This CEO Bet Everything on OpenDoor (ft. Kaz Nejatian)

Summary

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Brew Markets: This CEO Bet Everything on OpenDoor (ft. Kaz Nejatian)

Podcast: Brew Markets
Host: Ann Berry
Guest: Kaz Nejatian, CEO of Opendoor
Date: June 18, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this candid and eye-opening episode, host Ann Berry sits down with Kaz Nejatian, the transformative CEO of Opendoor, to discuss his approach to the company's turnaround. After Opendoor’s massive stock volatility and a vocal retail investor movement led to a leadership change, Nejatian (formerly of Shopify) took on the challenge of reshaping the troubled Ibuyer into a data-driven, tech-forward and operationally efficient company. The conversation spans his early actions, sweeping organizational changes, macroeconomic headwinds, acquisitions, product innovation, investor relations, and his own high-stake compensation—and why he’s “all in” on Opendoor.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Kaz Nejatian Took the Job & His First Days at Opendoor

• Drawn by the Mission: Nejatian was compelled to join Opendoor because “it felt like a flaw in the matrix—a company that should work” and was shying away from its mission. ([03:00])
• Radical First Steps: Within his first 30 days, he personally scrutinized every contract, expense, and codebase, often sleeping in the office on a mattress his wife sent him (“She actually ordered on Amazon a mattress to the office for me.” [04:43]).
• Back to the Office: On his first day, he ended Opendoor’s remote-first policy, requiring employees to return to in-person work—even before offices were secured. This bold move led to 1/3 of employees leaving:

  “We lost one third of population of the company that week.” (Kaz Nejatian, [06:05])

2. Diagnosing Opendoor’s Problems and Rebuilding the Business Model

• COVID Mistakes—Prop Desk vs. Market Maker: Opendoor misread its brief COVID-era success, mistakenly functioning like a “prop desk” (holding inventory for profit) rather than a “market maker” (moving houses efficiently for margin). This led to adverse selection and lingering inventory:

  “They thought they were beating the market by holding inventory...When the macro turned on them, the company learned all the wrong lessons.” ([06:38]) “By the time I got there ... over 50% of our homes had been sitting on our balance sheet for more than 120 days ... Now it's down to 10%.” ([08:33])

• Engineering/Data Focus: Nejatian reoriented Opendoor to be more data- and engineering-centric, drastically changing leadership and hiring practices.

  “It’s far more engineering, far less G&A, far more data, far less operations and sales... Before I joined, Opendoor had not shipped a new version of its valuation model for months. We now ship one every week.” ([11:08])

• Recruiting Top Talent: Actively recruiting technical talent from hedge funds, intelligence agencies, and top tech companies.

3. Macro Challenges & The Fed

• Interest Rates Still Matter: Despite all the innovation, the broader housing and mortgage market is still dictated by macroeconomic factors and monetary policy.
• Data Critique of the Fed: Nejatian critiques how poor the underlying government data is for such decisions:

  “It is undeniable that the data used to make decisions at the federal government are terrible ... If you tried to make a decision based on CPI inside a tech company, you would last about a millisecond.” ([13:16])

• Proving Viability in a Downturn: Proud to be demonstrating improved contribution margin and performance even as macro headwinds have worsened since he took over.

  “Our cohorts are performing at all time highs in a bad macro and worsening macro... Most great companies have proven they can build in bad macros. That’s what we are proving right now.” ([13:16])

4. Acquisitions and Product Innovation

• Acquisition Strategy: Focused on buying teams with technical founders (not just companies), particularly Y Combinator startups.

  “We acquire companies because we want to hire a technical team... The entire mortgage team was a YC company.” ([17:17])

• Title/Escrow Dominance via DOMA: Acquisition of DOMA intended to double down on title and escrow efficiency, anticipating a coming wave of refinancing as rates fall.

  “Our average throughput per escrow officer ... has more than doubled ... DOMA does title escrow transactions for refinancing...” ([18:41])

• AI-Powered Mortgages: Opendoor's new mortgage product distinguishes itself by being nearly fully automated (“launched with four people”), dramatically cutting costs and complexity:

  “You can buy a home from Opendoor ... get a mortgage, all without talking to a single human being ... Our rates are ... 70 to 125 basis points below market.” ([22:28]) “The single best thing we can do for children is help them grow up in a home their parents own. ... Mortgages are so margin heavy and [have] so many people in the stack that we're blocking Americans from owning homes.” ([21:17])

5. Communicating With Retail and Institutional Investors

• Retail Investor Engagement: While retail investors were pivotal in the company’s leadership change, Nejatian spends minimal time managing them directly.

