YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Glass

lines on the record: 57
first: 2024-11-21
most recent: 2024-11-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“This was really nice. You got me going down memory lane and helped me think about a lot of important moments in my life. So thank you.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To accomplish and also be able to put those emotions and negative energy or anxiety in a box. So I can't say that that is something that I have yet mastered, but it is something I am working on. And if anyone has some tips for me, please give me a call.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, here's a life lesson that I have learned, but I cannot claim that I have internalized. So I've been working now for a couple years with a mindfulness coach trying to create pause between stimulus and reaction, to create some pause for contemplative response. And one of the things that's taught in that area is that one can detach from certain outcomes and not have it be all consuming when things are going bad or going well, that you can kind of stay level and calm and also stay driven. I'm a very driven person. I obviously have really high aspirations for home tap and try to hold myself up to a pretty high standard. And that causes a lot of stress and anxiety. So apparently some people are able to both have high aspirations, stay totally driven, stay focused on what they want.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tried Your body's taking in a bazillion data points and trying to sort it out for you and tell you what to do. So I struggle a lot with that, but I think the best advice I got is sometimes just go with your gut and live with the consequences.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was of the poor side, and poor people are why. And I think he influenced me a lot by making me realize that you could be successful financially and you could be a great person and you could give back to your community and you could be there for your kids and your wife and you don't have to pick one over the other, you can and should try to do it all. And so he is a very important person that I've learned a lot of lessons from.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I got to college, I was surrounded by some kids who had very different childhoods than I did. And one of my friends, and still one of my closest friends in the world, his dad was a very, very successful investor. He was one of the guys really attributed to being the inventor of the hedge fund industry. And the whole world that they lived in was totally foreign to me. I had grown up in blue-collar inner city, Brooklyn, and this was a whole different world. And the thing that his dad, Dad's name's Howard Berkowitz. And Howard took me under his wing a bit. And the thing that I saw with Howard, that was amazing to me. He is such a good dad, and his family loves him so much, and he loves his family so much. And he's an amazing philanthropist and mentor, and he just cares so much. It was great because I think prior to seeing him, I would have stereotyped it says rich people are X.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for sure, my dad is number one. Unfortunately, my dad died very young 20 years ago. He was not a formally well educated man, but he taught me a lot of great lessons.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Double Parkers. Grew up in Brooklyn, New York life, city kid. Now I live in Boston, also not known for the friendliness of our drivers. And gosh, why are you double parking? Especially you're double parking and 10 feet in front of you, you could pull over to the curb and not block traffic. It's just so rude and so inconsiderate. It's definitely my number one pet peeve.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am a terribly slow reader. I think that surprises people. I read at best, I think half the pace of what my peers read at. It's horrible. My kids will be reading something if we're all looking over someone's shoulder or reading something and everyone is in bed asleep and I'm still finishing the paragraph. As a result, I tend to process information verbally. So I learn a lot more and I can communicate a lot better speaking than reading because I'm so slow”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll preface by saying I am not a particularly gifted basketball player. I've always loved playing basketball. I played a lot when I was a kid. I was an adequate intramural level basketball player just to set the expectations. But my favorite thing to do is I blow off steam by shooting free throws. I find it so relaxing. I still am baffled why I cannot get myself to shoot a hundred percent because it's the same motion and nothing's moving. And unlike Steph Curry, I'm not shooting after running 48 minutes up and down a court with defenders on my back. I'm just standing there shooting free throws. But I would say that is my favorite individual thing to do.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like the life I lead and the privilege that I have to do this is beyond anything I could have possibly imagined could have been true for me when I was growing up. When I was young, I thought I wanted to be a prosecutor because I wanted to go into public service and I went the business route. But I feel like hometap, if we continue to do it right for me gives me the fulfillment of a lot of why I thought I wanted to go into public service. So at the end of the day, if Hometap is a durable lasting company where the best talent builds their careers and feels taken care of and helps take care of each other in that company, and we build a brand about how we've changed lives and helped paid for kids college or people's health treatments or help them stay in their home or all kinds of amazing stories. And today we've helped over 14,000 and five years from now, that number, maybe that number's in the hundreds of thousands of homeowners.