Using AI, Community, and Transparency to Build a Better Investment Firm with TJ Burns

TJ Burns, founder of Burns Capital and ex-Amazon engineer, joins the Invest Clearly Podcast to break down the real challenges of raising capital and building long-term LP trust.
He shares why he left fund-of-funds behind, how he uses Discord and transparency reports to keep LPs in the loop, and how AI is reshaping underwriting and investor ops.

📌 Topics Covered:

• LPs left in the dark: why it’s so common
  Building an LP-only Discord community
  What AI can do for investor ops in 2025
  Why he's walking away from fund-of-funds
  The dark side of urgency-driven capital raising

Podcast Transcript: TJ Burns on Building Trust in Passive Real Estate Investing

Pat Zingarella (00:01) TJ, thank you very much for joining me. Before we jump into it, why don't we take about 30 seconds for you to introduce yourself and Burns Capital, and then we'll hop into some questions.

TJ Burns (00:14) Thanks for having me, Pat. My background's in tech - I graduated MIT and then went to work at a startup. The startup got bought by Amazon, and I worked in a lead engineering position for seven years. All the while I was getting the entrepreneurial bug, mostly in real estate. I bought some small multifamily, some single family, got my realtor license, and then started passively investing. That was a really good fit for me because I was working this demanding job, I was in an expensive market, and I was really looking for diversification and exposure to real estate. I wanted to learn as well.

So I started passively investing and thought it was really great, but my timing wasn't super great. This was around 2020, 2021. I did some really great deals, and I did some deals that turned out to not be so great. Through that experience, I started to notice things that just didn't seem right to me in how deals were marketed and how deals were communicated. I also realized that I really liked the business.

So I started working with an operator who I had a lot of trust in, who I liked what he was doing. He took me under his wing as a partner, and I started raising money alongside him, learning more about his operation. That was the first deal I raised money for back in 2022. Since then, I've been steadily growing my business, Capital Partners. I've raised a little bit over $10 million to date across eight offerings. We've gotten even more specialized recently. Now we're moving more over to the operations side. We're just doing two different types of deals - one on the multifamily side, one on the lending side, and that's where we're at.

Pat Zingarella (02:16) Very nice. It's funny - there are almost direct parallels to my background as well. I was at Gartner, started listening to podcasts, started actively investing in small multifamily. I actually got my realtor's license because my wife did, and I went alongside with her. That led me to here. So it's kind of funny, but when you were at Amazon, did you start raising capital while there, or were you an LP and then left Amazon to pursue the GP path?

TJ Burns (02:47) I did actually start raising capital while at Amazon. I worked at Amazon up until August of 2024 and I started Burns Capital Partners in April of 2022. So there was a little bit over two years of overlap there. I think that was good for a lot of reasons. One, the business of raising money - it's not a business that's designed to make you wealthy or even to have an income for the first couple of years that you're in it. It's really a long-term business. The people that you raise money from, your investors, they get paid first. The payout for people like me is supposed to come later on when you perform. And especially how we structure our deals, they're a little lighter on the fees, especially upfront. That's because we believe in what we're doing and we want to capitalize before we profit. But I needed my Amazon income to support myself for a long time.

It also helps in establishing your relationships. At Amazon, I was one of a few people that had their feet also in real estate. It put me in a position where I was able to better find those people that were perfect for what we were doing - people that would want to invest in what we were doing. Still to this day, a lot of my LPs came from Amazon relationships.

Pat Zingarella (04:10) Very nice. Earlier you said you were an LP, maybe saw some things that you didn't prefer or you could have done better. Now that you are raising capital, what are a few of those things?

TJ Burns (04:25) The industry is, as you know, a bit opaque. There's not a lot of information out there, and the information that is out there is sometimes sugar-coated. It's shown through rose-colored glasses. In my experience, I found myself in a couple of deals - I'm thinking of a few in particular, your classic value-add multifamily deals in the Sunbelt - and just along the way, things wouldn't add up.

For one deal, I got a huge distribution month two, and it's a value-add deal. On one side, I was like, "This is great. I'm getting money back already." I came to realize later on that they had just over-raised for the deal and then used that to fund distributions, even though it was this value-add deal that wasn't actually producing cash flow yet.

Communication is another huge thing. In that same deal, the communication was monthly and then it became quarterly and then it became intermittently whenever, maybe every six months or so. To me, people are used to information coming instantly in today's day and age. The deals we do, at the very least, do monthly reporting. Even if it's lighter reporting, we just want more touch points with our investors.