  “I spend basically as much time on X now as I did at Shopify ... 20 minutes a day, max.” ([24:47])

• Openness to Average Shareholders: Earnings calls and AMAs are structured so that retail investors can participate and ask questions.
• Institutional Investors (Morgan Stanley): Spends little time on Wall Street conferences; values actionable, challenging feedback.

  “If you can get free advice from high IQ people who are mission aligned, you should do it.” ([27:46]) “One of the main feedbacks is that I am not a simplifier ... Communicating complexity simply—it’s a fair criticism.” ([29:31])

• Storytelling and Market Skepticism: Acknowledges most turnarounds don’t work and that skepticism is warranted, but insists the data is clear if people look again.

  “There is a very real reason why people don’t believe in turnaround plans—because they almost never work.” ([31:18])

6. Going Private? Kaz’s All-In Bet

• Initial Plan to Take Opendoor Private: Revealed that he and board member Keith Rabois considered buying the company and taking it private pre-turnaround.

  “My wife and I had discussed literally selling everything we own ... and two of us were just going to take it private.” ([31:32])

• Thick Skin and Motivation: Unfazed by public scrutiny, says he frames negative articles as motivation.

  “I just kept that front page, framed it, and put it in my office.” ([33:20]) “We printed the [‘Opendoor will fail’] article, framed it, and it’s now in the lobby of our office for everyone to see.” ([33:24])

• Compensation & Alignment: Highlights alignment via outsized performance-based comp:

  “My family is the single most levered family in the world on the stock price of Opendoor. In fact, we have bought into public markets multiple times.” ([35:18]) “I don’t look at the stock price every day ... what I can tell you is—when you look at the core metrics of the business ... they’re all looking very good.” ([35:18])

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On tackling difficult but worthwhile challenges:

  “I try to optimize my life for hard, valuable, and fun. If something is hard and valuable, it just tends to be fun.”
  — Kazna Jatian, [03:10]

• On prompt radical change:

  “On my first day ... I said we’re no longer remote. We’re going back in the offices ... One third of the people ... chose not to. So we lost one third of the population of the company that week.”
  — Kazna Jatian, [06:00]

• On institutional investors pushing for clarity:

  “A very good criticism of me is that I am not a simplifier ... There’s a part of my job where I am not exceptionally good at, which is communicating complexity simply.”
  — Kazna Jatian, [29:31]

• On leadership mindset:

  “If you are hurt by what the Wall Street Journal says about you ... being a public company executive is more difficult. I am lucky in that I am the type of person who just doesn’t care.”
  — Kazna Jatian, [32:08]

• On incentive alignment:

  “If my comp package was set like other CEOs ... I’d be getting paid a lot of money regardless of what the stock does. My family is the single most levered family in the world on the stock price of Opendoor.”
  — Kazna Jatian, [35:02]

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Timestamps of Major Segments

• [02:18] Kaz Nejatian joins; first 30 days as CEO
• [04:43] Sleeping at the office, radical cost review
• [06:00] Ending remote work; 1/3 workforce exits
• [06:38] Deep dive: Mistaken business model, inventory glut
• [08:33] Days-in-inventory, transition to market-maker model
• [11:08] Tech, hiring, and Opendoor’s organizational overhaul
• [13:16] Macro headwinds and criticism of Fed data
• [17:17] Acquisition of DOMA & strategy for talent and tech
• [19:43] Launch of rate-locked, AI-driven mortgage product
• [22:28] Product design philosophy and “mortgages for everyone”
• [24:38] Retail investor outreach & communications
• [26:35] Institutional investor (Morgan Stanley) involvement
• [29:31] Feedback on communication and storytelling
• [31:18] Turnarounds, skepticism, and going private
• [33:20] Using negative media coverage as motivation
• [35:02] Compensation, stock ownership, and true alignment

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Summary Takeaways

• Kaz Nejatian has radically reshaped Opendoor both structurally and strategically, transforming it from a struggling, management-heavy, slow-moving company into a lean, technology-driven operation.
• He’s deeply invested—both financially and emotionally—in Opendoor’s success, citing both mission and massive personal skin in the game.
• He’s transparent about the challenges, from staff turnover to skeptical Wall Street analysts, but is undeterred, focusing on long-term operational discipline and innovation over day-to-day stock price movements or external opinions.
• Finally, Kaz’s approach underscores a core belief: in transformative leadership “hard mode” produces sharper decisions, and even when public scrutiny is intense, conviction and data must lead the way.