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, as you take a step back and reflect on your whole journey of this entrepreneurial experiences early on, bringing it together into this very mission driven focus at Hometap, how do you feel about this whole experience at this point in time?”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To finance it and what its future value will be, and there's tools to help you get the most out of your house, and there's more things and products and services that we plan to offer through that home equity dashboard because the business is around the mission to make home ownership less stressful and more accessible. So our product team and our marketing teams, they have a long list of really interesting, exciting products and capabilities all centered around that mission. So five, six, seven years from now, we will hopefully continue to be in as close to 100% of all US states as we can be in. We'll broaden the set of products, we'll help educate through partners, we'll add more capabilities and services to be able to deliver for homeowners. And I don't know, maybe five, seven years from now, we're pretty big thing outside of the US as well.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think seven or eight years from now, versions of home equity investments will be considered a mainstream product that people will think about when they're contemplating loans. It'll be like, oh, I could take out a HELOC or I could do a cash out refi or I could do an HEI. And so I think that we'll have done our job to help people educate and understand the pros and cons and let people pick the product that's best for them. I think that HomeTap certainly five, seven years from now we will be a multi-product company. So there'll be multiple versions of AGIs for different types of homeowners in different situations. And there'll be other non-HEI products that we offer to homeowners. Even today, one of the things I'm really proud of is our team built out something that we call the Home Equity Dashboard. The Home Equity Dashboard is a product that we give to our homeowners and its tools to help you think about your home and its value.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what I would say though is I look forward, we're just getting started. So we have shown ourselves to be able to be resilient. And when you look at the magnitude of opportunity there is to help homeowners through a variety of products for well-intended mission-driven companies to help, by the way, that's just US homeowners. There's nothing that says that over time that we can't figure out how to do this for homeowners across the world. Homeowners, they need choice. The economy has changed. The cost of housing has changed. Our macroeconomy has changed. Affordability is really tough. Accessibility is really tough. People's home and financial lives and emotional lives are so intertwined. So they're just so many good things that we can do for homeowners, for society to build a good business that we can be proud of, even though it's been eight years. I feel like we're on day one.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has been a difficult journey to get to where we are today. So over the seven and a half years that we've been at this, we went through the startup phase, which is where most companies stumble. We then went through the pandemic, which every company obviously had tons of things to grapple with. But we went through the pandemic in housing-related business. So we had extra macroeconomic and housing things impacting us. We then went through a period of time where we had to live through the most rapid escalation of interest rates within a short fixed period of time than anybody had seen in our lifetime, which had tremendous impacts on”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would expect to be in an asset class in terms of bankers who lend to the space and securitization bankers and bond buyers who are looking at the QCIPs and understand how the value of them and intermediaries like diligence providers and accounting firms that know what to do and lawyers that understand the transactions and backup servicers that are in place in case there's a problem and you need to help homeowners and something goes wrong with the company There are so many different components to what it takes to pull this off it's probably twenty different categories of companies that need to be in at the same time. So it takes time to get that all to come together. We're finally there, but that was hard. That took a long time.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any startup definitely requires some level of blissful ignorance. Because if you knew all the things that you were going to have to pull off, you might just go get a real job. We've helped to create the HEI home equity investment space, an education of consumers, which back in 2016 I thought was going to be the most difficult part of this business. There's this giant $500 billion a year mortgage industry with tens of thousands of brokers that have relationships with homeowners and real estate lawyers. So we've got to educate the whole world on the fact that there's this very different alternative. What I underappreciated is just how many different parties need to come together to create a new asset class, which is what we've done. Today, I would say that home equity investment is still a relatively small, but it is an asset class. It's an established asset class. There is everything that you”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the most part, our competitors have done well, and we have a lot of respect for our competitors in this space. And there's been some new companies that have entered that are off to a good start. There's a lot of homeowner demand for what we do. So I still would argue we're in the very early innings of the opportunity to help homeowners here. I think the increased value of homes, the rising interest rates, the unfortunate fact that real incomes have not risen nearly as fast as the cost of housing. I think that those continued macroeconomic trends have led to a lot of tailwinds for businesses like ours.