Founder Mode & The Mortgage Market
Episode publishedPodcast: Lumida Wealth : Non-Consensus...Lumida Wealth : Non-Consensus Invest Beyond the Ordinary
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Welcome to nonconsensus investing. I'm Ram Alowalia, your host and CIO at Lumida Wealth, where we specialize in the craft of alternative investments. At Lumida, we help guide clients through the intricacies of managing wealth so they don't have to shoulder the burden alone. Through
this podcast, we draw back the curtain to
reveal the strategies employed by the best in the business for their clients so that you too can invest beyond the ordinary.
Alright. And we're live. I am thrilled to be joined by a longtime friend, Vishal Agard, founder and CEO of Better. Now Vishal, I've known, I think, for over 15 years. I've known him, I think, definitely, Vali and I know my wife. Vishal and I've done investments together to invest in my prior company as well. Vishal took his first company public when he was 26. And what we wanna talk about today is founder mode, the future of the mortgage market, how AI is gonna transform that, negotiating with SoftBank Masayoshi san. Vishal has got an incredible set of experience that, yeah, I think we can all
Of course, Ram. I'm so delighted to speak with you and and everyone listening.
Let's dig in. Let's start off with the Zoom viral moment. And I'm sure folks remember this. There was a in 2021, everyone was laying off, which is the right thing to do back then. You had Zurich interest rates. People got bloated. It's time to cut costs. And there's a viral moment where you're on Zoom, and you terminated 900 people. By the way, I listened to that video in preparation for this. And in my view, word for word, nothing was really out of place. It it did lend itself to a viral moment, though, of course. It's on Zoom. In fact, Zoom's stock price all time high is the age of digital m
Yeah. No. It's a fair question. Look. Honestly, that was not my finest moment. There's a lot of ways that we could have handled it better. We really tried to figure out what were the alternatives. It would seem much worse to actually ask everyone to come back into the office and then tell them that we weren't gonna be able to they weren't gonna be part able to be part of the better journey going forward. That seemed actually cruel, so we decided to do it over Zoom. And I think the fundamental thing that I got wrong was I could have hid behind an HR person. I could have hid behind the folks who
Two questions there. First off, why not have the managers deliver the communication via Zoom themselves? You said you wanted to leave from the front. Was there a thought process around that, or did someone on your team say, hey, Vishal. You gotta own this and just you deliver the message to everyone. Like, why why did the manager deliver that?
To be honest, we had a lot of folks who were relatively young managers and relatively inexperienced managers. They had gotten battlefield promotions. To give you some context, Better went from doing 4 a half 1000000000 of loans in 2019 to doing 25,000,000,000 of loans in 2020 and then 58,000,000,000 in 2021. And this is during COVID. And so we had people that were loan officers who became senior loan officers, who became senior managers of loan officers, who became vice presidents of sales, and got promoted so rapidly through this that they had never had the experience of being able to work th
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