3’s a Crowd

How do you view the importance of partnerships in growing a business? Why do you need that?

Well, I think fundamentally on the partnerships, I'm a believer of better to have two cofounders just because there's so much uncertainty, there's so much stress. I think two works out well, definitely not more than two, like three, it's like 3D chess, way too complicated.

So, you say two just so there is someone you can collaborate with, someone you can commiserate with and you're not so lonely at the top?

That's right. I mean, of course, it doesn't always work out, right? But I think two cofounders works out well and they gotta be equal owners, you can never have a disparity in ownership of the cofounders, that just doesn't work either. One is an overpaid employee or an underappreciated cofounder, it just doesn't work. If you can do it on your own, that's great, and then later on, of course, getting key partnerships. So, for example, the E-Loan, the partnership that made us was we got the Yahoo! Finance deal. I remember that day walking out of Yahoo! and, my God, I mean, that's a long time ago with Ellen Siminoff who's running all those marketplaces at Yahoo! in those days and she was amazing, and we got that deal and it was never looking back. Everything just, then we got this big VC round and Goldman Sachs decided to take us public and then we went public, and then it was just like one thing after another, right? So, there are those absolute make it partnerships, but those can also be dangerous too, the pursuit of a lot of those kind of huge, it's like you're dancing with elephants in those big companies, the big finance companies, when you're a small fintech start up, again, they can completely make everything but you can waste a lot of time kind of dancing with them and it never goes anywhere.