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is no longer the case as a result now of a seven year track record and a securitization market and the rating agencies rating this. I would say we're now in a place where there's a broad range and different types of investors that are looking to get into the HEI and home tab world, go back to year one. We had $12 million. And what our marketing team quickly figured out is that there was enormous demand for what we do. But we only had $12 million and we needed that 12 million bucks to last until we would be able to find the next pool of capital. When I think about the challenges of the business, it's thinking about those three things. The schedule management and coordination across operations, capital, and homeowner demand is a very complicated and critically important thing to get right. And I'd say at any moment in time, we've had to juggle those three things.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The growth of our business, I think of as being, it's a stool. We're trying to build the world's best, tallest, most durable stool. Boy, that sounds like a really inspiring mission. The three legs of our stool are homeowner demand. The second leg of the stool is capital supply. And then the third piece, which is where your last question was, is associated with operational capability to scale and scale with excellence. And that starts with our marketing capabilities and our sales. And we actually don't call our salespeople sales. We call them investment managers because we want them to think about their role as they're helping a homeowner manage through an investment process and decide if that's something that's interesting to the homeowner. Then of course our underwriting and application team and then all the things we do to support all that under operations side. If any leg of the stool is shorter than the other two legs, you got yourself a bad stool. And we want to have a big solid, stable stool. So I would say at any moment in time over the last seven and a half years, the leg that has often been the shortest has been the capital side.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The application process, the underwriting process, the signing and funding process. And then the third group that we think about in terms of technology and capabilities is the capital side. And a lot of that has to do with reporting and how we're able to move money back and forth and to give them an understanding of the size of their portfolio and how it's performing. Some of that now is an operational component. We've done just this year multiple securitizations. There's now ratings in this industry. So the rating agencies are able to provide ratings to these assets, which has now led for broadly syndicated securitizations, which brings new capital partners in. So I'm really proud of the job led by our capital team, but cross-functional in terms of broad support. So it's a combination of technology and operations that you have to invest in in order to make a company like this work.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think one of the unsung strengths sometimes of a company like Hometap is how much we do with respect to the use of data and technology to drive operational benefit and scalability. We have a pretty sizable product engineering design and data science set of teams. We do think about three constituents internal to home tab. One is our homeowners. We're trying to continuously think about building a user experience that helps them understand what they're doing, makes it easy to do it, interact with us well, puts as much work as possible on our shoulders and takes it off of their backs and really be best in class in terms of a user experience. The second part is in order to achieve this kind of scale, you have to have systems and processes in place that allow for that user to scale without making mistakes. So we have built an enormous amount of operational technology to support”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can ever get our job done in isolation. If me being happy means I get stuff done because I'm the kind of person that likes to get stuff done every day, well, I can't be happy unless other people support me because I can't do it alone. There's no job at home tap that's an individual sport. So that means that in order for me to be able to be a great owner, I need the people around me to be great neighbors. I need them to collaborate. I need them to collaborate with trust. I need to communicate directly and constructively. I need dissension to happen in the room, not after the meeting. So we felt like these two values really go hand in hand of what it means to be a good owner and what it means to be a good neighbor. In some ways, it's pretty simple. It just balls down to the golden rule. It's the workforce version of do unto us.