How an ex-semipro poker player bet big and won the $4.3 trillion mortgage market: Fintech50
, including crypto exchange Coinbase and Opendoor Technologies, which buys homes quickly for cash, have since gone public. Counting Blend, at least four current members of the Fintech 50 are considering listing on the public markets.
That wasn’t the only way the ambitious Ghamsari kept busy before graduating from high school first in his class. He worked at McDonald’s, Starbucks and Circuit City, rebuilt Dell computers and taught himself to code. At Stanford, a need-based scholarship helped cover tuition, but Ghamsari tried his hand at online poker to help pay for living expenses. Soon, when he wasn’t studying, he was playing day and night, with his winnings extending well into the six figures.
With little regard for the brilliant undergraduate’s precious time, campus police impounded Ghamsari’s forbidden golf cart. “It was totally obnoxious for me to have, in retrospect,’’ he concedes. No matter. By the time he graduated with a computer science degree in 2008, he had bought an Aston Martin and been recruited by the ultra-secretive big-data startup Palantir Technologies, originally funded by the CIA’s venture arm.
At first, venture capitalists, focused on fast, disruptive growth, were skeptical of Blend’s approach. Winning business from stodgy banks was uncertain, they warned, and there were only so many banks to sell to. “Venture Blend’s big break, however, came courtesy of a competitor. In 2015, Dan Gilbert, the Quicken Loans billionaire, launched Rocket Mortgage, which cut mortgage closing times from over 40 days to just a month—similar to what Blend was offering. “Every bank’s board woke up and said, ‘Oh, my God, we need to find a solution to compete with this, because if we don’t, we’re going to lose volume to Rocket.
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