YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Lofton

lines on the record: 55
first: 2023-05-11
most recent: 2023-05-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“But it's also led us to where we are today. So if that's the case, then what's a different way to think about ownership besides kind of a zero or one option, an all or nothing game where you got to have this giant amount of capital up front to actually get a home, so what are some options in between to try to democratize and diversify the number of people who have access to that same tool? And so that's where we came at this problem from with the shared appreciation thing. This is one of those tools that could help chip away that in the future somebody would think, actually the way to buy a home is to have a co-investor in it until I can be a full owner versus needing to be owner right off right off the bat. And with that kind of thinking, you can move from saying, oh, there's just no way that this intractable problem, that there's nothing to do to like, hey, let's go test it out. Let's see if this works in a few markets with a few people. And if it does, let's expand it.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then trying to prove out how to cover come those barriers. And with each one of those steps, something moves from being, well, it's only done this way. It can never be done another way. That's just what we're stuck in to maybe this is okay for some people, appropriate for some people too. This is the way it is. And that's electric cars and Tesla. People said no one's ever really going to want to go away from gasoline-powered cars to this is only for wealthy people to, you know, you have every car company now. switching their entire fleet to electric so i think part of this is you got to start somewhere and say this is the world that we live in do we like the fact that um residential real estate is a speculative market not really but we should have changed that many decades ago in the 30s when it was kind of enshrined in how mortgages were done and then ultimately became a speculative investment that people could build wealth on which has been powerful for many fans”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That comes back to the heart of what really inspired me and Jonathan with Landon in the first place. I think it's funny that the analogy I like to think about is Elon Musk and Tesla. Now, I'm always hesitant to bring Elon Musk because I'm not an Elon Musk. But I do think one thing he has been really good at is painting a really long-term picture of the future and asking what are the real world impediments to getting to that future.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's how capitalism has worked since day one. And so if you're trying to figure out Tools to mitigate some of the effects of capitalism that are destabling. Again, if you have a society where there's a ton of have-nots and not a whole lot of haves, we've seen that story play out before, and it's not great. And if you want to try to chip away at balancing that back out so that, you know, we can have societies that are that survive, then you need to think about this sort of thing. How are you going to give access to people who don't, to families who haven't been able to jump into that game yet? And that's kind of where you can think landed fits in is just helping people access that”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think that that is true, that there's going to be increasingly, as boomers pass away, there's going to be another shift in intergenerational wealth, which is going to trend demographically. It's just going to trend to the boomers that have money, right”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not everybody. I mean, I mean, obviously first time homebuyers, this is very attractive too because they don't have another asset to sell and have some down payment for. So that means a lot of people who are in their maybe late 20s, early 30s, a lot of people making big life decisions, getting married, maybe going to have kids. But you also have people who are retired or near retirement age and haven't ever owned a home and want to own their home now. There's one home buyer I remember who shared that she needed help from Landa because she needed to buy a bigger home because her kids were moving back in. You know, that's the world we live in now. And, you know, now she was going to have her kids and her grandkids under one roof. And so she was going to need a little bit of support to get there. So you really had people to.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What totally depends on where, right? Because in the Bay Area, you're well over $100,000, and you're like, 110,000 dollars or so, but it's averaged out the next biggest market for us was Denver, Colorado and very different. Market, though increasingly catching up. So I think on average now we're somewhere between 70 and $80,000 per home buyer.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other institutions. Yeah. In this case, the hospital system you work for would pay landed as a vendor. To kind of run this program for them. And then the money that's actually invested in that home is going to be coming from that institution. You wouldn't need to kind of pay anybody anything until.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was all under one roof. And now with kind of the way that was 2015. It's now 2023 different world. And what makes a lot more sense is kind of decouple those two things where there's a lot of work to be done to fundraise, whether it be from private money or public money for shared appreciation. And then you need the technology and the infrastructure to actually deploy that. And that's what Landed Inc. is going to continue to do. It's be that infrastructure layer. Now the fundraising opportunities are much bigger than they used to be. State of California just announced California Dream for All, the biggest shared appreciation program ever. And that was something we helped them design. And they saw our work and said, hey, what if the state tried to scale something like this? And so, you know, there is a lot of work to be done on the fundraising side, but that is kind of now increasingly separate from the work of being the infrastructure to deploy it.