to affordable housing.
And you've probably seen though how inefficient it is even with if you can build cheap housing for the cost, right? Cuz you can build cheap housing in in uh Houston with like the traditional ways of building it. It's the other that cost it to be so much. It's everything You probably felt it real time when you're like, "Hey, I'm trying to see this company and uh we know the product's good. We know that we can build for cheap, but it keeps getting expensive because of
bureaucracy. Everything else. Right?
Everything else.
And you're like, "What the heck is this?" Yeah, so then I got even deeper into it with starting the Better Angels Affordable Housing Fund where we are literally ourselves now co-general partners with developers building affordable housing in LA. And the goal is to build it at a third of the cost in less than half the time of what the city is doing today.
What does that What do those numbers look like?
So, the city today it's 800,000 a unit on average taking 5 to 7 years to build. And that is way too expensive and way too slow Mhm. to be able to really impact housing in the city and to have any real impact on affordability or homelessness. So, you're like 250 a door? The goal ultimately is 250. We won't do a project for under for over 300,000 a door. Okay. And we want to get it done as quickly as possible. Yeah. You know, all in under 3 years.
Hopefully. And then what was the business plan? So, like walk me through cuz you seem like a guy who has a business plan when you start anything. Yes. What was the business plan for for Better Angels and for the housing?
So, for the housing fund specifically, the idea is to leverage private capital instead of public capital Okay. to do the equity associated with these projects, so you don't have to try to line up multiple tranches of capital, which is very inefficient, very expensive, and creates even incremental compliance requirements, which make the project more expensive, not just because of the financing, but because of all the rules you have to follow. Mhm. We get rid of all of that by having a single check to do the equity, and then leverage innovations like modular development to make the construction cheaper and faster, and leverage things like ED1, like other entitlement provisions that are now in the city and the state to enable faster
permitting, but you still have issues around inspections, you still have issues with hookups from DWP, you still have issues around scale-up and stabilization, but there's clearly an opportunity in this model to also enable master leasing, Mhm. which we think is much needed by the city. My head of housing, Andre Bueno, comes from HACLA, Mhm. which understands the need for more affordable housing, the need for more workforce housing, the need to to leverage tools like master leasing to speed up the entire process and to stabilize faster. So, all these things enable not just the more rapid building of housing, but private sector market-rate returns
for the projects, Mhm. which means you could cut the public sector out of the construction part of the process. Yeah. Let the public sector still subsidize rents, let the public sector do master leasing, let the public sector support wrap-around services with nonprofits providing the services on-site, but let the private sector do the construction. Let the private sector build the housing because the private sector knows how to do it profitably, efficiently, and effectively. And that's going to enable much, much more building across the city.
What's your pitch to investors who are redlining LA? Like if if someone's watching this right now and they're like, why would I invest my money in a place like Los Angeles where the regulations are so high, the risk is higher because you don't know the rules of the game. I think that's a common thing that we talk about offline is is uh is you're playing a game, right? When you're doing sort of any business, it's a game. And you have defined rules that hopefully don't change often. Sometimes they do, but for the most part they stay similar rules, right? The problem with housing in Los Angeles, and I've seen this even in my 8-year career, which is not very much very long. The rules change so often Yes. that a business plan doesn't take 6 months to execute. Like these are long-term business plans.
And when the rules change from when you started it to halfway through, like the business plan has to pivot and change, and that's very hard in housing. So, what do you say to someone who says, why would I go invest in a place with this amount of risk and this much pardon my French. Why would I do that?
I've been a public company CEO, and I can tell you one of the most important things if you're running a big business is predictability. It actually matters more that you're accurate than it does if the business is doing better or
worse.
Yep. People don't understand that, right? You could actually have a worse quarter [snorts] but be accurate about it and you'll be penalized less than if you have a good quarter, but you missed your your ultimate target.
Wow.
So, it's about predictability. And if you think about finance, you're talking about Charlie Munger. Mhm. What is the most important number in finance, the most important metric if you're an investor? IRR.
And what is the biggest factor in IRR?
