Billionaire Founder: No One Tells You This About Starting A Company | Ankur Jain

23:28Learn more at schwab.com slash trading. So, you know, I love this idea of, you know, you basically are putting a uniform on people, giving them a mission. And I do think, like, humans need a mission. And they want to feel like there's purpose. You want to have a purpose.

23:43Ankur Jain:You want to have a team. You want to go build towards something. Yeah. And by the way, part of having the greatest team is knowing who's not a good fit for the team. And I think one of the challenges I've seen, like I am petrified every single day that we, I hope this never happens and we will do everything to prevent it. But as companies hit that$10 billion plus growth phase, I have watched so many of my friends who have built iconic companies that I have looked up to for years that I now work with day to day. And their teams are so bureaucratic now. And they're stuck in process and titles and nothing gets done.

24:21Ankur Jain:And I'm thinking to myself, what happened to this company where it was the most innovative, fast moving, incredible business? And now they have committees for committees for committees. and nothing gets done. What happened? And I think what happened is they, there's a couple, I mean, a lot of different things happened, but one is they started to throw bodies at problems. And by the way, I can see how that happens. Like when you're in the thick of it and you're trying to put out a fire, you have a growth opportunity that seems right there in front of you. The easy solution is throw more bodies at it.

24:54Ankur Jain:And so the reason we put that hard cap of 25 people per business line is it forces me and my partners to say, are we just not prioritizing well if we can't get this done with 25? Because any great startup, I mean, WhatsApp was like 40 people when they sold for$19 billion, right? Yeah. It's Spotify, the six-person team sort of famously. Right. And I think, you know, Jeff Bezos used to call it the pizza, two pizza box rule or whatever. But we look at that and say, are we not prioritizing well? Or is this business genuinely big enough that it needs to be split to run as two businesses? Right? In which case, it's no longer just add one or two or three because it's always just add one more, add one more.

25:38Ankur Jain:And before you know it, the team is 60 people. And so this forces to say, are we really going to invest in hiring an entire back-end team, front-end team, market-end team, product manager, GM? It's not as simple as just throwing one or two. So having a little bit of forced constraint has kept us small and kept that entrepreneurial energy within each business line. The second thing I think that we do to keep that small culture is we're pretty ruthless and adamant about saying, are you the right culture fit here? It is so easy to justify, especially when you're shorthanded and you're moving fast and you're growing quickly, that you just need help.

26:18and you end up allowing the wrong type of talent, B-talent, candidly, to stay on a team. And once that starts, it spreads

26:28Ankur Jain:because they end up hiring B-talent and then it just, before you know it, it's not there. And so we've been pretty tight about, first of all, that 90-day window. You have no, when people join that first 90 days, we'd rather be respectful and fair to the candidate to say it's not working. And so also creating that forcing function where you get your onboarding jacket and you get welcome into the team after your 90-day period gives us a chance to say, is this person the right fit? Without feeling bad, because everyone comes into it eyes wide open, that that's how our business operates. But once you're in, we have your back.

27:07What percentage do you catch in the 90 days? Most.

27:10Ankur Jain:And I'll tell you, it's a learning lesson for our teams, too, because I say, if you catch it in the first 90 days, that's great. If we catch it after 90 days, that's on you. And that speaks to your leadership ability here at the company, too. Great forcing mechanism. Because otherwise, it's tough. Like, somebody joins, you feel bad, you want to. And this way, there's mutual respect. We're not bait and switching anyone. Everyone comes in understanding how the process works. and they have a chance to come in and see if they're the right fit for them and for us. And just because they're not right fit for us doesn't mean they wouldn't thrive at another company.

27:46Yeah. Let's talk about leadership a little bit. How can you tell if somebody is a leader or a manager? And how could you tell if somebody is a good... We don't hire managers. That's right there. We don't do managers. I just don't believe in that. in a world where everybody has to own a piece of this business. And by the way, when I say own, I mean the product succeeds or fails with them. And we compensate them as owners. They have equity in this business. They get upside in this business.

