Playing To Win with Blend's CEO Nima Ghamsari and Greylock's Jerry Chen | Greymatter

Hi and welcome to Gray Matter. My name is Jerry Chen, partner at Greylock and today we had the privilege to sit down with Anima Gamsari, co founder and CEO of Blend Labs. We're gonna sit down and talk about a bunch of things. Firstly, the whole financial services industry and how technology is disrupting that multi trillion dollar business. Second, a little bit more about the Blend story and Nima story in particular, and how he went from student through Palantir, through starting Blend, the adventure along the way and finally, advice for founders out there for Nima himself, building kind of one of the definitive cloud companies in fintech. So Nima, thanks for being with us today.

Thanks for having me, Jerry. I'm happy to be here and excited for the show.

Cool. Well, maybe let's start talking about the fintech industry and the mortgage industry in general. This is a market that's over $2 trillion in loans, mortgages every single year in the U.S. $45 trillion of consumer lending in the U.S. every year. And just today I was listening to the news that they're thinking about deregulating the smaller banks and credit unions to allow them to issue loans with fewer regulations. Nima, why are mortgages always in the news? Why are people always talking about interest rates and mortgage rates? Why is this always top of mind?

Well, the mortgage industry, I think the US has done a really good job of making homeownership the American dream. It's something where you can use it to build wealth over the course of your life. I know my parents bought a house in the late 90s and that has been a foundational piece of their long term wealth and their ability to eventually live a relatively free retirement, which otherwise wouldn't have been possible. And so the US government has made it a really important staple in the economy and something that I think is very important to the future. Now on the flip side though, it's an extremely cumbersome and relatively manual process, both for consumers who go through the process. If you've gotten a mortgage or any really any product from a financial service institution, usually it's very paper based. Manual and mortgage is probably the worst, or at least historically. So there's hundreds of pages of documents, there's multiple visits, many weeks involved in the process. And part of the reason for that is historically Silicon Valley hasn't really been involved in helping build the technology for the space. It's hard to say we should blame the financial services industry for not having technology when nobody's been building technology for the space.

Why do you think that is Silicon Valley has been excited to take on markets from selling books and music online and TV shows. But it seems like every time I see a founder walk through a door say, hey, I'm going to take on banks, I want to sell. In the fintech industry, regulation and large institution incumbents, a lot of founders get afraid. Why do you think it is? And where do you guys find the courage to actually be sort of contrary.

In this market from a kind of market perspective? I think a lot of founders, especially the ones who are first time founders coming out of college or a few years out of college after their first job, they have very little experience with the financial services industry outside of maybe their student loan and perhaps a checking account and a credit card. They haven't gotten a mortgage yet. They haven't really had the full experience of what it takes to get a real financial services product. And so because of the lack of expertise, I think that's one of it. It's not really a courage thing, it's just a lack of understanding of the problem space and you need that. And then the second thing I think is there's this inclination in Silicon Valley to disrupt in a vacuum. And by that I mean saying, I don't need anybody else, I'm going to do this entirely myself. And so a lot of people historically tried to build full stack companies where the company was everything. It was not just the product that they were delivering, which was a better mortgage or a better credit card or a better whatever, but it was also the lending behind it, it was the capital markets behind it, it was the consumer marketing behind it, customer acquisition costs. That's a really tough business for a startup where when you're in a startup, focus is everything and if you're focusing on 50 things to try to get them all right at once, it's pretty difficult to succeed actually.

Let's double click on that full stack versus back investor breed technology platform you mentioned. A lot of startups come out, I want to do this in a vacuum. We've seen this rise of full stack lenders, be it SoFi, consumer student loans and other mortgages and some have succeeded, some haven't. Blen you guys decided not to be a full stack company and just say, hey, we're going to work with the large bank and non bank lenders. Tell me about that strategy and how did you made that decision to get trade offs? You did.

