The Pomp Podcast - Opendoor CEO: Housing Is Broken (Here’s the Fix) | Kaz Nejatian

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

Kaz Nejatian is the CEO of Opendoor. In this conversation, we discuss the housing market, interest rates, and how Kaz is thinking about expanding access to homeownership. We also go inside Opendoor, including how AI is reshaping the home-buying and mortgage process, his approach to building companies, and why transparency and accountability to retail shareholders matter.=======================As markets shift, headlines break, and interest rates swing, one thing stays true — opportunity is everywhere. At Arch Public, we help you do more than just buy and hold. Yes, our dynamic accumulation algorithms are built for long-term investors… but where we really shine? Our arbitrage algos — designed to farm volatility and turbocharge your core positions. The best part of Arch Public’s products is they are free! Yes, you heard that right, try Arch Public for free! Take advantage of wild moves in assets like $SOL, $SUI, and $DOGE, and use them to stack more Bitcoin — completely hands-free. Arch Public is already a preferred partner with Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, and Robinhood, and our team is here to help you build smarter in any market. Visit Arch Public today, at https://www.archpublic.com, your portfolio will thank you.=======================Sign up for the Gemini Credit Card: https://gemini.com/pomp#GeminiCreditCard #CryptoRewards This video is sponsored by Gemini. All opinions expressed are my own and not influenced or endorsed by Gemini. Gemini-branded credit products are issued by WebBank. For more information regarding fees, interest, and other cost information, see Rates & Fees: https://gemini.com/legal/cardholder-agreement Some exclusions apply to instant rewards; these are deposited when the transaction posts. 4% back is available on up to $300 in spend per month for a year (then 1% on all other Gas, EV charging, and transit purchases that month). Spend cycle will refresh on the 1st of each calendar month. See Rewards Program Terms for details: https://gemini.com/legal/credit-card-rewards-agreement Checking if you’re eligible will not impact your credit score. If you’re eligible and choose to proceed, a hard credit inquiry will be conducted that can impact your credit score. Eligibility does not guarantee approval.=======================0:00 – Intro1:54 – Opendoor mission: tilting the world toward homeownership8:41 – Opendoor’s next layer: AI-native mortgage & underwriting13:34 – Shopify lessons: the “first-derivative” business model19:48 – Retail shareholders & transparency/accountability23:38 – Kaz’s principles: turning down money & career philosophy29:47 – $1 CEO pay structure & aligning incentives with shareholders37:04 – Kaz’s wife & building an independent media company38:44 – Government policy & housing affordability41:06 – Interest rates: where they should be & why42:54 – Why economic data is wrong46:25 – AI inside Opendoor: speed, efficiency, bringing jobs back49:14 – Consultants/committees vs weekly reviews54:12 – Message to retail shareholders

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano many of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them

for hours while i ask questions in an effort to learn so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform watch episodes on youtube and tell your friends and family about the podcast my goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Go back to

1990 the average american would have had to spend four times their annual salary to buy a home it is now almost six the cost of housing because of the friction has gone disproportionately high while mortgage rates have calmed down just because the asset size is large doesn't mean friction needs to be high in fact the fact that asset high size is high means friction should be lower because markets should clear more easily like the mortgage industry is a highly sophisticated one these assets can clear quickly. Mortgages can sell in a day. There's no reason a house can't. What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a great episode with Kaz Nadastian. He is the CEO of Opendoor. And in this conversation, we talk about the housing

market, what's going on with interest rates, how he's thinking about tilting the world towards home ownership, and what's going on inside of the company, his viewpoint on building companies, and how you as a retail shareholder actually can interact with the company and why he wants you to hold them accountable. This conversation is littered with all kinds of insights and very unique thoughts that you're not going to find anywhere else. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Kaz. All right, Kaz, I thought a great place to start the conversation. You have a company, which is one of the most widely held stocks in all of America. So Americans are very interested in what happens at Opendoor. You've got this mission of tilting the world towards

home ownership, which I think is something that people, when they hear that, they just immediately are like, I want that guy to win. I want that company to win. Can you describe a little bit why you left an amazing job, an amazing opportunity, and went to Opendoor and why this is such a calling for you? Look, I think Americans are drawn to Opendoor because Opendoor's mission is a deeply American mission. When Tocqueville came to America 200 years ago and wrote Democracy in America, he said that a main difference between America and Europe and the reason America had avoided the road to serfdom was because Americans owned the ground they lived on right it's actually not um a theoretical thing jefferson literally said

the most important people to state are the small landowners when you own your home you own a share in the future of your community owners stay they fix things they take care of their neighborhoods renters leave there's a very large difference of people and how they react to problems right owning a home is like a little bit like being married to a community it makes a difference in how you feel about it and the data is just undeniable look i think the most important thing we can do is this kids that grow up in a home that their parents own have better life outcomes fascinating and this matters it matters to future world because we are trending the wrong way. For the first time in American history, young people are buying their

first home on average after they turn 40. That means they're setting down roots later. They get to create multi-generational wealth later. Wealth transfer in America primarily happens through homeownership. They're actually, we're having a real struggle. And I think this is partially because we have fewer homes than we need. And that's real. We should build more homes. But it's also partially because the friction in homeownership has gone up while the friction in everything else has gone down. It's much easier to buy a mattress than it used to be 20 years ago. But it's more expensive to buy a home than it used to be 20 years ago. Just the transactional costs have gone up.

