Leadership
Jason Russo
Founder & Principal
Asset-based private lending and real-estate development, backed by over three decades of Wall Street risk instincts and 22 years building World's Fair Capital from the ground up.
Wall Street discipline. A lender built to move fast.
Jason Russo's career began in 1992 on Wall Street, where he traded through the kind of markets that teach a person to make decisions with conviction and incomplete information. He learned to read risk quickly, price it honestly, and act before the opportunity passed, instincts that would later define an entire lending platform.
In 2004, he founded World's Fair Capital to bring that discipline to real estate finance, building on a family tradition of sound, patient investing. Where traditional banks saw paperwork and delay, Jason saw opportunity, and built a lender designed to move at the speed real deals require. Today, WFC is a nationwide direct private and hard-money lender, providing fast, asset-based financing to real-estate investors, commercial borrowers, mortgage brokers, and correspondents across 41 states.
His philosophy is simple: underwrite the strength of the asset and use common sense, not bureaucracy. That focus lets WFC structure first-lien, interest-only capital around the deal in front of it, from single-family fix-and-flips to ground-up construction and commercial bridge loans, and close in days rather than months. He built the firm to be the lender borrowers can count on when a bank falls through.
For Jason, lending was never the whole ambition. Through WFC Development, World's Fair Capital doesn't just fund real estate: it builds it, applying the same discipline that drives the lending platform. It's the firm he set out to create: a lender that builds.