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Less fundrais Yeah, because one of the things that we learned, we started this company really integrating the two jobs of building the infrastructure and technology platform, which was the ultimately we were generating revenue through our partnerships with real estate there. That was the business model with a need to fundraise a lot of capital for real estate investment and shared appreciation.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or housing as a benefit, but don't want to hire a bunch of people to do the work that we do. They don't want to rebuild the systems that we've built to try to make that be done efficiently. So now we're white labeling, that same down payment structure for other institutions.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. We're a lead generator. Yeah. You got it And what's been really interesting with the change of this last year with interest rates and shift in the economy overall is we also recognize that that has been our revenue model until now. And with kind of a lot of the change in the market, we recognize there was a need to diversify how we operate the business to still provide a similar type of offering, but look at different revenue models. And we've started to shift more as a B2B where we are working with organizations, you know, hospital systems, universities. Even some companies that have capital invest themselves and want to offer home ownership as a benefit.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Coldwell Banker, or NRT, any of these big names. And we We just say, hey, you're already spending, you're going to spend a lot of money on marketing. Think about this as your marketing budget. We're going to bring you leads rather than you have to go find that person. We're going to literally bring you someone who's More ready to buy than most of your leads in the first place because they've come to us, learned about the financing, have now access to a down payment program that helps, you know, get them ready to buy today instead of having to wait a few years to save for a down payment.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, you know, you can think of it as these investors already know they are going to invest in real estate and want to invest in real estate and they have the money available, but they just don't have a mechanism to get it out there efficiently. And so they want to work with us to be that mechanism.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The third component, that share of the equity of the home when it gets refinanced, we had baked that into our own revenue models. That would go back to the investors that we partnered with. We always recognize that there's an option to like any traditional fund investor have that be a revenue stream. We felt like it was a better idea to try to be a neutral third party rather than being the investor. Kind of facilitating that so it could play traffic cop, if you will”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Commission. And then we expanded that to mortgages as well, started our own joint venture mortgage business. We were able to be a mortgage broker in that case. And the idea here is that the growth in the business side can come as you add on more products”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, just like how Redfin and others got started, we would partner with real estate agents who, if we bring them a lead, a home buying teacher who wants to use our program, they agree to share in part of their commission with us.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great question. So that's where kind of going back to where we were talking about this idea of opco and propco. That's where these two things are really important to think about because the investment in the down payment program that eventually goes to home buyers, that doesn't come back to Landed Inc. That's not what pays my salary or is what Our venture capitalists are seeing their return from. We are just facilitating that relationship and that transaction. You can almost think about our down payment program as our differentiating marketing tool that people are coming to us because they want that help and they want that tool. But ultimately, we landed up initially as a real estate brokerage.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A product like this is even in higher demand than ever has been. That said, we've had a lot of, we still have through this entire change over the last year, still have quite a few people exiting the program. Just recognizing that still when they do the math in the long run, instead of sharing kind of the future gains of the home that they expect, that it makes sense to kind of make a move now and fold that into their mortgage. So it hasn't prevented everybody. It definitely has changed some people's calculations. Investors think about this as a portfolio investment. It's not just One investment, one home. This is actually spread out across a lot of geographies and over a lot of time”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the conversations you always had with investors, as well as home buyers, is recognizing that real estate's always cyclical, right? And that there's going to be changes to what, you know, whether it be just the perceived value of land or things like interest rates, these levers are going to move over time and there's going to be certain moments when it's going to be more interesting and advantageous to say refinance or make a move and others where it might make sense to hold on or in one of those adjustment times. I think what's happened is number one, the change in interest rate has made unaffordability even more of a challenge. Right. So in some ways.