28:16Ankur Jain:We give them, when we have extra cash on the balance sheet, like we'll do buybacks and offer people liquidity on their equity. This is a real ownership-driven culture. Managers are kind of a waste of space at our company. because if everybody's there to drive something, you have to own it and be able to take the ball to the end zone. And so that is how we operate across even our GMs, if you will. We call them pod CEOs, right? And so they sit down. They're leading and doing the deals themselves too. There's no traditional management layer at our company. How do you define a good leader versus a bad leader?

28:59I think we lead by example, number one. I don't love, and you see this in Wall Street all the time, it's the guys who say, hey, we're an in-office culture, and then they're dialing in from the Hamptons. Kills me.

29:16Ankur Jain:So we do not do that. And I think you got to lead by example, number one. People want to be out in the trenches. And I think every one of the people I work with, I feel really lucky. If I need help on something, they're not delegating it to a team. They're just jumping into the trenches to get it done. I mean, that's another thing I see all the time is I'll talk to these companies that used to be innovative. And now instead of getting the deal done directly, they hand it off to 10 teams who hand it off to 10 teams. And I just don't understand how anything happens when you take that approach. Let's talk about product a little bit.

29:56How did you figure out what you wanted to build? And if somebody's listening, thinking about, like we said in the beginning, I want to build a company. What would you tell them on how to find the thing that matters? Again, I want to build a company is not a great way to start a company. I want to solve this problem is a really great way to solve it.

30:13Ankur Jain:My dad always tells me, he's obviously now built quite large businesses. And he says to me, if you want to create a billion dollar solution, solve a$10 billion problem, right? Housing is a$2 trillion a year spend category. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to talk to 10 customers and say, no one is happy with how they're paying rent or their mortgage today. I mean, that was where we started. It was this problem where your cost is going up year over year over year. And for many people, the quality was going down. And if you think about it, that whole paradigm was either ripe for regulatory disruption or a chance for a private company like Built to step in and say, we need to rethink the whole housing space because housing should be the center of your life.

31:03Ankur Jain:It should be the center of your everyday neighborhood. It should be the place you spend the most time, the place that determines what schools your kids go to, what restaurants you go to, what bars you go to, what gym you sign up for. It's the most important decision you make outside of your family, right, and usually with your family. And I just think that housing wasn't treated that way. It was treated as a transactional thing. And so when you think about it, it's like all of a sudden you wake up everybody thinking, I have to pay rent again, and I get nothing back for it. I'm paying rent again.

31:31I'm not getting access to anything from it. And if you just, that problem starts, I mean, it was eating at me. And I think once you start taking it that approach, you start to realize, wait a second, that problem is a way bigger than$10 billion opportunity. And that was how we started. And now you guys do many things, but you start with one problem. And how do you think about what to do next? I like this idea of multiple teams. And if it's not big enough to have a team, then it's probably not our opportunity. But do you have frameworks for how to go from your first product to how to not get distracted by 50 options?

32:04Yeah, so most companies die from indigestion, not starvation. There's never a shortage of opportunity. If you have too few things to do, your company is dead long before you've had the conversation. So the real question is, how do you prioritize now and how do you make the right focused bets? For us, what's interesting is we actually really just have one core product, which is our hospitality platform, which has evolved from what was a loyalty reward. and so it's expanded in what the platform is. But in the same way Amazon today, they started selling books and now then they started selling cameras and computers and clothing.

32:45It sounds like 10 different businesses. It's actually one platform. And 95 % of the system is the same across all of those. You're still using factories to store the products. You have an online website with a product page, a checkout, a way to deliver the product to the customer.

33:02Ankur Jain:It's one commerce platform. Built is one hospitality platform that starts at the home. That was our books. And we said, how do you take the rental experience and make it feel high service, rewarding, a great experience? I don't want to have 10 different places I go to to check my packages and my maintenance and pay my rent and then sign my lease. I want one unified experience. I want to make it so it's rewarding. So when I pay my biggest expense every month, I get rewarded. and I want to have it connect me to everything around my home because I don't choose a building just for the building. I pick the neighborhood I want to live in.