There were two, I think there were two kind of pillars. One was the focus pillar that I mentioned and then the other one was around impact we have a principle at Blend that says that we focus on impact. And what that means is we want to touch as many consumers and make as many of those loans as much better as possible. And so for instance, we could go about this ourselves, but then we have to go and find hundreds of thousands, if not millions of customers. We have to go and build a marketing machine to do that. And that takes even the biggest lenders in the country that have been doing this for years. Everybody's heard of Rocket mortgage. Now they're sub 5% of the market and it's taken them 10 years to get there. And so for us we said, well if we partner, we can a focus on what's truly differentiated, which is the tech, and build that and make sure that exists in the ecosystem at large and B, we can get really wide adoption of that and touch millions of consumers and really make their process a lot better. And so those two things combined, it was somewhat controversial at the time I think because a lot of the fintechs that had been really successful were full stack lenders. You mentioned sofi, Lending Club, Avant, they were lenders, they were full on lenders that would allow for consumers to go to their site and get a loan. And so for us to come in in 2012 and say, you know what, we're not going to do any of that, we're just gonna build the software and we're gonna make sure everybody gets it. That was a different approach.

I love that pillars and how you decided how to reach the right business model by asking yourself how do you have the biggest impact in the industry? And I always say in board meetings if you don't ask the right question, you don't get the right answer. And so the question for you guys was how do we have the biggest impact on the industry? And that was actually be the technology platform for these companies. Maybe just give the audience out there a quick snapshot of Blend in terms of through your customers that you talk about, but the amount of loans that your customers touch even after only four or five years.

Yeah, our customers do about a quarter of the loans in the industry, so about 500 billion a year in volume. And that's just in the mortgage. We have started to work with them on kind of products that are similar and related, like home equity loans and lines, which I think as rates increase those are going to be increasingly popular. So I think having those partners and having those people who are willing to really trust us to deliver a great consumer experience, a data driven transformation of the process has been Great, because now every time we touch a consumer, we get a piece of feedback at the end of the process and that feedback then comes back into our team and we can see it and get excited and rally around the consumer impact we're making.

As an investor and a board member, it's something I always marvel at, that your customers are touching 25% of the loans out there. You mentioned some of the competitors out there that are purely online are sub 5%, sub 3%. It's a testimony to the platform that you built and also the impact you have. Now, before we talk more about building Blend, we're getting ahead of ourselves. I want to talk about the kind of the Inception story about how Blend came to be and your background coming from Palantir. I always love to understand where the inception, the idea and the inspiration came from. Take yourself back to what you were a Palantir experience there and then lead us into the starting a blend.

Sure. So, yeah, I was at Palantir and we were trying to build out the financial services practice there. Part of that was going out and working with a lot of the large banks and it happened to be right after the 2009 financial crisis really hit. And I think a lot of it, by the way, was caused by some of the things that we're talking about. But as we worked with the banks, they had these huge portfolios of loans that were in default and underwater because of the housing crisis. And we got to look at that and they brought us in to help fix some of those things. And we quickly realized that there was very little technology investment in this space. And this was going to be a paper driven manual process unless somebody went and really fixed it and had to fix it from the start. And by the start, I mean where the consumer first engaged with that institution, somebody had to go all the way there, make it a data driven process and drive it as a digital online thing that a consumer could do end to end and then hopefully that would transfer down market all the way down to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who fund a lot of these loans and make sure that there's transparency throughout the entire ecosystem. We kind of saw that come full circle. Recent news. We just got Fannie Mae to approve our data and make it what they call day one certainty. And what that means is now that our data flows all the way through the entire ecosystem and gives the consumers and the lenders certainty at the point of sale, which is a pretty magical experience.

So you saw the value this data transparency at Palantir, because you Guys were working for large banks in the throes of the Great Recession and the financial collapse was really driven by bad data and bad mortgages and mortgage backed securities. At what point did you realize, hey, I'm going to leave Palantir because you had a great job there as senior leader building and leading the whole fintech process. How did you guys go about deciding that we're going to take this plunge together?

At some point while we were working on this problem and looking in the kind of post crisis world, we realized that yes, what we were working on was amazing, but I think we had to go to the root of the problem and solve it. And so once we realized that that had to exist at the point of origination for the consumer, we had to go and start something. We didn't feel like we had a choice because we felt like if we didn't do this, it would probably not happen or it would happen five or 10 years slower than otherwise.