Why? Look, I think if you think about how you buy anything today, you buy shoes. You used to go to a cobbler. You didn't have your size. You have to go around, you have to spend a bunch of time. Today you want shoes, go to Allbirds and you buy your shoes. You don't like them, you return them, right? That's not true for homeownership.

The way the industry has shaped, partially because how capital works in mortgages, partially because laws like RESPA, partially because how decentralized it is and how local the market is. Homes are not like every other asset class. Their markets are highly local. So the edge really matters.

The transaction costs have gone up. When you buy a home, just to give you a sense, we calculate that of a transaction, up to 10% of it are transaction costs. Wow. If we just get rid of that 10% and go back to what the transaction costs would have been in 1990, it's the equivalent of creating 5 million new homes in America. And there's no plan to create 5 million new homes anywhere, right? It's just not possible. So that cost has gone up partially because the last space is basically untouched by tech and partially because the way since the financial crisis, homeownership has skewed in America. How much of people buying homes after 40, you know, can all these demographic or kind of industry trends are because of economic reasons, like just straight cost or economic friction versus consumer behavior changes?

Hey, I actually want to be more mobile. I want to be, you know, kind of a little bit more transient. How do you think about the difference? Let me ask you a second question first. There is nothing that says homeownership should make you unable to move. That's actually Opendoor's core feature. I was talking to someone in Minnesota. I like doing customer service calls.

I was talking to one of our customers in Minnesota and he said, Hey, I have a job in Dallas. I want to move. If I list my home in Minnesota right now, it'll take me 180 days to sell it, which means I can't buy a place in Dallas. My family has to stay in a hotel. I can't afford down payment. And Open Door says, great, we'll give you an offer in 48 hours. We'll close in 14 days, move to Dallas. So I think there's actually a very real thing because the days on market has become so long, people are less willing to make the commitment. It's become much harder. But it's almost like by adding liquidity to the market, people should want to transact more. Correct. I mean, that's a real

happens in literally every market right when you added liquidity to car market people bought more cars it's a very real thing so but but uh but a lot of it is the first thing which is look i think if you go back to not that long ago go back to 1990 the average american would have had to spend four times their annual salary to buy a home it is now almost six the cost of housing because of the friction has gone disproportionately high while mortgage rates have calmed down like mortgage rates are lower than they used to be they're not as low as they were like a few years ago and they should go back there because interest rates are artificially high right now but mortgage rates were lower than they were in 1990 or 1980 but the prices houses were much lower as a percentage of

your home ownership the second thing also if you think of cars um cars transact much more quickly than homes do much more efficiently and a car is only on average about 10x less expensive than a home for an average family right an average family buys a car that's about 10x cheaper than a home they buy average and people you say about cars it'll be impossible to have cars transact cleanly it'll be impossible to have them done quickly until carvana came around right so these are just because the asset size is large doesn't mean friction needs to be high in fact the fact that asset size is high means friction should be lower because markets should clear more easily like the mortgage industry is a highly sophisticated one these assets can clear quickly mortgages can sell

in a day there's no reason a house can't now uh most of open doors critics will argue i buying doesn't work it's a broken model everyone else has failed they've seen competitors pull out of the market doesn't matter how good you are as an operator doesn't matter how good of a team that you assemble just bad business model doesn't work what's your response i mean they're just objective they're just wrong they're just wrong about the math look i think there's um two things need to be said one if you ignore the era of poor management decisions open door was unicomic positive on its core ibuy model for most of its life like just objectively true but you also need to think about what the business model should be look i think

And I said on our earnings call, the job of Opendoor, our mission is to tilt the world towards homeowners and people working hard to become homeowners. But that's our job. And if someone shows up to you and says, hey, I want to transact with you once and never again, the odds are you would call that person a carny. Right? Good business models aren't built that way, right? you want a business model built on mutual trust over a very long period of time and luckily for open door a home is literally the basis for that for most people so open door business model is yes we want to buy that be the best place you can buy a house or sell

a house we want to give you fair offers and sell homes at a fair price and have very thin margin doing that compared to what everyone else has and we're going to be profitable off just that but we also have opportunity to attach things to home mortgage warranty insurance i've said we're going to launch our mortgage products i actually announced it a couple weeks ago that we're going to build the first ai native mortgage product what does that mean in america it means you're going to be able to buy a house and get a mortgage without talking to human being without having to send us a bunch of forms via email without faxing us things we'll be able to buy a home and get a mortgage on it the way you buy a car and get a lease on it from tesla you know what's interesting