33:40And so that was our approach. And we've taken our platform for housing where we spent the first couple of years, and by the way, we did over$100 billion

33:47Ankur Jain:of housing volume through our platform, right? How do you take that and now scale it so that the connected experience you have is unified at the restaurant and the gym and all these places right in the same way that a hotel does. Like if you've been to a great hotel property, when you check in for your room and you go downstairs to the restaurant, they have your profile. You can charge it to your room. They know your preferences. The person at the restaurant can help you book a spa appointment at the spa. The person at the spa can get you tickets to the next event. And so that interconnectedness should be how it is everywhere you live.

34:25And that's really what we've done. The way Amazon went from books to using the same product for other categories, we've taken the platform we built for housing and we've now opened that up so that all these

34:36Ankur Jain:local businesses, these small businesses that you work with, for example, can now connect into that ecosystem and run that same unified experience for customers everywhere they live. Have you ever had a moment where you got offered a ton of money, a big opportunity, but you turned it down because it wasn't right for the company? All the time, but it's not in the way you'd think. There's no such thing as free money. And so someone once told me, they said, we're talking about an investment round. And he goes, pick your valuation, I'll tell you the terms. And that was the day I realized that every price has a cost on the other end.

35:18And so yes, Someone can come tomorrow and offer us a billion dollars, but if it's stuck with a bunch of return hurdles and controls and board seats, it just doesn't matter. And we've seen that all the time.

35:32Ankur Jain:I mean, the number of times people have come to us in our earlier days, this is why we didn't raise money for a long time. We wanted to keep control of the company, keep the board to people who we genuinely want to help run the business. And we had a lot of investors come to us with big check opportunities, but it required certain voting control rights, certain veto rights, certain board governance that just kind of wasn't right for us. And today, that discipline on our side has allowed us to be lucky enough where, first of all, most of my investors were our customers. They were using the product and said, we want access to the upside here.

36:11Ankur Jain:We just brought in United Wholesale Mortgage. The CEO and founder there, Matt Ishby, is one of the most talented operators I've ever met. He's built the largest mortgage business in the world. And when Matt and I teamed up to go build for homeowners, he asked to put$100 million into the company as well. And that type of strategic partnership end-to-end is the dream way to take capital. Our interests are totally aligned. And taking it from a private equity group who maybe doesn't have the same interests at heart, just not worth it. It's very true. I was talking to Amjad, the CEO of Replit, who's become a buddy.

36:49And I asked him the same question. And he had turned down a billion dollars for Replit back when they had no cap. They hadn't even made any revenue yet because he had been grinding for 11 years before they made really much of anything. And he said that wasn't even the hardest part of running the business, was turning down the billion-dollar valuation. He was like, you know, the hardest part, and he's like, and now I enjoy it. But he said this on the podcast so I can say it. He's like, I remember when I told Peter Thiel that he should invest in the company. And Peter said, it's never going to be a big company.

37:22This vibe coding thing is sort of ridiculous. And he put it in an email. And he's like, I kept that email for so long. And then he's like, we're still buddies. So I forwarded it to him later and said, do you still think this or something? And I was like, did he respond? He's like, no. But I was wondering, do you have any chips on your shoulder that have pushed you while building built? I mean, every day, every single idea.

37:45Ankur Jain:I don't think it was a chip. I think that's what motivates you as a fun part. If you have a vision and it's disruptive at all, it is a problem if everyone already gets it and thinks that this is obvious and no one has done it, there's usually a problem. There's an element of saying the problem is understood. The way you're solving it is a little bit unique. And it takes time to convince people that it can work. Because if it was that obvious and everyone knew it was going to work, someone would have done it already. So you don't even think about it that way? No, it's a game. Somebody says no to you or like, no, he's not going to be able to do it.

38:28No way. Does that make you chuckle or you don't even notice it? No, it usually tells me that there's something in the way that we're communicating our vision that isn't right. Because either, by the way, there's two options when somebody says that. Either they're right and I'm wrong, in which case none of this matters and the business is not going to go under. Or I didn't do a good job of explaining it to them in a way that makes sense in their box. And that to me is the best forcing function. Like I find our best product development comes from going to all the naysayers and just trying to pitch them over and over and over and over and over again to see what hits and what doesn't.