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really breaks up into two buckets, and then we have some sub points underneath each. The language that we use is the language of home ownership. So really the two core values to home tap is what does it mean to be a great owner, an owner of your work? What does it mean to execute but execute with intention? What does it mean to be the kind of person that creates solutions? What does it mean to be the type of person that rolls up one's sleeves and just gets it done as opposed to waiting for someone else to get it done? So we talk about what it means to be a great owner. I think over my many years now of being amongst companies, which is if there was one thing that at the end of the day is the most important thing, is do I believe in this company and do I feel like what I do contributes to that mission? So we really felt like focusing on people who want to be great owners and contribute. And that's what makes them tick is a super important component of that. But then we recognize the fact that no one of us”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over the years, we've had to make some tough decisions where people are maybe they're really good at getting some stuff done, but they don't get stuff done in the way that we want it done. And we've had to part ways with folks who don't represent these values. I say this all the time to new people on their first day, which is the CEO cannot decree a company culture. I can do my best to live those values and to appreciate them. But we're 240 people. Each one of us, as an individual, is now one two hundred fortieth of the culture, and every day we have an opportunity to strengthen that culture and put one more brick in to strengthen it, or chip away at that mortar and make it one step weaker. So it is absolutely a team sport. And I think we've been fortunate in that over now many years. We've continued to strengthen it.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when we were maybe 10, 12 people, we, through foresight or luck, we said, wow, this might be a big company someday. We better get crystal clear now on what we're all about. So we got really clear on identifying what our values were to support this culture. And then on the back of that, to this day, when we interview candidates, all questions basically translate into our core values. When we're finishing up annual performance review conversations inside our business, their guidelines around are describing how you're doing relative to our core values. When we have our all-hands meeting once a month where we get the whole company together, we take a moment to highlight a few individuals who've gone above and beyond and demonstrated our core values. And when someone's not demonstrating those core values, what we ask is for leaders and managers to call them aside and say, hey, that's just not the way we do things here.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's rough and it's long hours and they're stressed, it's because they believe in what we're doing and they believe in each other and they feel committed to our mission and to each other. So if we get that right, it doesn't predetermine success, but it's absolutely a prerequisite to success. And if you don't get that right, you've got no chance. So I would say the number one thing is culture right behind that, I link that to having a team that replicates your culture, believes in that culture, and operationalizes that culture so that culture isn't just a plaque on a whiteboard or in a conference room that has a bunch of values listed. It's just something that you live every day.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's mostly about team. We've been very, very lucky. We were able to recruit people early on who not only were fantastic when we recruited them, but who have developed over five, six, seven years into brilliantly talented executives. And those teams have been building out the organization more broadly. The most important thing you can get right if you're going to scale a business and continue to grow and be durable is culture. How could we possibly achieve any really important critical goals if we don't have a team that believes in our mission, that cares about each other, that goes the extra mile, that works through the startup phase, that works through the pandemic, that works through the Jerome Powell phase, that works through the crazy turbulent political times that we live in? Because at the end of the day, even though it's hard.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early in this year, we crossed deploying over a billion dollars. We've been growing very rapidly since then. We have helped over 14,000 homeowners. We operate in 18 different states across the country, and we're growing pretty rapidly from that. We've got over 240 employees at Hometap. We're trying to build this to be big and durable, and lasting, and we're pretty proud of where we are.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second one I would say is around financing. So historically, what makes the mortgage world work is the availability of warehouse financing and of securitization, which allows for both investors to seek a levered return and also through the securitization market be able to achieve some level of liquidity so that they can take that capital back and in many cases then go recycle it and redeploy it. So for example, our first fund, there was no warehouse facilities available. People hadn't heard of the HEI industry, the home equity investment industry, and we were literally seven years away from there being a securitization market. So I think another element to how you build your product roadmap is what can you do to be able to create some level of both leverage and also liquidity for investors. In our case, between then and now, we have”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they evolve along a number of dimensions. So one of them is around scale. So the first fund was twelve million dollars. We've had days now where we've deployed that much capital. That fund lasted us the first year plus. One of the things, even as we started to grow, which was another chicken and egg problem, is as we'd start to talk to people who had the capacity to write $100 million types of checks or more, and we've had some write even bigger checks, they'd say, well, if I commit to you, I need to put this money to work and you've shown no proof that you actually could go deploy this amount of money for me. And I said, well, it's pretty difficult for me to prove that I could deploy $100 million if I don't have $100 million.