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Transcript

[Ann Berry]

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[Ann Berry]

that's aflac.com brewmarkets Kazna Jatian, Open Door CEO Welcome. I am for many reasons excited to have you join, but One of them is in the thick of open doors, greater stock volatility, and a call for the previous CEO to step down. I had Eric Jackson join me articulating his thesis for why he felt that Open Door could be a winner and that it was a sort of underdog and the need to bring about a change at the top. And then very shortly afterwards, Kaz, you were announced. So talk to us. How long have you been in the top seat now? And in your first 30 days, what did you do?

[Kazna Jatian]

So it was. I've been in a job for almost nine months and it's been genuinely fun. It's been a great nine months.

[Ann Berry]

You look very happy. You've got great energy, you and your team.

[Kazna Jatian]

I try to optimize my life for like, hard, valuable, and fun. And I find if something is hard and valuable, it just tends to be fun.

[Ann Berry]

Okay.

[Kazna Jatian]

If it's not hard, it tends to be not valuable or fun.

[Ann Berry]

Okay?

[Kazna Jatian]

So it's been a good nine months and I think we've made a great deal of progress against the mission, which is always just, you know, it's fun to see the company week on week being 7x higher than it was this time last year in terms of our home acquisitions, which is like, you know, meaningful metric for us. But the first, you know, the first 30 days were just interesting. You know, I never thought I was previously a COO of Shopify and ran a large product org there. I never thought I would leave that job. I genuinely didn't. But Opendoor felt like a flaw in the matrix. It was this company that should work. The core mission is incredibly important. The business is not meaningfully more difficult than other market maker businesses. And it just felt to me like a company was shying away from that mission. So it just felt like I was drawn to it. But, you know, I left home on Sunday to 5 San Francisco, which is where Opendoor only had an office because Opendoor was a fully remote company. And when I was leaving home, I told my wife, we have four young kids. I said, I don't know, hey, sweetheart, I'll be back Thursday. And then she, without missing a beat, said, do not come back until there's a plan to break the company even.

[Ann Berry]

Smart lady. Smart lady. I like that as an.

[Kazna Jatian]

I thought she was being funny. I'm like, no, no, I'll be actually, no, no, I'm not kidding. You're not coming back. So she actually ordered on Amazon a mattress to the office for me. So I arrived at the office on Monday at the same time as the mattress. So we pulled the mattress into a confere and I'd spend many weeks in a row just going through every single dollar the company had spent.

[Ann Berry]

What an act of love to get you a comfortable mattress to make sure

[Kazna Jatian]

it wasn't kind of. It wasn't that comfortable, but it did the job. So it was, you know, we went down to Rails, took the company apart, literally went through every contract the company had signed, every bill, had paid for previous 12 months, reviewed most of the repos of the code, and spent a lot of time trying to understand what had happened. And I only, I think I did one. I think I only made one decision on my first day. So at 9am on my first day, I met the company. And Opendoor was a fully remote company. And I said to everyone, hey, we're no longer remote. We're going back in offices. By the way, we don't have offices. We'll tell you where those offices are next Monday. We expect you to be at the office the following Monday. And if you can't, we appreciate your time here, but we're going to be in person. That was a hard decision, but I think it was the only decision I made on day one.

[Ann Berry]

But then it can't have been that hard of a decision. It was hard to maybe communicate, but it seemed as though it was.

[Kazna Jatian]

It was an easy decision to make. It was a difficult decision by consequence. Right. One third of the people to whom we asked to move back to an office chose not to. So we lost one third of population of the company that week.

[Ann Berry]

Yeah.

[Kazna Jatian]

Which is, you know, not. It's in no one's plan to start and have one third fewer employees.

[Ann Berry]

So that happens and you've gone through the guts of the business. You're in there going through all the contracts to just quote what you just said, Kaz, to figure out what had happened. What had happened, what did you find?

[Kazna Jatian]

So I think there's a bunch of things that happened. The first one is that Opendoor internally had made some mistakes in the COVID era by not understanding the difference between a prop desk and a market maker. And because they had made money by holding inventory, they thought they were smart. They thought they were beating the market by holding inventory just so people get lucky with the macro helping them in the stock market thinking they're smart. When the company went over its skis because the macro turned on them, the company learned all the wrong lessons. The company decided that instead of moving faster and being a good market maker, it should become a prop desk with Wider margins.

[Ann Berry]

Define that for folks who perhaps don't have the same level of background.

