Founder: How I Brainwashed Myself to Be a Billionaire at 34 | Ankur Jain

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For the person who's watching this right now that's like, "I wanna grow a really big business," what are some of the ingredients?

If somebody started the conversation by saying, "I wanna build a big business," I would say, "Go stay at your day job," because it is so painfully difficult. And unless you are so passionate about the problem you're solving, it's not worth it.

Ankur Jain is the CEO and founder of Built, which helps you use your rent money to get rewards to eventually buy a house. But this episode isn't just about what he's built. He is giving all the secrets so that you can build it too.

If you want to create a billion-dollar solution, solve a $10 billion problem. And I think once you start taking that approach, you start to realize, wait a second, that problem is a way bigger than $10 billion opportunity. And that was how we started. But I'll tell you, one of the best pieces of advice I got when I was younger, someone said to me, they go—

I want to talk about raising money. You have raised a lot of money for now an $11 billion valuation company you have.

Yes.

The cool part about that is I think people hear $11 billion and they're like, "Well, must be nice. You know, sure. Yeah." But how do you go about raising billions of dollars? You don't have to have billions in order to build a company like this 'cause you can talk other people into it. What does that look like?

Well, Kyle, let's take a step back. It's funny. Every stage of building a company is really the same exercise, just bigger. Bigger problems, bigger opportunities, bigger check sizes. And I still remember for our first startup, we were, I mean, we moved to San Francisco, I was 22, 22 years old, and we were out there hustling like months on end to go raise $100,000 round checks to go fill up like a $2, $3 million round.

Yeah.

And the funny part is it's pretty much the same process when you're raising a $100 million check. If anything, it might actually be easier. Yeah. Um, because you're talking to folks at that scale, this is what they do institutionally. All that said, um, I mean, candidly, I'm pretty anti-raising capital from traditional investment groups, uh, especially in the first couple years of your business.

Why?

So I made this mistake in my first two, first two companies. Um, it's really tempting to go out and find the Silicon Valley venture fund to give you the early early capital check. The problem with that is the minute you take capital from a traditional investment fund, you are on this like rat race where everyone is chasing growth and these, you know, whatever the hot metric of the month is. So, you know, in 2014 it was number of mobile app users. In the '90s it was eyeballs on your internet site. And then it becomes number of subscribers or it becomes one day it's about ARR, the next day it's about EBITDA. And the problem with all of those metrics is they don't necessarily matter to your business at that moment in time. Yeah. And so, you know, this time around as we, as we launched Built, we were fortunate to take a step back having made some of those mistakes. And we said, if we can, if we have to take capital, who are the people that are most vested in our long-term success? Mm-hmm. Not the investors who want a quick markup on paper so they can go tell their LPs that they have a markup and raise more money. But the folks who are betting on us because they want to use our product, yeah, they're the most aligned with our success. And so when we started this, I mean, the first bit of capital, like, we just bootstrapped this, and I funded a lot of this upfront, uh, just with my partners. And the first money we took in was from real estate owners. It was folks who own businesses like Related Apartments or Equity Residential or AvalonBay, rental apartment owners who wanted our product and were willing to invest both to help us build it, but because if it worked for them, they could share in the upside.

Yep.

And those are the types of capital partners you wanted. So we didn't, for years, we started this business end of 2018, early 2019. We didn't raise any like big capital rounds until we had already built the business. And at that point it was really just about building a war chest to go scale. Versus getting stuck in that rat race early.

Yeah. So if you were young and raising again and you were going after that first $100K or $1 million and that person is listening right now.

Yep.

How do you even get the first people to say yes? Like, do we have some tricks of the trade?

This is what I'm kind of getting at is the people who care most about your success in the early days are the people who know you and believe in you. Yep. Those are always your best supporters, right? What they call the family and friends round, you know? But separate from that, it's the people who are your customers, right? And so if you're a consumer product, I've always been a big fan of products, platforms like Kickstarter, 'cause the people who are financing your business are the people who desperately want it to work because they care about the solution you're building. And so again, they're not looking for, can you go build a hypey business or build some quick markup round? They want you to deliver the best product. And I think too often as a founder, especially in your early days, like you're trying to get that validation. Yeah. And so you're so focused on can I get the venture firm and Silicon Valley, like the Sequoia or whatever it is to give you a check. It gives you like a temporary boost but does nothing to help you long term.

Yeah. It's such a good point. You, so, so basically if you had to think of it in concentric circles, you're like people who know you because they're betting on you, not it. Yep. And then the second one is people who want the it actually. Yes. And kind of know you. And then third is credibility be like, all right, now I got Sequoia or Andreessen Horowitz.

And even that, I would wait. Like, get this product out because the first 3 products you launch are not gonna be the product that ends up working. Yeah. But the people who want to solve that problem will iterate with you.

Yeah.

Right? And so they need to resonate not just with the solution but with the problem you're solving. And then they'll stay with you and iterate with you.

So do you think you ever actually sell anyone anything or do you just find the people who already want what you're selling?

I look at it as aligning interest, not raising capital or selling, it's that you want everyone to win. Yeah. And if they believe in your product, you're not selling. In fact, you're doing everyone a favor by giving a piece of your hard work, blood, sweat, and tears, and letting them buy into your company. And at the same time for them, if they believe in your product, they're getting access to share in the upside of them being an early customer. So they're essentially getting a kicker to being an early backer and better from a customer perspective.

It's such good advice. And I think it's kind of underrated because when you've never raised money, it just sounds crazy. You're like, I want money from any motherfucker. You know, if it's green, I'll take it.

Totally.

But sometimes it's hard actually when you have such a wide net to catch anything.