Speed. Time. Yeah. If you can't predict how long a project's going to take, you have no ability to predict the IRR. Mhm. And therefore, the project is not financeable if you're a big national institutional investor. And that's exactly why LA has become redlined Mhm. across the board. It's not predictable anymore. Some of it is throwing out rules like ULA, which makes absolutely no sense and has killed construction in this city. Yeah. And was proposed by one of my opponents who now is regretting having done it, but fought really hard to get ULA passed. Yeah. We have to be more thoughtful about how we are making the city more predictable. So, for example, if we could reduce permitting times by 80%, that makes
it more predictable. If we could have parallel processing of things, that reduces duration. If we have dedicated departments for net new residential development at places like DWP, that makes it more predictable. You know when your stuff is going to get turned on. If we have shot clocks around permitting and entitlement, so that you have a set number of days, that makes it more predictable. All of those things will encourage more investment in the city. And then layer on top of that, streets that are cleaner, neighborhoods that are safer, all of that improves the value of real estate, which drives more development, which is the only way we're getting the average cost of rent down in the city.
Yeah, I mean, steel man for me real quick. What would your What would someone who has the opposite view for what you're saying? Like, what is their counter arguments to what you're trying to do? Why would Why would Why would someone disagree with with this?
There's almost no way to disagree. The only real argument against any of these plans that I have, right? Everybody wants safer streets. So, it makes sense to double the patrols. Everybody wants cleaner and and better infrastructure. So, it makes sense to do maintenance and repair our broken infrastructure. Yeah. It makes sense to modernize the city, right? Everyone's frustrated with anything they're doing with the city. It makes sense to create jobs here to bring back Hollywood. Obviously, everybody agrees with that. The question is, how do you do this stuff? And in particular, who is best equipped to do it? So, the argument against me is that I don't have political experience. I actually think that's an advantage. Mhm. Number one, no incumbencies going into office. I have no favors to repay. I have no alliances to uphold.
I am there purely to get the job done and to help all Angelenos. Yeah. Also, there's a question about how do you operate in a government if you don't have government experience? And what I would say to that, look at housing. Look at homelessness. We've had a mayor that has incredible political experience. She was a politician for a long time. She worked in Sacramento. She worked in DC. She has incredible political alliances. But no ability to execute. And so, homelessness is terrible in this city. Housing production's at the lowest level in a decade. Film production's down 40% since 2019. These are not success stories. We are moving in the wrong direction. And so, political experience, political connections does not lead to
results. We've proven that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
What leads to his results is a leader that knows how to operate.
That's how we're going to transform the city. You mentioned something about um people wanting to see these changes, obviously. I historically have never been political. One because I always felt like focusing on what I needed to do is the most important thing. Like I have to be able to get my done first, right? You know, your mask on before you put other masks on. That's a lot of the the ways that I thought about it. And then when you start to do business, then things start affecting you and you're like, I don't want that to affect me. That's very upsetting. Why are you doing that? What about like the the NGOs? The people who are there's clearly someone who is winning from the lack of streamline-ness. There's the bureaucracy. Like there's money that's being moved. The money's going somewhere, right?
Like people are going to be not be happy if you go and say, "Hey, we're cutting this off. We're cutting this off. We're cutting this off." Someone's making that money.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, there's definitively fraud. Has to be. There is a huge amount of waste. But there's also in between, right? Not necessarily people that are corrupt or committing fraud, but people who are benefiting from the broken system. So, they're operating within the the rules. Yeah. The rules are just bad rules. And so, they're benefiting from the inefficiency of the government and the way things operate. I'll just give you a really specific example around housing. How is it possible that we're now spending $800,000 a unit? That obviously makes no sense. But if you're told the way you're going to make money is a cost-plus model, you have no incentive to rein in the costs. Your incentive is to let it cost whatever it costs. I'm not going to try to make the cost
lower. If I get 10% of the project fee, then I make way more money if it's $800,000 a unit than if it's $300,000 a unit. So, we have to change the rules of the game. We have to make it about profitability and efficiency.
And you could see this all over the board. SpaceX is what came to mind for me, right? Cuz Boeing, Lockheed, all those guys, the whole NASA government space system previously to SpaceX was basically cost plus. And then SpaceX came at came in and said, "We're not going to do that. We're going to build, you know, as cheaper and efficiently. We're going to win the contracts and bids." It's like, "Oh no way." Like, that's how people are incentivized, you know? Like, it's it's it's not it doesn't take a no-brainer to to realize that that doesn't work when you're working with humans.
Exactly. That's why we have SpaceX engineers at Model Z. Yeah. Exactly that reason, right? Their job is every single day, "How do we cut one or two percentage points from the cost of what we're doing?" So, every day they're looking to be more efficient. Yeah. That is the opposite of what's happening with people that are operating a cost plus model, where they have no incentive to lower the cost. Mhm. And you end up with what we have today. [sighs and gasps] It's a very interesting time and very interesting space. So, there will be losers in my administration, and those are the people that are taking advantage of the broken system.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, we don't want those people to win. I'm okay with that.