[Kazna Jatian]

Sure. Let me give you a sense of like, let me actually talk about two different types of financial plan, right? There are prop desks and there are market makers. So if you run a hedge fund, you buy a stock and your goal is to hold it for profit, sell it later. If you're a market maker, your job is to be citadel and buy and sell the stock as quickly as you can. Your job is only to help clear the transaction and make very little money very quickly.

[Ann Berry]

It's volume based.

[Kazna Jatian]

It's a volume based business. You run a business essentially on gross profit, dollars at risk, adjusted in housing. The parallel is very easy to understand. For a very long time. Opendoor said, okay, we did not make money when we bought houses at fair prices. Therefore we need to buy houses at extremely wide margin. So it would go to people and say, hey, you have a $400,000 house, I would like to pay you $300,000 for it. And the only people who are going to say yes to that trade are people who know something you do not know.

[Ann Berry]

Adverse selection. Right.

[Kazna Jatian]

Who definitionally are paying for adverse selection. So what ended up happening is the company bought worse and worse homes, and they bought worse homes, margins got worse, and they said, oh, our margins are bad, we need to increase our spread, so offer even worse deals. And by the time I got there, the operational variance caused by buying all these crappy homes that had foundation issues, didn't have roofs, was causing homes to live on our balance sheet forever. To give you a sense, on our first earnings call after I joined, over 50% of our homes had been sitting on our balance sheet for more than 120 days on days on market. That compared, I think the market back then was 20% on average. So six months later, my third earnings call, 10% of our homes had been sitting on the market for less than 100 before more than 120 days and the market had gone to 30%. So we moved inventory much more quickly. And when you move fast, you do an interesting thing. You only care about clearance. Like if a prop desk, if market goes down, what a prop desk does is they slow down, they back off. When a market turns down, what a market maker does is they speed up. And I think Opendoor has to be right about time more than it has to be right about value. That's the most important thing. We need to know how many days a home will sit on our balance sheet. And if we're right about that I think we can get a lot of other things right. That's been the biggest change at Opendoor since I joined. We try to be right about time.

[Ann Berry]

So one observation for you and then a question for you. The observation is, I appreciate you going through that, Kaz, because the very simple narrative that was out there was interest rates went up. They went up very quickly and open door, you know, caught a falling knife and didn't know how to deal with it. So the fact that you actually went through and just talked about the fundamentals and the underlying portfolio, I think is very valuable. So appreciate you doing that. The question I have for you is increasing that velocity, reducing that time held didn't come out of nowhere. So what did you do? Did you change? Was it. Was it a people change? Was it a technology change? Was it all the about what is it that you actually executed on to make that?

[Kazna Jatian]

I mean, the company doesn't look anything like it did a year ago. Look, public companies have to release their neos every year, their executive list. There isn't a single person left who was an NAO of the company before I joined. Not a single one left.

[Ann Berry]

So who did you bring in? What skills are we looking at?

[Kazna Jatian]

So Opendoor is a highly technical company. We have the company has. The company's opex has remained fixed or has gone down. Actually fixed opex has gone down, but the shape of the company has changed. It's far more engineering, far less gna, far more data, far less operations and sales and marketing. The company looks internally and feels far more like a tech company than an operational company. Let me give you a sense of it. Before I joined, Opendoor had not shipped a new version of its valuation model for months. We now ship a new version of our valuation model, our DIP model, our risk model. We ship one every week. We run them in background. We run challenger models. And we are recruiting. The guy we recruited to lead our sales price modeling team, which didn't exist before I joined. He used to lead wiretech teams at Citadel that did pricing for commodities. The head of our data team used to work at one of the largest intelligence agencies in the world, modeling communication satellites and placement of them. So the quality of the team has changed dramatically. The type of people we have have changed dramatically. And if you look at our last 40 hires, because you can go on LinkedIn and scrape them, I would put those 40 hires against any 40 hires at any tech company, not any real estate company, any tech company. The last 40 people we hired, many of them turned on jobs at Anthropic and OpenAI and Meta to come to Opendoor.

[Ann Berry]

Huge test testimony that there are still though elements of this that are not quite beyond your control. But there is a big overwhelming macro variable just to get back to that. And that is what happens to interest rates. From here you can have all the, you know, the best technology in the world, but you know, ultimately what is the landscape that you're now playing in. Kevin Wash, NEW Fed Chair what does his outlook mean for your business? He said that he wants to be a very different kind of Fed chair.

