Bilt’s Ankur Jain On Solving The ‘Four-Banana Problem’ And Gamifying How, And Where, We Live

Welcome to Compound Interest from Semafor Business, a new podcast where we explore the way that business is changing in these subtle and seismic ways. Hi, Rohan.

Hi, Liz. Who do we have today?

This week we're talking to Ankur Jain. He is the founder and CEO of Built, which launched in 2019 with this pretty simple idea of a credit card that gave you rewards points when you used it to pay your rent. They've expanded since then into mortgages and student housing, kind of taken over residential real estate one block at a time. But what it's really trying to do do is build this kind of lifestyle arcade for upwardly mobile millennials— that would be me— and Gen Zers— that would be Rohan— and where the tokens kind of are these rewards points, and the games are everything you buy. So flights and restaurant dinners and workout classes and prescription drugs. So he's the perfect person to ask about this evolution in business that I've been totally obsessed with, which is that Every company wants to be a membership club. This sort of episodic commerce where I give a company money and they give me a thing, whether that's a ski pass or a movie ticket, is being replaced by sticky commerce. Um, like I keep getting these ads for an urgent care membership, which is nuts. Like the thing you should buy as little as humanly possible is like emergency room visits, but there is like almost certainly some private equity firm trying to wrap all this up. And a monthly subscription. Always. And, you know, Wall Street, you know, the obsession on Wall Street with recurring cash flow is really what is driving a lot of this. Um, you see it in the rise of this sort of subscriptionization of everything. You see it in the way that shareholders really value these recurring revenue models and like really do not like at all lumpy windfalls, even if they're a lot of money. They just don't want to deal with them or think about them.

Yeah. Gamification of life and recurring revenue. What could, what could possibly go wrong here?

Very 2023. That's a 2026 story.

But it is, it's also kind of weird, right? That like, we do this for things that people buy every once in a while, like a hotel stay, but the biggest recurring expense for every American in the economy is housing. People buy it every month.

You're totally right. I mean, housing services, which is rent, mortgages, utilities, is like 12% of the economy. I'm talking about, you can think about that like a $3 trillion a year subscription fee for living.

Pretty big TAM.

Totally. It's huge TAM. And, um, that's total addressable market for our non-Silicon Valley Listeners, and it's, um, it's the kind of TAM that, you know, is a really juicy target, particularly when you are talking about the kind of adjacent spending that Built is going after. These are the neighborhood coffee shop. This is the Sweetgreen downstairs. Um, and so, so I'm really excited to talk to Ankur about all that.

Awesome. Uh, well, let's take a quick break and then we'll come back and Ankur will join us.

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Ankur, thank you, uh, joining us. Where, where do we find you on this? We're in the middle of the blizzard of 2026. Where are you today?

Thank you for having us. Listen, this is our day 1 at our new headquarters here in Meatpacking District of New York. And I have to say, it's been— it's a good omen. We started off where we had the whole city to ourselves. I was impressed. I mean, I'm a mile away walking to work, but we had some team members who walked in from Brooklyn. A lot of excitement around the new space.

Well, you're making me look like a total slacker. I am doing this from home. Rohan braved the trip into SoHo today because he left his mic at the office. So you're making me look bad already.

I was forgetful. Let's not, let's not make it seem like you're slacking here.

And I'm a mile away. These guys are the real troopers coming in from, you know, hour, hour and a half walks.

It's that startup hustle. You got to earn that. What is it, $11 billion valuation? Your investors like to see that hustle.

We can get a really nice new headquarters, but we can't get comfy and cozy. It's still very early days for the company and we want to continue to deliver.

Well, let's start there. Let's, I mean, let's start with like, what is Built? And, and specifically talk us through kind of what was Built 1.0 and, and where's it going now?

Well, look, Built is a membership program for where you live. And it all started with this simple idea, which is housing is your single biggest expense. Housing is the single biggest decision you make, and it's the center of your life. I mean, you're, where you choose to live drives where you shop for coffee every morning, where you go to your local gym, where you go to which restaurants you tend to visit the most, what school districts your kids go to. I mean, where you live is the single most important decision and the biggest expense for consumers. And yet prior to Built, there had never really been a single platform or brand that focused on your home and where you live. And so Built You know, I guess we started in 2019, so almost 7 years ago. Wow. You think about it, people spend 30, 40 in New York, even more percent of their income on rent every single month. And prior to BILT, that payment didn't build anyone's credit history, which is crazy.

Yeah.

You didn't earn rewards on it, which I think is silly that you can earn rewards buying a round of drinks at a bar, but not paying your rent every month. And, you know, when you think about the path to homeownership, renting really didn't have any mechanism to move you closer to homeownership. And so those were some of the founding principles that we started this membership program on.

And, and that question of like, why can't you pay your rent on a credit card? It has an answer, which is that there's a swipe fee, right? And, and landlords don't want to lose that 3%, you know, to the, to the bank. And that's a feature, not a bug. bug of the payments world. So like, what is the magic of the reward system that you've set up that kind of cracks that nut?

So I think, well, first to clarify, Built didn't launch as a credit card program. So we were always about how do you make payments for your housing at your early days when we launched in 2022 with a small handful of property managers and a co-brand card program. But the idea was, whether you pay by ACH, whether you pay by check, whether you pay by debit card or you pay by credit card, how do we make it the most rewarding? And one of the things we found was in the early days, it was really hard to get property managers to adopt our loyalty and payments program. I mean, getting a building, an apartment building who, you know, for all intents and purposes, they look at this and say, well, collecting checks works. Why, why break it? Why change things, right? And so it's a unique challenge to move a market like that into something new. And so we spent 3 years, like I said, integrating into building systems, building out a rewards program, pitching apartment managers. And even when we started to launch and realize just how long it was gonna take to get apartment managers to give us a shot, the really kind of breakthrough idea that got us into market faster was the card program where we said, well, if in parallel to this we go direct to consumers by giving them a credit card that they can use to directly pay their rent and earn points, then we can start to build a user base and a brand that will hopefully at the time help us accelerate our broader platform adoption for apartment managers. And that's kind of what happened. We just had no idea how big and how fast all these things would grow when we were first launching.