Yeah, and the problem is when you start going out and raising money, look, there are, most investors have never built a company. Yeah. And you have built a company, you know how painfully hard it is. And these investors, if you talk to a professional investor, they love to tell you everything needs to be perfect and they understand these charts and, And you start again chasing the wrong type of metrics and growth and priorities. It doesn't matter how smart you are. Yeah. You inevitably get caught in this trap and we see it all the time. By the way, companies small and companies large. It's like you see today, right now, everybody is rebranding themselves as AI, AI, AI. Now there's, everything is AI. So I will first of all say that there is some element of truth to it, but positioning yourself that way just for the sake of thinking that's what investors want, you're building for the wrong customer. And I think that's the challenge. You go around talking to them, well, X company is really hot right now. If you talk to the average person, they'll say, well, if you do this, something like that, I'll give you money. But again, you're chasing the wrong customer.

One of my actually favorite mentors, he's an old dude billionaire, and he had this line that I loved. He's like, ugh, you should never trust a salaried investor. And I loved that line because he's right. They're not operating, they're not building, and they don't have of risk. They don't have skin in the game.

The problem is just about every investor these days is now a fee-driven salary investor. So it's more about understanding where the incentive alignment is beyond that.

Yeah.

And so, and you know, back in the day there wasn't people willing to take venture bets, right? You had to go to venture capital firms to raise capital. Over the last 15 years or so, every major organization small business owners through to large enterprises and corporates, you know, strategic international groups, they've all spun up investment arms. Yeah. And so the, the whole point is in the early days, why would you go to a middleman like a venture firm whose value add is to connect you to somebody else who, by the way, then still doesn't have any interest in actually helping you, right? Versus going directly to these companies that you wanna sell to anyways.

Mm-hmm.

And having them partner with you. And if it's the customers, get them bought in. Like, I love, like I said earlier, the Kickstarter model. Yeah. It's a great way to get people bought in to what product you're building. And by the way, if it's not working, raising capital and then launching that product would've flopped anyways.

Yeah. Now let's talk about your background. It's not like you grew up with a ton of cash.

Yeah.

Building in Silicon Valley, doing all of this. Like, what was the come up story? For people who maybe look at you now and go, well, must be nice.

Well, it's a grind, but I'll tell you, I was fortunate enough to watch the grind firsthand. And so I don't know if you know, my parents were both immigrants. My dad grew up in India in a poor village, like outside the suburbs of Delhi. My mom grew up in Israel, moving around. Her father was in the United Nations, so moving around constantly. And they came to this country with nothing. And at the time, what was so, I think, magical was anybody could come to the United States with a dream. And it was truly one of these places where you could come barely even speaking English and have an opportunity to build one of the most amazing futures for your family. And I got to watch firsthand, you know, when my parents had me, he had just got, my dad had just gotten his first kind of break and was, you know, a junior level role. He got moved to Seattle, uh, to join a company called Microsoft. And this is still in the early days. And I got to watch them not just build that, but then when I was 6, my, just my parents decided they wanted to pursue their own entrepreneurial dream and they quit their jobs, took our life savings. My mom and dad together started a technology.com company. And every day after school, my brother, sister, and I would get dropped off from school to the office. And we would just watch them build on what became a really successful dot-com business back in the day. And since then kind of have continued to grow. And so firsthand we got to see the grind of what it took, but also the fun that you have when you do it with people you love. And we caught the bug early. I don't know if we even had a choice with how early we caught it.

Interesting. So if you had to like recreate you, so somebody's like, for the person who's watching this right now that's like, man, I wanna be like him one day. I wanna grow a really big business. What are some of the ingredients? And what would even your parents say the ingredients are?

Yeah, I would say if somebody started the conversation by saying, I wanna build a big business, I would say go stay at your day job because it is so painfully difficult. And unless you are so passionate about the problem you're solving, it's not worth it. Because it is the ups and downs you'll face and the time it will take will be many, many, many years longer than you think it will and much, much, much harder. And it's the greatest experience in the world if you are passionate about the problem you're solving, 'cause you will ride the waves out and figure it out. But I'll tell you one of the best, like, you know, piece of advice I got when I was younger, someone said to me, they go, when you think you have a problem you care about, sleep on it, and then ask yourself the next morning, can you live in a world where this product doesn't exist? And if the answer is yes, don't waste your time on it. Because too often people get excited about an idea they think is an opportunity, and what inevitably ends up happening is 1 or 2 years later, that idea doesn't even matter to the market anymore, right? And you see this all the time. It's Uber for this. Nowadays I see built for this, built for that, and it's just, That's not a problem. And it's definitely not a problem somebody cares enough about every single day, 'cause that's, it's not something that you can actually build towards long-term. And so, you know, when you start a business, if you're going to do it, it should be because you see a gap in the market, which pains you personally, that you want to chase because you got it, you know you're gonna change your solution 10 times. And if you're not committed to that, problem, there's no way you're gonna survive the waves.

It's just so much truth. What is the most miserable point you've ever had at Built? Like, did you just, what is the moment where you're like, I thought we were gonna go under, we weren't gonna make it?

I feel like it's never—

Are you like, Tuesday? It was yesterday.

Well, it's, you know, it's funny, you never, you never have that mentality. So it's never a, oh my God, the world is ending. But every day there is a fire you wake up to and you have the low of the lows and the highs of the highs. But when you have those fires, and I think you can probably relate to this, if you have the mindset of the world is ending, like it will end. So you ever, to me, each of these things are just a chance to pivot, right? And it's, you know, when there's an issue that comes at hand, you can sit there and whine about it or you can figure out, well, what does this mean about what's wrong for the business? Or how do I change? Like every, one of the greatest things that I've come to realize is everything happens for a reason. As long as you figure out what that reason is, right? And people always say, when you look back, it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Well, so in that moment when shit hits the fan, what we try to do is say, okay, what has to be true for us to look back in a year from now and say this was the greatest thing that happened to the company? And it's a totally different mindset, but it forces you to say, yes, this may feel like a crisis, But what would have to be true for this to become the thing that made us a stronger, better company? Um, then you go chase it.

That is such good advice and also really hard to do in the moment.