is um uh i've been an investor in figure technologies for a long time and um one of the things that they really opened my eyes to was this idea of for helox you could basically come in i think if i remember correctly they would tell you within like five hours you know if you were going get the, or I'm sorry, within five minutes, whether you were gonna get the HELOC or not, and they would fund it within like five days. And so because they had some part of their business associated with blockchain, people were like, how does the blockchain do that? And then when you would go and you actually understand the product, it's like, no, you just use things like Plaid to look in a bank account and understand how much money somebody makes and

where they were, you know, all these different data points that to me feel like a much more modern underwriting. What you're talking about is not just kind of the plumbing or infrastructure of the underwriting. You're actually talking about the interface for people to talk with the mortgage lender is all going to be kind of AI-driven. Look, when I was at Shopify, we built a small business,

unsecured small business lending product that a small business could come, click a button and get funded the next day. It didn't exist. We built it and were like, well, how do you underwrite it? How do you get credit scores? I'm like, why do I need a credit score

to underwrite a small business? I have their payment data. It just sounds insane. I think traditional underwriting is just deeply flawed and deeply broken. And when you go into a mortgage factory today, it is not that different than how it would have been run, honestly, 20 years ago. It's basically the same structure, same people, same processes. This is why the average mortgage costs over $10,000 to produce. That doesn't have to be that way.

Let me give you an insane, a very large part of our cost structured open door is a number of days that the house sits on our balance sheet before we can sell it to you. You said you want to buy a house. You've gone to one of our homes in Dallas, Texas, you're like, do you want to buy it? You've done the online checkout. We have to wait a month or two sometimes for the mortgage to get funded. well if we run our own mortgage business that month can go down to eight days or two could go down eight days that's a lot of uh waste in the system that we're paying for and you don't get a house you want imagine you want to buy a house we can buy your house

give you a mortgage an entire thing can be done in days rather than months so to understand open door i think one of the things that i've gotten as you know as you know i've talked um i've got an understanding of is explain what you did at Shopify in terms of looking at the relationship between the company and the merchant, and then the financial services and the products that you built around that relationship. Because I think that although they're different businesses, the model is somewhat similar here. I think they're very similar. The model is very similar. Look, I've always been more fascinated by the first derivative of the business model rather than the core business model.

I think it's actually the most interesting companies in the history of the world are built in a first derivative. Let me give you an example. The Union Railroad, Pennsylvania Railroad. People are like, hey, they lay down rails, they make money from freight. No, they make money from selling the land around the stations to towns and businesses, right?

First derivative business model. McDonald's. McDonald's with Coke or land. um even better google with ads like i search the first derivative of the search is ad interest the first derivative business model is almost always the more interesting one for large businesses apple app store like this is a very real thing right so the question is what when i got to shopify shop i had a business that was mostly sass great business just generally great business. But the first drive of that business model is transactions that occur on Shopify stores

and work they create. So if you're in a small business and you sell something, you need someone to underwrite that transaction payments. You need someone to fund it for you. You need someone to pay the taxes. You need someone to calculate your shipping rates, all that stuff. Now, all this stuff typically gets done by third parties right so um you own a small business you have an accountant you'd have a tax guy you have a shipping guy you have all these other people that you're feeding and our thesis at shopify was that that sucks it sucks that in order to sell shoes i need to know an accountant a loan guy a tax guy a shipping guy and i have to pay all these people like as they're on my path it's terrible it's bad experience for everyone and they don't

know my business so they gave me generic advice and i have to overpay them because they're third parties so our logic was hey like can we solve those problems and the answer was it turned out to be financially incredibly fruitful for shopify today 75 of shopify's revenue comes from services not software and what just explain a little bit in terms of like what those services are and kind what the bigger ones have been oh yeah so uh when i got there we had payments we launched uh capital across the world shop pay tax shop by balance which is an embedded banking service in shopify shipping international duties all the things that you think would go with buying and selling stuff on the internet it's almost like a concentric circle you say okay

here's the merchant here are all the things that they need to be able to do and as you guys just kind of ate into that stack well as we build trust right because people want to buy things from someone they trust right if you were mentioning shopify you have to think about who to use for tax whereas you already trusted shopify because shopify gave you a great software like okay i'll just use shopify for tax that's what's going to happen open door too by the way because there's a reason why if you look at the builders like a company like lenore great company It's like 70, 80% of people who buy a home from Lennar get a mortgage from Lennar. Today's episode is brought to you by ArchPublic.

As markets shift, headlines break, and interest rates swing, one thing stays true. Opportunity is everywhere. At ArchPublic, they help you do more than just buy and hold. Yes, their dynamic accumulation algorithms are built for long-term investors. But where they really shine? They're arbitrage algos designed to farm volatility and turbocharge your core positions. The best part of ArchPublic's products is they're free. Yeah, you heard that right.