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ever done. And the data shows that people tend to get out much sooner than 30 years. 30 years matches the mortgage. It makes the government comfortable. We partner with Fannie Mae to make sure we follow their guidelines. That is a big reason why those numbers like 30 years are there, but the reality is that it's in everybody's interest for people to get out of it sooner. And we just have the job of informing people and reminding them of that.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great question. Well, that's why having a strong relationship with the consumer and keeping them top of mind on how their home is not only a roof over their head and a place where the kids grow up, but actually an investment and keeping them informed with what might be in their interest, what kind of actions might be in their interest to take to make sure they're getting the most out of that investment, including getting out of this partnership. And in talking to investors, probably reason people got comfortable with the time horizon is that the pattern of how people refinance even without landed is something data you can look at. If you're typically people are refinancing anywhere from five to eight years to drive down their interest rate or for some other reason. So if that's already happening, then you can expect that to happen with this product as well. And there are, like I said, there are a lot of different experiments with shared appreciation all over this country. And actually all over the world. I mean, the UK has had one of the biggest shared appreciation down payment program.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're right on the nose there. I mean, it's the federal government for generations made it illegal to basically build wealth and pass it along to your next generation or set it up so that you got a chance for ownership but then lost it. That happened in 2008. It most impacted Black families. The idea that if you have a tool that actually can act as the bank of mom and dad that a lot of people don't have, you could help people get into this game. This game of home ownership, this game of ownership period that helps build wealth. And that's, so what we found is that Well, even though you don't have to explicitly say or focus it on being a tool for BIPOC homebuyers, let's say, that you do have people disproportionately who don't come from intergenerational wealth using a tool like this.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We want them to own the 100% of the home that's in their interest. And then we want to recycle the capital. You know, our investors are doing this because they want to see that money recycled, whether it's an impact from an impact perspective. They want to reinvest it in the next teacher or they want to gain a return from it. Either way, they want to see that kind of recycled back before 30 years.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, we do our best to communicate with you to let you know that we still exist and that, hey, if you wanted to refinance today, this is what you would share. You may not want to hold on to this forever. We really actively try to manage people out of the partnership because we think of it as a stair step into ownership.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's also, I mean, there is a real cost to it. If there's a potential that you're going to share in some of the equity, you know, essentially that you're gaining from this investment, that's a cost. It's just that it's not fixed. It's not fixed. We're not going to say it's definitely this percentage of the borrowing, which is what a loan is. That's what you will do with your mortgage. And the other pieces there's no monthly cost to it. So in that way, On a month to month basis. This is the whole thing. For most families, we're talking about back to my own experience with my family, it's just about cash flow. It's about a month-to-month management of your money. And so if you can get money that you don't have to add to your debt burden, that can be a huge thing. And that's what this would do.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. Well, in that case, what you said about it being feeling like free money would be the case. We were always very clear with people this isn't free money.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How much appreciates the part of the change of value. And the person would share back that. Portion of the change in value that they agreed to when they bought their home, plus what they originally got Initial model was for every kind of 1% down payment support you get, you would share in 2.5% of appreciation. So if you get 10% down payment support, you're going to share in 25%.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were building off of shoulders of others. There have been institutions since the 70s that have been leveraging shared appreciation or shared equity to help people into homes. The reality is though, it's always been specific organizations, maybe one city at a time that was doing this, no one had really figured out how to make this a scalable solution.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that was one of the pools of money we have to raise. One thing that I never thought I would become was a fundraising machine. But we had to raise money. That was what's called a propco, the property company. We had to raise money that was available to the individual buyer to invest in their home to help them with the down payment. That was kind of one stream. The other stream was we need money to run our company. And that was the operating business, the OPCO. And that's where we raised money from venture. It has always been a dual fundraising challenge. And on top of that, of course, that's the fundraising piece. Then we headed to do the work of building the infrastructure.