How did you pick your co founders? Tell me a little bit about them. Because the risk profile of leaving kind of a well paid, secure job like Palantir to go do a startup where most don't work out takes some level of risk appetite. So how does it go about making sure everyone was signed up for the same journey?

We had worked together pretty closely in the past at Palantir in particular, and so we had a really good comfort with each other. I think if we hadn't worked with each other, it would have been a disaster because you learn things about the people you've been working with for years. You learn things about them when you found a company with them that you would never know otherwise. Even some of the people that you have worked with for years, they change when you go into a high risk environment. So it could work where you work with somebody and find a partner that you've never worked with before, but I don't think it would have worked for me.

Maybe talk about a couple of your co founders and how they complement your strengths and weaknesses and vice versa.

So I'm sort of BD Tech product hybrid, did a lot of that at Palantir and brought that here to blend. We knew we needed somebody sort of deep tech. That ended up being Eugene, our cto, who I also worked with at Palantir. We knew we needed somebody with a little bit more operational rigor, somebody with a more complementary view of taking risk. And that ended up being Aaron, our cfo, who was one of my clients when I was at Palantir. And so bringing those different Perspectives to the table I think was instrumental because I think the worst thing that could happen is living in an echo chamber and feeling like you're making all the right decisions. And it turns out everyone has no idea what they're doing. But if you don't recognize it, that becomes a big part of the problem.

Speaking of taking risks, your background before Palantir is also super fascinating. When you were at Stanford, you took risks semi professionally. What'd you learn about playing poker professionally that made you a good or bad founder, you think?

Sure, yeah. So when I was at Stanford, I was a professional poker player for the time I was there, and then as well as two or three years after. And then when I got sort of full time into Palantir, I let it go as well. As, you know, the FBI came and shut down a bunch of things, but I played online exclusively and I think the things that it taught me were not being too result oriented. And I want to elaborate on that a little bit because I think this is number one kind of misunderstood thing. In companies that like to measure, everyone likes to measure, everyone likes to be data driven. But it's really important to understand that there's variance in the real world. And by that I mean as a person going through some process, your process might succeed 80% of the time, 20% of the time, and fail 20% of the time. But even if you work perfectly and just because something worked out for you doesn't mean you did the wrong things. And so, you know, in poker you could play a hand perfectly and then the river comes and drops an ace that gives your opponents a pair and you lose the hand and you're like, well, I played that perfectly. You could either take two paths. You could either say, I'm going to change my play style and I'm going to just fold next time because they're going to hit the ace on the river. Or you could use the understanding of variance and probability and say, well, actually that ace was a really unlucky situation for us, we played it perfectly, etc. Or vice versa. You could draw to a backdoor flush, which is one in a very small number of hands that will ever hit something like that. And you could draw it and hit it and say, well, I always hit this backdoor flush and make that decision every time. And so I think as companies start to implement things like okrs and these kind of frameworks around measurement, it's really important to not make short term reactions to things that went your way or did not go your way, because Being results oriented in that way could ultimately make you think the wrong things are the right things. And that's the death of a company long term.

I love that philosophy. And oftentimes we say around the table, it's okay to be wrong for the right reason. Right? You play the hand perfectly and sometimes it doesn't go your way. But as an investor, I'm okay being wrong for the right reason. And more importantly, we always talk about like pattern recognition in the Valley and startups, and oftentimes people learn the wrong things from these patterns. Like, oh, Google's a great company, their name started with a G, so let's invest in companies that start with the letter G. Right? That's not what to learn. And so you want to make sure you're learning the right things from what happened and not the wrong things and vice versa.

One thing we do at Blend, which I think has been really valuable is these five whys or RCA's where we'll go into a problem even if it's a good thing that happened or if it's a bad thing that happened. If it's a major event, we'll go and we'll do a five why. We'll kind of really understand the root cause of that thing and not just assume that because it was the wrong thing, that there's something that we all understand the reason it was wrong, or it would be just because something good happened, that we were perfect along the way. And so doing that and taking 30 minutes once every couple weeks to really dig in with the team and understand what happened, how we did it, how we could do it better next time, I think is super important for the.

