Opendoor

Everybody's a fucking casino.

Who's the best one? Opendoor's down 10.

It's gross.

It's gross.

The stock reaction is already showing up who wins and who loses as rates stay elevated.

So Opendoor, for example, right, their stock is down 70% year to date because their iBuyer model depends on transaction volume and that transaction volume is not there.

We just talked about what is it, the 16% year over year decline in pending home sales, right? Now, you think Compass on the other side, they are up double digits on the year because they are a luxury market sort of exposure there when it comes to real estate.

Anywhere real estate acquisition helps them insulate from mid-market, which is very much what Opendoor does.

So it's also worth noting how violently these stocks swing on rate expectations.

Think on November 2nd, Robert, when the 10-year yield briefly came down a little bit, right, sub 5%, Rocket Companies was up 9%, Compass and Zillow were both up 8% on a single day, while the homebuilder ETF, ITB, barely moved.

What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Alexey Komiserik, member of the technical staff at Anthropic.

Alexey ran growth engineering at Opendoor and Masterclass before Anthropic.

He also teaches growth engineering at Reforge.

In this conversation, we explore how the vibe code era is rewriting the math for build versus buy, why Anthropic built its own CDP, and what MarTech tools survive even though they could technically build them internally.

And so like, I mean, specifically starting with email, but also the performance marketing and the landing page stuff was very much just like, you know, it's not interesting until you've actually like had the problem.

And then you're like, oh, actually like automating this is great.

And part of the reason Opendoor hired me was like, they were trying to figure out what they're like, like long-term email sequence looked like and what the future of that architecture was like.

And I was like, oh, I know exactly how we should do it.

The media portrayed this startup as a rare embodiment of the type of big problems that Silicon Valley should be solving and that all other startups should aspire to their level.

That company was called Opendoor, and their idea was to make it possible to buy or sell a home in just a few clicks.

Opendoor was heralded as the next big startup behind Uber and Airbnb given the scope of the problem they were going after, the size of the real estate industry, and the company's proposed value creation.

Opendoor was the perfect mix of all the hottest Silicon Valley trends from the 2010s.

Online to offline businesses, data science, machine learning, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and automation all applied to the old-fashioned world of real estate.

In Silicon Valley, where academia is greatly devalued, Opendoor's differentiation was that by recruiting the best Stanford PhDs, data scientists, mathematicians, software engineers, and quants, they could build proprietary algorithms that could accurately price the exact current market value of any given home and then predict the resale value of that same home over time.

With these proprietary algorithms that could price in every single aspect about a home and its neighborhood, Opendoor's value proposition was that they could value homes with more precision, rigor, speed, and accuracy than a traditional real estate agent.

The company could then use these algorithms to buy homes at scale, quantify their value, repair and renovate them with as little capital as possible, and then resell that home at a higher price within three to four months, basically flipping homes at scale with algorithms and automation.

And obviously that's true.

And I think obviously like, and you know, nothing is better, you know, in getting any, in any of these stocks, whether it's IronCypher, Hut, Carvana or Opendoor, then, you know, a dirt cheap stock price, you know, to kind of, you know, that de-risks everything.

But today in looking at all these names, you almost have to be a financial wizard You have to be sort of like an expert on real estate trusts almost for a lot of these names, which seems kind of crazy, but it's true.

And we can get into that.

Anyway, interesting stuff.

All right, I wanna just show the chart of Opendoor because I think it's important to talk about the lottery tickets that didn't hit for people.

So Opendoor went crazy and was up, like, six times in a matter of two or three months, and people are saying it's gonna go to $20 a share, $30 a share, $50 a share, $100 a share.

This company's gonna be...

Even, like, the insiders of the company were saying-

Okay

... huge, huge gain.

So, so he, he called the shot, Babe Ruthed it, it worked, and then he tried to do the same thing for Opendoor and he took the stock.

And then after 10 years, I want to get back to building.

So I joined Opendoor.

I was the head of learning and development there.

and running all management and leadership development, role-specific training, employee onboarding, and then started my coaching certification journey.