39:07It's like, I don't believe in the like, go send out a survey to 10 ,000 people and it gets like, you've got to be in it. Cause if somebody, everyone will tell you it's a nice, if they don't have any commitment to play, it's a nice idea.

39:18Ankur Jain:Every one of your friends will tell you it sounds like a great idea. You ask them to pay for it. It's a very different thing. I remember I was looking at starting a healthcare company before this because those are some of the healthcare, housing, student loans. And there was a model. I was fascinated by the one medical approach, which sold to Amazon. Ten bucks a month, people had access to electronic medical records, a concierge-style doctor. This is for their health. And I remember asking somebody, like, oh, that's a great idea. I said, so would you sign up? Well, I don't really get sick that often.

39:50And meanwhile, they're spending$10 on a coffee or a drink every single day and wouldn't spend$10 a month for healthcare.

40:00Ankur Jain:As you know, that business largely moved to enterprise B2B sales. So I do think that finding the people who say it's not for me is some of the best way to test and figure out your product market fit. Because people like to take the hardest thing is translating this new idea into boxes people understand. There was no such thing. When Facebook launched, people forget there was no such thing as a social network. At the time, they described it as a website to share photos. That became a social network. And now people are like, it's a social network, but just for your close friends or a social network, but for this.

40:39when describes it. So taking the problem, the solution, and then translating it into the boxes people understand today is so underrated in marketing. I think it's too easy for us as founders to get stuck in our own world where we live and breathe this thing and we understand all the nuances of what matters. And to a customer, even the greatest products, How often, I mean, Amazon is a multi-trillion dollar company. How often do you think about Amazon?

41:13Ankur Jain:Like when you go to order your chips or your toilet paper or whatever it is you need for your home, you go in for 10 seconds, add it to your cart, place, order, and you're done. And so when somebody has three seconds to think about your business, what works? And for us, when we launched, it was get rewarded on rent. And that was it. And that's all you had to think. And having that clear hook to your product is really, really important. You get rewards for airlines and hotels. Now you get it for rent. How do you come up with a hook for a product? How long did that take you to come up with that?

41:50Finding a hook at the very beginning of a company is very different than coming up with what you think, how you market your company later on.

42:01Ankur Jain:when you're starting a business i would say you look at this big problem you want to solve ideally it's a big enough problem that you have a lot of room to grow if you start with something too broad no one can understand where it fits in their life i've got so much going on the last thing i need to do is spend five minutes learning about a new platform on the flip side there's a lot of great products that launch is a great hook right i mean when i used to work at tinder we had a very simple hook. Swipe right, swipe left, match, and that was it. Meet people anonymously, right? The challenge is converting that hook into a platform.

42:40Ankur Jain:So I would actually say it's not as hard to create the hook. It's really hard to find a hook that can evolve into a platform. And a lot of these businesses that are great hooks, you still have to get lucky in the right time and the right everything, but there's still a cap. And the greatest companies figured out how to evolve from a hook naturally into a platform without losing sight of what made them successful in the first place. How did you guys do that? I mean, a lot of it was just from our customers. I mean, it's interesting. We started off, people know us for a direct-to-consumer business.

43:17A lot of our business is actually providing solutions to B2B.

43:23Ankur Jain:So we started with both a direct-to-consumer and a direct-to-B business property management solution to provide loyalty and rewards on your rent payments. Why are people not building their credit? Why do they not get rewarded? Why is the experience so painful to rent a home? In building that, we were hearing from both customers, The consumers wanted more ways to earn rewards. And the property managers wanted us to connect more and more of that experience. So it wasn't just the payments and getting rewarded on the payment. But how do you make leasing? How do you make the package system, the maintenance, the renewals, everything seamless?

