YouSaid · the spoken record

Jay Farner

lines on the record: 37
first: 2025-11-12
most recent: 2025-11-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That almost like undersells how hard it is to build a monetization engine. Like, you know, mortgage, I've had to get like fingerprinted and God knows how many states. Like, you know, we're doing this Mr. Cooper deal and I had to send like, you know, ink fingerprints to the state of Virginia, like every single bank account I've ever had. Ah, it's just so complicated. I mean, I wish it weren't that way, but it turns out it's very, very complicated to add on and bolt on the monetization engine. And by the way, it's very hard to build one of these daily active used products, but because you have a little bit more voyeurism in the field of real estate, it's not necessarily like I have very, very near-term proximity to purchase intent. And then like, why hasn't Zillow done this? You know why? I'll tell you what. It's really, really hard. And they're addicted to the current business model of selling leads to agents.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you have people like it's kind of like there's some search engines that are very, very tightly coupled to transaction. And real estate is not always that way for two reasons. Number one is that there is this entertainment value to it. And then number two, there's just a lot of latency. Like I was looking at homes when I was just a little renter in Santa Clara having just moved here. I couldn't afford a house in Palo Alto. And I would look at homes all the time. And that was actually like there was purchase intent, but just with like years of latency, you know, versus Google, that's not how you use Google. Like, it's like, I want to buy a fly swatter. I type in fly swatter, and then I see 50 search links pop up. I click on one of those, and then I buy, and maybe I'll buy tomorrow, but there's just much more near-term proximity to that. So that's part of the reason why you've got a DAU product, and that does not necessarily mean you just bolt on a monetization engine and then you get it to work, particularly where the monetization engine, it's like.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I'm going to spend all night looking at homes that I cannot afford in a weird part of the world that I'm never going to even visit. Why do people do that? I don't know. Like, it's fun. It's kind of like this aspirational. I like looking at homes. Oh, like I heard that, you know, Cheryl Sandberg sold like, let me look at that house. I heard that, you know, Sharon Stone this or I heard that, you know, Liam Neeson, that, like, you're not going to buy Liam Neeson's house, but you're still curious, you go look at it. The purchase intent tends to be low.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's so much latency. I mean, I think Zillow is a good example of this. A lot of people use Zillow. It actually doesn't make that much money because it's like, it's a lead generation machine for agents. That's how they make money. The vast majority of their revenue comes from like you do a search. Why are you doing a search? You're not even doing a search with purchase intent. Like Google makes a lot, we've talked about Google a lot in many podcasts, right? So Google makes lots of money and it's a freemium model where it's like 99% of the time you're searching for like how do I kill this annoying fly that keeps like buzzing around our pot. And then one percent of the time it's like, I want to go buy a fly swatter. And that's purchase intent. And then there is a fly in our studio varin. That's what I'm referencing here. So, you know, one percent of the time there's purchase intent. Whereas if I'm, there are people, you know the term Netflix and Chill, right? There are people that have done this with like looking for homes. It's like.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every single year. Let's add retail. Let's add, like, they have so many different product lines. And the reason why is because they all are like, you know, if you have a curve that looks like this and then you have the exact opposite curve, you combine this with that, and then you get a straight line. And you want to have straight lines because they're predictable, but your business actually under the cover is typically not a straight line. It's composed. It's like a Fourier transform. You have these overlapping sine curves in such a way where you actually do get hopefully a monotonically increasing straight line.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if I have a line that looks like this, it actually might be composed of 50 things that look like this, but to Varun's point, they kind of counterbalance. And a big mistake that entrepreneurs often make is like, I have a business that is a sign curve. Let's kill it. I don't like that business. No, no, no, no. It's actually a great, like most businesses are in some way, shape, or form cyclical, even if you don't think of it that way. Like, just add another sign curve that has like a slightly different period. So it just counterbalances. Like if you're, and the banks actually have done, like JP Morgan is the most valuable bank in the world, and they have done this because they have a bunch of sign curves, right? It's like, should they get rid of their investment banking business, even though in like 2022, the investment banking business was not profitable? No. But they're going to make a lot of money sometimes. It's like a feast or famine type thing. But let's add wealth management because we get 50 basis points on a trillion dollars every day.