In this episode, Sam Parr and Shaan Puri discuss the business model of Opendoor and speculate on what the next “Opendoor for X” might be. They explore various industries, including used electronics, trading cards, and lottery tickets, analyzing how instant liquidity can disrupt traditional markets.
Topics: Opendoor, business models, instant liquidity, entrepreneurship, startups, market disruption, used goods, trading cards, lottery tickets
Keith Rabois and Opendoor [00:00]
Shaan Puri: Have you seen what Keith Rabois is doing as his new startup?
Sam Parr: No.
Shaan Puri: So, you know who he is?
Sam Parr: Yeah.
Shaan Puri: So, he’s the guy who, uh, uh, he was like ex-PayPal, then he was the COO of Square, he’s kind of a known investor at Founders Fund, and then he started Opendoor.
Sam Parr: He’s a known asshole, like people think that he’s a total asshole on Twitter, super hilarious to follow because he’s just absolute jerk to people. Um, you know, his like number one tweet is just like, “Wrong,” the period. And he won’t tell you why, he won’t argue back, he just calls you an idiot, and then if you like try to argue, he’s like, “This is why I’m I was more successful at the age of 27 than you are at 40.” And he just like rips people like that. And like, who does that? That’s nobody does that. So I think that’s just like really crazy and entertaining to me. Um, but anyways, he’s doing, so he did Opendoor. And what Opendoor is, it’s now like a publicly listed company because it did a SPAC, and Opendoor is a multi-billion dollar company. And basically, it was like, selling your house is a time-consuming and stressful process. What if like the day you want to sell, you could just sell your house right away? Give you a price, you say yes or no. And uh, that’s what Opendoor did. So they basically would just buy your house, and then they had a lot of data to know how much to buy your house for, and then they were the brokers, they could keep the broker fee for themselves, buying and selling, and then they would sell it within like 90 days, hopefully. And they do this in a whole bunch of markets like Arizona and stuff like that. And so they’ve done very well, you know, kind of like on paper. And like Zillow now like does the same thing to try to compete with them. They kind of changed the way that the the business model of these big real estate companies worked, where now like the money to be made is in basically like auto-buying your auto-buying your house and then reselling it for you, and using a bunch of technology to do that.
OpenStore and Buying Businesses [01:40]
Shaan Puri: Anyways, his new company he’s starting, uh, with with Jack Jack Abraham is, uh, called OpenStore. And so you have Opendoor and now you have OpenStore. I know they haven’t released a bunch of details, but I think I know what it is, which is it is Opendoor for buying businesses. So it’s the same idea for buying, I think it’s going to be specialized in online businesses, but maybe not, um, where basically you just say, “Here’s my business,” and then they say, “Here’s your offer. We’ll buy it off you.” And, um, and so I don’t know if this is going to be specialized like e-commerce roll-ups, like a Thrasio, um, I don’t know if it’s going to be online and offline, like, um,
Sam Parr: Where did you learn about this? And what what can I go Is there a website yet?
Shaan Puri: Uh, they announced it. So I heard about it a few weeks ago, like six weeks ago maybe, and I was like, “Oh, that’s super interesting.”
Sam Parr: How did you hear about this?
Shaan Puri: So, somebody told me about it because their friend interviewed at the company. And so that’s like the only way you could know about it, because like when you interview, they like kind of tell you the premise of the company. And that guy was like, “Oh, dude, you know Keith Rabois is doing a new thing? It’s basically Opendoor for buying businesses.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s sick. Uh, that’s a great idea because buying a selling your business is also just like, but it’s even more than buying a home in terms of time-consuming, stressful, uncertain on what price you’re going to get, uncertain what price it even should be. And, um, and the marketplaces to do that online, like BuyBiz, BuyBizSell or whatever that website is, like .com, they’re so like old school, you know, like on how they do that. And so, um, so I think there’s like room for improvement there. So I found that to be really interesting.
Internet Marketers and “Sleazy” Tactics [03:13]
Sam Parr: Let me bring this up real quick, which is, it’s so crazy how often internet marketers, who often are accused of being sleazy, how and many of them are, I mean, they’re they’re accused of being that because they are, but they’re often ahead of the game. So, for example, email marketing, email newsletters are all the rage right now. Uh, scammy guys, like, I don’t think this guy’s actually scammy, but David DeAngelo, he used to sell dating books in the 1990s by having these long emails. I just stole and copied from him. Um, the other thing is paid memberships. Paid memberships have been a thing for decades. Now, guys like Greg, your friend, our friend Greg, is doing a paid community thing, and Greg’s like a cool guy. Um, and so it’s like it’s it’s like cool to do it. Um, and there’s so many more, and this is another one. Buying and selling businesses online has been a thing that internet marketers, so for example, Flippa, where you can buy affiliate websites, that’s been a thing for years. Empire Flippers is another one. Empire Builders, yeah. Empire Builders, and if you go, is it Empire Flippers or Empire Builders? I think those are actually two different two different things.