44:00And then we started seeing that local businesses were coming into the buildings asking to put up flyers for, come get 10 % off at the Taphouse Grill down the street. or, hey, we have a dog walking service or we have a home repair service or whatever that might be that they put in your apartment building. We said, how in the world is all this local commerce happening in 2024 at the time on little pin boards and elevator screens in an apartment building when you have the most captive audience, which is people who live locally, who need services like this and local businesses trying to reach them and no clear way to connect the two outside of just like digital ads.

44:42And so we started building a neighborhood marketplace to connect people who lived in the buildings right on Build's platform with local business. And it was, again, just one by one by one. And then we realized, wait a second, if we're going to connect you to those businesses and our brand is about hospitality and loyalty, then it needs to be as seamless as it is when you're in a hotel. I don't want to go from the apartment building, walk into a restaurant, have to pull up my phone and say, here's my QR code.

45:11Ankur Jain:I live at this building down the street. Like, that's embarrassing. And so we did the work to integrate from our apartment buildings into the restaurants and into the gyms and into the pharmacy. And today we operate one big neighborhood ecosystem that's all centered around your home. Good sleep is everything. That's why Oli's science back support is made with a blend of melatonin and L-theanine for both kiddos and grownups. So when your mind won't switch off, you've got something that can help. Erasing thoughts and restless nights won't stand a chance. Find Oli's sleep solutions for the whole family at Oli.com.

45:47That's O-L-L-Y dot com. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. You know those friends who support your preference for podcasts over music on road trips? That's the energy State Farm brings to insurance. With over 19 ,000 local agents, they help you find the coverage that fits your needs. So you can spend less time worrying about insurance and more time enjoying the ride. Download the State Farm app or go online at statefarm.com. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. What are some things you do at Built that you're really proud of internally, but that are weird that people externally wouldn't even know?

46:26Like culture-wise, team-wise. Besides our jackets and our medallions and our team pods. Yeah, I like that story. I want more of those. I mean, we do a lot of that stuff. We just launched our first competition cup back to our idea. We reward our customers. We wanted to create a points and rewards platform for our team. So now across our company, our business lines, as we have fun, whether it's serious stuff like hitting business goals or it's just more silly stuff. like who had the most people show up for our team happy hours or whatever, you can get points. And we gamify the whole thing. And then every month amongst the myriad of other comp and other benefits, people can redeem their points.

47:09Like for example, take control of the music in our building. It sounds silly, but people love it. And you talk about music, it's such a core part of identity and so one of the things we love every time someone joins our company this is actually a tradition we started at my first startup when i was 22 you get to pick a song for the built playlist and it's like your walk-up song and so when you come up and get your jacket everybody picks their walk-up song and every everyone in the company hears it for the first time during your walk-up and it lives forever on the built playlist and today we have a playlist it's about just under 300 songs for the 285 or so people that are at the company.

47:53And it's the identities and personalities of everybody at the company. And it was so funny. One of my co-founders, he didn't realize when we were 22

48:02Ankur Jain:this was going to be a thing. And he thought he was being funny, and he picked the song Like a Virgin. And 14 years later, it is still his walk of song as we play the playlist backwards, get to the end of the playlist. and every quarter, that's his song. That's hysterical. You know, you've talked a lot about the hard part of being an entrepreneur. What do you think is the hardest part about running a company that most people don't understand? I don't know. I don't want to scare you. I have fun. To be clear, this is the greatest thing I could have ever asked for. I guess it would be really hard if, you know, My best friends and my wife and everyone thought of this as a separate thing.

48:46And it was like you were saying earlier, you come home and they're asking, when is this going to be done or whatever. But this is our life. And it's fun.

48:55Ankur Jain:And I don't know what else I'd wake up wanting to do. When you work on these problems, maybe I'm just lucky enough at Built. But every possible thing that I'd want to do is somehow tied into the world we're building. And so it's exciting. We would spend time with these restaurant owners who I had met through wanting to connect to our residents at the buildings. You become friends with them. You learn about their business. All of a sudden, they started asking us, well, can I use Build's platform for my entire operations, not just the marketplace? And then we launched a hospitality business from that.