You know, there are established incumbents, right? Are you, are you trying to take on— I know Amex and their program has been an inspiration for you. Are you trying to take them on?

No.

And be a sort of financial lifestyle company? Or is it this— you've made this argument before, right, of being sort of toast for everybody who operates a business in a neighborhood?

We think of ourselves as a commerce platform, not a payments or financial platform. If you think about it, again, I started this off by saying your housing is your biggest expense, but it's also the center of where you live.

Right.

And so when we think of our core business today, I'd say the closest comp of how Built has actually developed is probably like something like Shopify, where Shopify powers online commerce by providing you all the tools end-to-end to set up your business and transact online, right? With Built, we're really about residential commerce, which is how do we power your apartment building, your home? How do we connect your home to the local coffee shop, the local restaurant, the local grocery store, the local gym? And we create a single platform where, you know, if you're an apartment building, you can launch with Built and suddenly have a full resident experience platform to handle payment collections, rewards, amenity bookings, leasing, all of that. If you're a local restaurant, you can jump on Built and all of a sudden connect instantly with all the locals who live around the neighborhood and drive more business from all the apartment buildings near you. That historically you'd have to go put flyers under the door or billboards. Like that was the old way this stuff was done for. I mean, if you go back, it's funny. I was talking to my dad the other day who pioneered, funny enough, the Yellow Pages online back in the day. It was so funny because we've never made the connection that when he was doing Yellow Page, that was literally businesses driving local ads through a phone book that was like. And in many ways, what Built is now facilitating is actually connecting local businesses to local customers, but through your home.

So your customers then really are the businesses? Yes.

Our revenue in our business is driven through property managers, mortgage servicers, local businesses. But I think in many ways, you know, like other platforms like Shopify or others, it's by providing a service to the end consumer.

But then the differentiation, if I can push you there a little bit, Shopify, I don't really have a choice. If a merchant uses Shopify as their point of sale, I'm using Shopify.

That is how Bilt works too. So I mean, if you go into an apartment building, right, every single resident, when you live at one of these property managers that work in our network, whether that's Related or Brookfield or, you know, Equity Residential or Greystar, every resident that moves in is signing their lease through Bilt. They're using Bilt to make their payments every month. They're using Bilt to manage their amenities or file maintenance requests. We are the platform that operates that. And now more and more. So if you've gone out, I don't know if you've been to one of our restaurant partners or a local Duane Reade or Walgreens, but every single guest at, say, take José Andrés, right?

Okay.

Every single guest that checks into a José Andrés reservation, that entire experience is orchestrated through Built from The comped items that you get to the guest, you know, gifts they give you to the discounts they give you through to the checkout, which is powered by Built and then connects you to your whole neighborhood. So you can say, oh, charge it to my apartment building and just walk out.

Like living in a hotel. You know, when you talk about it like that, it sounds more kind of like an operating system for residential real estate. And that was sort of, I think, the question around Toast or Square, which is that as a consumer, as someone sitting down to dinner in a restaurant, like, I'm sort of agnostic as to what software the restaurant's using to kind of manage their bookings. Whereas if I'm an Amex holder, I'm like acutely aware of the brand and there's a lot of value in whipping out that card. And not that you necessarily have to choose, but is there like, are there pieces of both of those that you're trying to put together or are you totally fine being kind of a slightly anonymous, a nonverb company, but that provides this like really valuable service in the background?

We've taken learnings from both and I'd say built again, because we are, at its core, a residential commerce platform and membership program. When we come out at these brands, like you go to the José Andrés, it's powered by the built neighborhood checkout, and the customer has a built membership they can use at those locations. And so what we said is we don't want to be a financial instrument. We're agnostic. If people like to pay by Venmo, amazing. If they like to pay by Amex, amazing. If they want to use our co-brand card, Amazing. But Built is the connective tissue that connects it all together in your neighborhood. And so it is a, I'd say if you think of it like Amex built a membership program around a credit card, we're building a membership program around where you live, which is your home. And I think that is the fundamental difference. And if you look back, I would say one of the things Ken has shared with, you know, me from his learnings, and so my partner at this business is Ken Chenault, who was the CEO of American Express. for almost 20 years. And one of the things we talk about a lot is that, you know, there was a time before Amex decided to become a bank where they were debating if Amex should become the platform for all merchants to help them accept all payments. Can Membership Rewards be the rewards currency for the merchants that then it helps them interact with consumers, not just cardholders? They made a strategic decision in 2008 after the financial crisis to become a bank. and really focus on being a cardholder-driven business. I think as Ken and I have grown Bilt, we have really focused on, we want to be a member consumer-facing business through all payment acceptance, not limiting to just one credit card or debit card or payment method.

It's funny, I mean, you know, Amex made that decision at a moment in time where it made a lot of sense, but my guess is they'd be more, and they run a great company, my guess is they'd have a higher multiple if they had, if they had gone the other way. There are some downsides to being a bank.

There's a reason MasterCard and Visa are valued the way they are, right? When you're a network, it's a different platform. But Amex is also a phenomenal business.