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we would be helping people access a traditional mortgage. That was our goal. Once you get to a traditional mortgage, which basically means you need to have 20% down, right? That was the golden number we're trying to get people to. So, our job was to get people to that 20%. They would then have to go to a bank or a mortgage lender. To get the other 80%.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In an interface, an interface for the consumer, but also just lets a lot of data management. Of what properties are being purchased, what their values, and what that means for the investors that we are partnering with. So there was just a lot of components there. And so to be able to compete, we wanted to be able to offer real ownership in something.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Buyer. That's a lot of money. We start multiplying how many people would use support like this. So we're going to have to mobilize a lot of money. It's going to take a lot of infrastructure to get us there. And frankly, there's an unknown timeline here, how long it's going to take to make that happen. With an unknown amount of money that's going to take, with a lot of risk. And it was clear to us at the time that venture seemed to be the right fit. And so, and there's other pieces that are worth mentioning. We were going to have to compete for talent. And we're going to need a lot of engineers. Yeah. Engineers. Their option is to go get equity from one company over us. We're going to have to compete with that.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, one of the earliest conversations was, what's the corporate structure going to look like? What's going to be the best? And our approach, our thinking was okay, we know there's a challenge here for a lot of people with this down payment piece. And we know that to create a different world, we're going to have to eventually move just more money than God to make this happen. Because each person, if you're talking about offering up to $150,000 per”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And these are the people who are feeling this problem the most. And you could partner with their employer, somebody who they trust, to communicate, to market that this product exists. And that's ended up what we did. We ended up partnering with school districts and hospitals and governments to kind of get the word out about our product so that their staff wouldn't just feel like, hey, what's this sketchy thing I found on the internet that's offering down payment program, but actually this is something that's trying to address a challenge that they know I have.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. But if you don't have the whatever, $100 to $200,000 up front to get the mortgage in the first place, SOL. So the core concept here was who has kind of the jobs that are paying relative enough to afford a mortgage but may not have the upfront costs? What are the jobs that are relatively counter-cyclical, right? So if the economy goes down, these jobs still exist. Well, they tend to be these infrastructure jobs in education, in healthcare, in government. So, you know, the lesson here for us was make sure the product that you have is actually solving a real problem for people.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Needed to buy a home and who don't have the only other option that's available out there, which is the Bank of Mom and Dad Know going and borrowing money or getting money from a family member to get started. If you don't have that. Who is having this problem? What's the person who could otherwise afford a mortgage? Our product helps people who have enough money to afford rent on a monthly basis, but can't do that and afford the down payment.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That decision, who our customer was at the end of the day, came after we figured out this tool, to be honest. Because for all the reasons that you just let you listed, it was who most acutely is going to feel this problem of not having the upfront wealth.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If this keeps happening, no one's going to be able to or work in these positions. And if they don't work in these positions, who's there to teach your kids? And who wants to live in a place where there aren't teachers, right? And so I think about this as an infrastructure challenge. How do you make sure that you have the people that you need to build the cities and the societies that you want to build? And support them, you know, uphold them because they're upholding all of us every single day. They're doing all this stuff that we already depend on every single day. Why aren't we actually upholding them? And there seems to be a way in which we just think more creatively about the financial tools that are actually available. But making them more widely available to people leveraging technology to do so, there is a huge opportunity here.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. I mean, good salaries. A lot of these folks have pensions, right? They actually have some mechanism where they're starting to build wealth, but they're not paid enough. To put money in retirement, pay the cost of living for where they live, and save for a down payment. And these are people who can't just pick up their laptop and go work remotely. You got to be present for them. And the story that really struck me is that. There is a teacher in the South Bay of the Bay Area who would drive two and a half hours each way to get to work. Sometimes we'd decide just to sleep in their car. They didn't want to drive back. There's the emotional part of me that says, Oh, that just feels wrong, right? I don't want that to exist. But honestly, the math side of me, this equation doesn't add up.