49:32And that came from just going out for drinks and having fun with people in the space. And so, I don't know. It all ties together, I feel like, in a fun way. and it's hard, but it's fun. Worth it. Yeah, you know, my new thesis that I've been sort of playing around with is I think a lot of entrepreneurs were unhappy when they started companies. And so now when they're famous or all over the internet, they're unhappy now and they were unhappy then. And so now there's a lot of people that talk about how miserable it has to be to run a business. Is that true? You see that a lot? I see it a lot, yeah.

50:01Interesting. Well, think about it. I mean, I think there's a lot of reality to the statement of like, pessimists sound smart and optimists make money. And so I think this idea of being sophisticated and more pessimistic and then you seem reasonable and you're not a Pollyanna and there's no rose-colored glasses is actually kind of normative. And then if you seem too happy and whatever, it's like, ah, really? Is that actually how you're going? And so I like to hear entrepreneurs say that they're having fun because I believe that too. I don't think we have to trauma bond always over how miserable this is.

50:31Because if it was super miserable, you're quite capable. You would probably just go become an employee somewhere else if you didn't like it. I'd be a bad employee, but yeah. Like I said, I love it.

50:41Ankur Jain:It's a lot of fun. But I said, we made a very intentional decision to build this company with a group of people who either were or have become our best friends. And we spend all day, every day together working on stuff that's fun and exciting. And part of that makes the hard stuff worth it too, because you're going through it together. And I think it would be really tough if I was doing this alone. That would maybe be a different view on this. Is this where you take all of your video meetings in this room? No. This space, by the way, is a reflection. It's so funny. So one of my co-founders and I, when we were 24, I guess we started the company when I was 22.

51:29Ankur Jain:So we launched when I was 23, 24. we used to come to New York to come launch like do media tours and whatever and we used to stay across the street at the Standard Hotel and it's just a funny full circle moment because I remember the night we were launching our first startup we were sitting at the bar right at the Standard Hotel across the street and we were looking over and this building had just opened it was the Samsung headquarters they had the first virtual reality experience it was this huge screen I I remember looking at like, that is the coolest new space ever. And that night we stayed up all night to get this thing ready to launch.

52:07Ankur Jain:And of course we hit 50 bugs the first day because that's how all startups are. And it was this crazy fire. And, you know, we were here a couple of nights ago, late night. And I was just joking because now we have the building. The whole building is built. We're looking over the bar where we first started launching our first product. And we're now launching new products every day and going through the same experience. and I was kind of saying earlier, now it's the same ups and downs and chaos, which makes it so fun, just bigger scale. You go from launching one product in a year to a product a day or every week to raising$100 ,000 to raising$100 million, but it's really the same crazy game.

52:49Do you think that you just get anesthetized to it after a while? Does it just become sort of easier because you build up a muscle eventually to the difficulty? But I also think you can't get numb to this stuff.

52:59Ankur Jain:Some people, every day, you just got to have the pinch me moments. As things get bigger and crazier, sometimes you look around and you're like, how was my day meeting with this person and doing that thing and seeing this thing? And it's pretty surreal. I think the minute you become numb to all this stuff, you're kind of fucked. because part of what makes this thing worth doing is that excitement you get every time you get a cool new opportunity and I feel like every day at Built Now the scale and things that we get to do are like on a daily basis things I would have dreamed of doing once 10-15 years ago.

53:45I love that yeah my dad always says do you think eight-year-old Cody would think this is cool and And the answer is yes. She'd be like, what the fuck do we get to do every day? This is wild. You can't lose that. Again, it's the fun. I mean. Yeah, yeah. I always like that framing of, does eight-year-old you think this is cool? And does 80-year-old you kind of approve of the way that you're doing it?

54:07Ankur Jain:Maybe we'll worry about that problem later. I want to talk a little bit about, I remember you talking somewhere around, built almost like came to fail, basically. And in the beginning, you had one point in particular where you didn't think the company was going to take off or make it. And now you're here today. Do you remember what that moment was? We've had a lot of those points in the early days. I think maybe what you're referring to is we had spent, it was actually a regulatory challenge. So early in the company, we had started this, again, with this idea that paying your rent is your biggest expense.