It is totally hard to do. And that's also why you wanna build companies with your best friends. You know, it's funny, we, my first business, I've been very lucky yet. We were sitting down and I remember I was trying to figure out who to start with as a team. And I had, I'd come outta Wharton and I had all these people I knew from kind of schools that had whatever the right pedigree, the right background, the right connections. And I remember sitting with another friend of mine who sat me down and was like, when you go through the ups and downs, are these the people who you trust to stand by you no matter what? Or are they mercenaries? And what we realized is if you start a company with people that you trust, I'm the opposite of the, hey, don't do business with your friends. I only wanna do business with my friends because first of all, I spend most of my waking day with these people, right? So I wanna have fun with them. Two, inevitably when things go up and down and when things are changing, you wanna know that you're not thinking about, can I trust the people around me? 'Cause you gotta be a united front against the rest of the world. I mean, it's similar to the military side, right? I mean, my godfather was the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the US military and I grew up, had an opportunity to grow up around that. World. And one of the things I always took is it wasn't just coworkers. Like, these are your brothers and sisters, right? And you go through hell and high water, but you're never sitting there questioning, does the person next to me have my back? Because there's no way you can win a battle if you're worried about the person to your right of you and how it's perceived and what you have to say and how do you have to sugarcoat things. Like, you want to be able to be raw. Transparent and know that you can ride those waves together. And I just, I don't think you get that when you hire mercenaries.

No, you don't. I mean, I work with my husband, he runs the business with me and my father actually works for us. And at one point I gave my brother his first job and my mom, and there's parts that suck about that. But like when you set expectations—

Totally.

—upfront, it's actually the best thing in the world. We joke now, we don't know if we'd still be married if we weren't working together.

How do you share a life where you're spending 18 hours a day on something and then all that's on your mind is the fire you're dealing with and the person you're talking to can't relate to what you're talking about. Yeah.

Or they just say, when are you gonna be done for the day? Right. You're like, right after I stop obsessing about this for the next 3 years, you know, right about then.

Look, and that's really important. Every, like, my co-founders and my partners of the business are my best friends. Their significant others are my best friends. My wife is their family's best friends. Like, we do everything together. We, and that's part of what makes this so much fun. And I take a lot of pride, you know, we've, we've never had an executive at Built leave the company. Most of the folks here I've met along my career at different stages. Some of them I've worked with since I was 19 years old, some since I was 25, some since I was 29. But I can tell you that if you asked any one of them, I would bet that any one of them would respond that we're in this together for the next 10, 20, 30 years together. And that type of joint commitment to each other has allowed us to go through every battle and challenge, even the most stressful days. Like sometimes sharing in the downs can be as fun if you're with the right people to just laugh about the absurdity of it as you can celebrating the highs.

What— why— how do you get other A-players to stay with you that long? How do you recruit them and retain winners? So there's a couple of things.

One, I go back to friendship. I mean, I don't think people have that same type of loyalty for coworkers. There's a real difference. So we really try to pick people who are passionate and share the same set of values, but are really people you want to hang out with, you want to spend time with, you want to be open with, and want people you can communicate with, right? I think that's just a prerequisite for any great talent. There's a lot of great talent who If they come in off the bat posturing, you know it's not gonna work. That's just, it's just not the right culture fit. The second thing is I think great talent wants the ability to have autonomy and small teams and move. Any great talent hates bureaucracy. And if someone's asking you how many people they get to manage, like red flag number 2, right? 'Cause immediately they're thinking about empire building. Not about winning. And so even as we've grown Bilt, one of the things we've been very disciplined about is keeping our business structured as small teams. So even though the company's an $11 billion business and we touch housing and hospitality, and we have all sorts of businesses that are hospitality platform services like hotels and restaurants and gyms and pharmacies, we run every business line as its own mini startup. And so now you've got entrepreneurial, amazing talent who are some of our best friends who are incredible, hardworking, maybe not like the, we don't start with the pedigree, we start with just the hustle. And they now get to build their own mini billion-dollar business within the Built platform. And so we cap these teams at 25 people. We put engineering and product and business development and partnerships and account management and marketing, all in that one team, capped to 25 people. And that allows, you could ask anyone in this building and everyone can tell you exactly what part of our business success or failure they own. I mean, it goes back to that again, if you ask, you know, when your husband was in the SEAL team stuff, you ask him, every single person on that team knew exactly what part of the operation they owned. And that means that operation will succeed or fail on that one person. Now there's some risk to that. I mean, you don't have a plan B, C, D often 'cause you're making a bet on the person. But the best talent rises to that occasion. And they want it. And they want it. And that's what they, they don't wanna be a cog in the wheel. They wanna know that the success or failure for this part of the business is on them. And that's, I think, been a huge part of what's driven the Built culture.

I liked the flags that you guys have for the teams. Yeah. They're saying that each team sort of picks their own mascot.

Well, so again, you'll appreciate a lot of this was inspired, and that's why I was curious to learn more about your guys' travels. I mean, I remember when I was for my 10th birthday, I got the chance to go spend time at Camp Pendleton, and it shaped a lot of how I thought about culture. I went down and I visited the USS Carl Vinson, spent time on the base. Every squadron I met had their own team brand. They had their own medallions that represented their milestones, their fleets. They had their patches for different things they came through together across cross-squadrons, and we do the same thing here at Built. We took inspiration from that. So each business line has their own team sub-brand to Built. They run their own company, they have their own operations, their own leadership, their own groupings. Everybody gets milestone medallions when they cross key things as a team. But then as a business, whenever someone joins our company, if they make it through the first 90 days, We welcome them to the team with a built Letterman's jacket, and then any major milestone across the entire company gets added to your jacket as part of being a part of the company-wide story. And we love it. And to some that may be sappy and corny and whatever, but for us it's, and again, we're in this for 10, 20, 30 years together at least.

No, I love it. Like Raising Cane's founder, when I was chatting with him, he was telling me about the hard hats. That they each get. And I loved it. In our business, I think like, what about, will you toss me that shit?

That one is an ugly shit.

Oh, we don't show this shit? No, we're not gonna show it. This is terrible content. Somebody sent that shit to us. Yeah, absolutely not. We're gonna— So, you know, I love this idea of, you know, you basically are putting a uniform on people and giving them a mission. And I do think like humans need a mission and they wanna feel like there's purpose. It's fun.

