Kaz Nejatian, CEO of Opendoor, discusses public companies sacrificing future growth for short-term stock performance, citing PayPal as a primary example.
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.”
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.”