54:44It should reward you. It should build your credit. and we always felt paying rent should help you towards a path to home ownership. And so when we started the company, that was the mission and vision of help. And again, it's evolved in different variations, but that was the North Star of making your housing payments work for you. Six months into really focusing full-time on this business, we were sitting with our lawyers and they had this painful call where they go, well, we spoke to our specialist, by the way, and we have some good news, bad news. Oh, God. Good news is we love your business and what you're trying to do.

55:24The bad news is we're not sure it's legal. That's a pretty big bad news.

55:30Ankur Jain:But at the time, it was this unknowingly gray thing where no one had ever asked the regulators if your rewards could be used towards a down payment on a home. and no one had actually formalized the idea that rental payments should count towards your credit history for a mortgage qualification, which is mind-boggling. And so the way the regulations worked is you could only use certain frameworks of things to qualify for a Fannie, Freddie, or FHA mortgage, and you only had certain sources of funds that you were allowed to use towards a down payment. So we sat there and we said, well, do we pivot?

56:14or is this worth fighting? And we spent 18 months going down to DC, spending time with the Department of Housing, with Fannie Mae, with Freddie Mac, with FHA, and all these different

56:26Ankur Jain:groups. And in October of 2019, because we started this problem, like beginning of 2018, actually the first, before it was even a company, actually it was later than that, sorry, my timing is a little bit off here. But we got the Department of Housing for the United States to formally approve the use of rewards towards a down payment and paying your rent to count towards your credit for a mortgage. And so all of a sudden, for millions and tens of millions of Americans, paying your rent could now help you buy a home one day. But if we had raised venture money to kind of take it full circle, if I had raised venture capital money at the beginning of the company, there's no way I would have had the freedom to make the decision to fight for 18 months to go try to solve that because we were looking at this for a 10, 20, 30-year opportunity was worth it.

57:18If I had taken venture money and they were looking for, well, how are you going to raise your next round in 12 months at a higher price, we would have just gone out and been forced to launch something that was very different and hadn't spent the time invested in building that foundation. That's sort of absurd. Like 18 months, no company, no revenue.

57:38Ankur Jain:We still kept pitching it. Did you have revenue? No, not at the time, but it was just a couple of us. And that was what I was getting is you can bootstrap this stuff. You don't have to artificially grow too quickly. Yeah. And look, that was a mistake we made in my last company. We took venture money early and it was all about growth, growth, growth, growth before we were ready for growth. And it wasn't like we sat around and did nothing. I mean, during that time, we just built assuming success, right? So we kept building the tech product, the platform. We were pitching real estate owners and airlines and hotels for the rewards program every day while we were waiting to get this approval.

58:18Ankur Jain:And figured if we don't get it, we'll figure it out. But if we get it, we want to be ready to strike. No, it's incredible. I just think a lot of times we can fault the level of belief in what we build that we have in ourselves. And so that takes a lot of belief to go, I'm going to change a regulatory landscape. It might be illegal. I'm going to do it anyway. And I'm just going to keep building with the belief that I'm going to figure it out. I think to figure it out was the key. Like we weren't going to do something that was illegal, but we were going to figure it out. We were going to find a way to adapt the business, adapt the product or adapt the platform to make it work.

58:51Ankur Jain:But we were also committed to getting that thing approved. And by the way, it makes sense. Like that's, and maybe this is the delusion. Like we didn't do this because we wanted to start a company as the core, right? It was, this just didn't make sense. It didn't make sense that paying your rent on time every month for five years has no bearing on whether you're eligible to get a mortgage payment. That's the best predictor of whether you're going to pay your mortgage on time. And if I can get rewards and I can go spend them on airline tickets and hotels and throw them away on stuff that's like whatever, why is using it towards buying a home, the American dream, something that people would be against?

59:32It just doesn't make sense. Do you think you have to be slightly delusionally optimistic in order to build a company?