The biggest thing is that I just didn't have a community of other passive investors that could tell me if these things were typical for the industry or if they weren't typical. I felt like I was kind of on an island. We'll talk about some of the things that we now do at Burns Capital Partners with our investors to counteract that.

Pat Zingarella (06:24) I'd love to talk about that. You were what I would say early on and one of the more active people on Invest Clearly, and that's obviously all based around trust and taking the business out of it. If we just focus on the trust aspect and the transparency aspect, you do some things differently than I've heard a lot of people do in terms of your Discord channel. So I'd love to talk about that. You have all of your investors in one place chatting, right?

TJ Burns (06:54) That's right. That comes directly from my experience and what I heard from some of my investors. I have one investor of mine who's in a deal with a huge syndicator - hundreds of millions of dollars in AUM. He has written the investment off to zero because he has no idea what's going on. He wants to talk with other passive investors. The GP won't answer him, let alone link him up with other people that might be in the same situation. He just has no clue.

After hearing this from him and also having that experience myself, I thought, "Why don't I set something up for my investors where they have a community if they wish to engage?" So now we have a Discord channel that every passive investor we have is invited to. They can go in there, they can see all the different deals that we are managing, and they can read the reports of those deals. So they know exactly what we're doing.

If they don't want to talk to us directly, which we talk with our LPs all the time, some people just - you'll find that maybe they feel positively or negatively, but they're not going to share that with you. Maybe they just don't have time. So we have that Discord channel. If LPs want to connect with other LPs, they can. A lot of our investors are real estate investors as well. They're business owners. They ask questions to other investors. They ask about other things in the industry. I just thought it'd be a really good thing, a net positive for those LPs, especially if I felt like we were building something that was valuable and that people would respond positively to.

I found that with passive investors, they're very lenient if you just give them a base level of communication and effort. I also wanted to put myself in a position where if I ever did start to slack, people could call me out on it. I think that's important.

Pat Zingarella (09:08) That's pretty neat. So it's a pretty active community without you involved in it, and it's not just like they're communicating with each other. It's not just a "here's my update, thank you." There's actually a lot of engagement among the LPs in there?

TJ Burns (09:23) A little bit. I think at its core, passive investors are still very busy people. Many of them own their own home, maybe they have a side gig, they definitely have a full-time job, their spouse works, they have kids. So I think it's a lot of people that are also passively viewing the group. We definitely do get questions, but I think we also do a pretty good job of sharing information so that people already just know what's going on and they don't have to ask too many questions.

Pat Zingarella (09:57) It's so important. I want to touch on what you said earlier about leniency. As long as you're communicating, the number of conversations I have with LPs that are massively invested with sponsors that have no idea about the performance of their investment and cannot get a hold of their sponsor is just unnerving. The thing is in those situations - I say this all the time on podcasts and when I'm a guest - people will talk about the loss, potential loss of capital for a quarter of a second, and then go into how poor the communication is for a lengthy conversation. It's the narrative right now. What's tough is you see the narrative in the industry changing. I think in the past couple of years, it's been all around "achieve financial freedom, retire early." Now it's "trust, transparency, trust, transparency" in every LinkedIn post.

It seems like you're really driving transparency among current investors. What about with new investors? You just started this in 2022. That could be a narrative people latch on to. What are you doing to drive trust with newer investors?

TJ Burns (11:15) I think it comes down to the transparency thing that we've been talking about. I really don't want, and I don't expect, new investors who find me on the internet to just blindly trust me. I don't want that because I want these investors to make informed decisions for themselves. My belief is that the service that I offer is massively beneficial to a small group of people.

I know that because it was massively beneficial to me. I'm still one of the largest LPs of myself and will continue to be. My view for this business would honestly be to turn it into a micro family office at some point and just get very specialized and invest my money into what we're doing. But I know this is beneficial to the profile of person that I was - that tech employee or any W-2 employee that's super busy, wants to diversify, has no time.

My goal is to just provide as much content as I possibly can on what we're doing and our story so that those people can make a decision for themselves, and that's over any medium. If they want to talk with me, we'll schedule some time and I'll share everything I know and be as honest as I can. If they just want to read our case studies, they can do that. If they want to go into our data rooms and look at all the information around the deals, they can do that.

I think one of the difficult things is that these investments are complicated. They really are. So it's very hard to make sure all the questions are answered, to communicate all the nuance through content. I have some people I've been chatting with for years that are still doing their due diligence, and that's great. There's no time scale on what I'm doing. I'd like to be doing this for decades.

