#45 Anthony Gude: Regulatory Certainty, Risk Management & Institutional Development Platforms

**Zeus Hernandez** (0:00)
Welcome back to Infinity Podcast. They are joined by Anthony Gude. Anthony solves the regulatory and approval problems before the money shows up. The proof is in the execution of Ramsgate, the development of an eight-story mid-rise in Los Angeles, where his team tripled density and cut approval timelines to a third of the typical. Not by lobbying or spending more, but by pre-resolving the entitlement pathway before capital ever committed.
That approach, moving engineering and approvals upstream of capital, is what's opened doors to institutional investors and what he's now scaling into a broader platform. Beyond the individual projects, he's building the systems that make complex development financeable at scale.
This is a conversation about risk, how it's created in development, who actually carries it, and what it takes to build with certainty rather than hope. Anthony, it's great to have you on the podcast.

**Anthony Gude** (0:55)
Zeus, thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk about some very interesting topics with you.

**Zeus Hernandez** (1:01)
So in this podcast, Anthony, we're going to be covering three sections, engineering as a foundation, regulatory certainty, and capital manage framework. So starting off with our first section, much of the industry today treats engineering as a cost center, something managed after design. Anthony's model, raw model, inverts that engineering is a primary risk management function, and that inversion is a source of the competitive advantage. So Anthony, you've operated across financial markets, structural engineering, and ground up development, which is a sequence that almost no one follows in today's industry.
What did each layer teach you that others couldn't?

**Anthony Gude** (1:39)
You know, thank you for that question. I think, I think my obsession with the problem and then chasing after it is what leads you down that particular path. Probably not the only one. But then threading that together and trying to take projects end to end is, is a different type of purpose.
You know, the risk management has always been in the engineering space or aimed at engineers. Whether or not it ultimately ends up being the only problem to solve is another question, right? But I think that prioritizing it, this day and age when regulations are constantly changing codes, land use, when folks are trying to come at that from a economic perspective, there's no ignoring the real cost, which is really time or technical blockers. And however far they're buried in the consulting team, they ultimately show up in the cost of time.

**Zeus Hernandez** (2:41)
Yeah.
Anthony, the industry today treats engineering as a cost center managed after the project is designed, which is much of what you just alluded to. How did you come to see it as a primary risk management function instead and first started out your career and then with the butterwork that you're doing now?

**Anthony Gude** (2:57)
Yeah, I think it ultimately now makes sense. I think early in the career, it was just whatever question I didn't have an answer to, I wanted to know where it came from. And so when I was working through that, it was just the pure painful friction of not knowing and having to go gather the person. And that in real estate is the common ground, the probably the one thing we can all relate to, that we're just always pulling other people in to solve problems. And that's the beauty and the most challenging part of it all.
But I had an innate desire to sort of reach the end point, you know, I think undergrad in mechanical engineering and then the progression into the business world.
It was a question of, I love working with people, but also I want to know, I want to know that there's an end point. And we want to have a certain degree of certainty in development when you're on the hook for millions of dollars, or just when you're serving a client. You know, I always would give a proposal, go do the work, make sure I can execute on it, and then go sign the proposal because my biggest fear was the client would execute a proposal and then I wouldn't know where to go with it. And so that, I think, was an internal driver to focus on what became later risk management, frameworks, understanding regulatory environments, whether it's land use or product certification or fireproofing engineering or material sciences. They came back to wanting to remove the primary blocker. And now, that's even more so than the development venture that we're now getting to the point of essentially institutional handoff, is that that became the foundation of where I wanted to take the company. Not structural engineering, not civil engineering, it's all engineering that's applicable to removing the regulatory barriers. And so I landed on a few things that we can talk more about.