Compass Co-Founder Ori Allon Has Had THREE Huge Company Windfalls, Owns $405 Million Of Compass And Zero Direct Reports

ByAmy Lamareon April 15, 2021inArticles›Entertainment

Compass, the dominating real estate firm went public recently. The IPO turned its two founders, Robert Reffkin and Ori Allon into very wealthy men. The two play important roles at the firm, but Allon is who we’re talking about today.

Ori Allon, 41, has already sold two tech companies prior to co-founding Compass. As of this writing, Ori has a $405 million stake in the company yet no direct reports. By contrast, Reffkin has eight C-suite executives reporting to him.

Allon is the technical co-founder of Compass. He is an engineer by trade and an entrepreneur who hails from Israel. When he was a 26-year-old Ph.D. student at Australia’s University of New South Wales, he wrote the algorithm for the Orion search engine. His innovation was to index the web so that the search results were relevant even if the keywords weren’t present on the page.

Bill Gates was a fan of Orion. There was a bidding war between Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google for the company. Google won that bidding war and used Allon’s algorithm to make a smarter search engine. Orion is now an integral part of how Google’s search works. Allon worked at Google for four years.

Allon left Google to start the company Julpan, which looked at how people shared information on social media sites. One year after founding Julpan, Twitter acquired the company and made Allon the director of its engineering office in New York City.

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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

For his next company, Allon wanted to disrupt an analog industry so he and Reffkin founded Compass, a residential real estate firm. The firm has grown to control 4% of market share of U.S. home sales by dollar volume between 2019 and 2020. The firm has 19,000 agents that it lured away from rival real estate firms with higher pay and stock options.

Allon’s reduced role at Compass now that it’s a publicly-traded entity seems the natural progression for this serial entrepreneur. When he does leave, he will do so with a nice windfall for his years with Compass. Allon owns a 5.5% stake in outstanding Class A shares of Compass. It seems his exit has been planned and underway, Reffkin didn’t mention Allon in the letter to prospective investors and his name appeared in the IPO prospectus just five times.

It will be interesting to see what Ori Allon does next!

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Compass Co-Founder Robert Reffkin In Prime Position To Become America’s Next Black Billionaire

ByAmy Lamareon April 20, 2021inArticles›Entertainment

The real estate firm Compass went public recently at $18 per share. By the end of the first day of trading the stock was at $20.15, giving the growing company a market cap of $7.9 billion.

We obviously have no idea where the stock will go over time, but the public listing puts its 41-year-old co-founder, Robert Reffkin, in prime position to potentially become America’s next black billionaire . If all goes to plan, Reffkin would also be the youngest black billionaire in the elite group.

Or the stock could plummet!

As of this writing, here are America’s six black billionaires:

#6: Jay-Z Net Worth : $1.3 billion

#5. Michael Jordan Net Worth : $2.2 billion

#4. Oprah Winfrey Net Worth: $3.5 billion

#3. David Steward Net Worth: $3.9 billion

#2. Robert F. Smith Net Worth: $6.5 billion

#1. Kanye West Net Worth : $6.6 billion

[We do not yet count Tyler Perry as a billionaire as another publication has declared. But it’s possible that by the time Reffkin reaches billionaire status, Tyler will have as well…]

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Photo Provided by Compass

Reffkin co-founded Compass in 2012 with Ori Allon. He formerly was an executive at Goldman Sachs. Reffkin owns $480.7 million worth of Compass shares currently and has another $186.5 million that will be disbursed to him over the next four years. So at today’s prices, Reffkin is essentially worth around $670 million on paper right now.

Reffkin’s stake in the company makes him one of the most successful real estate entrepreneurs in the country after nearly a decade of being a fringe player in the industry.

Reffkin got his bachelor’s degree and MBA from Columbia and went into the world of consulting with gigs at McKinsey, Lazard, and in the administration of George W. Bush (he was fellow in the Treasury Department). While with Goldman Sachs he rose through the ranks to become chief of staff to firm president and COO, Gary Cohn .

Compass is not yet profitable. Since its 2012 founding, the company has lost around $1 billion. Compass lost $270 million in 2020 alone.

That said, the company’s revenue has also grown by more than 20 times since 2016 when it had $187 million in revenue. Revenue in 2020 topped $3.7 billion. According to the comapy’s S-1 filing with the SEC, Compass’s market share rose from 1% to 4% from 2018 to 2020. Compass is growing roughly 10 times faster than the average U.S. real estate company.

Reffkin was inspired to found Compass by his mother, Ruth, who is a long-time real estate agent. She now works for her son’s firm. On a personal front, he has raised more than $1 million for charity. One of the charities, America Needs You, (he is the founder) aims to help young people who live below the poverty line and are the first person in their family to go to college.

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