Pat Zingarella (13:16) That's great stuff. You mentioned content a couple of times. One thing that I think is a sticking point in the industry is influence versus education, or marketing versus education. You're pretty active on LinkedIn. How do you balance that? What is education, educating investors versus influencing the top of the funnel? How do you think about that?

TJ Burns (13:45) It's really tough because the stuff that works is not the stuff that's good for LPs. That might be surprising for people to hear - most investments are emotion-driven. They're not driven by logic, and the best marketers online know that and they play to it. So you'll see in these types of investments false urgency that's created. You'll see carrots dangled like high returns or business plans that worked out super well. Of course, you usually don't get the full story on all those things. The ones online that are sharing all of the hard things about the business, maybe they don't attract as much attention from LPs.

For me, I just try to report. I just try to document what we're doing and not worry too much about the marketing side of things. At this point in my business, we've reached the point where we get referrals, we get repeat customers. Early on in the business, it was much more top-of-the-funnel driven - LinkedIn people that I was directly reaching out to. So we don't have to do as much of that anymore. With our content, it's just reporting on what's going on as best we can.

Pat Zingarella (15:23) Your goal I saw on your LinkedIn is to scale up to $20 million under management, I believe, as a short-term goal. Is that number meaningful or is that just the next step for you?

TJ Burns (15:41) No, it doesn't really mean anything. It's one of those things where you need some kind of goal. That's an example of marketing - it's a good way to capitalize on what I was saying in that specific paragraph because you have to end it somehow. But for me, this is an infinite game. I really love what I do, and I love being an entrepreneur. I look back to my time at Amazon and it was great for that period in my life, but I would not want to go back.

I have a two-year-old, I spend so much time with him. I spend a lot of time with my wife and I work on things that I find very meaningful and impactful, and there's a lot of upside in them. So the goal is really just to keep doing what I'm doing and to continue to find balance in my life. I think the money naturally follows that. I don't have big aspirations for a fancy house, jet, fancy cars. I don't really care about any of that.

I want to make sure that my investors are taken care of. I think the money will follow for me, and I just want to keep doing what I'm doing.

Pat Zingarella (16:49) You run the fund model, the fund manager model, which I feel like you have an uphill battle with trust because they have to trust you and then trust your ability to trust. How do you convey not only your trustworthiness, but your ability to choose the right person to invest with?

TJ Burns (17:15) To clarify, we've done a lot of fund of funds. We've worked with two different debt funds. We've worked with a larger equity fund, and then everything else we've done has been co-GP where we're involved in the partnership. We're actually moving away from the fund of funds model. I haven't talked about this yet, but I haven't said it publicly online.

I do agree it's an uphill battle, and the role of the fund manager is to underwrite the underwriters. So as a fund manager, you're not the one that's actually operating the deal. You're the one that is picking the operator, and maybe you're working out preferred terms with that operator. Maybe in some of our past deals, that operator is working at a scale that is not accessible to retail investors. So we work with one group that their minimum is a million dollars. They're more of an institutional group and our minimum is $50,000 that flows into their fund.

The benefit is that rather than compete against the best operators that you can find, you can now work with them. There are some operators out there that I don't want to compete with because they have much more resources than I have. They have much more experience and it makes sense to just work with them. As somebody that picks the operator, you can pick the best of the best. Most everybody will take investments. If you can raise money, they'll work with you.

The challenge is one, you give up control of what you're doing. So as a fund manager, you're giving up control most of the time to that operator, and the money you raise, you don't have control over what happens to it at the end of the day. I convey that to LPs and they understand. Usually I have access to information that they wouldn't have access to in underwriting the underwriter. As long as they understand all of that and we're aligned, then we're good.

But the drawback, which is why I'm moving away from the fund of funds model and more towards having control over what we do, is that it's really hard to tell who a person is going to be five years from now. People are dynamic. They change. So I can underwrite you, Pat, today, but five years from now, maybe your priorities have changed. Maybe your values have changed. Maybe my values have changed and maybe they're not compatible anymore. The problem is that I've already given you control over what we're doing.

I've thought a lot about this. If I want to build a long-lasting business, I need to have control over what we're doing. So the shift for me has been moving from those deals where I didn't have control slowly towards deals where we have more control and then doing fewer deals overall.

Pat Zingarella (20:34) If you're comfortable chatting more about this shift, how does your business mindset, especially around your investors, change as you start to make that shift into the operator?

TJ Burns (20:52) It becomes less capital-focused. We'll still raise money, but prior, my main responsibility was raising money amongst other things. There's all the compliance things that are associated with that, where you have to make sure that you're doing so in a compliant way. But at the end of the day, the value that I was bringing to the partnership was being able to raise money and form capital around what we were doing.