59:39Ankur Jain:I mean, I don't think it's delusional. I think it's funny. People always say, I don't want to take the risk of starting a company. Personally, I find it way riskier putting my career in the hands of somebody else where I don't know what direction they're going to take the business. I don't know where I can work. And that's why I think the people that we bring on think similarly and they come to build because they have leadership and autonomy. But I think it's way more risky to just go work at a big company that decides the next day they're going to replace the entire factory with some automation or something else with AI.

1:00:17I think that's a little delusional sometimes compared to being a part of something you can build and grow. Yeah. No, I'm with you. I think it's interesting. I was just talking to Seth Godin, who's one of my favorite marketers of all time. And he was talking about when we all started getting indoctrinated. And it does kind of go back to school and high school and the Prussian system. And we were built in a way to be beautiful workers. And so that's hard to break that. God, that's so sad. I know. I'm going to get you to this side of having more fun with these conversations. No more trauma bonding.

1:00:53Russian entrepreneur trading. Okay. It seems like one of your superpowers and your team's superpowers is you bring a lot of people on board, lots of partnerships and deals and connections, which is not always what tech companies are known for. How do you think about setting up partnerships and pitching people to come into your ecosystem? Like for somebody who hasn't done it before, do you have rules or frameworks for that?

1:01:17Ankur Jain:It's so funny. This is the part that I enjoy most about Builds, bringing all these worlds together from real estate to culture to, you know, this month we worked with airlines to do, you know, transfer bonus on rewards. We worked with Disney and Anne Hathaway to launch Devil Wears Prada 2. And we're also launching a new mortgage platform to help mortgage brokers. So the breadth of what we get to do is part of the fun of what we build every day. But I also think it's where the value creation lies. And so I'd say there's two different things that I think a lot of folks miss when they're doing partnerships.

1:01:50Ankur Jain:And the first is they go into these meetings to go pitch their product. The reality is no one cares about your product. They care about their problems. And it sounds so obvious, but the first thing is understanding what each stakeholder in your ecosystem cares about for their business. right and if you can just walk into a room and start with understanding what they care about and solve their problem you're already night and day compared to the 50 companies that come in whether i see it now on this side the number of people who come in and start the meetings by pitching me on what they do without any concept of what matters to us it's a tough space to start right but then the real fun i think is that you know if you're the bitching the biggest company and entertainment.

1:02:39Ankur Jain:They can do anything. They have the reach in entertainment, right? They know everyone in the entertainment world. When you can come to them with something that's from a different world, there's a lot of value creation there just from the disconnected nature of these spaces. And so for a local restaurant, they may know everything to do with hospitality and restaurant world, but it's probably not likely they're spending their time building relationships with the property managers for every apartment building that's around their business. So when we can come in and say, let me help you solve your guest experience at your restaurant and connect you to our local marketplace, now the value is compounded.

1:03:19Ankur Jain:But now when I go to the next group and say, well, to the car service company and say, well, we can help you connect not only for your guest experience, but when apartment owners need to send a car for someone for a tour or when restaurants want to offer a car service to get a nightcap at their other bar, we can tie that customer into you. And all of a sudden, the network effect creates compounding value. And now if you're not in the network, you're left out. And so you start by solving the problem for one, but very quickly we built it as a network where everybody benefits from each other. And now it's become this flywheel that just gets more and more valuable every time someone joins it.

1:03:58Then let's just end with this last question. For the person watching today, what do you hope they get out of this conversation by the end of it? That's a good question.

1:04:08Ankur Jain:Hopefully they had some fun. Number one, I'd say for those of you who are thinking about starting a business but don't really feel that passionately about the problem you're solving, I hope I can save you three years and not start the company. For those of you who are passionate about solving a problem and starting a company, I hope I can save you the headache of raising capital too early. For those who are at that growth phase, hopefully there's something that we learned the hard way that you can take away to keep your team nimble, fast, and operating like a startup, even as you hit 10, 11 billion dollars plus.

1:04:41That's amazing. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. So cool learning about Built and what you've done. Thank you for coming. So, Built.com. And where do you like people to follow you? Built or my Instagram is great. And your Instagram is? Just Ankur Jane. Oh, easy. Okay, great. Thanks, Ankur. Thanks for having me.

1:05:25The funny side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com.