Disclosure
Opendoor saw double-digit attrition after Nejatian instituted a seven-day RTO mandate
“On my first day at Opendoor, I said, hey, we're going back to the office. Everyone has seven days. And so a bunch of our colleagues decided not to join us on that journey and left the company because they didn't want to work for an in-person company. And we wi…”
Opinion
Nejatian: Opendoor lacked real culture because professional managers let it atrophy
“I don't think Open Door had much of a culture. Transparently, I think what happens to companies when they're run by, like, professional managers is, like, culture atrophies.”
Opinion
Nejatian says PayPal is struggling today because it prioritized short-term metrics
“And the result of that, by the way, very objectively is PayPal. Like over and over again, that company made all the wrong decisions because they cared more about today than 10 years from now. And guess what? It is now 10 years from now, and the company's in de…”
Disclosure
Nejatian proposed to Keith Rabois taking Opendoor private together to fix it
“My wife's plan, literally, genuinely, honestly, was that we would, like, sell everything we owned, leverage ourselves as much as we could to take Opendoor private, so we could fix it. So I called Keith back in, I think, April, and he was, hey man, I'm thinking…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Opendoor paid a consulting firm $5M to advise cutting quality across operations
“The single largest expense on our income statement was millions of dollars paid to a well-known consulting firm whose advice can be approximated as the following. We paid him five million dollars for this. This voice was basically the following tweet. Do every…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Opendoor replaced an 11-person manual home offer workflow entirely with AI
“So between the time, like you put your address in and you Got an offer. There'd be 11 human beings who touched that. That's insane. That's just an insane outcome. Like, today, zero human beings are in that loop in many of our flows. Like, AI does all of that.”
Assertion Contradicted
Opendoor's earnings livestream peaked at a record 55,000 viewers
“Our earnings was the most watched earnings in history. The last National Open House we did broke records for how many people watched it. No. Yeah, by a lot, but not by a lot. We should fact check this, but I think at one point we had 55,000 live viewers.”
Disclosure
Opendoor's press email auto-replies telling journalists to DM Kaz Nejatian on X
“There's no, like, we don't have a PR department. Like, if you email press at opendoor.com, get an email back saying, we don't have a PR department. If you want to talk to someone, DM Kaz on X.”
Assertion Partly supported
Nejatian mandated a one-week return-to-office despite Opendoor lacking physical office space
“I showed up on a Monday, my first Monday at work and I said, Hey everyone, by next Monday, we're back in offices. At that point, we didn't have offices. Like we didn't know where people were gonna go. So we had to like the team had to go sign leases, open up o…”
Opinion
Nejatian: Modern companies become too meek and afraid of themselves
“You know, I think, look I think the very real thing that happens is that, like, modern companies become, like, very, like, meek. They're afraid of themselves.”
Opinion
Nejatian: Most public companies treat 'retail investor' like a dirty word
“Most companies do this thing where they use the word retail investor as though it's a swear word.”
Insight
Running a public company is only harder because of negative press scrutiny
“There's one way in which running a public company is harder than running a private company. Like, one real way. And that is, people will write things about you in newspapers. So if you care about what the Wall Street Journal writes about you, running a public …”
Insight
American corporations slowly decline once professional managers take over from founders
“But I find in the history of American corporations, and for Westworth, I think this is a uniquely like North American problem because it's not true in Japan, for example, but in history of American corporations, you get these significant moments of alpha follo…”
Insight
Nejatian: Consulting firms and best practices only yield average industry outcomes
“But the best way to get the same outcome as everyone else Is grab a consulting firm, ask them what is the best practice in x industry, and do that. But what that gets you is what the industry does.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
External consultants billed Opendoor to create presentation decks for internal meetings
“There were consultants billing open door money to create presentations for internal open door meetings.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Nejatian: Opendoor offshored customer support to Mexico on consulting advice
“Because of the advice we got from this consulting firm, we offshored customer support of Ovador to Mexico.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Opendoor has hired more YC founders than any other company under Nejatian
“If you look around, we have hired more YC founders into Opendoor since I started in any company.”
Insight
Nejatian: Real culture comes from doing hard things together in person
“The best thing for culture is doing hard things together in person.”
Disclosure
Nejatian: Opendoor's career page is designed to repel 99% of applicants
“My job is to actually describe the type of place this is, and lots of people will not want to work here. In fact, less than one in a hundred people will ever want to work here. That's fine. Like we have a very high bar, like our career page tries to do a very …”
Insight
Nejatian: Waiting does not reduce risk in business decision-making
“I also think that like people misprice risk in their head and they think waiting reduces risk. And in my experience, it just fucking doesn't. Like, it doesn't, right? All it does is take time away from time you could be spending doing other things.”
Insight
Nejatian: Speed compresses mistake timelines rather than increasing total errors
“Literally all companies are a collective effort to learn. And if we learn faster, we do more. So all this, all that matters, right? Like now, like if we do things faster, we'll also be wrong more frequently, but we would have been wrong that frequently just ov…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Nejatian says Opendoor's balance sheet was a ticking time bomb upon joining
“When I got here, the company, the company's balance sheet had like a ticking time bomb on it. Like it wasn't obvious how the company was going to survive that ticking time bomb. Now, luckily we've cleaned it up. The balance sheet is incredibly healthy, but for…”
Opinion
Kaz Nejatian: Palantir and Shopify stand apart from all other SaaS companies
“I think there's like two SaaS companies that stand differently than the rest. It's like Palantir and Shopify. There was up to two. I think it's partially because they do things that are just so different than every other company.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
All Opendoor product managers are individual contributors reporting directly to Nejatian
“All the product managers at Opendoor report directly to me. They're all ICs, they all report to me.”
Kaz Nejatian