Shaan Puri: I think it’s both. Yeah.
Sam Parr: But they, but if you go to those websites, you’re going to a lot of people are going to be immediately turned off. You’re going to think, “What the fuck is this?” And fucking startup guys like us, we just come in, I guess that’s what we are. We just come in and we take this stuff that these guys have been doing for years, and we just say, put some lipstick on it. Yeah. 2.0, make it a flat, beautiful color. Uh, it’s so funny because like, cool, this sounds neat, but this isn’t unique.
Shaan Puri: Right.
Sam Parr: Uh, yeah, I I think, you know, there’s no unique ideas, really. There’s, you know, remixes of ideas, there’s old ideas that you make new, there’s new platforms. There’s but but I think it’s cool, and I think it could be big. Uh, it’s one I’m going to keep my eye on. Then I saw another business like this. So I started to put together a little bit of a pattern here, and I said, “Oh, what is Opendoor for X?” So what other parts of life and and, uh, and in the world could use instant liquidity? Because that’s what this is. It’s basically taking something that was kind of illiquid, like your house, and takes a lot of time to get liquid where you actually sell the thing, and takes a lot of, you know, you got to like you got to move out, you got to stage it, you got to repaint it, you got to get a broker, you got to list it, you got to do tours. No, instant liquidity, we buy your house today. Don’t do any of that shit. Um, same thing with your buying your business. What else needs that? And then I saw another one. And this business is called, um, I got to grab the name, but it’s basically doing this for used electronics. It’s called Backflip. Just got funded, and Backflip is basically saying, “We’ll instantly buy any of your used electronics.” And, uh, because they’re Well, that’s not a new thing either, and and I think it’s awesome.
The “Opendoor for X” Pattern [05:47]
Shaan Puri: And so, it’s not that it’s new, it’s basically that there is a big swing being taken by people who are going to try to do this at scale using like the modern kind of internet marketing and models to do it. And so like, you know, like we buy gold or whatever, what are those billboards? Or gift cards. You know, like gift cards, yeah, exactly. Like, um, and there’s like a gift card, there’s actually a gift card startup that crushes, uh, that that basically took the old model and just does it new. I can’t What’s it called? Raise, Raise, I think is the name of it. Raise, yeah. I’m I’m on their website right now. I’m looking at raise.com. Holy shit. I can look at the traffic and just tell you these guys are printing money.
Sam Parr: Yeah, Raise is going to be like a kind of a billion dollar plus win. Uh, and nobody even like hears about this company, nobody talks about this company, but, you know, super simple business of like, you know, gift card, the gift card business, resell of gift cards essentially. And so, um, so anyways, I’m interested in this Opendoor for X, which is basically instant liquidity for things that were pretty illiquid before.
Shaan Puri: That’s interesting. All right, let’s play off that. So, houses, okay, there’s EquityZen, which I think is badass. Uh, so EquityZen lets you But also EquityZen kind of looks more like Flippa than it does like Opendoor, meaning like it’s kind of hard to get in, it’s kind of obtuse, you got to like sign up to see shit, not everything is there. It’s like a 10-step process to do an investment. It’s like EquityZen is not like it’s not Robinhood on my phone where I can just like do my thing. And so like secondary shares, yeah, it’s like a shitty name, like I don’t know, like it’s just bad all around. And Forge Global was the other one, it’s like also bad. I don’t know, I feel like somebody should can do this better. Carta is trying to Carta X is trying to do this better, um, right now, which is like secondary shares of of private companies.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I’m not a fan of Carta, but, um, I could see them doing well, but I’m not a I’m not a fan of Carta, so I don’t know if I want them to be the best at this. Um, AngelList is also trying to do it. You know, there’s a bunch of people trying to do this. Second trying to do OpenDoor, trying to do What they’re trying to do is a little bit different. They’re just still trying to do the marketplace. What Opendoor did was different. It wasn’t like Opendoor wasn’t just another housing marketplace, it was, “I will buy the thing off you right now because I know what I can sell it for.” Um, and I’ll I’ll I’m comfortable with this 5% spread that I will I will keep. So, you give up 5% of your upside, but you get the certainty of it being done now. And, um, and I’m comfortable in that 5% spread. So somebody would need to do this for secondary shares where they just go, “You want to sell your your your company stock? Done.” And then I will figure out how to re-flip this thing on the other side with my own spread.
Used Furniture and Trading Cards [08:12]
Shaan Parr: So, there’s a few people that have done this with furniture, and furniture is really hard because furniture doesn’t ship well. Yeah. Um, but there is if you I don’t I don’t know if you know, I mean, I buy I like buying used furniture because you can get like $10,000 couches for like three grand. Um, and let’s often times they’re really nice. Used furniture is not really a thing on the internet, uh, or at least it’s not hugely popular, but you could I think there is still an interesting way you can do this with used furniture.