Let's talk briefly about that card. So I know you say you don't wanna be a card company, but there was sort of infamously this, this 4-banana problem. And maybe I'll actually have you explain it 'cause it does sort of tell a fun tale.

So one of the things we've done, just similar to how companies like Gap or Delta or even like Jimmy John's will launch a co-brand credit card program. What that means is you can license your brand to a major bank and they can issue a credit card with special rewards at your business, right? And so given that we were building out the largest platform for your home, we realized we had a chance to grow our member base by going directly to consumers with a card program. And in the process, the hope was that these customers would then engage even more with our network of apartment buildings, our network of merchants, similar to how if you get the Gap or Sephora card, they hope that you drive more engagement with Sephora or Gap or the Amazon card with Amazon. What was interesting is that when we launched this card, we discovered 2 interesting challenges. We launched our first co-brand card with Wells Fargo. On one hand, we had no idea the card was going to grow this fast. I mean, we were like, this is all part of a strategy. If you look back at our original deck in 2019, pitching property managers. Like we didn't even have a co-brand card in it at the time. But the idea was if we could build a user base, we could then use that to go win properties. Because we were the only player in the rent category, there was a lot of these optimizers, if you will, in the market who really have like 20 credit cards and they'll jump between this card for dining, this card for grocery, this one for whatever. And it's It's a much bigger community than I ever thought.

Yeah, you underestimated Reddit is what happened.

Yeah, really.

It's funny, my cousin worked at Reddit for years and I called him. I go, what? Why didn't you call me 5 years ago and warn me about how this world works? I mean, by the way, some of the most passionate members we have are these Reddit, which has been a great learning lesson for us. Um, but there's a community of that and usually When people are doing that, they're splitting that, call it, you know, consider that optimizing across 5 different cards for groceries, right? Built was the only card for rent, and we didn't really have guardrails around that. And so people were coming in and everybody was using whatever optimization strategy they had and then Built for rent. And so that, that group of 5 to 7% of users who are a very passionate, very loud community. They can really kind of upside down your P&L if you don't have a strategy for how to handle that. And so we took an evolution step as we, you know, in the last year and as our rest of our business had grown, we, we relaunched our co-brand card to a new platform, really focused on how do you drive engagement in our neighborhood network. And as part of that, closed a lot of those loopholes that we had around rent, um, that were challenging.

Not to put too fine a point on it, can you actually explain the 4 banana problem?

We had a really simple idea originally, just keeping it like the most basic of saying on the 1.0, oh well, anybody, if you look at the average customer, anyone who uses their card more than 5 times uses their card as their everyday card. That was kind of the original premise in the original card. Again, not factoring in this subset of optimizers. And so we had a rule that you could earn your points on rent as part of using your card 5 times. And, you know, for the vast majority, for 90, 90, 90, 95% of our customers, that was perfect. They were choosing to use this card to earn rewards across all their spend, including housing. The 5 to 7% though used it for 4 bananas, And rent. And, you know, I honestly, I could, I in hindsight should have, should have maybe predicted that, but it just, it really is a different use case than you're planning for. And so that's why I think you see with a lot of card programs, as we've learned with our bank partners, a lot of these guardrails around how they do different rewards.

Yeah, like some credit card consultant owes you some money. Some money back on that advice. But, but I mean, that is obviously not a good business for Wells Fargo. And, and you ended that partnership last month. You have a new issuer now. How do you make the card sort of top of wallet and not this spending nut that everyone's gamifying themselves to crack? Or, or do you not really care?

I mean, listen, it's just, to me, the co-brand serves a purpose. It's about, now it's about 10% of our customers get the co-brand card. You know, a typical airline is probably close to 20%, but they spend a lot more time on their card. As you know, like every ad is a, it's a, For us, it's really more about now today as we go forward, we have almost 6 million members. We have today 1 in 4 apartment buildings running on the Built platform. We have 45,000 local merchants running on Built. Our question is, how do we drive more rewards, engagement, and value for our customers when they're in our network of our partners? And so the new card was really focused on that, and that is really our strategy. So everything is about how does this card drive more people to rent at our buildings, get a mortgage through our mortgage partners, get benefits at our restaurant partners, benefits at our gym partners, visit our pharmacy partners. And in return, we believe that they can get the most value possible on their everyday life in their neighborhood through Built. And we're seeing this today. Like, we had, again, just in the first 2 weeks, we had almost 85% of our 1.0 active customers move to the new card. So, you know, already just kind of in line with what you saw in that optimizers versus not. And already that population is over 2.5 times the engagement on our card in the first month than we had before.

And should we read into the new cards you launched? There are some tiers. I think you've got an Obsidian and a Palladium. Should we read that as the elbow at Amex Gold Platinum that it appears to be.

Chase has Freedom and Sapphire and Reserve, and Amex has theirs, and Citi has their, you know, Double Cash and their Strata program, and Capital One has their Venture and Venture X, and United has their Explorer and their, you know, whatever premium card. And I think it's a similar approach and strategy.

The thing I remember about those, about those super high-end ones is that you can't cut them. And so when you have, when you lose it, when you, they send you a new one, uh, you have to send it back. And for a while Chase was like spending kind of obscene amounts of money, like recycling the metal and the things. So. I don't know, something to keep in mind on the product design side.

I do think nowadays, I think all the major cards have some form of metal cards.

So, well, it sounds good when you plunk it down, you know, but to take a step back, you know, rewards are, whether they're through credit card or something else, are at least to their critics, I think kind of one of the great wealth transfers of the modern economy, right? In credit cards, largely poorer people who resolve— who revolve balances subsidize all the lounges. In your— in Built's world, Who is subsidizing all those perks that your members are getting? Where's that come from?

