Over the last couple of months I’ve moved away from leading a cross-functional team to doing IC work remotely (will be a separate post later). As I’m a little more distant from the business (geography & nature of what I’ve been spending time on for the last month or so) I was trying to articulate for myself why I believe Opendoor’s succeeded so far and why to be bullish / bearish about the co. especially as I exercise more options (commit $$ to the co). Harder to share what’s still to be done & what I think the challenges that remain are, I found this a very useful exercise. Particularly so as I’m spending more time with new companies and what’s the must solve hypothesis for them at their earliest stages.
Please note: This is my opinion based on observations. Sharing this but redacting parts that might be considered sensitive.
Company execution:
Customer experience / Customer focus. NPS – word of mouth
Capital markets
Pricing algorithms
Internal tools
Product marketing – “sell your house hassle free”
Complex ops management
Analytics – ops, pick markets, etc
Home entry: Text to enter
Ability to launch markets
Recruit A+ talent. Constantly.
Timing & necessary conditions:
Low interest rates
Macro up cycle
MLS data open with history of transactions
Repeatable housing
Where the business is yet to succeed:
Adjacent Services (sort of already done but more broadly)
Survive a downcycle
Competition (welcome, public company)
Margins
Why I’d still bet on opendoor:
Huge, huge, huge market.
Truly a better experience for customer
Margins at scale
Enduring moats:
Flywheel
Brand equity & trust in the marketplace
Internal operations tooling ?
It was also an opportunity for me to take stock of where I think I excelled and had the greatest impact.
My impact at Opendoor:
Solving complex problems at the intersection of technology and operations and regulated businesses. Always driving to simplify and using software and ops processes to drive better outcomes
I’ve been a general purpose human more than anything else
Had the chance to original support team in Phoenix: 0 -> 1 -> 5. Original playbook, scripting, tooling. Today team is 50+ people.
Data analytics + bots to drive operational leverage
Brokerage: spec’d & lead building of transaction management platform & ops playbook for compliance in 1st state (AZ). Gold star from regulator. Playbook scaled
Canonical work: winding down Opendoor Mortgage 1.0 (beta), strategy for 2.0 and scrapping, core team to launch 3.0. (Mortgages @ Opendoor needs to be a book, lol)
lFor 3.0: Leading cross functional growth team. 3 eng, pm, 1 pmm, 1 CX ops, and 1 analyst
In H2 of 2017, at Opendoor we encountered a problem with came with a small threat: it could force us to shut down a market we operated in (low probability) but not nailing it might potentially disrupt or pause operations in all other states we were “live” in should it not be solved. It had to be a cross-functional effort between the brokerage, EPD*, and compliance teams to solve.
I stumbled upon the project largely because I think nobody else had said signed up for it 😬. The story of this project deserves a post in itself but the project ended up achieving its goal, against all odds. Given various circumstances including needing to staff up resourcing quickly, a hard problem, and a looming deadline, in classic Opendoor fashion we retro’d on why we thought the project had succeeded.
I think applies to any project whether it be for yourself, within a company, or even the early days of a startup. It reminded me a lot of how things were when all of us on the Polymail team were living together and doing YC in the summer of 2016.
Clarity – helps align everyone and convince people to join. Simplify how you talk about what you’re doing.
External Deadlines – force prioritization and a ship. (of course there’s caveats here)
Enthusiasm – this sh*t is hard, be excited for it and find amazing people to work with.
Tailwinds – always be able to answer the why now.
People, people, people 💙
This one turned out to be one of my favourite special projects at Opendoor because of the people I got to work with and learn from, the ownership over the problem, the ability to have a meaningful impact, and learning one more pillar of business complexity that we have. Plus it gave me a chance to do what I love doing the most: managing the product and the operations.
The project also ended up having a much larger than our initially scoped impact as we, hi Tim, Visnu 👋🏾, built a brokerage specific transaction management product (Broker Admin), and sped our path to move to our own contract management software (HelloRito) at Opendoor.
Two years ago, I had a deadline hanging over my head to find a new job and renew my visa. Two years ago, I walked into Opendoor SF for the first time with a new job and mostly afraid of how I’d fit into a 200-person company having just wrapped up an adventure at a company of just 4.
It’s been almost 2 years since I joined Opendoor and what an incredible ride it’s been. Looking at my notes from Nov-Dec’16, here’s the story.