Sam Parr: Right. So I think trading cards is one. So I know a lot of people that have sports cards, they collected as a kid, it’s in their attic somewhere, it’s in a box. They kind of heard, oh, cards are worth something, but they don’t like they don’t know what they have, they don’t know what it’s worth. They don’t have them graded, they didn’t send them into PSA and pay the money to get them graded. So I think if somebody basically did the shoebox model where you basically say, “Put it all in a shoebox and mail it to us, and we will pay you for it.” Uh, we’re we’ll do all the work of figuring out what it’s worth, and then we’ll pay you, you know, 70 cents on the dollar for for what it’s worth. And like today, you’re getting nothing for it. And like that that’s the and if if you don’t like our offer, we’ll send it back. And I think that if somebody did that, they could just hover up all the long tail of like trading cards that are out there, um, that people are not doing anything with that they want to monetize.
Shaan Parr: That’s interesting. Okay, so, uh, we’ve we’ve we’ve furniture is not that good. Trading cards is pretty interesting because it’s a lot easier. Cars, everyone, a lot of people do cars. Carvana does cars, and I think that that is so sick. They’re a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company.
Sam Parr: Is that the same model they they use where they’ll instantly buy your car off you?
Shaan Parr: Yeah, like they’ll buy it in a matter of minutes, which if you told me this like years ago, I’d be like, “No way, that that can’t be done.” But they made uh $5.6 billion last year in sales, so it works.
Sam Parr: Right. Okay, so it’s working. Opendoor for cars is working, yeah.
Shaan Parr: Yeah, totally works. Um, what else is interesting? What’s a huge thing? Like what’s what are some of the bigger assets that you possibly have in your life that you want to Wow, Carvana’s market cap is $45 billion. Holy shit. Yeah, it’s working. Um, what else is there?
Sam Parr: I don’t know. There’s going to be some obscure shit like, oh, like life insurance policy payouts or some or like, you know, like something like that that I’m like, I don’t even know that space, but that makes sense. It takes, you know, it’s something that you get or like social security. Like I know like my parents are getting to the age where they can collect social security. Like, would they take a lump sum of all their social security now and, you know, at at 70 cents or 72 cents on the dollar, and then, you know, this company just collects the the payments over time? Like, probably. I don’t know. Like there’s a lot of people who would make that trade.
Shaan Parr: Dude, did you know this? So there’s this uh a company, I have to go and look at what it is, but you guys can probably Google it actually, but I think some banks do it, like Goldman will do it. But if you have a winning lottery ticket, they’ll buy it off you. Right. And they’ll give you the money upfront, and it’s structured in such a way where they’re they’re still able to make their profit, but they’ll buy lottery tickets from you. Like we’re talking like $10 million lottery tickets or or seven figure. Uh, I I uh, it’s kind of interesting. People buy winning lottery tickets off of people. That’s actually kind of an interesting one. Um, I would actually need to do some research. How many people do you How much money do you think is won in the lottery per year?
Sam Parr: Oh, dude, I have no idea. I mean, I feel like the weekly lottery, the Powerball, every week is like, you know, between 50 and like $200 million. It’s it’s like that’s that’s like on a weekly basis that it’s so now it doesn’t get won every week, that’s how it accrues and that’s how it gets bigger, but like, you know, I don’t know. You do you have the number in front of you? I feel like it’s going to be I’m looking at it. So I don’t know. No, I I uh, no, I I can’t find it. There there’s 1,600 lotteries created each year, so there’s at least 1,600 unique winners. Um, no, I don’t. I don’t have the numbers. But lottery tickets, this might actually be kind of interesting because you said the life insurance, I’m like, what do you wait to get paid for that you would take a discounted upfront payment? Lotteries is kind is actually kind of interesting. Um, and I do know that some banks actually do that.
Sam Parr: Right. Uh, you know who else does that is Whitey Bulger. You remember Whitey Bulger?
Shaan Parr: I’ve never even heard that those words in my life. Do you do you know the movie The Departed?
Sam Parr: Yes.
Shaan Parr: You know Jack Nicholson’s character?
Sam Parr: Okay, yes.
Shaan Parr: It’s modeled after Whitey Bulger. He was a gangster in uh Boston. He was an Italian or Irish mafia guy. He uh or a mobster guy. He ended up going to jail recently, they found him and they um um he got beaten to death in jail, so it was like a a crazy ending to the story of him because he was America’s most wanted man for like 20 years. And um, anyway, he as part of his story, he won the lottery three times. And the way that he did it is people who had won the lottery the in the neighborhood, they would have to go to him and he would buy it from you and he would go and cash the ticket. And uh, so this is like a famous like the numbers game they call it. That’s like a famous mafia thing.