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We get pit. So there's just been a lot of really good alignment and operational strength that's come out of the early ways that was the only way we could solve the capital issue was to create this GPLP fund, but a lot of good stuff.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, a byproduct of the fact that we raised funds. So we are an asset manager and we manage these portfolios and our homeowners with the care and attention that an asset manager would, where this mission driven company that goes beyond everything we can possibly do to help homeowners in any way possible, but it also works to the advantage of our capital because if you can help homeowners avoid tough situations, then you're going to have good outcomes on the investment side. So we are very different than a classic mortgage originator who originates a loan and then sells it off to an investor. And then we are completely committed to an ongoing relationship with the homeowner and completely committed to working with the homeowners to ensure that they do well and we're an equity product. So we want their home to do well. We want them to make a lot of money off of the future sale of their home because we're completely aligned in how”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to think about your value proposition and who your customer is on the capital side like a product roadmap. It evolves over time. And what your value proposition is on day one and who that value proposition resonates with on day one is different than what that looks like in year three and in year five. And now in our case coming up on year eight. So in the earliest days, we started off investing our own capital because we really did not have a compelling enough value proposition to anybody. We then raised a small fund, which is a not typical way to fund asset-backed investments. A lot of people thought we were totally odd for doing this back then because it's just not the classic way that mortgages and loans get funded. And of course, we're not a mortgage and we're not a loan and we're a new asset class and a new product. So we were forced to have to be more creative. But I think a lot of what makes HomeTap special now seven or eight years later is”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In general, the way you solve a chicken and egg problem is you ratchet up the chicken and the egg a little bit at a time until they're almost exactly at the same place at the same time and then metaphorically close on both of it in a synchronistic way. That's conceptually how you do it. In practice, what we did was we put our money where our mouth was, was we took some of our own operating capital in the beginning and we made the first set of investments with capital that we had raised into home tap, which not only strengthened our systems and got the kinks out, it also helped us prove out the value proposition to homeowners, got us talking to homeowners, understanding what they like and didn't like, and not just that the product was the right product, but the way we delivered it was in a way that was easy for them to understand and transparent and clean. One of the really interesting lessons that I've definitely learned over the last seven coming up on eight years is that for a business like ours,”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You free up all the equity. So our really simple idea was just well, why isn't there a third option? Why can't you just sell a little bit and still control your house, own your house, live in your house, not have to pay monthly payments, not increase your cash burden, not be in more debt stress, not hit your FICO score? And this is where also it came together for me in my life. As an entrepreneur and someone who's been a huge beneficiary of investors investing with me, equity capital, no debt, no monthly payments, no interest, risk of loss that if I don't deliver, you could lose your money. So I've been a huge beneficiary over many decades now of equity capital and also a purveyor of equity capital when I was an investor at Bane Capital. So it was like light bulbs flashing saying, wow, they're in every other business, in every other industry, businesses.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you think about starting this business, we decided that the homeowners that we wanted to start helping first were homeowners who you would describe as being in a position of being house rich and cash strapped. You've lived in your home a long time. Your house is appreciated. You've done it right. You've paid down your debt. You've paid off some mortgage over the years. And now over the years, you now have this really big balance of equity value in your home that you own apart from the bank. You own it, but it's illiquid. And it's hard to tap into. And historically, there were two ways to tap into that equity, which is number one, you could borrow more. You could do a refi or you could take out a second lien mortgage or HELOC. And those products make total sense for homeowners depending on your situation. The other option is like my friend, which is for whatever reason, borrowing more is not desirable or not attainable, like his temporary situation is you sell your whole house.