[Kazna Jatian]

Look, I think let me give you answers in two ways. The first is let me give you answer as someone who spends a lot of time caring about the economy and then let me give my second answer as the CEO of Opendoor, because I think they both matter. I think in the first one, I think most people who work in tech would tell you that it is undeniable that the data used to make the decisions at the federal government are terrible decisions. Data that no one in a tech company would use. If you tried to make a decision based on CPI inside a tech company, you would last about a millisecond because it is not real data, it's second derivative of data. Right? Like there's a reason why truflation and CPI have just diverged so much. So I think everyone in federal government, not just the Federal Reserve, for whom I have a great deal of respect, could do better using actual data rather than first and second derivatives data. That's a very real thing. I think we would make different decisions and the economy would be far better. So I'm very sympathetic to the desire to change how the Fed does this. Now as a CEO of Opendoor, look, my job is to build a company regardless of macro and the macro since I've shown up has not helped. Opendoor macro has gotten worse almost every month for housing. But in that environment, Opendoor's contribution margin we set at the last earning have increased every single month in a worsening macro. Our cohorts are performing at all time highs in a bad macro and a worsening macro. So we are proving that you can build this business and be profitable and be a great business in a bad macro. Because I think in the history of great companies, most great companies have proven they can build in bad macros. That's what we're proving right now. If the macro turns, we'll take the tailwinds. But I like building this in hard mode. In fact, I chose this job knowing it would be hard and building in hard mode because the hard decisions you have to make are easier in hard mode. You no longer have the luxury of lying to yourself and you've got air

[Ann Berry]

cover to make tough decisions. You have to communicate to your teams 100%.

[Kazna Jatian]

When macro punches you in the face every single day, you can't rely on Hopium. You have to make good decisions every single day. And I think we are proving at open door that the models we have built and the team that we have brought and the aggression with which we're attacking the problem.

[Ann Berry]

Let's take a quick break and when we come back, more of my conversation with Kaz. John, have you ever captured anything in a bottle?

[John Crateau]

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[Kazna Jatian]

So we acquired two different things. The first is we acquire highly technical founders. So if we don't acquire, we acquire companies because we want to hire a technical team. So if you look at Opendoor today, our San Francisco office or Miami office, you would notice more YC logos on people's sweaters than almost any other companies. I think we have hired more YC founders into OpenDoor since I showed up than most companies. YC is Y Combinator and that has been our entire mortgage team was a YC company that we acquired just to build a mortgage team. But those are teams we're acquiring. DOMA is a different story. Look, Opendoor has a title and escrow business that I believe over the last six months has become the best title and escrow business in America. We are far more efficient, we're far more diligent and our throughput has, our average throughput per escrow officer at Opendoor has more than doubled. Way more than doubled. I won't take you back but it's way more than double in the last six months. Which means we have capacity to do more tele escrow transactions. And what DOMA does is DOMA does tile escrow transactions for refinancing where the cost of of the title insurance can be very low or could be insurance free.

[Ann Berry]

Right, Very interesting.

[Kazna Jatian]

Which means that we can allow our customer clients of doma, major financial institutions using our title escrow, our escrow officers and our escrow technology to be far more efficient. Because this was going to happen if the rates turn to be a significantly high number of refinancings in the US and the bottleneck for refinancing in the US will be escrow. And Opendoor has the single best escrow business in America, without a doubt.

[Ann Berry]

Well it's interesting because in anticipation of that refinancing wave to your point, there's somewhere else that you've gone which is developing. I think it was in beta testing when you announced it, a quote rate locked, 4.99% mortgage. Now rate locking is not for the faint of heart. History has shown. And Opendoor did have a previous product suite that was open to a home loans in 2022 and this went in the sort of wrong direction. So what gives you confidence that you're going to get it right this year?

[Kazna Jatian]

The first time Opendoor had a mortgage product, for what it's worth, that product made money. Yeah, it was not a bad product. It made money. It just required more humans than a product should require to run. Opendoor's mortgage product is not a general mortgage product for everyone. We're not building a mortgage product that anyone could use to refinance their homes. That's not what it's for. We also won't offer every mortgage in the world. Our job is to find the 80% of our market that is buying open door homes and offer them a great mortgage experience. So today you can buy a home from Opendoor in Colorado, we're now live in Texas. You can buy a home from us, get a mortgage, all without talking to a single human being. Buy the home and get a mortgage and it will be a great rate. Our rates are somewhere between 70 and 125 basis points in the market below market. And we can do this because the cost of. Fannie and Freddie published this. The cost of producing a mortgage in the United States today is about $14,000 on average. And you are paying as a customer for a pork barrel buffet of margin of various different companies in the chain of that mortgage. The mortgage margin is somewhere between 3 and 350 basis points of yield that you are paying to someone else. There's no other financial institution that any company would accept with this wide a margin. When there is no risk, Mortgages are sold to Fannie and Freddie. They're guaranteed. No one would accept this. But in mortgage space, which is the largest loan any customer takes out in the US we allow a system that has so much margin, so many mouths to feed. So I think it is objectionable. Let me tell you, I can get passionate about this topic, but let me tell you why. The single best thing we can do for children, the single best thing we can do for children is help them grow up in a home their parents own. The data is undeniable. The life outcome, the health outcome, the educational outcome of those children is unbelievably better. And mortgages have so margin heavy and have so many people in the stack that we're blocking Americans from owning homes. So why is our mortgage product different? There are no human beings to be paid in the production of that mortgage. It is done almost entirely with AI. It is our mortgage team. People will be surprised how small our mortgage team is.