So remember our rewards and our membership program, there's 2 things to note. First is that the rewards and benefits are funded by the property managers and the merchants, right? So this is not a bank program, it's not a credit card program. Obviously they fund extra rewards if you also use their co-brand card, if you use a Chase card, et cetera. But in this case, this is a local business saying, how can I drive better customer experience and more engagement from people who live in the neighborhood? Now you could do that as a 10% discount like they used to do traditionally and go put up a flyer.

Right.

But don't forget, a 10% discount is still a 10% cost to the rest— to the restaurant or to the local coffee shop, right? And if you can create instead a rewards and customer experience For people who are nearby. They can say, hey, if someone who's come in 5 times, I wanna surprise them with a round of drinks. And Bilt integrates into the point of sale system so we can automatically recognize the customer, push the round of drinks into the point of sale system, and send Liz a text saying, hey, welcome back. It's your 5th visit. We're so excited to have you. We've just asked the kitchen to send you a round of drinks. And all of that is orchestrated by Built's platform.

The obvious pitch is for businesses also, I imagine it allows you to target high spenders or their kind of spenders really accurately, whether that's through some sort of formal program or informal program. How do you guys— is that a perk you offer merchants?

It's less about how do I target this spend versus that spend? It's how do you target people who live in my neighborhood?

Right.

Right. It's quite cool. In our platform, you can actually see in the, you know, the property manager product or the merchant product, a neighborhood of all the buildings around you. And you can create benefits for people who live in that property and know that it'll be seamlessly executed. So you could say, hey, people who live in those buildings down the street from me, if they come in, we'll offer them 5x points.

Yeah.

Or a round of drinks or 5% off. And that shows up in their membership that they get when they live at that building as a local benefit they have at that restaurant. And when they go, there's no awkward, like, here's my coupon or here's my app. Like it integrates seamlessly into their CRM system, their booking platform, their POS system. And so again, if you go back to the Shopify example, there's like 2 parts to our product. There's the main business, which most customers don't see, which is the backend system that drives it. And then there's the membership, which is, if you think of it similar to the Shop app that Shopify's been pushing out recently, or Shop Pay.

Yeah.

Or Square with Cash App, right? Where you have Square powering the merchants, but as a Cash App member, you can see all of your benefits, your transactions in one place and pay. Similar model to that.

We all live in New York, right?

Yeah.

So, you know, like I can go down around the corner from my apartment, go to Sweetgreen if I really felt so inclined, not that I'm a big fan, I'm a big workout guy. I could pick between, you know, Barry's Bootcamp or a Pilates studio. But a lot of Americans don't have that choice outside of, say, SF, Miami, New York. How does this— how does this scale geographically beyond just major cities where there are hyperlocal neighborhoods with everything you could possibly want?

Yeah, I mean, today already we have 45,000 local merchants on this platform. Don't forget, it's not like New York. You may have more, like, eclectic diversity, But these neighborhoods around the country are built on local businesses, right? You have, I mean, most of the local restaurants, local gyms, and for them it's honestly much harder to reach customers than say like a SoulCycle even who we work with, or a major entity like we work with Landry's as well. But those are larger organizations with bigger marketing budgets to reach these customers. Most of our partners are, It's the local restaurant who wants to figure out how to drive bookings and drive more covers, and it's really hard to do that. You don't have a huge marketing infrastructure. You don't have, you know, major food group has 30 to 40 people who just focus on customer experience and VIP.

One thing that just jumps out to me, is there not a tension between, say, a Duane Reade or a Walgreens, which has tens of thousands of locations, and how they surface on platform versus, say, A local pharmacy, a mom-and-pop around the corner? How do you— is there a tension there?

We work with both. And I'd say like one of the things that, you know, Ken and I talk about this a lot, is our orchestration platform, which is the backend side of our business. In many ways we think of it as how do you democratize access to the best customer experience and hospitality to every mom-and-pop? Yes, the large guys can use it too to streamline their operations. But if you are a local pharmacy, all of a sudden with Built, you can be executing marketing to the people from the moment they move into their apartment building. Hey, would you like to transfer your prescriptions? By the way, we can also automatically file your FSA, HSA as a benefit through the Built ecosystem. And so again, if you think of it like there's our membership, which sits on top, which are people who live in our network of buildings, you have to use Built at these properties. And you get the access to these member benefits. There's our orchestration platform that drives customer experience and hospitality across the neighborhood, like a hotel, as you were saying, Liz, right? And then there's all the integrations that sit underneath that that make it seamless, right? So you don't have to have 10 different people managing 10 different systems to make it really easy for you. And again, just to simplify the experience, like When you move into your home, we want your neighborhood to feel like a hotel property, right? You have your card on file. You walk, you ask downstairs for a reservation at the restaurant, they book you downstairs. You go to the restaurant, they bring you something that's your favorite drink. You're at the end of the meal, you can charge it back to your room. You want to go to the gym, they can book you the gym. Like everything is just tied together around where you live at the center.

Well, we have to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more from Ankur after this.

Welcome to What's Working, the show within a show featuring Compound Interest's seasoned partner, Amazon Business.

I'm Semafor's CRO, Rachel Oppenheim, joined by Amazon Business VP of Technology, Doug Gray. Welcome, Doug.

Thanks again, Rachel.

So we talked about what Amazon Business is, but now I want to dive into the why. Why did Amazon Business even decide to get into the complex world of B2B buying in the first place?