You wanna have a purpose, you wanna have a team, you wanna go build towards something. Yeah. And by the way, Part of having the greatest team is knowing who's not a good fit for the team. And I think one of the challenges I've seen, like, I am petrified every single day that we, I hope this never happens and we will do everything to prevent it, but as companies hit that $10 billion plus growth phase, I have watched so many of my friends who have built iconic companies that I have looked up to for years that I now work with day to day, and their teams are so bureaucratic now. And they're stuck in process and titles and nothing gets done. And I'm thinking to myself, what happened to this company where it was the most innovative, fast-moving, incredible business? And now they have committees for committees for committees and nothing gets done. What happened, do you think? And I think what happened is they, there's a couple, I mean, a lot of different things happened, but one is they started to throw bodies at problems. And by the way, I can see how that happens. Like when you're in the thick of it and you're trying to put out a fire, you have a growth opportunity that seems right there in front of you. The easy solution is throw more bodies at it. And so the reason we put that hard cap of 25 people per business line is it forces me and my partners to say, are we just not prioritizing well if we can't get this done with 25? Because any great startup, I mean WhatsApp was like 40 people. Yeah. When they sold for $19 billion, right? Yeah.

Spotify, the 6-person team sort of famously.

Right. And I think, you know, Jeff Bezos used to call it the pizza, 2 pizza box rule or whatever. But we look at that and say, are we not prioritizing well? Or is this business genuinely big enough that it needs to be split to run as 2 businesses, right? In which case it's no longer just add 1 or 2 or 3 because it's always just add 1 more, add 1 more. And before you know it, the team is 60 people. And so this forced to say, are we really gonna invest in hiring an entire backend team, frontend team, marketing team, product manager, GM? It's not as simple as just throwing one or two. So having a little bit of forced constraint has kept us small and kept that entrepreneurial energy within each business line. The second thing I think that we do just to keep that small culture is we're pretty ruthless and adamant about saying, are you the right culture fit here? It is so easy to justify, especially when you're shorthanded and you're moving fast and you're growing quickly, that you just need help. And you end up allowing the wrong type of talent, B talent, candidly, to stay on a team. And once that starts, it spreads 'cause they end up hiring B talent and then it just, before you know it, it's not there. And so we've been pretty tight about, first of all, that 90-day window. You have no— when people join that first 90 days, we'd rather be respectful and fair to the candidate to say it's not working. And so also creating that forcing function where you get your onboarding jacket and you get welcomed into the team after your 90-day period gives us a chance to say, is this person the right fit without feeling bad? Because everyone comes into it eyes wide open. That that's how our business operates. But once you're in, like, we have your back. 100%.

What percentage do you catch in the 90 days?

Most. And I'll tell you, it's a learning lesson for our teams too, 'cause I say, if you catch in the first 90 days, that's great. If we catch it after 90 days, that's on you. And that speaks to your leadership ability here at the company too.

Great forcing mechanism.

'Cause otherwise it's tough. Like, somebody joins, you feel bad, you wanna, and this way there's mutual respect. We're not bait and switching anyone. Everyone comes in understanding how the process works and they have a chance to come in and see if they're the right fit for them and for us. And just 'cause they're not right fit for us doesn't mean they wouldn't thrive at another company. Yeah.

Let's talk about leadership a little bit. How can you tell if somebody is a leader or a manager and how could you tell if somebody is—

We don't hire managers. That's, I'll start there. We don't do managers. Like, I just don't believe in that. In a world where everybody has to own a piece of this business, and by the way, when I say own, I mean the product succeeds or fails with them and we compensate them as owners. They have equity in this business, they get upside in this business. We give them, when we have extra cash on the balance sheet, like we'll do buybacks and offer people liquidity on their equity. This is a real ownership-driven culture. Managers kind of a waste of space at our company because if everybody's there to drive something, like you have to own it and be able to take the ball to the end zone. And so that is how we operate across even our, you know, GMs, if you will, like we call them pod CEOs, right? And so they sit down, they, they're leading and like doing the deals themselves too. There's no traditional management layer at our company.

How do you define a good leader versus a bad leader?

I mean, I think we lead by example, number one. I don't love, and you see this in Wall Street all the time, it's the guys who say, "Hey, we're an in-office culture," and then they're dialing in from the Hamptons. Oh, oh, kills me. So we do not do that. And I think you gotta lead by example, number one. Like, people want to be out in the trenches. And I think every one of the people I work with, I feel really lucky. Like, I don't, if I, if I need help on something, they're not delegating it to a team. They're just jumping into the trenches to get it done. I mean, that's another thing I see all the time is I'll talk to these companies that used to be innovative and now instead of getting the deal done directly, They hand it off to 10 teams who hand it off to 10 teams. And I just don't understand how anything happens when you take that approach.

Let's talk about product a little bit. Like how, how did you figure out what you wanted to build? And if somebody's listening, thinking about, like we said in the beginning, I wanna build a company, like what would you tell them on how to—

Again, I wanna build a company is not a great way to start a company. I wanna solve this problem is a really great way to solve it. My dad always tells me, he's obviously now built quite large businesses, and he says to me, if you want to create a billion-dollar solution, solve a $10 billion problem, right? Housing is a $2 trillion a year spend category, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to talk to 10 customers and say no one is happy with how they're paying rent or their mortgage today. I mean, that was where we started. It was this problem where your cost is going up, year over year over year. And for many people, the quality was going down. And if you think about it, like that whole paradigm was either ripe for regulatory disruption or a chance for a private company like Built to step in and say, we need to rethink the whole housing space because housing should be the center of your life. It should be the center of your everyday neighborhood. It should be the place you spend the most time, the, place that determines what schools your kids go to, what restaurants you go to, what bars you go to, what gym you sign up for. It's the most important decision you make outside of your family, right? And usually with your family. And I just think that housing wasn't treated that way. It was treated as a transactional thing. And so when you think about it, it's like all of a sudden you wake up every day thinking, I have to pay rent again and I get nothing back for it. I'm paying rent again. I'm not getting access to anything from it. And if you just that problem starts, I mean, it was eating at me. And I think once you start taking it that approach, you start to realize, wait a second, that problem is a way bigger than $10 billion opportunity. And that was how we started.