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was going to say, so there's a concept in math, it's called a Fourier transform. And basically what that is is like if you have any function, if you have a line, like every business, their revenue and their profit should look like this. If you look like this, everybody's happy. If you look like this, everybody's not happy. If you look like this, people are like probably not happy. But actually, there's nothing. And what a Fourier transform is, is basically you can decompose any function into a bunch of sine curves.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's really like you start off with the profit center. That has been solved, and that's a really hard problem that entrepreneurs that come into our office every day. It's like, I'm going to figure that out eventually. But right now I have a product of people. I've got a toothbrush, but I have no idea how to make money on it. The other way of doing this, and I think it's a really interesting, you know, it's a 40-year-old company. Varun's been there for two years. You have a real profit engine. How do we turn it into a toothbrush?”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is it that we should do? And the answer can't just be we're going to drive down the cost to zero and have robots do everything and you're going to hate us. It's like a real interesting opportunity if you're engaging somebody every month to do something with them.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where Zapos was one of the very, very few companies that decided to take customer support and try to turn it from a cost center and actually turn it into a, well, I think he didn't call it a profit center. I think he called it like a love center or something. But like, you know, really engage the consumer. And there was a famous story from Zappos where there was some woman and the customer support rep add Zapos sent her flowers. Something bad happened to her. It's just like, you don't expect that to happen. Normally it's like, okay, I hired McKinsey and they said I could cut two-thirds of my people this way and that way. And then I could put people in this IVR and then I'll save $4 million a year. And like that's how a lot of companies treat their I'm sending a bill to a customer or I'm doing customer support with the customer as opposed to looking at it as an opportunity to upsell something, not in like an evil way, but it's like, hey, we have a monthly communication with you.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, whereas, on the other hand, you have companies where it's like they don't pass the toothbrush test, but that's actually not a qualification for success, right? $10 billion net income like that. So how do you take, I would rather start off with this, here is a very, very valuable thing that's a real business model perfectly run, very, very profitable. How do you add more products and services that add more value to the consumer? It's like you go to the dentist twice a year, that's it. That's just like, is there a way to go interact in a more regular basis? And that's where things like mortgage servicing come in, where it's like you get a bill every month. That's an engagement. What do you do with that? Most people, it's actually really interesting. There was a story that Tony Shea used to tell about Zappos.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And meanwhile, like in Silicon Valley, you have all of these daily active use type products. How do we make money? We can't figure out how to make money. Like, we get people to use this like ChatGPT, people use it every day. Are they making money? No. They're losing a lot of money. So it's very, very rare to find what's the more unique of those two? Is it like I have a product that people use every single day? It's like a toothbrush. Remember like Larry Page had a rule at Google, which is like, we will not launch new products unless they pass the toothbrush test. What's the toothbrush test? You have to use it every day. Hopefully you brush your teeth every day.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And then you have this other type of company where it's like, I make so much money. How do I get the person to use me every day? Not because it's like I just want somebody, like, but it's like I want to add value every day. And this is what I found so compelling because I'm, you know, this is not part of my day job at Andreessen Horwitz. And I invest in a lot of prop tech companies, a lot of fintech companies. And I have kind of an extracurricular activity, which is Rocket. And part of the reason why I find it so interesting is it's like this. So Rocket made, I think it was $10 billion in net income in 2021. Because guess what? Rates go down dramatically. People are like, I'm paying 6% for my I can refinance to two and a half percent. I'm going to do that. I'm going to save a lot of money and rocket was at the epicenter of that. But you don't refinance your mortgage every day. You don't go buy a new house every day. These are not daily active use type products.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got a gold watch If you're here for 10 years, you get a gold watch. So I got a gold watch. It has a nice little engraving on the back. If I can kind of add to what you were saying, I mean, like to take a pithy take on this, a lot of companies in Silicon Valley, it's like, okay, I use this product every day and like the company can't figure out how to make money.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's such a valuable inflection point. Or when they get a HELOC, or it's a financial product where you are taking a large loan responsibly, you're going to pay it back, but the amount of money made at that point in time is so much higher than when you're an 18-year-old kid and getting a free t-shirt with your $75 limit credit card.