Founders that aren't familiar with the framework, the five whys, can you give two more seconds on that?

Well, an example would be, let's say we lose an enterprise customer. And that customer was one that we really wanted and we really wanted to work with. The easy thing to do would be to say, yeah, that we ran the sales process wrong and move on and we're going to do better next time. But actually what we do at Blend is we say, well, why did we. We get together 30 minutes and we say, why did we lose that customer? Well, we lost the deal and here's what they told us and they'll give us some basic thing and we'll say, well, why were those things important to them and why were they not something that was built into our product and is it because we could have made it more important to them? The things that we built or did we build the wrong things? And then we'll go to the next level of depth. Okay, we built the wrong things for this segment of the market. Why did we do that? Oh, because we maybe had an explicit trade off that we were making as a company. And so the lesson is sometimes we might have made all the right things and that might not just be the right customer for us and vice versa. There are times when things go great, you roll something out and it gets amazing traction, but you did it in a very poor way. An example might be you did something in a vacuum. It took you two years and five iterations and now it's suddenly live and it's working, but you probably could have gotten that much faster. So it's easy to lean on the success and say, yeah, that was a great outcome, we got all this usage, but if you really dig deeper, you can find things that you could have done better along the way. And so it's never having the mindset of hey, we're really good. It's having the mindset of we're, we could have done this better no matter how well the outcome was.

So both your success and your failures do the five whys and you just learn. That's amazing. To avoid the same mistakes and get the right learnings from your successes.

And that's a structured framework. You don't have to use a structured framework like a five whys. Just think of that internally too, as you're working, you're not going to win every battle. As a startup, you're just not going to win every battle. And so you have to learn every time, no matter win or lose from every single battle that you fight.

I think it's absolutely the right rigor because oftentimes you want to know what went right, what went wrong. Even as an investor, we call that the kind of second third level questions. It's obvious to say, hey, why investment went well at the root level? Like, hey, it's a great market. What made it a great market? It's like secular trend towards mobile distribution. Okay, why is mobile phones being spread like wildfire? And so we always think about were the second, third, fourth order effects. I think the other side of this table, working with you as a former poker player, I remember going to negotiating your investment like, oh, shoot, Neva's a professional poker player. This negotiation is not going to go well.

I think it went pretty well.

I love that. Lessons from learning the right things, the wrong things that you took from actually being a poker player online at Stanford, starting this company and then early days of Blend, you're climbing this mountain trying to work with these large mortgage lenders. And mortgage industry is one super concentrated where the top 40, 50 banks and non bank lenders account for like half or more of volume. Now if you were another large bank or non bank lender, why is this super interesting? And then for the consumer, the actual borrower, why would he or she care about this blend experience? The blend transparency, the thing that we.

Bring to lenders, they want to be consumer first. So first and foremost, the biggest reason you'll care is because you want to drive a great consumer experience. People see the shift in consumer behavior happening. It's not happening as slowly, I think, as a lot of people thought. The dot com boom was almost 20 years ago and it's really taken into financial services in the last five years, but it's taken it by storm. And so I think that's the first and foremost. But I don't want to take anything away from the fact that it's an extremely inefficient process as well. They're paying upwards of $8,000 a loan to process and sell that loan. And that's expensive. I mean, $8,000 a loan and a $200,000, $300,000 loan is four points, three to four points, which for the consumer, if you add that to the cost of the consumer getting that loan, that's a very expensive loan all of a sudden. And then I think why the consumer cares is we put them through this really paper based manual process. And I mentioned the prices are higher as a result. And so, you know, end to end, it creates a negative overall experience. With Blend, we increase the consumer net promoter score, which is something we track pretty religiously as well as we lower the time to close and the cost of closing alone.

What was it like to kind of crack that market? And how did you go about picking your first customers? Because oftentimes I advise startups there's two early mistakes you can make as a founder. One is picking the wrong customers early. They'll drag you down the wrong path. And also picking the wrong pricing levels. So how did you guys go about reasoning where to enter the market? And a couple of largest banks and non bank lenders now are customers. How did that happen?