[Ann Berry]

How small is your mortgage team? How many people are we talking to?

[Kazna Jatian]

We launched it with four people.

[Ann Berry]

Interesting. Okay.

[Kazna Jatian]

We launched a mortgage product which is again, I would challenge anyone to try it.

[Ann Berry]

And what's your target dollar amount of mortgage issuance in your first year for this product? Just to put that in perspective, can

[Kazna Jatian]

I tell you something? I don't think of the business like that. I just don't. I think it's very. I think like hopefully our CFO thinks of the business like that. But I. Our job is to. So when I got to Shopify, I looked at Shopify Payments, Shopify Capital and Shopify Tax didn't exist. I think all those products have obscenely high penetration rate right now. Yeah, basically everyone takes them. And I didn't say my goal was to have an expansion rate. That wasn't my goal back then. My goal back then was take build a product yeah, that was worthy of use. I don't want to have to sell your mortgage. I want you to reach for that mortgage because it is the best deal possible. I don't want to advertise a mortgage. I don't want to have to spend operational dollars. Like, I want to build a simple product that works for the average person. And by the way, we won't be for everyone. If you are buying a $10 million home or a co op in Manhattan, please use someone else. You are the complexity. You are all the complexity in the system. And I would like to introduce you to the nearest bank possible. I want to issue mortgages for the average American, a mom and dad that are buying a 4, 5, $600,000 home in Houston, in Denver, in Fort Lauderdale. And I think that will allow us to, you know, build for 80% of people with 20% of complexity.

[Ann Berry]

Well, let's talk about how the market's responding to this. And a lot of your time is spent trying to explain to folks what you've done and where the company's heading. Now, one of the criticisms of your predecessor from a particular segment of your investor base, which was the retail investor, was that there was insufficient direct communication with retail investors. Specifically, how much of your time Kaz, is spent on X in conversations with retail investors.

[Kazna Jatian]

Honestly, very little. Like, I spend basically as much time on X now as I did when I was a CEO of Shopify, which

[Ann Berry]

is how much time?

[Kazna Jatian]

20 minutes a day, max.

[Ann Berry]

Okay.

[Kazna Jatian]

Like, I open the app maybe three or four times a day, very quickly.

[Ann Berry]

And you getting folks on the platform saying, hey, where are you? We want to hear more from you. What do you get? I don't.

[Kazna Jatian]

I mean, I. Look, there's two things. One is most companies treat retail investors like a bug. I do not. We're incredibly proud of the army, and they have. They, through their belief in the potential of this company and the importance of the mission, kept this company alive. And we will be held accountable to them. So I do earning. Our earnings calls are open to our average investors. Average investors ask questions on our earnings call. We do AMAs. I did an AMA a couple days ago because I was stuck at the airport. So I don't. I don't. Almost all my time is spent on product, to be honest, like, product and hiring. About 25% of my time is recruiting. About 60% of us have worked on product. Now, what I think a lot of people do, transparently, a lot of CEOs spend a lot of time at investor conferences. I spend very little time at investor conferences, mostly because I want to talk to the people who own the company, who are our shareholders. And I find that many of these investor conferences end up basically being there so corporate executives can check a box. And I don't really care what things look like. I care about what things are. And I. Look, if you have a. If an investor has a question, we're available, we'll answer them. But my job is to build a great company worthy of the mission.

[Ann Berry]

Let's talk about one investor who's built a pretty big position in Opendoor, and that's Morgan Stanley, according to the recent 13G filing, now owning over 10%. So how much time do you spend with Morgan Stanley and what have they said to you as their reason for having built such a large state?