Try ArchPublic for free. Take advantage of wild moves and assets like Solana, Sui, and Doge, and use them to stack more Bitcoin completely hands-free. ArchPublic is already a preferred partner with Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, and Robinhood, and their team is here to help you build smarter in any market. Visit ArchPublic today at archpublic.com, and your portfolio will thank you. and how much of that is uh distribution like moat versus trust or doesn't matter it's actually no it's actually three things one is distribution obviously because cac is expensive and we've

already paid for cac the second is a trust on a core product look lots of companies try payments and tax and capital because shop fight it and none of it worked because their core product was untrustworthy. And they didn't have CAS. People are like, I appreciate it. Thanks, man. Thanks. Let's say this is a very real thing. At Shopify, we succeed in a thing no one else succeeds in. But the third thing that is real

is most of these things end up being about underwriting risk. And we already have to underwrite the risk on the house because we have to buy it. Turns out we know something about the transaction. So we can underwrite the risk for the mortgage. We can underwrite the risk for

insurance. We can underwrite the risk for warranty. like imagine if you have to underwrite the risk for warranty of a house without knowing the fridge that is in the house without knowing the hvac that's in the house we put it there we know what's in there and we can have underwriting across thousands of homes which makes us lower risk so i think it's three things so let me go through them it's distribution which is real that's totally real um like facebook messenger is big for a reason distribution matters second is the trust to core product and at Opendoor we need to do an excellent job such the buying experience of a home or selling to Opendoor are just excellent so we generate trust

and the third is but underwriting the transaction now what i find interesting is um Opendoor really has uh four or five different audiences right obviously you've got buyers you've got sellers you've got what i'll just call the industry of professionals um you've got the media who obviously is very interested in what you all are doing and then you've got this massive base of retail shareholders and i find it fascinating that your retail shareholders can be the buyers and the sellers yep uh your buyers and sellers can be the shareholders um the media is almost uh you know kind of observing how these groups are interacting with each other and then reporting on it and so you all communicate in a very different way than most public companies yeah uh my

understanding is that pretty much the company you know x account is uh maybe just out there yeah but really you're the one communicating to the market via your x account that is like the main distribution channel for all communication how does that play into building trust with buyer seller shareholders media yeah look there's two things about this one i think open door as a company should be held accountable for what it does not just what it says but also what it does and the best way to hold yourself accountable is to not create layers between yourself and the people holding you to account right it'd be very weird if you were working at a job and your manager wanted to give you some feedback and the feedback arrived from someone who talked to someone who talked to your

manager that would just be weird right our job is to build an excellent product and get along in our mission and want to be we want to be held accountable we release our numbers every week most companies dread releasing their numbers every quarter we release ours every single week you have a dashboard dashboard accountable.opendoor.com um because we want and it says literally keep us accountable zero excuses we will screw up we'll make mistakes but we're not afraid to say we will make mistakes but we want to be helped so one of them is that hey um and i think the accountability also helps us learn more quickly like the fact that we screw up some offers sometimes and people tell us what tell me about them allows me to fix things i caught a bug

yesterday because someone said hey this offered him right i'm like oh i caught a bug in the code base. So it's a two-way thing. We ask for your trust. In exchange, we will be held accountable. And also what I see, and I see this across some of our businesses that we have, I see open door, but very few companies, there are people who will tweet at you, Morgan, various people on the team and say, this is broken. This sucks. This UI is confusing, whatever. You guys respond very quickly. And sometimes same day, there's a fix that is out there. And I think that that kind of rapid, not just, Hey, we hear you, but the rapid action and fix again, establishes more trust.

And to me is actually one of the signs of the company and the management is operating at a different level than maybe somebody who, you know, what, what is Twitter, right? You know, what, what there's people there, they're talking. We care deeply about our work. We take our work seriously. We don't take ourselves seriously. like i think it's very important to be able to say hey it sucks i agree this is what i tell my team like no one at opendoor owns the product the company owns the product therefore when the

product is bad it's not your fault it's the company's fault but you work here go fix it so no one should be offended no one at opendoor is offended when someone tells us hey your website sucks. I actually said, we agree. It's terrible. Watch us make it better. Like this is the worst version it will be. I promise we'll make it better.

We are like deeply troubled by everything that is wrong with the business. This mentality that you have or the approach is very unique. And, you know, before you and I ever met or talked, I asked a couple of you, I said, hey, you know, what is, what's kind of the story with Kaz?