And now you guys do many things, but you start with one problem. And how do you think about what to do next? I like this idea of multiple teams. And if it, if it's not big enough to have a team, then it's probably not our opportunity. But do you have frameworks for how to go from your first product to, how to not get distracted by 50 options?

Yeah, so most companies die from indigestion, not starvation. There's never a shortage of opportunity. If you have too few things to do, your company is dead long before you've had the conversation. So the real question is how do you prioritize now and how do you make the right focused bets? For us, what's interesting is we actually really just have one core product, which is our hospitality platform. Which has evolved from what was a loyalty rewards. And so it's expanded in what the platform is. But in the same way Amazon today, they started selling books and now then they started selling cameras and computers and clothing and all the— it sounds like 10 different businesses. It's actually one platform. And 95% of the system is the same across all of those, right? You're still using this, you're using factories to store the products. You have an online website with a product page. A checkout, a way to deliver the product to the customer. It's one commerce platform. Built is one hospitality platform that starts at the home. That was our books. And we said, how do you take the rental experience and make it feel high service, rewarding, a great experience? I don't want to have 10 different places I go to to check my packages and my maintenance and pay my rent and then sign my lease. I want one unified experience. I wanna make it so it's rewarding. So when I pay my biggest expense every month, I get rewarded. And I wanna have it connect me to everything around my home. 'Cause I don't choose a building just for the building. I pick the neighborhood I wanna live in. And so that was our approach. And we've taken our platform for housing where we spent the first couple years, and by the way, we did over $100 billion of housing volume through our platform, right? How do you take that and now scale it so that the connected experience you have is unified at the restaurant and the gym and all these places, right, in the same way that a hotel does. Like, if you've been to a great hotel property, when you check in for your room and you go downstairs to the restaurant, they have your profile. You can charge it to your room. They know your preferences. The person at the restaurant can help you book a spa appointment at the spa. The person at the spa can get you tickets to the next event. And so that interconnectedness should be how it is everywhere you live. And that's really what we've done. The way Amazon went from books to using the same product for other categories, we've taken the platform we built for housing and we've now opened it up so that all these local businesses, these small businesses that you work with, for example, can now connect into that ecosystem and run that same unified experience for customers everywhere they live.

Have you ever had a moment where you got offered a ton of money, a big opportunity, but you turned it down because it wasn't right for the company?

All the time, but it's not in the way you'd think, right? It's not money. There's no such thing as free money, right? And so someone once told me, they said, I said, you know, we're talking about an investment round and he goes, pick your valuation, I'll tell you the terms, right? And that, that was the day I realized that every price has a cost, right? On the other end. And so yes, you can, someone could come tomorrow and offer us a billion dollars, but if it's, you know, stuck with a bunch of return hurdles and controls and board seats and it just doesn't matter. And we've seen that all the time. I mean, the number of times people have come to us in our earlier days, like this is why we didn't raise money for a long time, right? We wanted to keep control of the company, keep the board, to people who we genuinely want to help run the business, right? And we had a lot of investors come to us with big check opportunities, but it required certain voting control rights, certain veto rights, certain board governance that just candidly wasn't right for us. And today that discipline on our side has allowed us to be lucky enough where, first of all, most of my investors were our customers. They were using the product. And said, we want access to the upside here, right? We just brought in United Wholesale Mortgage. The CEO and founder there, Matt Ishby, is one of the most talented operators I've ever met, and he's built the largest mortgage business in the world. And when Matt and I teamed up to go build Built for Homeowners, he has to put in $100 million into the company as well. And that type of strategic partnership end to end is the dream way to take capital. Right? Our interests are totally aligned. Taking it from a private equity group who maybe doesn't have the same interest at heart, just not worth it.

Like, it's very true. I was talking to Amjad, the CEO of Replit, who's become a buddy, and I asked him this same question. And, you know, he had turned down $1 billion for Replit back when they had no cap, you know, they hadn't even made any revenue yet. Yeah. 'Cause he had been grinding for 11 years before they made really much of anything. And he said that wasn't even the hardest part of running the business was turning down the billion-dollar valuation. He was like, "The hardest part," and he's like, "And now I enjoy it." But he said this on the podcast so I can say it. He's like, "I remember when I told Peter Thiel that he should invest in the company and Peter said, 'It's never gonna be a big company. This vibe coding thing is sort of ridiculous.'" And he put it in an email and he's like, "I kept that email for so long." And then he's like, "We're still buddies." So I forwarded it to him later and said, "Do you still think that?" this or something. And I was like, did he respond? He's like, no. But I was wondering, do you have any chips on your shoulder that have pushed you while building Built?

I mean, every day, every single idea that— I don't think of it as a chip. I think that's what motivates you is a fun part. If you have a vision and it's disruptive at all, it is a problem if everyone already If everyone already gets it and thinks that this is obvious and no one has done it, there's usually a problem. Yeah. Right? There's an element of saying the problem is understood. The way you're solving it is a little bit unique and it takes time to convince people that it can work, right? Because if everyone, if it was that obvious and everyone knew it was gonna work, someone would've done it already.

Yeah. Yep. So you don't even think about it that way.

No, I look at it as a fun game.

So what about when somebody says no to you or like, no, he's not gonna be able to do it. No way. Does that make you chuckle or you don't even notice it?