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That they've made. But I can't just show up at the 23rd hour and say, hey, I know I've never met you before. I've never given you a free t-shirt. You have no financial relationship with me whatsoever. You know, here's a mortgage. You're like, nah, I'm going to get it from the guy that gave me a t-shirt before, or I'm going to get it from my real estate broker. But the lifetime value, like it's funny, in finance, LTV normally means loan to value, right? So the value of the house is $2 million. I got a $1 million loan. That's 50% loan to value. But in most of startup land, when we talk about LTV, we talk about lifetime value. And the majority of lifetime value for a consumer, even an 18-year-old, is going to happen probably 15 years later in the future when they buy a house.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me the card. Well, they were kind of betting on. We talk about this a lot. There's CAC and there's LTV. The customer acquisition cost was t-shirt. The lifetime value is not like how much money I'm going to make for them at 18 when they only extend me $75 of credit. The lifetime value is if I stick with that bank, eventually I'm going to make a very, very valuable transaction. I mean, Banks bank money on net interest margin. So they take deposits, they make loans. What kind of loan might I as an individual take out with this bank that would generate a lot of value for them? Probably a mortgage. So the key inflection point for a bank or a lot of financial services companies is, you know, I now have Eric or Alex or Vruun as a borrower. I'm going to make a lot of money on them, but I kind of have to, I can't just like show up at the 23rd hour. It's actually a good segue for a lot of the cool stuff that I think Rocket and Verun are pushing for with some of the acquisition.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think what's really interesting about mortgage is I'll kind of tell a story by background. Here's my little parable or story. I get to college. I don't have a credit card. I went to Harvard, and there's a store called the Harvard Coop, or it's a co-op, but it's called the Coupe. And that's where you buy your textbooks and everything else. So I want a credit card, and they were like, apply for a Harvard Coupe credit card, and you get a t-shirt. I was like, ooh, I want a t-shirt. That sounds great. So I applied for this card. I had a, I think it was $75 credit limit. A lot of credit that was extended to me. And it was a bank called First USA, which eventually became something else, which eventually became something else, which I think eventually became Chase. So I got my card and they gave me a free t-shirt. Why did they really want me as a customer? Like they didn't want to just think I was like a supermodel and they wanted to put their t-shirt on me. Why is it that they gave me the t-shirt that they gave me?”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, like, you know, should it work that way? I don't know. That's how it works. So, like, that stuff I'm not sure, but yeah, I mean, we're an investor in a company called Point that allows you to sell part of your house. And you have a lot of people that are like, you know, they're house-rich cash poor. And again, that's another thing that doesn't make sense. Like if I have $50,000 in credit card debt and a 620 FICO, but I bought a house in 1950 and I own 100% of it, it's like, that doesn't make sense. Like I shouldn't have to sell my house so I can pay off my credit. Like, why don't I sell 10% of my house? Like stuff like that to just take a binary of like either rent or I own, or I either own all my house or none of my house. Like you can get a little bit more creative around the edges by giving people more options.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there's the blockchain stuff that doesn't really make sense to me. I'm a big, big fan of crypto, but it's like crypto exists. If you're trading things that are purely in That are purely digital works great. If you're saying, I'm going to represent something that's physical, where I need to assert my ownership. Like if somebody's living in my house illegally, that's called they broke into my home. And then I call the police and I say, I live here, Eric broke in, kick him out. And like, you can do that. But if I say, no, no, no, on the blockchain, it says that Eric, like we have, like the guys with guns enforce the laws, and they look at who owns the property based on the county recorder's information. Yeah.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you know that you're going to buy your rental, you'll probably take better care of it. If you take better care of it, well, the landlord doesn't have to worry about as many things and then the cost goes down. So, you know, there's a lot of in betweens that I think technology and actually more importantly, entrepreneurship can help drive. But you need a regulatory environment that allows it.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because there's a saying by Warren Buffett, which I love, which is nobody pays to wash a rental car. Like that makes sense. Why would you wash a car for Hurts? You're returning it.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And housing and all these things that are happening. And somehow. Like that was it. And a lot of these innovations that have popped up, what is Airbnb? Like, you have this piece of real estate and what do you do with it? Well, again, you can rent it or you can own it. You only have two options. No, no. You can rent it for a month or you can buy it and you can save money or rather help make your payments or have a second source of income or whatever because the Olympics are coming to LA in 2028. You have a little apartment near the stadium. Go rent it out for a month. Like that's an innovation that has actually made homeownership more affordable. Or we were an investor in a company that was helping do rent to own. You rent, but like you're basically setting on fire your rental payment every single month because it does not help you in any way, shape, or form in terms of getting ownership in a house. What if you could get a house that you have the right to buy later, which by the way would actually bring down housing costs as well to a certain extent?”