And one of the words that came up a couple of times was principled. And when I hear that, I'm always like, does that really mean principled? Or is that like, you know, some sort of concocted image that somebody has done? And you told me a story at some point that I think really highlights your approach to life. Can you talk about the startup that you sold to Square and then you quit the day after the deal closed? yeah we had a we built a startup the hard way um and it was genuinely difficult it was genuinely difficult and my wife and i put basically everything we had uh into company for the first little while payroll went on our credit cards like we put just everything we had into it

and in 2016 we sold the company but before you sold it earlier in the year in 2016 you had a we had an offer from a big company to sell the company um it would have made me very rich like hundreds of millions of dollars it was it was a lot of money it was a lot of money for us um for a guy who grew up like objectively poor it would have made us cas would have been fine uh and i remember i remember going home to my wife and i said great news sweetheart we got an offer to sell a sell the company to this company i'll call it company y and my wife said that's great news i just don't know what to tell you i said what do you mean she said my husband doesn't work at y she just didn't want like she just didn't respect the

company's mission and she was like nope we're gonna do it ourselves like we're in this together we're gonna do it ourselves and keep in mind at this point um we were genuinely struggling to make rent like it was like not easy like we made rent but it was like close there were a couple but it was close and she said strip no we're not selling so a few months later we end up finding company and want to acquire the company and um i thought it was a good company and we weren't going to sell and we sold the company and the deal was i would get essentially paid out in rsu's over my service at the company that acquired us like pretty much 100 earn out yeah yeah and we sold the company and i quit the day i had the deal closed um didn't sign my

employment offer just left um which for people who don't understand what you're saying you worked on a company for years you had an offer for hundreds of millions of dollars you don't take it you end up selling for whatever the price would have been the day the deal closes the next day or whatever you quit which means that all of those years of work you basically willingly gave away walked away from everything and got zero dollars yeah i just didn't think i didn't want to spend my life resting investing there's a thing that's looking valuable you sell your company and you just like spend four years becoming rich and i thought that would be um deeply boring um and we didn't have money we generally didn't

like it was a very like god bless my wife for you know keeping the family afloat because i didn't know what we would do but i knew it wasn't going to be that like i just knew it wasn't going to be that look i optimize my life every week i i take score of my life uh and i look at my career and i say uh did was it hard was it valuable was it fun every week was my week explain more about that process i find that if i score myself every week I don't allow myself to drift and be bad at my job and my job is important to me like because I'm on this world my wife and I when we got married we agreed that we would leave a dent on the world she's a journalist she does great work I'd leave a dent in the world

through code because I'm a nerd um so every week I judge myself was a week hard was it valuable was it fun and if I ever go two weeks in a row where the answer to those questions is not all yes i changed something like i'm like nope gotta change something like what's an example where you got two weeks of uh to change so i'll give a great example um i end up after selling the company and not going to work there i haven't told the story before i'll say it i'll tell the story um i ended up working at facebook which a company i deeply admire and i remember i had a meeting it was relatively heated uh and i i swear i'm working the average person i'm trying really hard not to right now and at facebook people don't swear that much it's a very polite company i learned that lesson

when i worked there yeah uh and i was like banging my fist on a table in this meeting and dropping f-bombs left right and center and i came out at a meeting and this senior leader of the company took me over i said kaz you'll never be an executive at facebook because you don't have an executive voice and i have this out-of-body experience where i literally remember watching myself have this conversation and i said what the fuck is that and then she said god bless her she said exactly and walked away yeah i don't even know who the person is but i can already guess there's only one or two people who would say that yeah and like i came home that night i talked to my wife but i said hey gotta go do something else that wasn't fun that's been two

weeks in a row where the work has not been fun um because i think if you do your job for money you have a job if you do it for impact you have a career like it mattered the difference matters actually like i don't i don't regret people have jobs lots of people have jobs that's totally fine a job is a perfectly good thing to have i've just never had one but i have a career and i manage it very carefully when um when you took the job at open door um one obviously all the retail shareholders were very excited because of your track record what you did at shopify etc um to me though the most interesting thing was uh your pay package yeah and the structure of it um essentially is this exact same idea of i'm gonna go bet on myself yeah but i

should be held accountable if i don't produce value then i shouldn't get paid talk a little bit as to um you know whatever you can in terms of like negotiating that having that conversation with the board and thinking about it with your wife i mean it wasn't much of a negotiation because what happens if you're a public company ceo you get these consultants whose job it is to uh get you paid a lot of money without it looking like a lot of money like that's the job of pay consult pay like these like consultants it's like how do i get paid get exactly paid a lot of money in the least offensive way which is what ends up essentially um creating most public companies where executives get rich being really terrible at their jobs that's like basically what happens

most public companies which is why like great american public companies decline so rapidly um ge like it's a real thing it happens the world right and i just didn't want that like i want my kids to be proud of their dad's career I don't think my kids, I have four kids, I don't think they care how much money I make, but I think they care. My six-year-old knows what Open Door does and is incredibly proud.

And I wanted that. So my conversation was, hey, look, I should get paid $0.00 and $0.00 unless, well, it's actually not legally possible, so I get paid $1.00. I get paid $1.00 a year. Why are you so greedy? I know.

