Posts

Why You Can’t Get Yesterday’s Rate, Stock Price, or Bitcoin Price

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My Angry Phone Call With Jeff Bezos! I recently called up Jeff Bezos last week and that he sell me Amazon stock for $6 per share because that was the price in October of 2001, when I wanted to buy 10,000 shares … but didn’t. I then explained to him that my $60,000 investment at […]Read More

Great Incentives VS. Incentives Gone Wrong (& Cobras Too)

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INCENTIVES ARE EVERYTHING/INCENTIVES GONE WRONG ARE FASCINATING! Great incentives create great outcomes. But unfortunately, humans are astonishingly bad at establishing incentives – a point investor, entrepreneur, and writer, Sahil Bloom recently made in a fascinating Twitter thread. Many people, myself included, have suffered from an inability to create the right incentives, which often lead to […]Read More

Learning From Amazon’s Many Failures; Failing To Succeed?

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We try various initiatives all the time at JVM – and often fail spectacularly. A few things that come to mind are a team competition we set up in 2012 that utterly destroyed morale; a profit-sharing program we set up in 2014 that turned out to be blatantly illegal (our attorney panicked and immediately made […]Read More

Leverage Your Database Before Amazon Does; Amazon Teams Up With Realogy

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Most readers have probably heard this already but Amazon is teaming up with Realogy to match homebuyers with real estate agents through a program called TurnKey. This is a huge deal b/c of the size of the partners. Amazon is the world’s largest retailer and Realogy, which owns NRT, Better Homes, Century 21, Coldwell Banker, […]Read More

Only One In Five Willing To Apply for a Mortgage Online

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We recently spent $26,000 on a new “point of sale” platform (Blend) to make it even easier for our borrowers to apply online. This was a lot for us as a small business, but it is nothing compared to the $80 million that Loan Depot spent to develop their online application and related technology. But, […]Read More