In Confusion, There is Profit

As I was thinking about our interview, I just started thinking that this theme of broader facilitated access to finance and to loans has been a recurring one throughout your career. How and why did you decide this would be your purpose in business?

Yeah, well, we kind of fell in some of the early sort of mega trends that the Internet ushered in with, of course, transparency, more control, getting rid of sort of the middlemen that sometimes really mess up transactions like this, and it's also spurred by kind of a bad experience I had when I bought my first house. It was forever ago, back in the 80s, and I kind of felt like we got ripped off and as we sort of looked into it, you kind of realize the whole industry operated under this whole notion of 'in confusion, there's profit,' right? This is how middlemen make huge commissions on these financial products, and that just seemed wrong. That seemed like the interests these people are trying to represent are actually completely against your interest, and when we saw what pioneers were doing with stock trading in the Internet, what E-trade eventually became, that was around time we first started it, this seemed like you could kind of apply this to lending and loans as well, and try to represent them the way Charles Schwab would kind of represent stocks and investments, much more transparently with much more alignment with the customer, and give the power of the Internet to the average consumer, and that was kind of the idea that we were really set out to do kind of among all of these companies.