Actually, you know what the crazy thing is I learned? I have to pay for benefits, So I actually pay open door money to work there, which I think is just I think is actually deeply appropriate. But if I don't, I pay a dollar unless I create value for shareholders. And if I create value for shareholders, then I get paid. And it's a generous package, but it's worth zero dollars or one dollar if I don't create value.

Do you think every public company CEO should do this? 100%. Yes. It is, it is, we, we have far, actually, let me be more clear. For companies where the job of the CEO is important and not a pure manager. If you're a pure manager, and I'm not knocking pure managers, there are companies where. Yeah, systems are in place. Yeah, like a ham sandwich could run the company, right? That's famous.

Like those companies should have good management packages. Some of the companies do have ham sandwiches. Yeah, yeah. But if a company, if a job is to create something that doesn't exist. then you want people who are optimized for that creation working right rather than time spent i think that generally it's like a companies where executives can have private cars and like nice houses and private chefs and all these perks without creating any shareholder value are just so bad for capitalism and capitalism is important like it's genuinely important look um

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gemini.com slash pump you know what's funny is um i took inspiration from your structure elon structure with our public company and um the part that stood out to me most was the reaction from institutional investors they were incredibly enthusiastic about this idea of incentivize people to create value yeah and it felt like um it's novel yeah but more importantly it did feel like okay now you're on the same side of the table as them and that is very rewarding i think for the people who are wagering capital even if it's not their money you know managed capital whatever they just want to feel like management is going to fight for them the only people who don't like it the only people who do not like these packages are lawyers because they're very easy to negotiate

because a dollar you can't negotiate based on it so lawyers get paid fewer dollars to give you advice and so lawyers are like this is risky and i'm like what is the risk i said i have a risk yeah but like what is the legal risk here like i get paid nothing i pay the company money unless i create value and the shareholders are better off and i think that's it but anyway um almost you went a step further than this i think this is the part that people don't realize um and the only reason i know is because i was told at some point that i wasn't allowed to do something and i went and i looked for examples and you were the only person i found you get a one dollar salary but you also bought shares i bought shares yeah right and so it is in a weird

way uh i believe the only equity that you own you bought in the market just like anybody else could correct 100 and by the way i think that's also important i bought shares like everyone else like on the public market like everyone else at the market price um and i would have bought shares earlier in fact my wife tried to buy shares earlier we couldn't because the laws ban us from buying shares outside period my wife would have fully put it into open door if she could talk about your wife a little bit because for people that don't know and i don't know if she describe herself this way um but she's a a journalist um and uh i've heard her described as like the canadian megan kelly yeah um which uh she may say she's better than megan kelly i don't

know but uh it's pretty great yeah they're both great uh you're like dent in the universe and hers it seems like together it's like a one plus one equals three yeah i mean it's what we it's what we optimize our life for look she she had a steady job at a big um one of the bigger media companies in uh canada and just one day just rage quit and said i want to be able to say the family yeah i want to be able to say what's on my brain i don't want to have to be censored i don't want to have to lie for a living um so she quit and started a company she has now the single largest independent newsroom in canada she has 21 full-time journalists working for her um and is i think the third highest uh substack in the world and global politics wow uh and she started from our basement

um with nothing uh she bought a laptop and started what what is it called so people can juno news juno news like j-u-n-o juniors it's it's it's canadian uh political commentary and news it's where i get my news about canada um it's they do mark carney and uh president g were a real buddy buddy i'm gonna get myself into trouble i shouldn't talk about this this is like one of those things we're like leave it for her she'll talk about it yeah all right um let's talk about just the economy and i think uh the current administration in the united states um we're recording this um a few days after president trump announced an executive order which is going to ban institutional buying of single-family homes, it seems like the

administration has a war on the lack of affordability. They have talked about Fannie and Freddie buying $200 billion of mortgage-backed securities. They obviously want interest rates lower. Just how do you think of President Trump, the administration, and the housing market? I think President Trump is doing an excellent job. Look, it should be true that a teacher can buy a home under salary it used to be true it should be true again and the stack of stuff is in the way of that is very high and the president is one by one attacking it one by one the mortgage stuff has been genuinely amazing just generally good work and the most recent stuff say hey look on a nation on a national level it may not be an issue but i'm telling you in atlanta in charlotte

in dallas in raleigh it matters the average homeowner the average teacher the average family can't find a single family home to buy they can't afford one so i think what the president has done is the right thing and look it's not like i don't think the government should be involved in everything and the government and by the way the president's being incredibly um nuanced and thoughtful about how they're going about this. The average American family owning a home is important for the kids that grow up in that home. And what the president has said is we now have the highest share of homes that are not owned by families and individuals. And when you think of a home, you don't think of it like any other asset. It's not like any other asset. It's important that