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is not surprising. Would you rather, like the American dream is to own a house you currently rent? Do you want to be part of the American dream? Everybody's going to say yes. How do you make it as easy as possible? And it's kind of making the process of buying as easy as possible. It's making it as affordable as possible. And then when you go under the affordability, it's probably the financial side, which is mortgage. And the United States is actually quite unique in that most countries, they don't have 30-year term mortgages to repay your principal and interest. Sometimes you'll have shorter duration, but you have the financial side and then you have the construction side. And I know more about the financial side than the construction side, but both of these, like if you make it cheaper, like guess what? More people will want to, you're going to open up this aperture. And the other thing that I would add, I gave a presentation about this a long time ago. I never thought it would be popular to have, I'm going to give a presentation on like home ownership.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a pipe dream, you can do this. There's this very cool famous Chinese, it's almost like a meme, but like this woman that's like showing off her like, you know, here's like this RV home. Look, shower, look this. And it's pretty funny. It's got like, it's like this very popular TikTok YouTube short thing. But you could do this. I mean, so I think you have like three main things. You need to make it as easy as possible for people to buy the house. And it really is. It's like I've never done this before. I buy a house once every lifetime. What do I do? All I know is that I pay my rent every month. I know how that works. Like I'm scared from this process of homeownership. Where do I buy? Do I get outbid? Do I get a mortgage? Ah, this sounds so complicated. I'm going to keep renting. And the biggest thing that people, I mean, so many people that rent, they do want to buy.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like you cannot rent or sell to somebody who was not white. So that part obviously bad. But the good part was we are going to build just like a shitload of homes and we're going to do it in a smarter way. And I mean, because if you have an assembly line for homes, and by the way, like Lennar and others, they do a version of this when they decide to go buy a giant tract of land and go develop it. They don't just like build one house and then finish that and then build the next house. It's really cool watching these communities get built because it is. It's like, okay, today is Foundation Day. And it's like Foundation, Foundation. Like they just do all of these things. Okay, today is framing day. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And these things go up very, very quickly. A lot of home building, and this, yeah, Vera and I agree with you, like it's the Adams versus Bits thing. It's like, it's just really hard to construct things. But we do have solutions to this, like modular housing is not a, it's not.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think the technology thing, that's why I was kind of quickly chat GPTing to refresh my memory on Levitown. But, I mean, this was the first planned suburb. And in 1947, so this was all these returning GIs. And it's like, we need to build housing for all of these people that came back. Like, what did you do? Remember the famous picture post-World War II where the GI is like kind of swooping this woman down and kissing her? It's like, what did they do after that? They got married. They bought a house. They had five kids. And hence the baby boom. Well, they needed to live somewhere. And apparently it was a 985 square foot house. But a lot of these were just like constructed so quickly. And actually the technology wasn't bad at all, but it was like, let's go bring the Henry Ford factory to housing. And that was levied and sons, William Levitt. And again, they did some bad stuff. Like they famously had something.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if he wants that $30,000 to turn into more, and like that's a natural thing, everybody wants whatever. If I buy something and it's not a consumable, like I don't care about this water increasing in value. I care about my house increasing in value. If you build 10 million houses right next to mine. The house is going to go down in value. So it's Nimbyism. And Nimbyism then becomes regulatory. And then you have people that vote for people that will give them what they want, which is Nimbiaism. So it's not just like you have evil politicians that out of nowhere say we now need to take 10 years to go build something or you can't build things. It's people as well.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's regulatory, but actually it's not regulatory always. It's this term Nimbyism, not in my backyard. So imagine that I bought a house and I know that the old people that own the house next to mine, they've made so much money by owning that house because they bought it in 1960. This is actually a true story. My first house I bought was Apo Alto, and I bought it for, I think it was $2.1 million in 2008. Very perfectly timed before Lehman Brothers failed. I figured I wanted a podcast before like the World Health. Should have bought it like three months later because I went down 50% and up. My next door neighbors, it was retired Stanford professor. He bought the house, I think, in 1960. Bigger lot than mine, worth more than mine for like $30,000.