Amazon Business builds on what Amazon is already great at. Most people know the Amazon buying experience, of course, and we wanted to bring that same convenience to business buying. We saw an opportunity to bring innovation to a space that frankly still felt overly complicated and outdated. And we know every procurement team has good intentions. The problem is it's really hard to build the right controls in a way that doesn't also create massive friction. Business buying is critical to operations, but it's often fragmented across vendors, systems, and manual process, which makes it slow, can be difficult to manage, and is expensive in ways that people just don't always see right away. That's why we launched Amazon Business 10 years ago, to bring Amazon's low-friction buying ethos into the world of procurement while still giving organizations the tools they need to buy at scale. With purchasing controls, approval workflows, invoicing options, and visibility into spend across all their teams. Whether it's helping a small team reduce the repetitive tasks or giving sourcing leaders clearer insight, we are focused on making business buying faster, easier, and more strategic without sacrificing control.

I mean, you launched, you know, right before the, the AI moment that we're we're all living in. How does that change either the premise or just like the ability to execute it at scale?

So we're launching our neighborhood concierge, which is the first time— think of it like having a hotel concierge downstairs at every apartment building in the US. And you can text the concierge anything about your home. You need help paying rent, you have a leak in your apartment, you have an amenity reservation you want to make at one of the common spaces. We're integrated. We handle that. But we can also help you find a local restaurant. We're plugged into the booking system so we can help you book the restaurant. We can help you book a car to the restaurant. But part of what we do is obviously, one, we take action, right? So the best AI in the market today gives you a lot of information, but it's not hooked into the ecosystem around it yet. And honestly, a lot of these businesses will never let a third-party AI come in and just mess with their backend, right? But because we power that backend orchestration layer, we can actually take action on behalf of their customers, right? And the second thing we do is we then personalize it. So if you're a member through Built, you can opt in to have us personalize all of your neighborhood experience. And because we're running the checkout experience at your local restaurant, but also your Walgreens and also your grocery delivery at your home. You can say, well, what would I like on the menu at this restaurant? And we can at the SKU level personalize that for you and even gift it to you as part of the guest experience. And so it's really cool. Like it's taken us years to launch. It's taken us years, you know, since 2022 to get to this integration stack. And over the next 6 months, I think people are really gonna see all of the different built pieces that are coming to life in a way that's just been quietly building the backend system. Like everyone talks about the customer-facing stuff. Like to your point, Rohan, at the very beginning, people talk about the membership and they talk about the co-brand card. You don't normally see and think about what's powering the backend of a lot of these restaurants and property management companies, right? One of our board observers who was at our last meeting, He's the CEO of a large real estate company and he was being a little bit of just giving me a hard time on the concierge. And he goes, sure, but like you don't understand the type of things residents ask our teams. I said, okay, tell me. He goes, we had a resident write in to say, I just spilled wine on my wife's dress. What do I do? And like our site team had no idea what to do. So I said, I don't know, I don't know what's going to happen, but let's try and see what happens. So we plugged into our Bilt Neighborhood Concierge. I just spilled wine on my wife's dress. What do I do? And within seconds it came back and it said, here's how to clean it. Spot it, don't swipe, swab it, whatever. But more importantly, we've just found these stain removers at these grocery stores near your home. I can have it delivered to you within 15 minutes to your home address. Would you like me to handle that for you? And it found an OxiClean bottle. You could click it, you could see, I mean, it was pretty amazing how the integrations with our local providers worked, and it checked the stock at the local store near your home. It was very cool.

There was a whole generation of startups that was very consumer-facing and trying to solve, like, pretty dumb consumer problems and get huge valuations doing it. And a lot of them failed, but then a lot of them actually found that what they were, there was some enterprise value inside them that was way less sexy, but was where all the money is. And I wonder, you are, you have this sort of consumer brand that you're building and sort of this, like, physical community that you are building. But you also, sounds to me like you have like pretty good software for landlords that may end up being where a lot of the value is. Like, would that be a bad outcome here if it turns out you just had this huge enterprise thing that you spun out or that became more of the company?

Well, to be clear, our very, we've always been a B2B2C company since day zero. Like, so our business has always been pitching housing owners on how we can improve the resident experience and drive more loyalty, more retention, et cetera. The approach to that, in our opinion, is not to be an accounting system or a backend system. Like, we're not competing with Yardi or RealPage or any of those companies. Like, that's not our business. We believe we can create the customer experience for these businesses. And that's why I said it's somewhere in between, you know, the Amex model and the Toast model, right? We're a little bit more customer-facing. Which Shopify is now trying to do more of, as you've seen, right?

I want to kind of go back to where we started, which is, you know, this idea, and it's why we wanted to have you on the show, that every company wants to be a membership club now. And it started with hotels and airlines. It's like totally contagious business model. Like, is that good? Like, whatever happened to just basic anonymous commerce where I go into a store and I give them my money and they give me that thing? Why is this a good thing?

You know, you can still do that. If that's what you prefer, I think—

It's getting harder. Every time I go and use my card, like, on the little tablet, it pops up, and somehow I didn't know it, but they have my cell phone number, and it's probably been sold to some telemarketers. I mean, there's, I think, some fair consumer angst about that trade-off between ease and personalization and, like, whatever dystopian nightmares at the end of that road.

Well, I think at the end of the day, like everything, it's about customer choice. And our approach is you sign up for the Built membership and opt into our program, and you can have a personalized experience where I think, look, for the majority of customers, you want convenience, you want access, and you want value. Those are the things that we put at the core of our customer experience for our merchants and properties. And so can we make it easier? So when you walk into an apartment building, they already have your account. You can be pre-approved for the lease. You can, Use your existing card on file to pay. That's like, I think more convenient than the old model of filling out tons of paperwork, scanning your bank accounts, you know, writing a paper check to get your security deposit in. You know, you can still do that and we process that for the builder.