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Occupants be a part owner in it. And then that would be a really interesting proposition to big time investors because they're trying to figure out another way. You know, you had Blackstone and others after the 2008 financial crisis buy up a bunch of properties. That used to be for ownership an hour, only rental. And that wasn't a world that either Jonathan were super excited about.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I will say, though, that's where partnering up, meeting other people who have come from a different background is super important, something I also believe in. And if you're going to build something great, you got to diversify your team. And my co-founder, Jonathan, came at it from a slightly different angle, but awakened me to another thing that was going on in our economy and our society, which is given how expensive land is and becoming, this is one area that had yet to really leverage technology to disaggregate or disintermediate investing in something like real estate, that there were a lot of people that would want to invest in real estate, but just can't because of the cost of entry is too big. So what if you made it easier to access investment in one of the biggest asset classes in the world and do so in a more cooperative way with the people who want to live in it? So it wasn't just, hey, we're going to buy up property and rent it back out to people that actually you can have.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's where my head went because that's what I knew really well. And honestly, I'm a millennial. A millennial who lived in San Francisco Bay Area. I was like, how the heck am I going to be able to afford to buy a home at some point? It was a selfish motivation too. Just like I need a tool that moves me from. Being a renter to being an owner, the zero or one kind of dilemma, what's the gradient in between?”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's really about the pinnacle of investing having your own home. And I thought, man, it would be really, first of all, crazy that I'm over-educated person and just now thinking about this. Why haven't I been forced to really learn this earlier on? And number two is what if we could bring the tools of high finance and tools of the wealthy to more people? Democratize who has access to build wealth in the first place.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remember sitting in this is, I think I'm the only person in the world that was inspired in an intro to finance class. And in this class, we talked a lot about the concept of diversification and the power of diversifying where your money is so that if one investment goes up, another one can go down, you still can be in a good place. And that was key to how rich people stayed rich. And I just remember sitting there being struck by the fact that no one in my social circles thinks that way. people don't have enough stuff, enough money, enough capital to even think about diversifying. Most people are just thinking about how the heck am I going to save enough to ever get a down payment on a home.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of my motivation to be a part of that campaign was well known if we're going to win this. I can't predict this, but I know it's worth working on and trying. There is a viable path here. It's going to be a lot of work. So it's that kind of one-part delusion and one-part grounded reality that I think I learned. There ultimately was successful in the campaign that kind of drew me to bring that to other ventures.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm a half black guy who grew up with a mom who's white, a dad who's black. But, you know, to the outside world, I'm a black man in America. And I genuinely thought that maybe by the time I'm dead, we'd see a president, one of my older, be a black guy, but not in 2007, 2008. And honestly, that was where all the skepticism was coming from, for example, from my own father, a black man who said this is never going to happen. This is never going to happen. And so.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having people see themselves in that story and getting them motivated to be a part of it. Was what my job was But I didn't, you know, this is in hindsight at the time. I was just doing it because I thought, man, this is the next thing that needs to happen. And I also never thought a guy that looked like me would ever have a chance of running for president.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For sure. I would never trade in that opportunity that I had to work on the Obama campaign for anything. It really did ground me both in understanding the power of having clear set of values that you operate from as an organization and making sure that that's known and felt across entire operation. In that case, in the Obama campaign, it was all about respect and power include. You know, no matter what, there's a way in which you can honor what people, what their talents and their resources, what they are and what they can bring to the table. And you could find a way to align those up to achieve a greater outcome if you just empower them right. I also learned personally what I'm passionate about, what I'm good at. And what I'm good at is enrolling people. My dad always said, if I had been announced more religious, I definitely would have been a pastor. But given that that wasn't my path, that, you know, getting people excited, telling a story.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Organizers from labor movements, you had management consultants, you had top lawyers, you had technologists, you had all these people from all corners of society coming together and saying, I think I have something to contribute here to try to do a campaign differently.”
2023-05-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT