Alan Grosheider - MKS Ventures

05/19/2026

You probably missed the Foundation Layer.

OpenAI. $852B. Anthropic. $200B in infrastructure. Microsoft. $100B+ into AI. Google DeepMind. National security territory.

That ship has sailed.

But here's what most investors don't realize yet:

The picks-and-shovels play is just beginning.

It's not in the chips anymore. It's not in the models.

It's in the workflow layer — the focused, capital-efficient companies using AI to automate how real professional work gets done. Legal. Government. Real estate. Healthcare. Construction.

These companies are being built right now on $1M. They're being acquired for $30–60M. Early investors are seeing 10–15x in under 3 years.

No IPO. No public market volatility. Clean strategic exits to the exact companies that just raised hundreds of billions and need to buy what they can't build fast enough.

This is the bet that's actually still open.

I wrote the full breakdown — the acquisition math, the real examples, and why the central U.S. is the best place to find these deals right now.

https://mks.ventures/you-probably-missed-the-foundation-layer-this-bet-is-actually-better/

05/12/2026

AI just crossed a line in real estate.

Last month, Kleiner Perkins backed a company that autonomously runs mortgage origination.

Not assists. Not recommends.

Runs.

If that's happening in mortgage... it will happen across all parts of the real estate process.

What does this mean for brokers and inspection firms?

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AI Just Crossed a Line in Real Estate.

AI just crossed a line in real estate. Here's what the Balerion AI raise means for brokers and inspection firms — and what's coming next.

05/07/2026

A broker told me his 73-year-old father still sells real estate.

Sharp. Experienced. Knows the market cold.
But he won't touch software.

Not his CRM. Not his transaction platform. Not any of it.

So his son asked him why.

The answer stopped me cold:
"If all I had to do is talk to it, I'd use it."

That one sentence told me more about the next wave of software than most pitch decks I've seen this year.

Here's the truth most SaaS founders aren't ready to hear:

Software that can be conversational will be conversational. In real estate. Healthcare. Financial services. Insurance. Construction.

And the companies that don't make the shift won't survive — not because their product is bad, but because the friction of learning software is now a choice. And pretty soon, nobody will choose it.

The 73-year-old real estate agent isn't the exception. He's the majority.
Millions of high-value professionals have been locked out of software productivity gains — not because they can't learn, but because the interface never respected their time.

Conversational AI changes that. You don't learn the software. You just talk.

This is exactly where we're building at MKS Global Ventures and Blue 222.

Not chasing unicorns. Building capital-efficient companies in tech-resistant industries — targeting clean $50M+ exits in four years.

The best moat in software right now isn't features.
It's removing the reason people refuse to use software at all.

I wrote the full breakdown in this week's Built to Exit newsletter.

If you're an accredited investor actively deploying capital, DM me — I'll send you this week's deal memo personally. If you want to follow the build, subscribe to Built to Exit.

Watch Your Saas...Disappear

04/30/2026

04/30/2026

Fourteen emails. Six phone calls. Three days.

That's what it took to schedule one inspection.

We called it "the process." We hired people to manage it. We built entire teams around it. And we still use it.

It doesn't have to be that way anymore.

Software is going through its most radical shift in 30 years. We're moving from tools that help you do work to systems that do the work entirely.

Jack Dorsey just cut 40% of his workforce and called it a structural redesign.

McKinsey says AI could unlock $550 billion in value in real estate alone.

The winners won't be the biggest firms.

They'll be the best-orchestrated.

What does this mean for real estate professionals, lenders, engineering firms, and anyone still coordinating work by email?

The work disappears. The relationship doesn't.

The Work Disappears

The work disappears. AI is replacing coordination-heavy workflows across real estate — and the firms that figure this out first will 10x their output without adding headcount.

04/27/2026

Meta and Microsoft just cut 20,000 jobs.

The companies building AI are the first to feel AI's disruption.

Let that land for a second.

Here's what that tells me about where smart capital is moving right now:

🔴 Public market tech is getting squeezed — enterprise software stocks are having their worst year in years. Executives are defecting. Headcount is falling. The incumbents are scared.

🟡 AI infrastructure is eating everything — 58% of all venture capital deployed this month went to AI. That's not a trend. That's a reallocation of the economy.

🟢 Private markets are the only place with asymmetric upside — Q1 2026 was the greatest venture quarter in history. $300 billion deployed. Every stage grew, not just the mega-rounds.

Meanwhile, the Fed meets tomorrow and isn't cutting rates. The "higher for longer" environment is still real.

That means your savings account is still losing to inflation.

And public markets are pricing in disruption they can't see yet.

The investors who will look back at 2026 and smile?
They didn't wait for certainty. They moved while others were frozen.

The best deals in America right now aren't in Silicon Valley. They're in the middle of the country — less picked-over, more loyal, and earlier in the curve.

We’re building and backing a small group of high-conviction startups in the central U.S. right now. If you're an accredited investor and want more info, let me know privately.

04/23/2026

91% of real estate agents are invisible to AI.

Not on page 2. Not ranked low.

Invisible.

In 18 months, 67% of buyers switched to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI to find their agent. Zillow just reported its first-ever decline in agent-discovery traffic.

The agents who started building AI visibility in early 2025 now hold 5.7x the citation share of agents who started just 12 months later.

The window is still open. But it's closing.

I wrote a breakdown of exactly what moves the needle — including the 7 things the top 1% are doing differently right now.



91% of Real Estate Agents Are Invisible to AI. https://blue222.com/91-of-real-estate-agents-are-invisible-to-ai/

04/23/2026

The Midwest Is Already a Major Startup Ecosystem

Many Investors Just Haven't Noticed Yet

The new Dealroom/StartMidwest report is blunt: the Midwest "no longer has much to prove from a scale perspective."

Its problem is that capital still treats it like a secondary market.

The 12-state region has 10,000+ startups, 99 unicorns, 304 scaleups, and has grown total enterprise value from $174B to $660B over the past decade.

The overarching finding: "The Midwest is one of the most underappreciated innovation ecosystems in the world."

Time to look at investments in this part of the country!

Headline figure highlights fact that Midwest generates 16% of U.S. GDP but captures just 3-5% of venture capital

04/17/2026

Brendan Wallace (Fifth Wall) made a point this week that more people in real estate need to hear:

Most companies are “de-weirding” AI… and in doing so, completely missing the opportunity.

What does that look like?

AI note takers.
AI-generated reports.
AI layered on top of the same old workflows.

In other words:
AI as a feature.

Not a transformation.

Here’s the problem:

Real estate isn’t lacking software.
It’s running on fragmented, manual workflows held together by emails, calls, and spreadsheets.

So when you “add AI” to that system…
you don’t fix it.

You just make the chaos move faster.

The firms that pull ahead won’t be the ones who adopt the most tools.

They’ll be the ones who rebuild how work actually gets done.

That means:
• Replacing manual coordination with autonomous workflows
• Structuring vendor networks instead of managing them ad hoc
• Embedding decision-making into the process itself

Not on top of it.

This is exactly what we’re seeing with our design partners right now.

When you stop thinking “where do we plug in AI?” and start asking
“what does this workflow look like if AI is native from day one?”…

everything changes.

It’s harder. It requires rethinking systems that have existed for decades.

But the payoff isn’t incremental.

It’s structural.

And in real estate, structural advantage = margin.

Margin = cost of capital advantage.

That’s where the real separation is happening over the next few years.

If you’re thinking about how this applies to your firm, feel free to message me.

Brendan's post: https://buff.ly/n8TXY8n

04/16/2026

AI is no longer just a panel discussion topic.

It is not a “someday” conversation. It is not a buzzword to drop at a conference and move on.

Across brokerages, development firms, engineering groups, banks, and investor circles, the same thing is happening quietly.

People are trying to understand what AI will do to their jobs, their margins, and their relevance.

These are the real questions being asked behind closed doors, and what they reveal about where things are heading.



What Everyone in Real Estate Is Asking About AI

What real estate agents, developers, lenders, and investors are asking about AI right now and what it means for the future of the industry.

04/16/2026

Something is shifting in how sophisticated private wealth allocates to alternative investments, and most people haven’t noticed it yet.

Family offices that have spent years chasing traditional VC fund allocations (sitting on 10-year lock-ups, waiting for a unicorn that may never materialize) are quietly beginning to move a portion of their capital into an entirely different model.

That model is the venture studio.

And the data behind why makes a compelling case.

Why the Smartest Family Offices Are Quietly Moving Money Into Venture Studios

Family offices are rethinking venture capital. Discover why sophisticated investors are shifting from traditional VC funds to venture studios for faster liquidity, higher IRR, and more predictable outcomes.