Robert Reffkin

Robert L. Reffkin is an American entrepreneur who co-founded the online real estate company Compass( COMP ) Inc. and serves as the company's CEO.

Reffkin is African American and Jewish and grew up in Berkeley, California. His father was an African American man from Louisiana, who already had two children, and shortly after Reffkin was born abandoned him and his mother. Emigrating from Israel at age 7, his mother Ruth Reffkin, after having her son, was disowned by her family after learning that their grandson was of African American descent. Since his mother never married his biological father, his mother gave Reffkin his last name, from her first marriage to Gene Reffkin, also Reffkin's Godfather. His father, a jazz musician, passed away when he was 11 years old.

Through A Better Chance, he was matched with and enrolled in San Francisco University High School, where he also delivered its 2021 commencement address. In 1994, Reffkin started his first business at age 15 DJ company funded by his bar mitzva and babysitting savings. He was involved with the Network For Teaching Entrepreneurship as a teenager