Well, I think early on we had a pretty broad market. There's banks that do tons of loans that would certainly be a great customer. But there's also brokers all the way at the bottom end who do one or two loans, but are kind of standalone and can move quickly on adopting new technology. And so I think for us it was about how do we narrow the segment to be as tight as possible because we definitely can't serve both at the same time. And then figuring out what the right go to market strategy is. Now Blend serves both ends of the spectrum. We serve the top end all the way down to brokers. And I think initially we started. The reason that we started at the top end of the market and started going after the larger banks is because it went back to the principle of impact. We felt like for better or worse, we felt like we could get them to adopt fast enough that it would provide enough impact to the market that we would feel good about our mission of creating this kind of impact in the consumer finance ecosystem. And that ended up being right. But that was a bet we were making on ourselves.

But again, it's driven by your framework of how did you have the biggest impact? And so it led to their prioritization of like, hey, let's choose the large bank and non bank lenders first and then you're addressing the rest of the market next.

And that was somewhat controversial because there were people who said, well, the banks will never partner with a fintech company, but I think we believe that they would with the right value proposition and the right level of partnership. And that's been a huge part of our business to this day.

It's actually one of the adages of enterprise sales is how do you make your customers a hero. Right. That's why they take a leap on it. A lot of it is creating credibility, but also sharing the vision of what you want to do, what you want to build. And actually the goal for your company is not to make Blend the household names to make your customers succeed and vice versa. I think a lot of early founders don't realize that their main goal is to make their customer, these large institutions successful. And the day thrive, you will thrive as part of it. Part of that success in making your customers a hero is this vision you have for Blend. And I want to hear you talk about two areas. One, your vision for Blend around financial services in general and why you think it's important. And number two, your vision for Blend on how you're going to make an impact on lenders and community. Because I think both those high order, equally important objectives really, I think, drive your company and actually create a connection with the customers.

Blend's mission is to create a simpler and more transparent consumer finance ecosystem. And part of that is accessibility and credit. I mentioned the story about my Parents getting their home and that turning into wealth. Well, that was in Cincinnati where the average home price is $100,000. This isn't for people here in Silicon Valley, this is for people across the world. And so my hope is over time we're able to get more and more of those people, easier ways to just understand what's available to them. In the financial services sector, the government puts a lot of these things in place because they want consumers to be able to get them. It's really on the technology companies and the lenders to figure out how to make it available in low friction for the consumers to be able to take advantage of those. I see us bringing that simplicity and transparency to consumer finance and hopefully that will help drive accessibility in credit, accessibility in housing, those kinds of things that I think historically have been extremely successful in the US Especially, how do we make that even better than what it is today? And so that shapes our thinking. And I think that mortgage is definitely the most highest complexity and maybe the best long term benefit for consumers. And that's why it's been a huge focus for us. But I think all of financial services is struggling with similar things where they've been using technology that's been out in the market for 20, 30, 40, 50 years and there hasn't been a heavy investment in it for a variety of reasons, whether it was because there was a crisis and banks stopped spending and so people stopped building or whatever it was. Those kinds of things I think are going to change over the next five or 10 years. It's going to become simpler, it's going to become less lower friction, it's going to become a lot more accessible. And so that's where we view the investment being needed.

Let's maybe talk about that just broader the impact of technology on fintech. We started talking at the very beginning how financial services and banking in general is a huge multi trillion dollar market that like you said, has been using old technology for a very long time. And there's all these cycles and ups and downs, a lot of opportunity. But the past four or five years at Investor, we've seen a rush of new startups, a rush of new technologies. Blockchain is an example of a technology people seem very excited about that's going to impact the financial services industry. But there's a lot of noise around that. Maybe talk about what you see around blockchain in particular, but also fintech in general.