Wait, how much, how much, how much of your customer base pays by paper check? I'm obsessed with people who still use checks.

Look, my mission is, I think if housing is the last reason that people still own checkbooks, in my opinion. And we have mostly digitized that through Bilt. There are some parts of the country in some areas, more so on affordable housing, where we still handle, you know, high single-digit percentages of checks. But for the most part, we've brought that down to low, low single digits.

It's like rents and like bat mitzvah cards. I mean, that's the last check I wrote.

Honestly, even bar mitzvah people are Venmoing now.

My dry cleaner, check only.

I love that. Let me ask you a nerdy question that may only end up being interesting for me, in which case we'll cut it. You know, one thing that, that sort of set off this, this contagious business model of loyalty was that during the pandemic, the airlines borrowed against their frequent flyer programs because they needed money. And that put like a very clear and very big dollar figure on, on what loyalty was worth. And I don't know, did that in some way enable Bilt to go out and say, we can actually build a big business on this, looking at those huge valuations that those programs got?

So probably less the airlines specifically, but COVID was in many ways one of those black swan moments, which I think enabled Bilt to launch, right? And so look, we're not the first. I'm a big believer, like ideas are not the, the reason companies succeed. Ideas are a dime a dozen, right? It's timing, execution, the right partnerships in the right place. And so You know, look, we spent a long time building this idea out, even in 2019 when COVID hit. It was the first time that property managers, rewards partners, merchants were even willing to give Built a chance because people were literally sitting there. They had no idea where the world was going. And it was, are people gonna pay rent on time this month? Are people gonna pay rent at all this month? You know, people were talking about giving out 1-month, 2-month, 3-month concessions for the first time in ages. And all of a sudden, a new way to issue rewards started to seem really compelling. And like all these things, you have a cold start problem where often you get the first one is really hard. If it wasn't for COVID, I'm not sure we would've gotten the first set of customers to give us a shot. And then it still took time, which then led us to the co-brand card, which then led us to the Everything else, but I don't even know if we would've gotten the first partners had it not been for that.

Interesting. You know, what happens to the value of loyalty and to your business particularly if like agentic commerce takes over? Like, will customers care less about Hilton and Delta points when their bots are just like making all their plans in the background? And then, and then doesn't your currency kind of be at risk?

Yeah, currency is still also a relatively small part of what drives our business.

Right?

So people are paying us to orchestrate the entire customer experience. So for apartments, like we, we manage the tenant screening, the leasing through to the resident app and the resident concierge where you make your payments, file your maintenance requests, go on. I think rewards are a whole, it's all about guest experience. So that's points, but it's also how do you do surprise and delight moments? How do you send the right message at the right time? that made people feel special? How do you take care of something seamlessly that they otherwise couldn't have taken care of? I don't think those things are going away. If anything, I think people are putting a bigger premium on hospitality. And you see that just in like the luxury space. People are paying record amounts for personalized guest experience, better hospitality, and you're seeing hotel prices go up, travel prices go up. Everything where people can get the experiential side more. I think Built is enabling that for every customer. And so if there's anything people are willing to invest more in, I believe it's how do I get treated better? How do I get a better experience? How am I getting more value? How am I getting more access?

But you know, you wrote this essay in 2017 that was a, a real indictment of the last venture boom. I think, you know, gave early voice to this idea that has since, in the last 2 years or so, like, totally taken off, that VCs were trying to solve stupid problems, like, I don't know, making tech-enabled juicers or something. And we've really seen a shift into these big seismic industries, notably defense and energy. And I'm curious of whether you think that, like, message got internalized in Silicon Valley. And, like, does venture, which is a pretty small industry that is optimized for very different things, like, have a right to win in this sort of new investment world?

Yeah. So I think unfortunately the majority of venture capitalists, I think, are lemmings and not trying to solve real problems. And by the way, I think unfortunately the incentive structure is set up to do that. You know, I remember someone once told me, I remember I was sitting with a venture capitalist and they were asking about like a really interesting investment in a pretty major kind of world-changing breakthrough healthcare category. And he goes, yeah, but everybody right now is focused on crypto. If I invest in that and it works, like everyone else is going to, we're all going to make money together. If I invest in your, this other idea you're telling me about and it doesn't work, I'm the guy who took the crazy bet and was dumb. And he said, there's no strikes called in venture, which I just found a painful mindset. Now, I'd say that the best of the best investors in this world are the ones who just take big bets and go. And you see that, like, you see guys like Joe Lonsdale who will go out and take big swings in categories before it's popular, right? And I think I have a lot of respect for that. You see Hemant at General Catalyst, he's doing the same thing. But I'd say Most of the industry is just, what is the safest way to get into a round that everybody else is already talking about? Because if I then get a markup, I go back to my LPs, I raise another fund, I get my management fees, and you just kind of spiral.

Yeah. I mean, and obviously your investors are bought in. When you, I assume, occasionally got told no thanks, what was the most common reason?

So we were I think fairly lucky. This goes back to my lessons from my past companies. I've made the mistake of raising money from venture capitalists at my last 2 startups, and I would not advise any founder to take money from venture capitalists until your business is far more mature because of the misalignment of incentives.

Sure.