Moving into the operator role, there are other things that I'm actually adding value to the partnership in. For me, a lot of that has been tech-driven - implementing AI into these businesses that are not run with tech whatsoever. Maybe they're run with a little bit of tech. We're working on something on the lending side right now that is all tech-driven. My role is actually more on building that infrastructure as opposed to raising the money.

We actually don't even have it set up in the US to raise money. It's all being raised from a partner that's outside the US. So in that case, there are no LPs that I need to worry about. It's all just building the tech. I think for that specific deal, we will raise money in the US eventually, but you can see how my role is starting to change a little bit.

Pat Zingarella (22:17) I'd love to talk more about the tech things you're doing. I feel like I've been seeing you post quite a bit on LinkedIn, almost taking a tech stack and replacing it or re-engineering it. Almost like, "Oh yeah, this was a multi-step zap, but now I can do this, this, and this." Can you tell us a little bit about what you've done with that?

TJ Burns (22:39) Underwriting is a great example of that. Think about the underwriting process for, let's say, a traditional lender. They're going to gather a lot of the materials manually. They are going to underwrite the loan manually - that involves them scouring the internet, talking to brokers, gathering all the information, logging it in some database. Technology is at a place now where you can do all that automatically.

There are interfaces where you can build that out in a way that's not super tech-heavy. My partner and I - he's a software engineer, my background is also in engineering. In building this lending business, we started from the standpoint of these low and no-code solutions. N8N is one that I use quite a bit. It's a low-code solution, meaning that instead of building from scratch, writing code, you're building with building blocks that are already made, and you're just linking those building blocks together. Maybe you're writing a little bit of code.

But we moved off that to then trying to build everything from scratch. We pretty quickly realized that the technology in the low and no-code space - that's Zapier and N8N, Make.com - it's really good. There wasn't a need for us to go and build this stuff from scratch. But if we were going to build it from scratch, the tools over in that neck of the woods are also extremely good. We're using Claude Code, and even for people like me who I wouldn't describe myself as a proficient software engineer, I could still build some really cool things just because I have a little bit of technical experience.

Going back to our vision, I think I'm one of those people that is an AI early adopter. I think the technology is crazy. It's incredible. I think most people feel that way at this point. I think we're at a point in history where the people that can adopt AI and add it to their business are going to crush their competition. It's going to be a huge wave. Businesses within real estate are especially susceptible to that because they're very document-heavy. They're very manual. Real estate's very slow to change. So that's really our thesis for what we're building with the lending stuff, and we're doing it through those low-code solutions.

Pat Zingarella (25:16) That's awesome, man. Congrats for making that shift. That's a cool journey to talk about. All right, I know we like to keep these things pretty tight for you. So I'd love to ask the burning question: What part of passive investing do you think needs to die?

TJ Burns (25:37) Just because it's fresh in my head - I got an email last night from a sponsor that had so much urgency in it. When I was an early LP, if you sent me a deal, I was probably going to invest into it because I just didn't have any deal flow. And the urgent language worked on me - "act now, limited spots remaining."

Sometimes that is true. We have deals where we might have two or three spots left and we just want to let people know. So that's okay, but it's overused. It's used so much where it's not even true. It's really just preying on people that don't have good deal flow. I think the inverse thing of what I'm saying is people just need better access. They need better deal flow. What needs to die is people just not understanding that there are many, many passive private real estate deals out there.

Pat Zingarella (26:37) Good stuff. Well, cool, TJ. First, thank you for coming on. Thank you for all of the engagement you have on Invest Clearly. Your profile's killing it on there. I know it's a big part of your strategy as well. Where can people find more about you and Burns Capital?

TJ Burns (26:54) I want to take this opportunity to thank you, Pat, for building what you've built. I think it's great for the industry. I'm not just saying that because I'm on the podcast. I really have gotten a lot of benefit out of using the platform. I think we have 20 reviews now on Invest Clearly. It's been really cool for me to see what people are saying. I've had investors come through Invest Clearly that I didn't know prior to being on there. I've had a couple of people that reach out and say, "Hey, I found what you're doing through Invest Clearly." I've had people invest because of that. Some people that I haven't even talked to at that point - they just went on, signed subscription documents and wired funds.

I think it's something that people are looking for. We put a big focus on encouraging investors to leave reviews. So people can definitely find me on your website. They can also find me on LinkedIn - TJ Burns - and our website is burnscapital.com.

Pat Zingarella (27:55) Awesome. TJ, thanks so much for coming on. It's been great.

TJ Burns (27:58) Thanks, Pat.