[Kazna Jatian]

So Morgan Stanley, I think there were large investors in Shopify also, and I think it's undeniable that it's one of the best funds objectively on the street. I think the performance speaks for itself. And I think they are the largest shareholder in the company right now. So, I mean, look, the team at Morgan Stanley knows me. They've known me since the Shopify days, and I met with them this week only because I'm in New York. We actually don't take that much because they know me and they understand the business and they've done their due diligence. They're incredibly thoughtful investors. And I had this conversation with them, actually. I said, look, I value incredibly smart people who are mission aligned giving me good advice.

[Ann Berry]

What do they advise? Give us some of the advice they give you.

[Kazna Jatian]

I think, honestly, I think one of the things they've done is we spent a lot of time talking about the shape of the market opportunity. And they're incredibly thoughtful. Like, they're incredibly thoughtful in that area. And look, I ran Shoplight Capital, which was one of the largest small business loan books in the US it was many billions of dollars and was totally unsecured. So I understand the capital markets problems that our business has, but I think if you can get free advice from high IQ people who are mission aligned, you should do it right.

[Ann Berry]

But give us some specifics, because for a lot of folks listening, there's a mystery to the institutional investor. I grew up on Wall Street. I was at Goldman Sachs for a long time. So I have a sense for it. But in your own words, just give us one nugget. What, what do the wise people at

[Kazna Jatian]

most of the time, I think one of the things that happens is like they actually push back very Hard on the decisions. Why? Why, why this? Why not that? Okay, and steal, Shop and steal. That's what really happens.

[Ann Berry]

Like, what's one example of something where they said, you know, kaz, why are

[Kazna Jatian]

you doing so Cash now, more later. As a product. We have a product called Cash now, more Later. I think it is very misunderstood as a product, and we should do a better job explaining it because we set it down, it went from zero to being about a third of our volume. And we should do a much better job explaining it. And it is true. A very good criticism of me is that I am not a simplifier. There's a part of my job where I am not exceptionally good at, which is communicating complexity simply. I like. I like going on rants.

[Ann Berry]

Well, it's hard and it's valuable. You said right at the top.

[John Crateau]

Right.

[Kazna Jatian]

So that was. That was the main feedback. And it was a fair feedback that I was that, hey, like, the company's doing well. Yeah, the cohort charts look like unbelievably good. You could do a better job telling the story. And I think that's a fair feedback.

[Ann Berry]

That's very interesting. That's very interesting. That is adding value. And a part of the storytelling is to investors. Let's talk about what's been going on there, because I look at your share price chart, Kaz, since the army rallied around you since you joined, share price is up over the last year, over 700%. The more recent period, year to date, it's been a tougher story. We've seen a slide. And when I take a look at what the analyst group is saying more broadly, the recommendations on the stock are sort of holds and sells for the most part. So the rest of Wall Street's not quite with you yet. So what do you say to them? You know, shares down 54% since mid September of last year. And, you know, when I read some of these reports, they say, we want to understand pillars for growth more clearly. So what would you say with the opportunity to sort of go on the record and articulate what they're missing?

[Kazna Jatian]

I think there's a very real thing which, like, if you're flying a plane, there's a pattern of, you know, aviate, navigate, communicate. It's a very real thing. It's just I'm obsessed with planes. I want to be a pilot, but my wife very smartly has advised that I not fly planes. But if you talk to pilots, they say, aviate, navigate, communicate. We're in the aviate and navigate. Part of our job Look, I think it is the best reason why people don't believe in turnaround plans is because they almost never work.

[Ann Berry]

They're very hard as a public company. You say this on the show all the time.

[Kazna Jatian]

Yeah. So it almost never works. In fact, my first plan for Opendoor was to take it private.

[Ann Berry]

Interesting.

[Kazna Jatian]

I think it's now very well leaked that my plan was to buy the company, take it private. Before.

[Ann Berry]

Did you have investors lined up to do that with you?

[Kazna Jatian]

I think it's now very well leaked that last February and March, my plan was to take the company private. My wife and I had discussed literally selling everything we own. And I talked to Keith Raboy, who's on our board now, and two of us were just gonna take the company private. Back then, the company was not as valuable as it is now, so it was plausible for the two of us to do it. Yeah, it is no longer. Obviously, it's much more valuable.

[Ann Berry]

To your point, with the underlying point being that your assumption there was a turnaround would be easier in private than in public.

[Kazna Jatian]

Yeah. I don't think.

[John Crateau]

Look, I don't.