families live in them and it's important to not be taken uh out of circulation uh from families to buy and i think it's deeply unfair just generally deeply unfair that the capital structure is built in such a way where families are disadvantaged when it comes buying home what about um interest rates you know i think there's a lot of people who would say hey lower interest rates are good for Opendoor. You know, I think I've been pretty vocal about the fact that the inflation metrics are obviously very wrong. Inflation is probably much lower. You have the deflation coming from AI. The Fed seems kind of behind the curve. There may be some politics, you know, disagreement between the Fed and the administration. How do you just think about interest rates, where they

should be and its impact on Opendoor? I think interest rates are very clearly artificially high it's just it's just very like look anyone who works in tech understands the significant deflationary pressure coming our way um we're gonna have very real deflationary issues at current interest rates not that long from now and i think this is one of those things that people who care about wall street and live in new york miss what is happening uh in the rest of the country and we're seeing in real way i think you talked about it a couple days ago about how inflation is now below two percent and decreasing we've seen a real pressure on the job market that is there because interest rates are too high and i think this is one of those things where people

are i think people deep down understand that the right thing is for lower interest rates but they are worried about what will happen um if they do it and i understand they have a different job than i do but i can tell you the average american family would be better off and the american economy would be far better off if interest rates were lower and they should be i was um surprised they were not cut more deeply last time it feels like um home prices if you at the data are starting to plateau potentially fall yeah um rents plateau to potentially fall we know gas is down we know certain foods are down i mean egg prices have fallen off a cliff etc um i remember when scott besant uh took over as a treasury secretary he was interviewed by

um the all-in podcast guys and uh one of the questions they asked him is you know do you believe the economic data and he said no and he specifically called out the fact that the data was saying one thing but people were yelling and screaming a different personal experience and he was trying to you know kind of figure out well do you believe the data or do you believe the people yeah i get the sense that the data has started to become much more positive in terms of prices coming down but if you go out on the street people say the prices are too high you know this is really bad i can't get ahead etc do you all make decisions internally at all in terms of economic data or what you're hearing from people i think jeff bezos was right about this when there

is a conflict between data and intuition the odds are your intuition is correct because all intuition is is crystallized knowledge over years that's all intuition is your personal algorithm yeah it's like it's like look um i think government data is very frequently wrong about these things you don't have to take my word for it you can look at crime reports the data would tell you a crime in san francisco has gone down i would like you to walk the streets of san francisco and tell me that right just because the people stopped reporting crimes so therefore the crime data went down great that's what like i think these are like very real things i think you can actually judge the health of an economy based on the lived experience of the average person

much better than you can based on some like database that was created in 1970 something where data is so laggy it's unreliable it's not look i think people who work in tech look at economic data and they think it's like user data you get from a browser because those of us who work in tech are used to so much live data all the time and it's real that's not true but government provide economic data most of it is an approximation that's very delayed and this is what kant talked about right pretense of knowledge that was his noble speech was about pretense of knowledge uh there's a great deal of pretense of knowledge when it comes to economic data and decisions that are made based on it someone said the other day that the fed could

not cut interest rates because the bureau of labor's employment data was delayed like i would I'd like them to stop using the Bureau of Labor's employment data. Like, that's just, I would just, that's much, like, call it plaid, get their data. It's crazy. I mean, this is why I'm such a fan of trufflation, is just, like, the real-time nature of it. I always laugh, you have to call it a real-time alternative metric, but actually, maybe you should call it a lagging, wrong data set in VLS, right? But of course, there's better data sets.

Yeah, we make, this is a very real thing. we make decisions on valuing homes based on actual data, like actual transactions on actual street and actual zip code. If we priced homes based on BLS data, no one would, like, we would just go out of business. We'd go out of business in a millisecond. Yeah. Talk about internally, all these new tools are coming out.

AI, obviously, is a big deflationary force. It feels like there's some things that you've shared in terms of the speed, the lack of human involvement in some of these processes. Do you have any examples? Yeah, let me give you a perfect example

about why AI is so good for the future of our economy. I'll tell you two stories. When I got to Opendoor, the day I got there, if you went and tried to sell a home to Opendoor, the odds are you would fail

because we were only available on 20% of the market. But even if you got through that, 11 human beings, up to 11 human beings would review your home. That's 11 employees of Opendoor who would look at your home before you made an offer. That number is now down to one in most of our flows. So we're looking at five, six times as many homes and making far better offers that are far more fair and far more profitable for us.