Yeah, So I think that the new availability of technology data infrastructure has been a really important area that's grown without the data infrastructure that grew into things like mint.com and these other personal financial management products, I don't think that we would be in a place to drive the level of impact that we want as Blend. And so we're grateful for that. First of all, I think the data infrastructure is a key piece. And now as we get into a relatively complex ecosystem, there's 20 plus entities that touch a mortgage, for example, there's many that touch an auto loan, a credit card. And so having all of those things, I think blockchain opens up the possibility for having those things become better and smarter over time. Not just blockchain, by the way, I think machine learning, for example, in a very human driven world where there's too many rules to build into a system, you, you need something like machine learning. You can't rely on humans to do everything and you can't rely on rules to build every rule because the rules change too often and they're too brittle and they're too kind of variable to have exactness around those things. You have to bring machine learning into the play. And so I expect these technologies to be widely deployed in the next 10 years. And if you're an entrepreneur who's coming into this and looking at what's possible versus what you see possible 10 years ago, you'll see there's tons of opportunity.

I like that framework. Also, the layering of technologies make more things available. So first and foremost was accessibility to data. Because once you have data through these personal services like Mint or whatever, you can do a bunch of stuff with it. And then secondly, to your point earlier, this market is so complex and that was part of what happened during the 0809 financial crisis. These instruments and derivatives were so complex, no one knew what was going on. So the fact that you need something like machine learning or machine intelligence to reason about it, you don't outsource decisions, but you need some help to reason around what's going on. Finally, this idea of a blockchain or something else like a ledger that's immutable, if you will, that helps give some level of trust and transparency think to institutions and consumers. As an investor, I'm super excited about this intersection of two or three technologies. I think for me personally, blend was one of the first investments we made. We have other ones in the fintech space, but we're actively thinking about how the next five, 10 years will shape out based upon these technologies in Silicon Valley, product and product managers on the consumer side, and what's important, there's A lot of AB testing, buttons and colors. But I think product on the enterprise side is very different because you have two audiences. You have our consumer, the borrower, you also have the banks. And you're one of the great product driven founders we know of in enterprise software. How do you think about that as managing product at Blend? And how do you weigh all the different stakeholders?

Yeah, actually we have a third stakeholder. We have the consumer, of course, and we have the buyer at the bank, but we also have users at the bank. And the biggest challenge that our competitors saw over the years that we've been able to bridge has been making sure we build something that even the users at the bank want to use. Because without that, you're going to get low adoption. And so we're seeing that in the market, Blend has the most adoption because we focused on that. And so I think for us, a big thing that I think makes us successful from a product perspective is that we really actively try to understand the problems for not just one, but all three of our Personas. The consumer, the lender user, and the internal user, and the buyer. And make sure we have a strong belief in how we think that should look in five years. And having that strong belief helps us work backwards to, okay, what's a great next step. And so it's really, really hard in enterprise to move the needle in huge jumps and get your enterprise companies to completely change their behavior overnight. And so it's really about how do you take that next step. And so maybe the core learning for us there was how do we build a process and a culture around iteration and taking small steps towards an end vision? We'll have a true north, but how do we take small steps in that direction? How do we do multiple releases a day to constantly be improving towards what we want to do as a company? That's something that's very, very hard to pull off an enterprise. But I would say if you're an enterprise company, find a way to do that and stick to your guns, especially a big enterprise company or focus on large enterprise, because that's the type of thing that will allow you to long term be truly differentiated from your competition. Who's maybe pushing one change every month or one change every three months. We can push multiple changes a day.

The product manager is thinking about the person not in the room. That could be customer, the user, the enterprise buyer. It could be the sales rep, the customer support rep. And so you had to be thoughtful about all these stakeholders. And so it's almost like empathy becomes a Thing you look for or hire for around great product pieces and then this layer upon that, how you make small iterations towards a greater vision and prioritizing is always great way to navigate. How do you choose and hire your product leaders? What attributes do you look for as advice to CEOs out there to hire good product people?

For our product people, I sort of require them to be very hands on. I'm a very hands on person. I think that when you're close to the market, you're close to the users that you described, you get a deep understanding of that problem space and it even evolves your understanding of the problem space over time. One random anecdote, as we spent more and more time with this market, and I spend a ton of time with our customers, we've gotten a really good understanding of how these things come to be. And by that I mean all of a sudden, after you get to a certain point in your product, all of your customers will start saying the same thing, hey, here's this other thing that might be an interesting thing to look at. And by looking across those customers and having that depth and closeness with the customers and the users, you'll get a really great sense of what the right strategy to get to that end vision that you have in mind. And so I require all of our product managers or leaders to be very hands on. This is not a place where you come and you manage a team and you help guide them. Only you have to also be a player and you have to understand and have a point of view on where we need to go as a product team and help drive there. Because frankly, we're never going to have enough resources as a startup. You're never going to have enough resources to have people sitting on the beach and waiting for things to happen with the team around them. And so you're always going to feel strapped and there's always too much to do to have people not be hands on. So that would be the number one trait. And then I think beyond that, somebody who's willing and understands and has that empathy that you described around the user and helps us figure out how we take our product from where we are today to where we want it to be.