Yeah, I'm okay with that.
We want those people to lose. What do you think your special sauce is? What do you think allowed you to grow a company like from a self-awareness perspective? You've probably had some introspective time to think about how you did what you did. And I'm sure when you made a a bunch of money, I've heard that it's like awesome for a little bit, and then you have to ask yourself, okay, then what is my purpose now, right?
I've I've done the thing. That's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Yeah, yeah, right? You have all the basic needs are handled.
Yeah, what's what's next? So, what do you think makes you unique? Like what what would if if I was to ask your wife, like what would she say Adam's superpower is?
Oh, I know what her answer is and I know what my answer is. Okay, please. My answer is that it's about being a lifelong learner. Mhm. Always willing to learn. Always trying to get something out of every interview, every conversation, trying to always improve. Which is really important if you're going to evolve as a leader, whether it's in business or the nonprofit world or in the government. You have to always be learning, paying attention to what's out there, understanding how to separate the signal from the noise, and continuing to evolve. And that has been true for me and that's been true for all the most successful CEOs that I know. It's about people who are coachable.
What would your wife say?
My wife would say that one of the keys to my success has been that people want to have a beer with me. Interesting. And so, people like to hang out with me and want to be part of what I'm building.
Is it because as they see your drive and I want to be around successful people. I want to be be around smart people cuz it it improves me. They say you're the average of the five people, right? That old that old saying or whatever. I love being in rooms where I can learn. Like that is that would that really resonates with me because that is what fuels me. I'm fascinated by things like human psychology, um understanding business principles. This this podcast started as me wanting to learn from people who are successful that I was talking to and understanding how they did it. Like what was the the thought process? Was there something that they did where they joined this, you know, not not tricks and tips, but it's Once you start to study really successful people throughout history, you see these patterns that emerge.
And the patterns are what tells the story. And if you can reverse engineer through your own way and the way that your brain thinks, you can start to then create the impact those people have created through learning from other people. Right. Learning from their mistakes as well. And so learning for me is is something that, you know, I think is drives me to continue to do what I do. Building a better mousetrap is what I always I always say. For you, like why did mayor feel like the path that you wanted to go on? Cuz I'm sure as you know, private's a lot more efficient. You could you could continue to keep growing in the non-profits. You could go and affect and do a lot of things in that space. Why did you feel like mayor was the route that you wanted to go?
Well, you asked what what do you do after you're successful?
For me, it's always been about impact. I want to help people and have real impact on society. And that's what I've done in all my work, whether it's housing and homelessness or workforce development, education, veteran services, disaster response. All of those things have been to help other people and to have more [clears throat] impact. And what happened is the work I've been doing as a private citizen, through philanthropy, through my non-profits, has hit a wall. And that wall was hit because of the lack of leadership in the city. And so I realized that the way to have maximum impact is not just through what I've been doing, but by being in the seat. By being the mayor, that that's the way I could really transform the city Mhm.
and make the lives of all Angelenos better.
If you were in your 20s today Yeah. right, and you had the choice of the world, you could do anything you wanted to, what would you do?
I'd do it again. Really?
Yeah. Would you do technology? Would you do housing? Would you do Where would you go? AI?
Like what I mean, look, I been very fortunate in being able to work in multiple disciplines, multiple industries. So, I did tech, I've done consumer products, I've done housing I've worked in multiple nonprofit sectors and really gotten to have a broad range of experiences and that keeps me motivated, keeps it interesting Mhm. and keeps me learning. Mhm. And I I'm going to continue to do that.
What advice do you have someone who wants to be successful? Like they want to make a life for themselves and their families, they want to build something that can last, they want to have an impact, but maybe they didn't have the mentorship or they weren't able to go to the schools or they didn't have something, right?
Whatever it is. Well, everybody has mentors available to them and those are books. Mhm. So, there's incredible wisdom in books. I spent a lot of time reading books as I was Yeah. growing my career and that is one way to get mentorship even if you don't directly have somebody you can talk to. I also found that the people I work with are often amazing mentors, right? We would give each other advice, we would work together, we would collaborate to come up with ideas. Sometimes we agreed, sometimes we disagreed but we would always commit. Mhm. And keep going.
What is the What books would you recommend to someone? I guess what are the most impactful books that you read?
I mean, for me it was things like The Innovator's Solution Built to Last, Blue Ocean Strategy, right?
