Opendoor

“I decided to invest based upon a keynote deck, really, that these guys were going to reinvent healthcare, which sounds like ridiculous, but I like to invest in keynote decks, like Opendoor reinvested when it was just a keynote deck and a team, Ever Album, whic…”

“With Opendoor, this is really a middle America play. This is not a play that necessarily resonates in markets where there's a lot of liquidity in residential real estate like San Francisco, Bay Area, and New York, where there also are a lot of VCs.”

“Backing, and I cannot believe I'm saying this, Dad, but an incredible two unicorns per year since founding, including Shopify, Opendoor, Flexport, Adyen, Twitch, Fitbit, and many more incredible companies.”

“In my portfolio alone, We've already done follow-ons or multiple follow-ons into companies like DoorDash, Compass, Katerra, Opendoor, as some examples”

“And at AngelList, we found companies like Ubers, Imogen, and Opendoor before anyone else, or before many others.”

“Absolutely not. You need to have one person accountable.”

“The person doing the checking should be responsible for the creation and the ownership of the checklist. Nobody wants a checklist if it's not actually useful. This is not one of those things where the manager writes it and hands it down to the team. In fact, I…”

“So at Open Door, for example, if we raised our offers on people's homes, we'd see a bump in conversion. So yes, we would therefore hit our growth goals, but profitability would have suffered.”

“I think it's super important to iterate for a while in the most lightweight tools that you can get away with, because inevitably you're going to be changing the way you do things.”

“For example, when we were focused on building the seller product in the beginning at Opendoor, we were again, so focused on building a product that was all about selling. But when we went and started asking people to tell us about their experience selling thei…”

“A mistake we made a few times early on was to commit to code some processes that just weren't fully baked yet and were continuing to evolve. And then because engineering resources are limited, which they often are, we had to Keep using these outdated systems t…”

“There was a point where we were working on hitting unit profitability in our core cities, where Eric decided he would show up to work every day wearing this blue t-shirt with the single most important company metric on it, and so everyone at the company knew t…”

“When I looked at how Eric, Ryan, JD, Keith spent time, it was very much focused on recruiting incredible people.”

“The nature of startups is that if they start working, you unlock resources and talent, and so, so many problems that seem hard today get easier over time, and I think Opendoor was kind of ruthlessly focused on solving the most important problems at the time, k…”

“Prior to founding Newfront, Spike was one of the first employees at Opendoor, where he helped grow the team from five people to an enterprise value of over five billion dollars today.”

“The one that I still make fun of JD about is how we did our pricing model, which we still basically don't do correctly. You know, eight years later, we'll eventually fix this, but there's a lot of debate about whether we should have consumers name their own pr…”

“Second, and related to that, we built insanely dumb idea of building like a distributed team, like in local markets, which is the bad idea taken from Uber was never a good idea in the first place. It might have even been a bad idea for Uber, but it was a bad i…”

“And in truth, most homes, when I say most, I mean, 83% of homes in the United States are more like a commodity.”

“Which is actually what we did in 2013 when we funded the company. We actually only funded the company with ten million dollars, which was basically just enough to buy two cohorts of homes.”

“Peter was willing to fund the company with about five million dollars, but fundamentally, to buy enough homes and prove that you could accurately price the homes, five million was at the very low end of what would be feasibly, statistically, to prove that we c…”

“So we wound up negotiating the second round pretty much before we actually launched the company.”

“So literally everywhere in the United States are going to be able to, you know, buy and sell homes through Opendoor except maybe the Bay Area.”

“The real reason for choosing to go down the SPAC model was I wanted us to be a public company as fast as humanly possible. I had some reasons to believe we could do it a little bit more rapidly through a SPAC. The truth is that's not really true, but it was ea…”

“I've always had the hypothesis that, in fact, Opendoor would do better in a bad real estate market, a down market, a depreciating market, than an appreciating market. If you think about it, we basically provide liquidity. Typically, people who want liquidity c…”

“In addition, we do use debt and debt is the oxygen for businesses like Affirm. It's the oxygen for companies like Opendoor.”

“The logo for Home Run was designed by Chad Hurley as a side project. I got a decent part of the website was coded by Max Levchin.”

“Actually some have, you know, like I'm sure Opendoor actually is profitable, a firm will be profitable, but usually it's a 10 to 15, 20 year journey by the time that happens.”