No, it usually tells me that there's something in the way that we're communicating our vision that isn't right. 'Cause either, by the way, there's two options when somebody says that either I'm, they're right and I'm wrong, in which case none of this matters and the business is gonna go under, or I didn't do a good job of explaining it to them. In a way that makes sense in their box. And that to me is the best forcing function. Like I find our best product development comes from going to all the naysayers and just trying to pitch them over and over and over and over and over again to see what hits and what doesn't. It's like, I don't believe in the like, go send out a survey to 10,000 people and get like, you've gotta be in it. 'Cause if somebody, everyone will tell you it's a nice, if they don't have any commitment to say it's a nice idea, Every one of your friends will tell you it's a, sounds like a great idea. You ask them to pay for it, it's a very different thing. I remember I was looking at starting a healthcare company before this, cuz those are some of the healthcare, housing, student loans. And there was a model I, I was fascinated by the One Medical approach, which sold to Amazon. $10 a month, people had access to electronic medical records, a concierge-style doctor. I mean, this is for their health. And I remember asking somebody, like, "Oh, that's a great idea." I said, "So would you sign up?" "Well, I don't really get sick that often. I don't know if—" And meanwhile, they're spending $10 on a coffee or a drink every single day and wouldn't spend $10 a month for healthcare. And as you know, that business largely moved to enterprise B2B sales. So I do think that finding the people who say, "It's not for me," is some of the best best way to test and figure out your product-market fit. Because people like to take— the hardest thing is translating this new idea into boxes people understand. There was no such thing when Facebook launched. People forget there was no such thing as a social network. At the time, they described it as a website to share photos. That became a social network, and now people are like, it's a social network, but just for your close friends or a social network, but for this. When describes it, so taking the problem, the solution, and then translating it into the boxes people understand today is so underrated in marketing. I think it's too easy for us as founders to get stuck in our own world where we live and breathe this thing and we understand all the nuances of what matters. and to a customer, even the greatest products, how often, I mean, Amazon is a multi-trillion dollar company. How often do you think about Amazon? Like when you go to order your chips or your toilet paper or whatever it is you need for your home, you go in for 10 seconds, add it to your cart, place order, and you're done. And so when somebody has 3 seconds to think about your business, what works? And for us, when we launched, it was get rewarded on rent. And that was it. And that's all you had to think. And that is the most— having that clear hook to your product is really, really important. You get rewards for airlines and hotels, now you get it for rent.

How, how do you come up with a hook for a product? Like how long did that take you to come up with that?

Finding a hook at the very beginning of a company is very different than coming up with what you think, how you market your company later on. When you're starting a business, I would say you look at this big problem you want to solve. Ideally, it's a big enough problem that you have a lot of room to grow. If you start with something too broad, no one can understand where it fits in their life. I've got so much going on. The last thing I need to do is spend 5 minutes learning about a new platform. On the flip side, there's a lot of great products that launch as a great hook, Right? I mean, when I used to work at Tinder, we had a very simple hook. Swipe right, swipe left, match, and that was it. Meet people anonymously, right? The challenge is converting that hook into a platform. So I would actually say it's not as hard to create the hook. It's really hard to find a hook that can evolve into a platform. And a lot of these businesses that are great hooks, You still have to get lucky and the right time and the right everything, but there's still a cap. And the greatest companies figured out how to evolve from a hook naturally into a platform without losing sight of what made them successful in the first place. How did you guys do that? I mean, a lot of it was just from our customers. I mean, it's interesting. We started off, people know us for our direct-to-consumer business. A lot of our business is actually providing solutions to B2B. So we started with both a direct-to-consumer and a direct-to-B business property management solution to provide loyalty and rewards on your rent payments. Why are people not building their credit? Why do they not get rewarded? Why is the experience so painful to rent a home? In building that, we were hearing from both customers, The consumers wanted more ways to earn rewards, and the property managers wanted us to connect more and more of that experience. So it wasn't just the payments and getting rewarded on the payment, but how do you make leasing, how do you make the package system, the maintenance, the renewals, everything seamless? And then we started seeing that local businesses were coming into the buildings asking to put up flyers for come get 10% off at the Tap House Grill down the street, or hey, we have a dog walking service, or we have a home repair service, or whatever that might be that they put in your apartment building. We said, how in the world is all this local commerce happening on, in 2024 at the time, on little pinboards and elevator screens in an apartment building when you have the most captive audience, which is people who live locally, who need services like this, and local businesses trying to reach them, and no clear way to connect the two outside of just like digital ads. And so we started building a neighborhood marketplace to connect people who lived in the buildings run on Build's platform with local business. And it was again, just one by one by one. And then we realized, wait a second, if we're gonna connect you to those businesses and our brand is about hospitality and loyalty, then it needs to be as seamless as it is when you're in a hotel. I don't wanna go from the apartment building, walk into a restaurant and have to pull up my phone and say, here's my QR code. I live at this building down the street. Like, that's embarrassing. And so we did the work to integrate from our apartment buildings into the restaurants and into the gyms and into the pharmacy. And today we operate one big neighborhood ecosystem that's all centered around your home.

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What are some things you do at Built that, like, you're really proud of internally, but that are weird that people externally wouldn't even know? Like, culture-wise—

You mean besides our jackets and our medallions and our team pods? Yeah, because I like that story.

I want more of those.

I mean, we do a lot of that stuff. We just launched our first competition cup back to our idea of we reward our customers. We wanted to create a points and rewards platform for our team. So now across our company, our business lines, as we have fun, whether it's serious stuff like hitting business goals or it's just more silly stuff like who had the most people show up for our team happy hours or whatever, you can get points. And we gamify the whole thing. You know, whoever, which every month amongst the myriad of other comp and other benefits, people can redeem their points. Like for example, take control of the music in our building, right? And it sounds silly, but people love it. And you know, it's, you talk about music, it's such a core part of identity. And so one of the things we love every time someone joins our company, this is actually a tradition we started at my first startup when I was 22. You get to pick a song for the Built playlist and it's like your walk-up song. And so when you come up and get your jacket, everybody picks their walk-up song and everyone in the company hears it for the first time during your walk-up and it lives forever on the Built playlist. And today we have a playlist, it's about, you know, just under 300 songs for the, you know, the 285 or so people that are at the company. And it's the like identities and personalities of everybody at the company. And it was so funny, one of my co-founders, he didn't realize when we were 22 this was gonna be a thing. And he, he thought he was being funny and he picked the song Like a Virgin. And 14 years later, it is still his walk-up song as we play the playlist backwards up to get to the end of the playlist. And, and every, every quarter, that's his song. That's hysterical.