Starting things is my default, whether it was thinking about how to capitalize on the fish wire craze in middle school or starting companies with friends after college. So when I left Polymail after we raised our round post-YC, with no plan, the first thing to do was figure out what should I build next. I spent most of October 2016 thinking about would follow. My notes/sketches show me all the things I thought were interesting: another productivity app 💌, a food-related consumer brand, something blockchain-related, a smart factory, and new retail experiences.
While I was dreaming about the next big thing to build, I also had a constraint—my visa status— that I hadn’t fully grasped the impact until an international student counsellor at UCLA reminded me, in November, that I had under 90 days left on my existing F-1 visa. I had only until Jan’17 left in the US unless I found a job that could sponsor my F-1 visa’s STEM extension. Because this threw a wrench in my plans to start something new again, I needed to find a job (and quick).
In general, job searches aren’t a particularly fun experience but I got started on mine. Back when I initially left Polymail I emailed a few folks asking, “If you see something interesting, let me know” but it was time to ping people again. I didn’t know what role I wanted…I didn’t have any specific career goals other than being entrepreneurial and having an impact. As I thought about roles, I had experience and was excited to work on products, analytics, and growth. However, a role itself didn’t seem like the most important pillar when looking for the next opportunity. Instead, I established criteria of what I thought was important to me knowing it would help me make a decision. I had narrowed it down to:
Joining a full-stack startup: Having grown up around operations heavy businesses in India, I wanted to spend time working on a project that would have the whole stack—build the software and use it too.
Talent & Culture: I wanted to work at a place where people I knew and respected worked. I wanted to learn from them.
Scale: I hadn’t worked at a place yet that found product-market fit, scaled, and needed real management. This was something I needed to experience first-hand. Reading books or medium articles were not a substitute here.
There were a bunch of companies with interesting roles, but nothing really matched all three. Serendipitously, Vedika, my sister, who was then working at Stripe told me she swung by the offices of a hot new startup where her friend Logan worked at a place called Opendoor. I looked up the company and at first glance, it appeared to meet my three criteria. On LinkedIn, I noticed that I knew a few folks who worked there, including Simon who I had last met in NYC when he was fundraising for his company at that time.
Some backstory: Simon and I originally met in 2014 when he was working at Robinhood doing PR and I was running LA Hacks where the founders ended up showcasing their app for the very first time publicly. You could say the demo was interesting—ask him about it.
The original email
I swung by the office at 116 Montgomery on a weekend to meet with him. Once there, he introduced me to another PM who was also working the weekend and left us for an impromptu interview…surprise, surprise. To say that the interview didn’t go well would be an understatement. I was later told that the PM thought I was smart, but also thought I spoke too quick. I told him that if the PM I had met wasn’t interested in the next step, I’d still be interested in other roles. He referred me for a different, and more analytics-focused, role. I needed my visa and time was running out. I thought to myself, “Let’s get the job, get the visa renewed, and then see what to do next. I likely won’t last long at a company so big for more than 3-6 months anyway, but at least I’ll have my visa.”
The referral worked on getting an email back from Jac, a recruiter. We spoke on the phone and she sent me a take-home assignment which seemed straightforward enough to do.
One week later, 22nd of Nov, I had somehow forgotten about it in the midst of preparing for a slew of other interviews. I remembered only after I finished the on-site I had that day down in Palo Alto and decided to head to the Stanford coffee shop get this thing done before the end of the day. I finished by around 5 PM, phew. However, given the rush to finish, I didn’t expect a callback. Surprisingly, I heard back and soon found myself scheduling an on-site.
Even with a few offers on the table and the deadline for my visa continuing to approach, I wanted to hold out for Opendoor. Less than 48 hours later, I received a call back telling me more about the offer and the role. However, it came with a hurried deadline and a compensation package that differed drastically from the others. Pay didn’t make it onto the list because it was more of hygiene criteria as opposed to one you could pull the trigger based off of. This would be a bit of a bullet to bite but I was genuinely excited about the company which had satisfied the criteria I set out with and had the opportunity to have a big impact though.
I called back and said, “I’m ready to do this”. My boss-to-be at that time, Ryan Johnson, recommended coming in the next day.
So on Dec 4th, I showed back up at 116 New Montgomery to start my first day at Opendoor. The first project was some product discovery work: call customers and see if they were interested in getting financing. Oh, boy! This was a sign of things to come.
Reflecting two years later, I’m grateful I made the decision I did. I’m lucky that the criteria lead me here to find each of three things I was looking for but also gave, and continues to give, me so much more. Also, the roles basically didn’t matter.
Full-Stack Startup: Opendoor really is a technology and operations business that builds software end-to-end and uses it too. Its fascinating problem set to have an opportunity to take on.
