For those who had childhood experiences on acreage, the most recent Transmission is for you — Escaping to the Farm. Reminiscing about my time spent with my grandpa on the McNabb Fish Farm made this the most enjoyable essay I've written in months, maybe years. I know there are multiple GEMs who own farms/acreage, including Ben Wright who recently closed on a 246 acre property on the St. Marys River in Bryceville (details on that below). The demand for unique outdoor experiences is very real, and many (all?) involve real estate restoration and development work. Since GEM was created to help counteract screen addiction, it should come as no surprise I'm enthralled with "return to the land" real estate opportunities.

Without further ado, on to regular scheduled programming below...

— Drew Meyers

TRANSMISSION RECAPS
This week, Drew Meyers explores farms and hospitality--as we become more disconnected from our past, and the physical world around us, there is a psychic need to “return to the land” that working farms are uniquely positioned to meet. Before that, Joe Dahleen argued that mortgage may be looking at factory-built housing wrong--the opportunity is larger than designing a modular or manufactured-home loan.

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NEW GEM MEMBERS

• Eric Olson from Rent Butter
• Anu Sahin from Zaito

ACTIVELY FUNDRAISING

• Premarket - $400k Angel Round (summary/deck)
• Sisu Mortgage Ventures - $2M Seed (summary/deck)

MEMBER NEWS

• 1000watt was acquired by HomeServices of America. — Marc Davison and Brian Boero
• Divya Aathresh and Max Fitzgerald were guests on the NAR Change Agents Podcast: Listen to the episode.
• Tyler Moynihan joined Flyhomes as Vice President of Business Development. — Tushar Garg
• Green Street Growth announced a partnership with Emerald Coast Growers, a wholesale grower of perennial starter plants and ornamental grasses with a 35-year history of quality, service, and strong industry relationships. — Ryan Coon

As always, links surrounded by the ❇️ indicate exclusive GEM content. If you would like to have access to all links or attend our curated gatherings, please consider GEM membership.

BIZ INTEL

PROPTECH INDEX WEEKLY - AS OF 10/2/2026
Consisting of 26 stocks, the GEM Proptech Index had a combined market cap of $226.522B, an increase of .42% from the previous week.

STARTUPS

WE BOUGHT THE RANCH
By: Ben Wright

Jen had been dreaming about this ranch for thirty years.

In September 2026, my wife Jen and I closed on a 246-acre ranch on the St. Marys River in Bryceville, Florida. We're calling it River & Roots Ranch. A handcrafted cypress log ranch house with a soaring stone fireplace, a chef's kitchen, and roughly 3,900 square feet of covered wraparound porches. 1.2 miles of river frontage on a slow, tea-dark, cypress-lined blackwater river that flows north out of the Okefenokee. Hardwood hammock, open pasture, food plots, horses, an archery course, and some of the darkest night skies left in Northeast Florida. When the gate closes behind you and you start the drive in, your shoulders drop before you reach the house.

The thing about post-exit life is that nobody warns you how disorienting the optionality is. When you're building a company, the constraints are the structure. You know what you're doing tomorrow because the company tells you. After exit, tomorrow is wide open, and wide open is a lot harder than it sounds. I spent the years after selling Upsuite doing what a lot of us do: advisory work, a startup, co-founding Peak Adventures, becoming the GEM Denver Ambassador, co-leading PEF Colorado. All purposeful. But underneath it was a restlessness I couldn't quite name. More like the feeling of running multiple parallel experiments and waiting for one of them to become the thing.

The Chautauqua retreat got me closer to an answer. Twelve founders in the woods. Deep peer mastermind sessions. LifeWalk discussions. No screens. I live just south of Chautauqua and walk to brunch there regularly. What I noticed that weekend, more than the content of the sessions, was the effect of the place. The scale of the landscape resets your nervous system before the first session starts. The conversations that happened on those trails and porches were different from what would have happened in a conference room. Not because the questions were different, but because the environment made it easier to answer them honestly. Chautauqua helped me to understand what the ranch could be.

Jen knew the answer long before I did. She'd been dreaming about this ranch for thirty years. A working ranch with real horses. A ranch house you can actually cook in. Regenerative gardens that feed people. A place our family will gather for generations. The dream sat in the background while we raised three daughters and built careers and companies. We stopped talking about it for years at a time. But it never actually went away. Now our daughter Savannah runs the agricultural program. Olivia designed the logo. Layla is the reason we're building the horse program. And Jen opened Drench'd, her Mat Pilates studio in Jacksonville, which has taken off. The ranch is a family project, and I think that's why it landed differently than everything else I'd been doing since my exit.

Here is what I've learned hosting groups on this land: the land changes how people work together. Corporate teams who come here for a day offsite start talking differently within an hour. The drive in is genuinely rural. The gate closes behind you. And by the time you're on the porch with coffee, the meeting you were about to have has already shifted register. It is easier to say the true thing here than in a conference room. It's the same thing I saw at the Chautauqua, but deeper. The ranch gives you 246 acres, a river, and the feeling that you've left the world for a while.

Drew has already been scheming about bringing a group to the ranch for a Shortlist retreat, Peer Passage Weekend, or Peer Circle mastermind. The ranch does day and multi-day retreats, full-property buyouts. Farm-to-table catering, guided river walks, horseback, archery, the whole thing. One group at a time. No shared spaces, no other guests. The kind of place where a retreat lands differently than it does in a conference room. If you find yourself in or near Jacksonville, come see the land. I'll make coffee and we'll walk the grounds with you.

FUNDRAISING

TOOLS TO HELP FIND INVESTORS
By: Drew Meyers

If you're looking for help finding the right investors, potential conflicts, the right partner, warm introduction paths, and actually writing the outreach, one tool to try is...