These are business books I really like. I'm a nerd about business books. That's why I asked cuz I Atomic Habits. Yeah, great book. These are all very helpful books. Does your brain work in systems? Do you think in systems? And like that's you know the filters of your decisions go through certain like maxims or um principles. I mean Ray Dalio has that. I'm I'm trying to think of the actual term of it, but it's basically like a a filter that you put through situations, right?
And it kind of gives you uh a rubric to to follow. Do you think that way? First principles thinking? Like is that your how your brain works?
Partially. Yeah. Look, you asked what makes somebody successful. I can tell you what makes a successful entrepreneur Okay. is somebody that has the three P's. Okay. Passion, persuasion, and perseverance. Cuz you need all three to truly be successful. Mhm. You need the passion to keep going. Mhm. Cuz not always going to be easy. Mhm. And when you're trying to persist or persevere, you need to go back to that passion to keep going. But you need to also be persuasive because you have to convince employees, investors, customers, clients, all partners, all need to be convinced to join you in some way on your journey. And those three things are what makes really successful people. And passion almost never is about money. Mhm. Passion is about the mission, the
core idea of what you're trying to do. Mhm. Because money is fleeting. It's not something that will keep you motivated.
Mhm. Once you have it, it's just kind of like that Maslow's. It's like what else is there, right? When you don't need anything else. When money can buy you whatever you want.
Yeah, so it's about it's about those things. But, for for everybody, it's about being committed to your work, finding purpose in what you do, and learning, continuing to learn, continuing to evolve. I see people all the time. I've had literally thousands of employees. I've mentored hundreds of people. And what I find is that people sometimes get stuck. And a lot of times people will try to go from A to B to C when they really should go straight to C. Mhm. They try to do things that they think will help them get somewhere
else. Like linearly?
And what ends up happening is they get stuck in B and they never wanted to be in B. Mhm. They wanted to be in C. So, I say go straight to C. Do the things you care about.
Do what you want. Yeah. Yeah, people need to hear that. I I find that in my day-to-day. You question a lot of You're like, well, the grass is greener, you know? Like the You've seen the fallacies of people trying to do different things and you always hear about the successes. It's very You don't hear necessarily about the failures, and there's a lot of
failures. There's a tremendous amount of failure, and all successful people know it's never straight up to the right. It's always up and down. Yeah. And so, kind of the principles I live by, you talk about first principles. Yeah. Yeah. One is balance. Okay. Never get too high with the highs, and never get too low with the lows. Yeah. You got to stay balanced. I've seen people who get super depressed when things go wrong, and they can't get out of it. And I've seen the opposite. I've seen people get super cocky when things go well, and then nobody wants to be with that person anymore. No one wants to follow them. Mhm. And [clears throat] they crash and burn, also. So, stay balanced. And that means stay balanced in your life. You can't work 24 hours a day. You got to try to find balance
when you can, with family, with friends, with alone time. You got to be able to do it. Second thing is, you got to understand what matters. So, I follow a simple rule about decision-making. Is this decision going to matter 3 years from now? If it doesn't, then it's probably not that big a decision. Mhm. If it does, then spend the time and go through the struggle to figure out the the right decision. But, if it's not going to matter in a year or three, then it really isn't important, and
it doesn't matter what you decide, so don't sweat it. Mhm. That's a good one. I like that, the overthinking part. Um the last thing I want to ask is I've only seen the political campaigns, they're just knowing about you for the last 4 months. Like, what's something you want people to know about you that they might not know? Like, who is the real Adam Miller? Well, who's the real you?
I mean, for me, I've always been driven by impact and trying to progress society, and that's been true literally my whole life. So, my whole education was about being able to start a company, and then my company was about education. I immediately parlayed those experiences into doing nonprofit work across a multitude of different issue areas, always trying to maximize impact and to do what's right for others. I've been very successful. I believe a lot in sharing that success and being a steward for others, and that's exactly what I'm trying to do now. I think I can have a huge impact on the city by finally bringing somebody with the operational skills, and
executive experience, and fiscal discipline, and ability to optimize a budget, and understand finance to really transform this city. And that's going to help millions of people, and that's exactly why I'm running for
mayor. Well, you have a lot to teach the world, and I'm glad you're you're sharing it here. So, I really appreciate it, Adam.
Thanks for coming on. If you want to learn more, votemiller.com has got the full platform and exactly what I would do in office, but great to be here.
Thanks, Tyler. Appreciate it. Thank you.
All right, thank you.