Talent: I’ve gotten to work with people I know, and made lots of friends with people I work with and respect. I’ve gotten also to recruit some amazing folk to come to join us too.
Scale: Opendoor has continued to grow and be successful and it’s amazing to work at a place where we’re impacting the lives of thousands of people every month during the most stressful transaction of their lives.
Thank you, Laura and Saige reviewing early drafts.
When on vacation a few weeks ago I was reflecting on what are some things I love about Opendoor and Transparency as a value rose to the top. Transparency has always seemed like one of those things that’s a no-brainer to follow and I’m grateful to see the steps we’ve taken at Opendoor to put it into practice. More so as a recap for future me, I wanted to outline some aspects of it.
Transparency can be encapsulated into one of our “5 Core Principles”: Build Openness
Productive communication depends on a foundation of trust and goodwill. Approach difficult conversations with curiosity. Avoid hearsay, passive aggression, and snark. Give feedback early and often.
Some activities that enable transparency:
All-Hands Q&A: Ability to ask the leadership team questions that will be publicly answered even though the questions itself can be anonymously asked.
Windows: I didn’t realize the impact of windows until we moved from moved offices. Initially, all the meetings rooms came with frosted windows which added a strange layer of secrecy that felt unnecessary. Within a few weeks of moving in our workplace team unfrosted most of the meeting rooms barring a few which are in the corner of recruiting and legal, and a few private rooms which are understandable.
Public Calendars: Everyone can see anybody’s calendar by default. The onus is placed on the person to make an event private when needed. It also allows for easier scheduling of time with co-workers.
Slack/Company Updates: There’s a healthy default towards posting messages in public channels as more than half the messages are read in public channels. Weekly Update and retros for most teams publicly shared(email and to #meeting-notes)
Documents: Not everything is searchable but if you come upon any link it’s likely that you’d be able to open it without needing to request permissions.
Metrics: Most metrics are now hosted on an analytics portal that everyone can access. Additionally, every morning a performance report of the business goes out.
Feedback: Various channels of customer feedback including reviews, NPS, twitter mentions, and more are automatically posted to slack channels which showcases the impact and experience of the service we offer. Additionally, there’s quarterly feedback from managers to direct. reports.
Financials: All numbers are presented to the entire company which exposes everyone to the ups and downs the business constantly faces. What’s been impressive is that even as we approach a 1000 people this information is held in the confidentiality that it’s shared with and my sincere hope is that this never changes(until the company goes public of course).
An Open-Mind: honestly, this is the real secret. We’ve got an amazing team.
TotalRewards/Compensation: Total rewards are still very hard to understand and I think we’ve gotten pretty good at this now. What makes it more complex is things like what’s the liquidation preference from the latest round, how much is my equity worth if to company exits at these 5 different valuations. I love how we’ve taken steps to create a rewards packet which better outlines this.
Upsides:
There’s transparency for transparency itself but it also allows for tangible value. A few upsides:
It helps builds trust much faster across the organization.
It helps collaboration happen faster as folks are exposed to more information earlier. It also allows ideas to flow across the organization even when people are not in the same business or functional unit.
It allows folks to have less postured conversations and as our core value describes, approach challenges conversations with curiosity as the information about what happened has already been shared.
It allows for a stronger muscle to handle organizational thrash.
It also allows for a stronger muscle to handle a few bad months or years as we’ve seen ourselves bounce back. In my opinion, this helps with talent retention.
Downsides:
Information Overload: As we get bigger availability of constant streams of data vs. synthesized information that’s most important to you might become a challenge. I’m curious on whether there’s a software solution here: AI for notifications.
Criticism: More people can be critical of other people’s work as you can see the short/medium term volatility.
Transparency vs. Oversharing: can introduce people to the sausage making which can be a bit hard on new employees & those with only a few years of experience.
There are some things you likely cannot be transparent about such as legal, recruiting, firings, etc.
What I think we can still improve on:
Context: allowing for a stripe-like email system so that most messages are available publicly. Most messages are still sent via email/DMs, especially as you go further up the organizational structure.
Salary Information: While there have been big strides mad here: I still have a desire to have all comp be on a public spreadsheet though I can understand why no company might ever do this.
Reducing Rumours: though I’ve never been at a company of this size and everyone tells me this is the least they’ve seen of anywhere else. I am definitely guilty if this too. The onus here primarily falls on the individual.
Overall, I think it’s very valuable and gets me excited about Opendoor. Future Varadh looks forward to sharing specific stories. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts about transparency.
Varadh 