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every startup has a chicken and egg problem. If there weren't some hard problem, somebody already would be doing it. And when we started working on the idea of all the people we talked to on capital side, on the real estate side, homeowners, I would say at least 75% of them told us we were being totally dumb and that this could never possibly work for all kinds of reasons, which is why most people don't become entrepreneurs. So we knew from the overwhelming number of people telling us that this was a dumb idea, that this was either brilliant or was going to be a training rec. And thankfully, I feel like it was a pretty good idea. As it turns out, we were not the first. We came up with this idea independently, and then we started doing research and figured out that there are other companies that were doing similar things and working on this stuff. So I cannot take credit for inventing this idea or this category. It was both good news and bad news that other people were thinking there was something to be done here.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And investment that would be appealing to homeowners, that would be appealing to capital partners. How do you build an operating system to make sure that you're not only in compliance with any and all laws and regulations that you need to be in compliance with, but goes above and beyond to do the right thing all the time for the homeowner? And we just got super inspired about the idea of let's build a big, long, durable, lasting company that's a next generation financial company and it's centered around the mission to make homeownership less stressful and more accessible. And let's let that be the guiding principle in everything we do. So that was the end of 2016 and we made our first investment to help our first homeowner in the late summer of 2018. I'd love to walk through what you need for this business to work. Well, to get a business like this started is very difficult because”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It worked out fine. They rented for a while, but they had kids, there was school stuff, and kids' stuff and total pain in the neck. And it was like, wow, the bank is saying you've got $800,000 in the bank. You can take all of it out or none of it out, but I'm not letting you take a little bit of it out. So those two things happen within a short period of time. And I was in this entrepreneurial mode. People's home, it's their most important financial asset. It's their most important emotional asset. It's where you live. It's where your kids grow up. It's where you build family memories. So all that came together. So we dug in and we spent the next year and a half until we launched the first home tap product. We spent months and months and months meeting with real estate experts across the board, building a data science capability, building models around how residential real estate behaves over time. How could you price?”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would help him. I would invest in a house. I don't want to be a landlord. I don't want to own someone else's home. But I thought, hey, this would be a good investment that you could help someone with and you'd feel really good about it. As a passing idea in the lunch. Two weeks later, I'm meeting with a friend of mine who tells me the story about how he and his wife had just sold their home in Newton, Massachusetts because the wife's mom had gotten sick just after the wife who was the major breadwinner in their family had lost her job, and they needed to come up with capital for care for the mother in law. And the bank wouldn't lend to them because the wife had just lost her job. They had lived in this house for years. They had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of equity built up in their home. And the bank wouldn't let them touch it. So they sold their entire house to free up the capital. They freed up $800,000 of capital to deal with a hundred thousand dollar challenge that they had on their hands, had to relocate.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And was not inspired. The idea for Home Tap did not come out of Jeff thinking really hard. They'd never do. Thankfully, the idea for HomeTap, we're in this mode of trying to think about ideas, working with one of General Catalyst's best guys there, Andrew Vassalo. And we're going through ideas and we're meeting companies and we're brainstorming on stuff. And I wound up having blunch with a young entrepreneur who needed some advice on a business that he was working on. He starts talking about the fact that neither he nor any of his friends really have a great vision of how they're ever going to be able to afford buying a place in Boston. These folks well educated could get good jobs. They could probably carry the mortgage, but the cash, the down payment to be able to put down just could never do it. So during that lunch, I was thinking, yeah, young people today are just in such a tough situation. And I wasn't thinking of us as a business idea, but I thought about it as like, wow, this guy's a great guy.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I left Bay Capital to help turn around one of our portfolio companies. I wasn't yet fully committed to leaving Bain Capital because I loved it. It's a great place, but I was yearning for the operating side and liked being an investor, but would say I didn't love it. I just wasn't getting the emotional energy of what I get when I'm on the operating side. So I went back, worked inside this company. Thankfully, things went well. We wound up getting it growing and profitable and it wound up being acquired. And then I decided not to go back to being capital because I thought I'm going to go start something else. And what I said to myself was if I'm going to go start something else at this stage, it can't just be like, oh, this is a good business idea that we can build and be profitable and make.