In the first part of the talk we discuss how to construct geometries sourced by branes carrying general condensates. As an example we consider fundamental strings carring fermion bilinear condensates. Dualizing to the D1-D5 system these correspond to the missing geometries needed to account for all black hole microstates in the fuzzball conjecture. In the second half of the talk we discuss new results in extracting field theory data from (asymptotically AdS) geometries. These methods can be used to show that the D1-D5 geometries do indeed correspond to R vacua with all the requisite properties.