The Exchanges

Q All of the sciences. Did you always want to do computer science, or was that, like, did that come from your parents?

A You know, it's interesting, because my parents are a little bit more old school. You know, they wanted me to be reading books and doing math proofs, but I loved computers as a kid in the, in the mid nineties when the computer boom was happening. I would be locked up in my room building computers, you know, coding and basic and learning the latest and greatest, whatever the most cutting edge thing was. And it was super controversial because the internet was getting going and I would spend all my time then on the internet playing these text based games, uh, that I was trying to learn how to also code myself. And it was not the most, uh, alignment, you know, it's like they would came from a different generation where the internet and, and computers were not a thing. And so they didn't understand what it was going to become. And, you know, so it was a little bit controversial, but I enjoyed it ever since I was eight years old.

AI assessment note: “my parents are a little bit more old school... but I loved computers as a kid”

Q We had a lot of fun. I remember the old offices together going there. I think we had pivoted a little bit, uh, but the mission, the mission was, uh, the mission obviously was a really important mission, a very inspiring mission. So how many mortgages do you process on a daily basis now? How big is the market?

A Yeah. So the market this year, it's like the mortgage market is at like a historic low right now. Um, and it has been since 2023. Uh, and so in a typical year, there will be something like seven or eight million mortgages. There's about four to five million mortgages happening this year, and Blend is about 20% of those. Maybe just under 20% of those. Um, and you know, the, the, the mortgage industry is something where it is, it is dependent on a lot of other factors, housing affordability, great sensitivity, uh, to, you know, interest rates because people can't afford mortgages, the mortgage rates double. Um, and so I think as that markets evolve, we're still about 20% of the market. We've expanded into a whole other suite of products because we have 300 banks and lenders on our system now that do home equity lines of credit and home equity loans, which is super important for debt consolidation if the consumer starts to get Less financially healthy. That's a great product.

AI assessment note: “There's about four to five million mortgages happening this year, and Blend is about 20%”

Q Tell us why it happened. I guess the mortgage industry crashed. Are there things you, are there things you would have done differently going into it, you know, if you go back and do it?

A Yeah, you know, the thing that I didn't appreciate at the time was how How far off I was from knowing how to run a business. And it's made me now every time I look at even myself, even today, I'm like, what could I be doing differently that I'm not thinking about today at blend as an example. But, you know, to your point, everyone was kind of spending a lot of money and multiples were super high and capital was very cheap. And I think a lot of us, myself included lost sight of the fact that The interesting and important measure of a business is how, not how much it gets done in an absolute sense, but how much it gets done. And like ideally with a smaller number of like per person, basically. If you can have a great impact on the world and you can do it with a small number of people, now you're seeing this with some companies that have, that have been started since then that are super interesting, amazing companies that, uh, that are a small number of superhumans doing that. I think we lost sight of that. And we probably on the other thing that I'm, I would, you know, sort of fall on the sword of is I got us into too many pies at once. Instead of saying, this is our bet. This is what we're going to go all in on. And we were, we had bought, we had acquired a title company. We had started a home insurance agency. We had been doing, we'd expanded too many product lines too quickly …

AI assessment note: “I got us into too many pies at once. Instead of saying, this is our bet.”

Q all of our, all of our listeners. If you have some graphic to show them, maybe we'll ping you on that and see what's allowed to be shown here. You can put it out. It's, uh, it does, it would be interesting to see, so I imagine it's the, you just measure what percent of the time it's wrong, and it's just probably getting much better each, each release, right?

A Yeah, and every new, I want to put an update to it, every new model that comes out, so that a new model comes out, let's say Gemma, you know, there's, there's this rumor that Google is going to release something at Google I.O. next year, or next week, I should say, and we'll see, we'll put it out, we'll run it against our evals, our hundreds of evals, and we'll see, you know, what, is it better or worse, and does it cost as much, is it fast, is it slow, like those are things that really matter. Um, but you know, it's like we're in a unique position to, to, to, to prove that out really quickly and then see if we have to deploy.

AI assessment note: “we'll run it against our evals, our hundreds of evals, and we'll see”

Q I want to get to Blend, which you launched in 2012, but was there anything you took with you from Palantir into building Blend? Now you didn't have as many magic cards at the Blend office, I noticed.

A Yeah, well, I will say, the, the thing that I loved about Palantir is that We always, I was the reason I joined Palantir instead of continuing with online poker. I mean, I still played a little bit at nights and weekends when I had time, but it's because you're working with the smartest people in the world. Um, and it's like, you know, obviously you're very smart, but it wasn't just you, you recruited the best people in the world that you could find to come and work at this company that nobody had ever heard of. And we were a small company at the time. And, but it was so fun working with the smartest people ever. And then, but the even bigger learn, which was a big learning for me, but the even bigger learning for me was we were deployed in the field and focused on solving customer problems, which was sort of the, everyone talks about companies and software companies being success oriented, but not in the same, people don't understand what success oriented is until you go and you see how Palantir approaches success orientation, where it's like the customer's outcomes, the software doesn't matter. The, the, the, the quality of the product doesn't matter. The APIs don't matter. It's just like, did you deliver that hundred million dollar outcome for them or not? And that's all that mattered. And that was such a unique experience. I'm so lucky I had that early on.

AI assessment note: “the even bigger learning for me was we were deployed in the field”