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With a guy who's had a bunch of successes and his businesses have done well and he's funded, he can afford to pay me. So now you've got capital and you've got talent. And if you've got capital and you got talent and you're pointing yourself in an interesting space, you now have the team and the luxury of time to go figure it out. And then you figure it out and then you have another win. And now it's like, wow, this guy's done it twice. He's done it three times. He's done it four times. It must be because he's got some special sauce. No one's got the secret sauce. We work hard. We do our best. Some of us have different skills and different talents, but a lot of that is the benefit that you get if you've had a few wins, it really does improve the likelihood that the next one's going to be successful for those reasons.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So much of the success or failure of businesses is really thin and it's timing it's did one thing break your way or break the other way? Did you manage to just get through that tiny window or did the window shut before you got out when you work harder and if you're smart and thoughtful and if you got some skills you might have on the margin a little bit better chance of being successful but so much of it is luck and timing and circumstance so i really do believe that people get too much credit when it goes well and they get too much discredit when it goes poorly because so much of it is things that are outside your control so that's a really important lesson for me because what i found is i was lucky enough to have some early wins so here's what happens you have an early win and now people are like oh this guy glass he knows what he's doing and then capital wants to back you because you just made your last investors a trucklet of money well now you have the capital and you're recruiting talent so talent says well yeah i'm going to go work”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try to get people to recognize is that just because you're the CEO doesn't mean you have to be the best at everything and you have to recognize the fact that you ideally should probably be the best at very few things because you've managed to bring people in who are way better at those things than you would be. And so I think it helped me a lot in seeing really good examples and less good examples of just this idea of your job as CEO is to work for the company and it's not the company's job to work for you. And you've got to work harder than everybody and you got to walk the walk and talk to talk and you got to remember that your job is to make the company successful, not the company's job to make you successful.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think I still benefit from having seen this movie from three lenses as a CEO lens of an investor on the board lens. So seeing the same movie from a different camera lens really does shape your perspective on things. For stars, one thing that was very useful is that there's an empathy that you have for the team that I think you don't necessarily or really can't necessarily have if you've never been in their shoes. So I think that that was a really useful thing for me because when I would be trying to help or brainstorm or coach, I was drawing on actual similar challenges and opportunities that I had to deal with in my life. So I think that was helpful. And I think I got a little bit more credibility and benefit of the doubt. I don't think it has to be true, but I think there's often a lack of trust that can sometimes exist at the board level between leadership and the board. But the other thing that I worked really hard to”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really great but incredibly hardworking, tense businesses that every entrepreneurial business, you've got ups and downs and moments where you're like, are we going to make it? And then moments where you're like, wow, we're crushing it and now you're not crushing it. And it's an emotional roller coaster to sign up for this line of work. So I was tired and I had small kids and I was pretty burnt out and I had been working 100 hours a week for as long as I had remembered. So I may be the first person in the history of the world who actually viewed joining Bain Capital as an opportunity to work a little bit less because that place is an amazing place with super smart, hardworking, incredibly disciplined investors. But I got invited to join the venture group, which was early stage and growth stage investing. And I thought I'd be there for a couple years. I wound up being there for quite a while. I was there for seven or eight years before I got the bug to tie up the shoelaces and put the sneakers back on and get back on the field.”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started an internet company that did pretty well, honestly, maybe more a function of the time. We got acquired. Then I started another technology company, which was an early mobile technology company. That business grew to be quite big over many years and also had a nice outcome. And being capital ventures was an early investor in that business. I had at that point just completed three back-to-back, really hard long operating runs of building really early stage businesses. So I get asked sometimes from people thinking about being an entrepreneur, when's the right time to do it and how do you think about it? Should I put away some money first? Should I go to business school? Those are reasonable questions that I had. And my answer is things change over time. And the right time to do certain things in your career is not based on a premeditated timeline. It's based on the situation and circumstances in your life. So at that point in time, I had these three”
2024-11-21 · Capital Allocators · Jeff Glass - Home Equity Investment at Hometap (EP.418) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source