Yeah, I love that advice of the ruthless prioritization because there's so many things you can do, you know, rush against competitors, incumbents, and then as a product manager, you got to lean into the customers, be hands on, understand what they, what makes our lives better, and then ruthlessly prioritize what's the first, second, third, Most important thing to do today.

And I would echo that just a little bit. I mean, one of the things that we struggle with, I think, as a team or struggled with over the years, has been how do you take the 500 requests that come in from the field? And basically you have to say no to all of them. And then you have to figure out of the 500, what are the 10 pieces of really, truly investable things for your company, and then make those things a reality. And maybe in a way that the field envisioned, but maybe in a way that they didn't. And so for us, it's tough, but you got to be able to say no. You got to be able to have that connection with the customer to help them understand why. Because if you're going to say no to them without telling them why, they're not going to be happy. And so having that, not just the empathy for the user and how you build your product, but even your empathy for your user and when you talk to them and how you work with them, it's really important with any product.

10 features that matter, right? And so good versus great. A great product is the one you get those 10 features. Right. And, you know, the other 490 you mentioned aren't right. But also having a rationale with the customers why these are, trust me, you're going to be happy with these 10 requests and other four, maybe just building upon that. If you take a step back after your tenure so far at Blend and you're still in the early innings, what one piece of advice would you give to your listeners out there that are founders or CEOs or want to start a company, that's the most important thing to kind of change the direction or improve where their company's headed.

Sure. So, yeah, I'd say extending what we were talking about earlier around being results oriented, you know, don't be results oriented. And as an extension of that, don't be afraid to try things that probably won't work. Because the thing that's important at early stages in the company are learning. The most important thing is learning our product looks nothing like it did five years ago. And probably in five years, we're going to look back and be like, wow, that product was terrible in 2018. And so I think the most important thing is learning when you're on a growth trajectory. And so try new things, make educated bets, but don't be afraid to be wrong as long as when you're wrong, you understand why you were wrong and get into that level of detail and Then maybe kind of one more tactical thing that we learned early on. Early on we had these really smart founders who had sort of purview into every aspect of the company and everything was an overlapping decision that was made in consensus. I would say the earlier the better. Find a way to divide the responsibilities and in a really functional way and create the ability for those groups to move fast. And by that I mean give that person who's head of engineering full autonomy over engineering decisions. And yes, they should get input, they should work with other members of the team, but nobody should be able to stop them from moving forward. Because if you hire people that you trust and are great, watch how they work. Absolutely. But give them the autonomy to run. And even if they're not going to make the same decision that you would 100% of the time, if it was 80% of the time, that would be amazing because now Everybody's running at 100 miles an hour instead of everybody moving 5, 10 miles an hour. We ran into that early on at Blend. We made the change super early to have really functional division of responsibilities. And that allowed us to move very quickly with that level of autonomy.

Going back to even your poker analogy, as long as you're doing the right things and learning and secondly, hiring the right folks, like good product people, good engineering leaders, and giving them the tool autonomy to run. Those are great, great pieces of advice. Thanks, Nima, for the time today and sharing both your thoughts on the market and the Blend story and your story in particular. At Greylock, we think about, okay, what makes a great investment. A great company is finding a great market and a great team attacking that market. And then I think what we have here, when I met you early on with SAHM and the rest of the teams, we had this huge opportunity ahead of us in consumer lending and then just a team of learners that were just iterating with velocity and hunger and learning. That think resonate with me and what we do at Greylock. And so I'm looking forward to working with you for the next two or three iterations of Blend and what this becomes in five, ten years.

Great. Thanks for having me, Jerry.