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My interview with @nejatian, CEO of Opendoor. This is a rare look inside a turnaround, while it's happening. It's raw, real, and violent. Kaz took over $OPEN when it was months away from bankruptcy. His wife shipped a mattress to the office and told him not to come home until he had a plan to break even. Some of what he told me: • "All success is unique, but all failures rhyme." • The most dangerous people in a company are competent but not mission aligned. • Meetings are a bug in the system. • The comfortable lies that sink a company are the same ones that sink careers (and countries). (Shane and guests may hold positions in assets discussed in this episode. Nothing in this conversation should be considered investment advice, financial guidance, or a recommendation to buy or sell any security.)
“You need to figure out which defaults are killing the company and change them violently. There must not be change management because you want the change to feel jarring.” Predictably terrific, highly opinionated chat with @nejatian on @shaneparrish pod: https://pca.st/episode/16ab2f16-0438-4e6b-aeb2-6450e4728437 “And I said all success is unique, but all failures rhyme. Good people leave. People lose control of innovation. G&A goes up. And over time, you end up picking fights with your customers and partners. So that had happened at Opendoor.” “And usually for tech companies, like your largest expense to an external vendor ends up being like your cloud provider but for Opendoor number one was millions of dollars written to very large consulting firm this company had come in and had told Opendoor to basically offshore every job to massively overload the company with gna and basically cut engineering which is literally what you do if you have zero desire to create alpha and that basically happened to opendoor and by the way i think this actually happens to a lot of companies where the founders are no longer there there is no large shareholder that cares a lot about the company so over time many of these companies essentially become hosts for professional leeches whose job it is to suck the company dry while making management look good.”