[Kazna Jatian]

I think there is a particular way. I've realized. Look, I've been a public company executive for a while. There is a particular way in which running a public company is more difficult than running a private company. That way is this. If you are hurt by what the Wall Street Journal says about you or why analysts write about you, being a public company executive is more difficult. I am lucky in that I am the type of person who just doesn't care. Look, I think there are non believers, and some of them will become believers once they look at the company again, but some of them won't. And that's okay. That's okay. You know, when I became the COO of Shopify, Canada's largest newspaper, on its front page wrote a story about how Shopify was failing. I didn't throw a hissy fit. I didn't get angry. I just kept that front page, framed it, and put it in my office.

[Ann Berry]

The day came out, you're motivated by it.

[Kazna Jatian]

I'm like, I have. I have. The Wall Street Journal wrote an article when I became the CEO of the company that Opendoor would fail. We printed the article, framed it, and it's now in the lobby of our office for everyone to see. Look, I believe if smart people look at the company again and look at the cohort charts and look at the contribution margin and look at the growth and the shape of the business, they will make their independent judgment about what we're doing and lots of smart people who are doing that are saying, oh hold on a second, this is a different company. But I don't, look, I don't demand that everyone do that. It's okay. If you want to be a non believer after facts have changed, you can do that. There are people who think the earth is flat.

[Ann Berry]

Well, before we go down the earth is flat thing, I just want to talk about your thick skin here and you're wiring perhaps to, to not take these things personally, even if it's on the front page of, of major newspapers. But I do want to touch just as a final thought on your compensation package. So when you joined, if you clear certain hurdles, you do stand to own only 12% of the company. And at one point, you know, that would be $2.78 billion of value to you. So you have $2.78 billion billion reasons to be thick skinned and keep on going. Or if you're a believer and you think it's going to work out. So there must have been some reaction to that comp package that you, that you felt you had to respond to. I mean, what did I say, Kaz?

[Kazna Jatian]

I mean look, my compact age at Shopify was also public. So I think people can back out.

[Ann Berry]

But it wasn't 2.78.

[Kazna Jatian]

It was, it was like, I mean it's public. It was hundreds of millions of dollars that like it had like accrued because I got.

[Ann Berry]

Yeah, so you should be flown around. You don't have to fly a plane.

[Kazna Jatian]

I flew United. So I think there's a, like the, I mean I had just, because I had just gone to shop at a certain stock price, the stock had gone to a certain other price and the comp package was large. It was, you know, generous and shareholder aligned. But I think the important thing is to realize is this, look, if my comp package was set like other CEOs just down the street from here, I'd be getting paid a lot of money regardless of what the stock does. Right. My family is the single most levered family in the world on the stock price of Opendoor. In fact, we have bought into public markets multiple times. Like after I become CEO of the company we have bought it's public that it be bought in public market at the stock price anyone could buy. So I'm obviously very bullish about the future of stock price. Otherwise if Opendoor doesn't hit numbers, it has never basically hit consistently. Coming to Opendoor would have been objectively bad financial decision for the Jackson family. But I don't look at the stock price every day. I just don't. I could not tell you what it is today, but what I can tell you is this. When you look at the core metrics of the business, number of homes we buy, days in possession, contribution margin growth metrics, they're all looking very good. And I think over a decently timed amount of time those will get reflected in the stock price. And for what it's worth, I think it is very reasonable for people to be skeptical that these numbers will last. And the longer you have a skepticism, I think the longer you risk not being a long LED ride with us. But yeah, it's been a fun journey so far.

[Ann Berry]

We're going to leave it there. Kaz, thank you for coming into the studio in New York today and for taking us through it in that sort of detail. I learned a lot. I hope others did too.

[Kazna Jatian]

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

[Ann Berry]

Come back, there's lots we'll do. Well, huge thanks to Kaz for joining us with his candour. I thought this was a very direct conversation. Lots of sharing there and we're certainly going to keep watching this one because we know so many of you are. That's it for today's Brew Markets Daily.

[John Crateau]

Brew Markets Daily is hosted by Ann Berry and produced by John Crateau, Tarka Bellatif, Aveni Laroya and Emily Millarn. Our dental director is Uchena Waoghu. Brittany Dotaku is our audio engineer. Executive booking by AB Silver and the president of Morning Brew Inc. Is Devin Emery. Tomorrow the markets are closed in observance of the Juneteenth holiday. So have a great long weekend and we'll see you back back here on Monday. Same time, same place. The right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. @blinds.com We've spent 30 years making it surprisingly simple to get exactly what your home needs. We've covered over 25 million windows and have 50,000 five star reviews to prove we deliver. Whether you DIY it or want a pro to handle everything from measure to install, we have you covered. Real design professionals, free samples, zero pressure. Right now. Get up to 50% off with minimum purchase plus get a free professional [e-mail] rules and restrictions apply.