HOW TO DO SOMETHING NOBODY HAS EVER DONE

Ankur Jain wanted to create a rewards program that helps people buy a home. Nothing like it existed. To become the first, he'd have to first fail over and over again.

- NATE HOPPER

In 2017, Ankur Jain had sold a company to Tinder, had become its vice president of product, and was hating the conversations he was having. He was living in San Francisco, where Silicon Valley types would talk about solving big problems and bettering the world—“and then the kind of stuff I would keep hearing about was, like, 'We're building crypto stickers,'” Jain says. This in a state where the median household price had hit twice the national mark, and in a city that over the past five years had seen median home prices nearly double. And it wasn't as if the housing stock had astronomically improved. “The more these things became expensive, the less you got as a consumer," he remembers realizing. "In what world of private sector markets does that make sense? And that, to me, spells opportunities to change a whole model.”