Part of the reason we took 3 years and we were able to take 3 years to launch the product this time around was that we didn't raise venture money. We only raised money from commercial partners. So we said, hey, if we're going to build a product for real estate owners, our first investors were AvalonBay, Equity Residential, related companies, Blackstone Real Estate, you know, Camden Properties. These were partners that cared more about our product delivering to the needs they had versus some fake markup. on paper. It was great. You have people who are totally aligned interests with you. Now, even today, most of our investors at the later stage are sovereign wealth funds and institutions. It's Vanderbilt Endowment and University of Illinois Foundation and Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan. It's large institutionals who are thinking, how do I create 10-year, 20-year Wealth for their pensions and their countries and their sovereign wealth funds, not how do I get a markup for my next round.

Seems like it might be due for a sequel to that essay. Publish it on Semaphore. We'll put it on the internet for you. Yeah, there you go. Is it true there is a 4-banana sculpture somewhere?

I saw a photo of this, but I didn't vet it. What's going on there?

We were just having fun with it. Look, I think one thing I've I've actually really come to appreciate our Reddit community. We have a top 4% Reddit community across Reddit, which is pretty amazing. And even though it sometimes ruins my sleep at night, it is really, really cool to have people who care so much about a brand and a product. And so part of that is also not only hearing the feedback, but also just having fun. And we know that the Four Bananas is a thing. We're not trying to pretend, we're not angry at anybody. People, People played the game and I respect it. That's our fault, right?

Just think of all the marketing dollars it saves you. This is like what Tesla always says. It's like, yeah, Elon is like a real tiger by the tail, but we've never bought a single ad. So.

We just had fun with it. And so we, yeah, we launched a new card. We created a beautiful art piece of the 4 bananas and we let customers redeem for it with points that they had earned from their 4 bananas and we shipped it out to people.

Well, that feels like a great place to leave it. So, uh, thank you so much. This was, this was really fun, Ankur. We appreciate it.

You guys to play with our concierge. It's very, very cool. It's like the first time I think people are gonna fully appreciate the depth and breadth of integrations that we've built over the last few years, cuz it just comes to life in ways that traditional AI just can't do.

Okay. I'll, I'll tell you my most analog problem and you tell me if you can solve it. Okay. Which is that I do not live in a built building. Uh, I live in a, a brownstone in Brooklyn and I'm this, I'm this apartment 3, but there's a garden apartment, which is 1. And so I'm constantly getting the doorbell for apartment 2. There's like signs. It doesn't seem like it's a solvable problem. And it's just like the architecture of New York is just like, it's, it's aligning against me.

Well, maybe we'll build a doorbell system. We haven't done that yet, but we can look into that.

Yeah. You know what? Uh, Ring is having some bad press. Maybe you can, um, maybe you can make a, a slightly less panopticon version of Ring that makes my life easier. Well, thanks so much, Ankur. We really appreciate the time. This is a lot of fun.

Thanks, Ankur.

Thank you guys so much. Good to see you.

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Well, Rohan, you are both younger and cooler than me and live in a cooler part of New York than I do. Like, does this— do you have a Bilt card? Do you have a Bilt membership? Does it sound like something you would do?

I will agree with younger. I don't know about the other ones. I don't, but I'm also like, I love the points game. I don't play the points game. as much as I should. But I was really struck because when I came into this, I thought Bilt was like a card company. That's like what I see. That's where I see it out, like at restaurants and stuff. But it's really not at all.

It sounds like they use credit cards because, like, for whatever slightly disappointing reason, like, that is the axle around which, like, our economy spins. Like, there are a lot of countries where that is not true. But like, we are, we are a plastic nation. It's the way to reach most people, particularly, I think, the kind of, you know, young, upwardly mobile people, not all of whom play the game as aggressively as, what do you say, that 5 to 7, 5 banana, 4 banana crowd?

The Redditors, just the Redditors writ large.

But, you know, it is a real sort of driver of commerce. And it's interesting to me, I think, I'd want to think about it a little more, but I think the way he's talking about it, you know, when you talk about rewards, like essentially people who carry a balance from month to month and pay a lot in interest for like a pretty unhealthy product and credit cards subsidize all of our airport lounges.

Yeah.

And if he has managed to kind of crack the sort of virtues of a rewards ecosystem without that, and it sounds essentially like he's creating enough value to— the idea is to create enough value to merchants basically who spend on customer acquisition anyway, and property managers who maybe now don't have to collect a bunch of checks and go to the bank, that he can create that value and then share that with people. Like, that seems like Sort of both an intriguing product and like less usurious than, than the rewards credit card system that we've all kind of come to, to accept.

There is something really interesting in that he's basically managed to convince, you know, people who operate on incredibly tight margins, right? Like pharmacies and real estate companies that they should let him or them subsidize this. And he also makes money off of this, but I don't know, like, I, I'm just still hung up on how, how much of their business comes from like the Relateds of the world or whoever's of the world. It's really surprising to me.

Well, there's going to be 2 tensions there, right? One, and you asked a good question, you know, about Duane Reade versus the corner pharmacy. But the problem is that it is just way easier to sign up big national merchants, right, than to have a sales force that is out there knocking on, you know, the door of Niergaard Pharmacy over on 7th Avenue in Brooklyn here. And so there is going to be pressure to sort of become these big national chains. And, you know, to some degree happened with sort of the food delivery systems where like, I remember when you couldn't get McDonald's on food delivery, you had to like go to McDonald's and then like now—

They make delivery.

Yeah. Yeah. And now it's sort of become, um, there's still obviously good local choice on those things. And I'm not a huge food delivery person. I think it is like a societal toxin, but—

I am sorry to disappoint, but I am.