“Instacart was in some ways an even more complicated business than Opendoor because it's a four sided marketplace. We have shoppers, we have buyers, we have advertisers, and we have the retailers that are on the platform as well with various different incentive…”

“These homes, you know, we did this program for a few months, and we learned that they were tremendously unprofitable for Opendoor because of the adverse selection element and we had to shut down the program.”

“Our overall goal was to be, and we were consistently profitable on every cohort of homes that we were buying, so our goal was, even if they were, you know, outstripping us in volume, we would be able to survive for a long period of time because our, we were un…”

“We never did a price match and we never negotiated on price with sellers of homes.”

“We raised 10 of the seed for Opendoor. That was actually the correct dose. Buying homes, you really can't prove that you can buy cohorts of homes accurately, like priced accurately and resold properly in less, for less than about ten million.”

“One mispriced tone could wipe out the profit of 20 or 40 homes.”

“Questions are cheap, answers are expensive, and the exec review should not try to get through all questions.”

“I think being a PM at a low margin business is one of the best things you can do. To grow your business acumen.”

“And I think the Important part here is it can't be so narrowly scoped because the tactics of the job you can learn, how to run a sprint, how to do prioritization, like that, that stuff you can learn. That's not what the test is. The test is the clarity of thou…”

“We had a bunch of initiatives over the year, building a retail buyer business, building a mortgage business. And I think we could have been better about focusing on what are our core strengths and how do we not be in sort of that new customer set, new capabili…”

“So I believe that poor hiring decisions are almost, are never just the person, never just the responsibility of the person being hired, the new person who it didn't work out with. It's almost always the company or the hiring person's fault, right?”

“We're going to look at all the data, but we're not going to make a decision in the first two weeks. We have to have the fortitude, the guts, the gumption to say, we might see patterns in the behavior where behavior is slowly changing over time. And so we actua…”

“At Opendoor, and I think this is true at a lot of operationally intense companies we actually consider sort of the classic triumvirate of end product and design and product ops and design, because it's so difficult to divorce your digital product from, you kno…”

“Opendoor's had different variations of, you know, a mortgage product that, that didn't succeed.”

“In a pithy way, someone that opened door where we're closely with had this phrase, which is you hire your strategy. Right. And so the person you pick to play that role will dictate how that person defines, you know, the success of that product.”

“I don't think you can throw out crap, right? Because the risk is then you have like a negative signal where actually your execution was just bad, right? And that's the reason it didn't work.”

“Talking to users is data. Like that is real. If you talk to 10 customers and they tell you something that is just as much data as I looked at a 150 data points and, you know, here was the insight.”

“We will create a network for buyers and sellers, homeowners, home buyers, and home sellers, where they will have a long-term relationship with us over a series of products we will launch. Some of them will be free, just because they're good. Some of them will …”

“We only get paid in options.”

“We will not choose to stay in a solely asset heavy world.”

“I'm going 20, I'm going 24. I don't know what the bet is exactly, but I got 24.”

“Like, I, one of the first things I did was I got the board member, and I went through literally every invoice the company had paid for the last 12 months. Like actually every single one of them. Like I've reviewed like every line item.”

“I think three years ago, this was an incredibly difficult problem that required human beings to visit homes and look around and look at the shape of the cart. Like, that's the real thing. If you're one side of the street that has a slope, the other side doesn'…”

“You know, leaving two hundred million behind at Shopify and another 70 something million in grants and what he might still get, you could only do that if you're post-economic, right?”

“In fact, I did buy at a higher price than the current price.”

“It's easier to price a car than a house, right? The nuance you have to get right I would wonder, prove me wrong. You can get within seven, eight, nine percent pretty accurately on comps, but it's the little shit that when you walk around the house, oh, they ha…”

“Opendoor will be the most aggressive in-office public tech company.”

“We will get to a point where you will buy a home from Opendoor, and if you don't like it, you'll be able to return.”

“I'm just going to say, I think it's a brutally hard business and over the next Three to five years. You want to believe in that vision of being able to help people in the most important financial decision of their lives. I just think it's an extraordinarily ha…”

“Opendoor was above 10% in many markets it was selling homes in a couple years ago.”

“Literally if you rank every stock in the U S and vaguely defined as tech and don't put a market cap filter, you know, a very small one cut out to on and below planet labs, bloom energy, open door, Oclo and Seagate top five performing stocks this year.”