You know, you've talked a lot about the hard part of being an entrepreneur. What do you think is the hardest part about running a company that most people don't understand? I don't know.

I don't wanna scare, like, I have fun. To be clear, this is the greatest thing I could have ever asked for. I, um, I guess it would be really hard if, you know, my best friends and my wife and everyone was thought of this as a separate thing. And it was like you were saying earlier, you come home and they were asking, when is this gonna be done or whatever? This is our life and it's fun. And I don't know what else I'd wake up wanting to do. Like when you work on these problems, I mean, maybe it's just, maybe I'm just lucky enough at Built, but every possible thing that I'd want to do is somehow tied into the world we're building. And so it's exciting. Like we would spend time with these restaurant owners who were, I had met through wanting to connect to our residents at the buildings. You become friends with them, you learn about their business, and all of a sudden they started asking us, well, can I use Bill's platform for my entire operations, not just the marketplace? And then we launched a hospitality business from that. And that came from just going out for drinks and having fun with people in the space. And so I don't know, it all ties together, I feel like, in a fun way. And it's hard, but it's fun. It's worth it. Yeah.

You know, my new thesis, that I've been sort of playing around with is I think a lot of entrepreneurs were unhappy when they started companies. And so now when they're famous or all over the internet, they're unhappy now and they were unhappy then. Interesting. And so now there's a lot of people that talk about how miserable it has to be to run a business. Is that true?

You see that a lot?

I see it a lot. Yeah. Interesting. Well, think about it. I mean, I think there's a lot of reality to the statement of like pessimists sound smart and optimists make money. And so I think this idea of being sophisticated and more pessimistic and then you seem reasonable and you're not a Pollyanna and there's no rose-colored glasses. Is actually kind of normative. And then if you seem too happy and whatever, it's like, ah, really? Is that actually how you're going? And so I like to hear entrepreneurs say that they're having fun because I believe that too. I don't think we have to trauma bond always over how miserable this is because if it was super miserable, you're quite capable. You would probably just go become an employee somewhere else if you didn't like it.

I'd be a bad employee. But yeah, like I said, I love it. It's a lot of fun. But I said, We made a very intentional decision to build this company with a group of people who have, who either were or have become our best friends. And we spend all day, every day together working on stuff that's fun and exciting. And part of that makes the hard stuff worth it too, because you're going through it together. And I think it would be really tough if I was doing this alone. That would maybe be a different view on this, but—

Is this where you take all of your video meetings in this room?

No, this space, by the way, is a reflection. It's so funny. So one of my co-founders and I, when we were 24, I guess we started the company when I was 22, so we launched when I was 23, 24. We used to come to New York to come launch, do media tours and whatever. We used to stay across the street at the Standard Hotel. And it's just a funny full circle moment, 'cause I remember the, the night we were launching our first startup, we were sitting at the bar right at the Standard Hotel across the street, and we were looking over and this building had just opened. It was the Samsung headquarters. They had the first virtual reality experience. It was this huge screen. I remember looking like, that is the coolest new space ever. And that night we like stayed up all night to get this thing ready to launch. And of course we hit 50 bugs the first day 'cause that's how all startups are. And it was this crazy fire. And you know, we were here a couple nights ago, late night, and I was just joking 'cause now we have the building, the whole building is built. We're looking over the bar where we first started launching our first product and we're now launching new products every day and going through the same experience. And as Codie was saying to you earlier, now It's the same ups and downs and chaos, which makes it so fun. Just bigger scale. You go from launching one product in a year to a product a day or every week to raising $100,000 to raising $100 million. But it's really the same crazy game.

Do you think that you just get anesthetized to it after a while? Like, does it just become sort of easier because you build up a muscle eventually to the difficulty?

No, but I also think you can't get numb to this stuff. Like some people, Every day, I mean, you just have to, you gotta have the pinch me moments. As things get bigger and crazier, you just sometimes you look around and you're like, how was my day meeting with this person and doing that thing and seeing this thing? And it's pretty surreal. I think the minute you become numb to all this stuff, you're kind of fucked. Because part of what makes this thing worth doing is that excitement you get every time you get a cool new opportunity. And I feel like every day at Built now, the scale and things that we get to do are like on a daily basis, things I would've dreamed of doing once 10, 15 years ago. I love that.

Yeah, my dad always says, do you think 8-year-old Codie would think this is cool? And the answer is yes. She'd be like, what the fuck do we get to do every day?

This is wild. You can't lose that. Again, it's the fun. I mean. Yeah, yeah.

I always like that framing of does 8-year-old you think this is cool and does 80-year-old you kind of approve of the way that you're doing it? Maybe we'll worry about that problem later. I wanna talk a little bit about, I remember you talking somewhere around Built almost like came to fail basically. And like in the beginning you had like one point in particular where you didn't think the company was gonna take off or make it. And now you're here today. Do you remember what that moment was?