I see. This doesn't surprise me at all. This is why I thought you might be a BILT member. But I think like, you know, keeping particularly in places, you know, like New York where you, you do have this like very local flavor, I, I could see it working. But, but I tried to press them on this a little bit and like, you know, they're sort of trying to do 2 things. They have this lifestyle company. I'm sure they would love for built to be a verb in some way. What exactly it would— I'm gonna built that. I don't know. And I'm sure there's a lot of value in that. And, and, um, it's certainly like buzzy and, and can really help knit your customers to you. But it sounds to me like there is like another probably way less sexy, but like more valuable business inside this, which is taking, you know, as we talked about at the top, 12% of the economy and processing the payments for that. And, you know, you know, I don't know, you see companies all the time realize that actually the fun direct-to-consumer thing they were doing wasn't really working, but like, boy, do they have a gem over here in enterprise software.

I mean, think about Slack. Slack started as the chat for a video game that failed, and then it got bought by Salesforce for $30 billion.

And I mean, and to some degree, you know, Square is like that too, right? Like, they sort of have this restaurant management software, and then they have like The Cash App, like, sure, okay. But, um, you know, and, and by the way, airlines are to some degree like this, right? They are credit card companies that like have a money-losing side hustle flying people around on big tin cans in the sky. And so it's not, there's not a tension. You can do those 2 things. Um, but as you know, as he's trying to grow and, and sort of decide where to invest in the business, I will be, I will be curious because as a venture investor, and I realized he didn't He didn't take money from those knuckleheads, of course, but—

Of course not.

You know, from an early-stage investor, you can get kind of swept up in the, in the, uh, the network and the buzz and the, you know, a consumer company that runs Super Bowl ads or whatever. As you know, as you grow and you get bigger and you're talking to sort of particularly private equity, private capital, big institutional money, they would much rather invest in just like a super boring, super profitable enterprise software company for the moment anyway. Um, and so I'd be curious to sort of see how those 2 sides of the business grow.

There is going to be a problem that they're going to cross at some point where they might sign up both Uber and Lyft, and one of them is going to be more willing to pay preferential, you know, pay for preferential treatment here. Um, and that's like a lot of risk for— they're trying to be middlemen, but they're also not really middlemen at all. Like, they're very enmeshed in all of this, and at some point they're going to have to start playing favorites here.

Yeah. And, you know, as I think he was, he was saying, you know, kind of optimizing your whole business for your, your Long tail of power users is just not, not a great idea.

Oh, totally. And we didn't really get a satisfactory answer on geographics, right? Because like New York, SF, Miami, to a certain extent, probably Austin, like these all make sense. This is where Related is building, right? There's like a naturally growing element of the population that is going to be super game to be in this built ecosystem. You know, you're a tech worker, you're a finance worker, you want your life to be as easy as possible. How does that scale or translate to Des Moines, right, where you're driving everywhere, you're not necessarily walkable? Probably don't make as much money. I don't really know that he had a clear answer to that, but I'm curious.

It's not obvious to me. And his pitch is obviously strongest when he says you should be able to treat your immediate block like a hotel, right? That it has a concierge and that you can bill stuff to your room and we can just all, like, be on permanent vacation in our heads. Look, I mean, people in the rest of America, like, do choose where to go to dinner and they, you know, they have lives and, and, and it's a little harder.

He's saying that.

I don't know about you. I grew up in real America, so I'm—

I grew up in suburbia, so kind of.

But, but, you know, I do think the pitch is obviously strongest, you know, in these, these big urban centers that have like young people who like spend a lot of money and are pretty social. And, you know, we'll see where it scales. But, you know, he said they're, they're, you know, national and, you know, see if they have some plans to go global. But But, you know, as we said, the TAM here is enormous. We all buy a lot of stuff and we do it in a slightly confused way that is often like not to our financial advantage. Um, and I've always thought there's money to be made building an app that's like, knows where I am. I would be willing to give up a little bit of privacy for that and tells me which card to use.

I mean, you could definitely vibe code that, Liz. You could definitely talk to Claude.

You can vibe code it. How's that? As we've discussed, that feels like a good weekend project.

You know, I'm a Luddite when it comes to AI. One thing, okay, there is one last thing. And obviously they've got Ken advising them, but you started to go down this path and I'm curious what the actual answer would be. I wish I actually had asked.

You're gonna ask me if I think Amex buys them?

Well, actually, yes. As an M&A reporter, that would be my second question. My first question is what's to stop Amex from doing just that, from becoming the platform for everything, for saying, hey, we know our interchange fees are really high, but, you know, mom-and-pop restaurant or TAV Hospitality or Thomas Keller, we'll cut you a 50 basis point deal. Um, if you start using us as your payment platform and as your platform for everything, I mean, what's the moat there?

Part of the moat is that it is harder for established companies to subsidize growth because they have grown-up investors who don't love that, right? That, that's sort of a feature of a young company that it's, it's burning money and bringing in investor, uh, bringing in customers. Um, Built sort of interestingly had Wells Fargo subsidize its growth for them, which must be nice. Um, You know, that may be it, but I guess—

So you do think Amex buys build?

I mean, I don't know. Capital One just bought Brex, right?

True.

You know, there are these big sort of financial services businesses that crack a code that the incumbents can't quite get there on their own. But those deals are expensive and hard. And if he sells, we'll have him back to talk about why. But no, I think, look, he's got a real theory of the case. You know, this idea that kind of everything is commerce and the ways that, that the way we just buy stuff is changing, often by like forces that we're not really aware of at all. I think it's just like, it's a, it's a good yarn.

That's it for us this week. Thanks for listening to Compound Interest from Semafor Business. Our show is produced by Josh Billinson.

With special thanks to Anna Pezzino, Claire Einstein, Katherine Bilbore, Rachel Oppenheim, Chad Lewis, Tori Corr, Garrett Wiley, and Daniel Our engineer is Bob Mallory.

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