There are things you have to deal with in a public company that are amplified. Like in a private company, these problems are discussed with your VCs at a board table. In a public company, they're discussed on Reddit. And it's kind of a Wall Street Journal. So, like, if you care a great deal about what's said about you in the Wall Street Journal, running a public company is incredibly difficult. It's just very difficult. Luckily, I just don't care.

Buying a home is supposed to be the American dream.

Instead, it's one of the most painful, opaque, and inefficient markets in the economy.

On this episode of the A16Z podcast, I'm joined by A16Z general partner, Alater Ampel,

who leads our apps practice and Open Doors' new CEO,

Kaz Najation, to talk about fixing those issues. We discussed why real estate has resisted disruption

for decades, how a marketplace model could finally break the real estate agency cartel,

and why Open Door's mission to make buying and selling a home as seamless as clicking buy

now is much bigger than just flipping houses.

Kaz shares what is really like stepping into the CEO's seat of a public company, why Open Door is really a software business, and how he's putting the company back on offense.

Let's get started.

Kaz, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me, man. I feel like you're the man of the moment. You recently took over as Open Door CEO. It's been a few weeks, a month. It's Day 16, I think. Day 16. And I feel like you're pioneering a new way of being a public company CEO. First, what got you excited about the opportunity and then coming into it? What was your mind tech going into how you're going to be CEO of this company?

I think Open Door will become like this

generational company because I think people like when you go to business school like you

should have a business plan and it shall be 17 pages and you should have like Porter's five forces

on it and that's how it's going to work. And that's just like generally not how great businesses

are built, at least not that many of them. I think it's important that great

businesses start with a very like simple statement that people can buy into or disagree with.

Right. Like it's that, that's been it's actually important that you're saying something.

I think home ownership is good for the world. The more people that can own a home, the better off we are.

This is objectively a broken process so we can fix it. So I think I was just like generally excited by the mission of the company.

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