We've had a lot of those points in the early days. I think maybe what you're referring to is we had spent, it was actually a regulatory challenge. So early in the company, we had started this again with this idea that paying your rent is your biggest expense. It should reward you, it should build your credit. And we always felt paying rent should help you towards a path to home ownership. And so when we started the company, that was the mission and vision of help. And again, it's evolved in different variations, but that was the north star of making your housing payments work for you. 6 months into, you know, really focusing full-time on this business, we were sitting with our lawyers and they had this like painful call where they go, well, we spoke to our specialist, by the way. And we have some good news, bad news. Like, oh God. Good news is we love your business and what you're trying to do. The bad news is we're not sure it's legal. That's a pretty big bad news. Um, but at the time it was this an, an annoyingly gray thing where no one had ever asked the regulators if your rewards could be used towards a down payment on a home. And no one had actually formalized the idea that rental payments should count towards your credit history for a mortgage qualification, which is mind-boggling. And so the way the regulations worked is you could only use certain like frameworks of things to qualify for a Fannie, Freddie, or FHA mortgage. And you only had certain sources of funds that you were allowed to use towards a down payment. So we sat there and we said, well, do we pivot, um, or is this worth fighting? And we spent 18 months going down to DC, spending time with the Department of Housing, with Fannie Mae, with Freddie Mac, with FHA and all these different groups. And in October of 2019, um, 'cause we started this problem like beginning of 2018, we actually first, before it was even a company. Actually, it was later than that. Sorry, my timing is a little bit off here, but we got, we got the Department of Housing for the United States to formally approve the use of rewards towards a down payment and paying your rent to count towards your credit for a mortgage. And so all of a sudden, for millions and tens of millions of Americans, paying your rent could now help you buy a home one day. But if we had raised venture money to kind of take it full circle, if I had raised venture capital money at the beginning of the company, there's no way I would've had the freedom to make the decision to fight for 18 months to go try to solve that. Because we were looking at this for a 10, 20, 30-year opportunity was worth it. If I had taken venture money and they were looking for, well, how are you gonna raise your next round in 12 months at a higher price? We would've just gone out and been forced to launch something that was very different and hadn't spent the time invested in building that foundation.

Like, it's sort of, that's sort of absurd. Like 18 months, no company, no revenue.

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

No, it's incredible. I just think a lot of times we can fault like the level of belief in what we build that we have in ourselves. And so like that takes a lot of belief to go, I'm gonna change a regulatory landscape. It might be illegal, I'm gonna do it anyway. And I'm just gonna keep building with the belief that I'm gonna figure it out.

I think the figure it out was the key. Like we weren't gonna do something that was illegal, but we were gonna figure it out. We were gonna find a way to adapt the business, adapt the product, or adapt the platform to make it work. But we were also committed to getting that thing approved. And by the way, it makes sense. And maybe this is the delusion. We didn't do this because we wanted to start a company as the core. It just didn't make sense. It didn't make sense that paying your rent on time every month for 5 years has no bearing on whether you're eligible to get a mortgage payment. That's the best predictor of whether you're going to pay your mortgage on time. And if I can get rewards and I can go spend them on airline tickets and hotels and throw 'em away on stuff that's like whatever, why is using it towards buying a home, the American dream, something that people would be against? It just didn't, it doesn't make sense.

Do you think you have to be slightly like delusionally optimistic in order to build a company?

I mean, I don't think it's delusional. I think it's, I think to, It's funny, people always say like, I don't wanna take the risk of starting a company. Personally, I find it way riskier putting my career in the hands of somebody else where I don't know what direction they're gonna take the business. I don't know where I can, you know, work. And that's why like I think the people that we bring on think similarly and they come to Built because they have leadership and autonomy. But I think it's way more risky to just go work get a big company that decides the next day they're gonna replace the entire factory with some automation or something else with AI. Like, I think that's a little delusional sometimes. I'm weird. Yeah. I'm weird about, you know, being a part of something you can build and grow. Yeah. No, I'm with you.

I just, I think it's interesting. I was just talking to Seth Godin, who's like one of my favorite marketers of all time. And he was talking about when we all started getting indoctrinated, you know, and it does kind of go back to school and high school and the Prussian system and, sort of we were built in a way to be beautiful workers. And so that's hard to break. God, that's so sad. I know.

I'm gonna get you to this side of having more fun with these conversations. No more. No more talking about trauma bonding. No more trauma bonding.

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

This is the part that I enjoy most about Biltz, bringing all these worlds together from real estate to culture to, you know, this month we worked with airlines to do, you know, transfer bonus on rewards. We worked with Disney and Anne Hathaway to launch Devil Wears Prada 2, and we're also launching a new mortgage platform. To help mortgage brokers. So the breadth of what we get to do is part of the fun of what we build every day. But I also think it's where the value creation lies. And so I'd say there's two different things that I think a lot of folks miss when they're doing partnerships. And the first is they go into these meetings to go pitch their product. The reality is no one cares about your product. They care about their problems. And it sounds so obvious, but the first thing is understanding what each stakeholder in your ecosystem cares about for their business, right? And if you can just walk into a room and start with understanding what they care about and solve their problem, you're already night and day compared to the 50 companies that come in. By the way, I see it now on this side, like the number of people who come in and start the meetings by pitching me on what they do without any concept of what matters to us. It's a tough space to start, but then the real fun I think is that if you're reaching the biggest company in entertainment, they can do anything. They have the reach in entertainment. They know everyone in the entertainment world. When you can come to them with something that's from a different world, there's a lot of value creation there just from the disconnected nature of these spaces. And so For a local restaurant, they may know everything to do with hospitality and restaurant world, but it's probably not likely they're spending their time building relationships with the property managers for every apartment building that's around their business. So when we can come in and say, let me help you solve your guest experience at your restaurant and connect you to our local marketplace, now the value is compounded. But now when I go to the next group and say, well, to the car service company and say, well, we can help you connect not only for your guest experience, but when apartment owners need to send a car for someone for a tour, or when restaurants wanna offer a car service to get a nightcap at their other bar, we can tie that customer into you. And all of a sudden, the network effect creates compounding value. And now if you're not on the network, you're left out, right? And so you start by solving the problem for one, But very quickly we built it as a network where everybody benefits from each other and now it's become this like flywheel that just gets more and more valuable every time someone joins it.

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

That's a good question. Um, well hopefully they had some fun. Number one, I'd say for those of you who are thinking about starting a business but don't really feel that passionately about the problem you're solving, I hope I can save you 3 years and not start the company. For those of you who are passionate about solving a problem, starting a company, I hope I can save you the headache of raising capital too early. For those who are already at that growth phase, hopefully there's something that we learned the hard way that you can take, take away to keep your team nimble, fast, and operating like a startup even as you hit $10, $11 billion plus. It's amazing.

Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. So cool learning about Built and what you've done. Thank you for coming. So built.com and where do you like people to follow you?

Built or my Instagram's great.

And your Instagram is? Ankur Jain. Oh, easy. Easy. Okay, great. Thanks, Ankur.

Thanks for having me.