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean If you wanted to change a window pane It would probably take two years right now. So the other thing is that it's not just that the old people have all the money. That's a problem, but it was much easier to build things when the old people didn't have all the money, but bought a lot of these properties. So now it's just much, much harder to build is number one. If you could just go build 10 million homes tomorrow, what do you think would happen to the price of homes? Would they go up or down? Pretty sure they would go down unless every economist is wrong about like supply and demand, you know, the intersection being the equilibrium price.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, basically, especially where if it was much easier to build, there's asset price inflation, but there's also, it was much easier to build 100 years ago than it is today. So this is not about housing, but all right, pop. How long did it take to build the empire state building? What do you think? What do you think for Red? How long did it take to build Empire State Build?”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How I could answer your question. But I think fundamentally that's the main one. Like, number one is supply demands. Very, very different than the Levittown area where it's like, wow, we're going to build like a shitload of homes. And that really, really happened in the 1950s. So it's supply and demand. And then it's also this kind of like asset price inflation, which is really kind of created this tail of two cities for people that have assets and people that do not.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you already have one asset and one asset would be stock, or one asset would be like your parents left you a lot of money and they left you an old house, well, supply and demand, there's only a fixed amount of real estate, there's only a fixed amount of Apple shares. Like those have gone up in value relative to the US dollar. Like these are the people that can buy homes today. And they are just predominantly and disproportionately older. And it is really hard for younger people to afford their first house because they get paid in cash. Like most people, if you're getting paid in cash, you might get a 3% salary bump every year. But like the S&P 500 compounds at 10% a year. And if you're buying with a basket of assets, then obviously you're not paying for your house with Apple shares. But if you happen to work at Apple, like houses have gotten a lot cheaper in the Bay Area in 25 years. If you happen to work at a company where you have no ownership in anything, you're just getting paid a salary. Like house prices have gotten a lot more expensive. So there are many reasons why I would answer your question.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what has happened since is if you just look at the pyramid of who I kind of think about inflation as being two different things. You've got the CPI, which is this, you know, the Bureau of Labor Statistics comes up with a basket of goods and services like gases won or bread is one or fish and eggs and butter and things like that. They get more expensive. They get cheaper. But then there's this other thing that I would call asset price inflation, which is not actually part of the CPI. Part of the CPI is rent or perhaps like the mortgage payment that effectively allows you to live in your house. But asset price inflation is very, very different. So there's a piece that we wrote a little while ago showing that the price of housing in the Bay Area has declined massively in the past 25 years. People like, no, no, it hasn't. It's kind of, if you price it in Apple stock and Google stock.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So love it, you ever heard of Love Town? Okay, Lovett Town, sure, you know, Lovedown, Verun. But this was one of the first track housing communities. So this guy, think about what Henry Ford did for the automobile. Like, how could you buy a car before Ford? These were handmade things that were very, very expensive. And I think it was James Levitt, who actually turned out to be somewhat of a racist, but Levittown was the first I'm going to bring the Henry Ford factory to housing. And it's actually a town in New York built, I think it was thousands of homes, sold them to GIs that were coming back. And like home ownership was just like you had lots of land. You had a country that was half the size that is today and just supply and demand. So you didn't have like all the old people had all the money. You had this giant giant population that wanted home ownership and you had lots of supply that was being built and actually new innovative techniques for building. And that's why I like to point to Lovettown.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think part of the problem is that all the old people have all the money. This really is a catastrophic issue right now because if you look back, the American dream has been homeownership for a very long time. And the example that I like to point to is after World War II, have you heard of Levitown?”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the problems that all the old people have all the money. It is like a catastrophic issue right now. If you're getting paid in cash, you might get a 3% salary bump every year, but the S&P 500 compounds a 10% a year.”
2025-11-12 · a16z Podcast · Rocket Companies CEO: Here’s How to Fix the Housing Crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source