And the product is better. The product experience is better. The company is better. the customer experience is better the other example is this um so opendoor did what most companies do under previous management which is they listen to consultants and end up offshoring some jobs to mexico we're offshoring our um customer service to mexico actually so on my third week of work i'm like oh let me call the customer service this is what happens and i said i called some very nice gentleman in mexico picked up a phone i said hey i would like

to place an offer to buy this home how do i do that and the guy on the phone said well you can't buy a home directly from open door can you google it can you google how to do that yourself and the guy was very nice he gave me the address for google he said type in g-o-o-g-l-e.com into your browser This is a true story. Good thing that he gave you that. You might not know where to go. Yeah, and that was a customer experience. All these consultants that we had paid a lot of money to

gave us advice to offshore jobs to Mexico where the customer experience was objectively terrible. Bad for us as a company who wants to sell the house and bad for a customer who wants to buy the house. I promise you, like, there were costs to that. Now, in an income statement, we probably saved some money because people in Mexico make less. But last week, we reshored those jobs to Miami. Why?

Because when we mix Americans plus AI, these jobs are highly valuable. So AI is allowing us to bring jobs back home and provide better customer service and be more profitable. So you've taught me a lot about running companies, thinking about how to operate. and um i think your uh your track record speaks for itself but i'm going to give you my only one uh piece of alpha yeah which i learned a long time ago i call it c2 death okay consultants and committees are where companies go to die it's so uh the day i took uh i took over open door and i reviewed every single bill we had paid for the previous 12 months because i'm a pain in the ass i reviewed literally all of them um i i read rockefeller's book in terms that he used to

do it too so i'm like i will do that that worked out well so i reviewed every bill and uh the single largest bill opendoor had paid was millions of dollars to a well-known consulting firm whose advice could be approximated as the following do everything worse but cheaper that was like i think that was generally like that was like that was the like first slide of the deck And look, the company went and did these things. And everything got worse, but cheaper. Like, how is this? Like, that consulting firm doesn't care about the output.

They don't care. They're not shareholders. Of course. They don't have to be held accountable. I'm never going to say their name out loud. No one's ever going to say their name out loud. Why? Because their contract bans us from saying their name out loud.

Also, because we're not mean and cruel people. But that is a very real thing. But it drove me nuts. Companies have quarterly review cycles to review their plan. A quarter. Our review cycles are weekly. We review things every week. We ship every week. We will be wrong every week. We'll learn. all a company is all it is is a collective conspiracy to learn fast that's all it is it's a group of people coming together saying hey guys if we conspire together we can learn faster can you imagine if you had a five-year plan for something what is this the soviet union it just drives me nuts that so many of our companies are runs by essentially bureaucrats whose only job is to look inoffensive on cnbc

i look i look i cuss i uh i'm not the world's calmest human being i have a lot of nervous energy but it works i think it will i really think you know one of the things um if you had to pick one aspect that you could uh teach every single ceo or leader of a company or a product team i've thought a lot about like what was the one thing that you would get them to do and uh i've concluded that maybe one of a couple of things that they could do that would significantly change the trajectory of their business is to teach them to ask why not today every time somebody tells you something just ask why can't you get it done today yeah i know i I think it's very, if you look at most American businesses, they're modeled after the American

army at the beginning of World War II. I'm not kidding. It's actually a very real thing because a bunch of people who went to war came back and built companies. I think that the number, I saw this somewhere and I've gone back and tried to find it and I couldn't find it, but there's something, I think it was the Vietnam War, something like 80% of public companies in America, the CEO was a Vietnam vet at one point. Like some crazy, just given the number of people who went and all this stuff.

It's a very real thing. But you know what is true about the American army at the beginning of World War II? It wasn't true at the end of World War II. At the end of World War II, the American army was a mean killing machine. Ford was producing airplane bomber pilots in less than an hour. Chrysler built more bullets than anyone else. But at the beginning of World War II, the American army was getting its ass kicked. It wasn't winning.

But at the end of World War II, the American army was winning. It was a winning machine. But somehow we built companies designed after the army that wasn't winning. and not the one that was winning look brave americans went to war without the tools they needed so they built the army a certain way by the time they had the tools they needed the army looked different that's what jocko wilnick talks about his book right like extreme ownership is a real thing you care about the outcome of the mission commander's intent matters i read um the army field manual which every ceo should read it's excellent it's excellent it's better

trained in any mba it talks about how to run a company i talked about running unit but companies aren't all that different and if we just run companies the way the army is run today not the way it was run at the beginning of world war one i think every company would be better off i uh i couldn't agree more um there's a lot of people who are retail shareholders who are going to watch this uh what's your message to them um one um i deeply deeply appreciate our shareholder ways. I'm incredibly proud of it. I'm so proud that Opendoor is one of the most wildly held stocks in America. I work here because of their mission, and I think our shareholders hold the share because of their mission. They want a financial outcome, but they could get lots of

other places. Their mission resonates with them. My ask of them is this. It's important that we not just say the right things but do the right things when you see us doing the wrong thing hold us to account we're not asking for forgiveness we're asking for honesty like give us feedback make us better hold us to account we're working hard every single day because the mission is important i think that is probably uh the single most important thing right is uh if you can leverage them to the benefit of open door uh it's a self-fulfilling cycle back to them because then they will enjoy the upside that they help create yeah thanks man thank you for doing this pleasure