Former team. I can’t imagine starting a company with someone that didn’t have such a deep respect and appreciation for their way of thinking because I feel like in any company, you’re going to encounter hard problems to solve, difficult moments; hence, when you’re testing and having that counterpart to encourage you if you think you’re right or tell you that you’re wrong when you’re wrong. How was life growing up there? It’s definitely a part of it. He was a really, really visionary in this idea of democratizing good financial advice for everybody, in a way where before, you had nothing, or you could only work through a human financial advisor that may charge you high fees and so on. The challenge that they were faced with was that traditional infrastructure, the traditional title, and escrow companies just couldn’t meet them where they needed to be. I loved growing up in Scotland. : Yeah. Spruce's mission is to make real estate amazing for everyone involved. I thought that was a pretty cool idea. If someone else has thought of the idea, then you can’t start the company. I showed up on my first day as an intern. If you could go back and give that younger self one piece of business advice before launching a company, what would that be, and why knowing what you know now? We operate under a vision of enabling a one-click checkout for any kind of real estate transaction. It was hard to not get a little nervous. Yale Law '10; Law Firm/ Microsoft/ Citrix/ Spruce. Take my quiz and get a custom action plan to start raising more capital. Patrick Burns. Latest round Series A (May 2017) Onwards to People. What we tried to remember, and what I think was always true, is that things like what we’ve experienced this year, if anything, build our conviction for the fact that people need something more convenient, something with more options than the traditional real estate transaction. You make decisions when you are a young kid without really perfect information, but definitely, I was curious about physics, and I always wanted to challenge myself, I would say, and physics seemed like one of the harder things I could go and study at the university to challenge myself. As the COVID-19 pandemic persists, Patrick Burns said consumer demand to refinance homes has skyrocketed. MetaProp has been a great partner to Ergeon. Spruce was founded by Andrew Weisgall and Patrick Burns in 2016, and is headquartered in New York with hubs across the U.S. : Yeah, absolutely. I think you’ve had him on the show before. How do you guys make money, Patrick? Tell us about it. The applicable Spruce entities are authorized agents to write title insurance underwritten by a licensed title insurance underwriter. Once I got over that initial realization of my dress faux pas, I immediately thought, “Yes, this is the kind of environment that I want to be in where the most interesting thing was the work; the most interesting things were the problems we were solving and the best ideas. Prior to starting Spruce, Patrick was Product Manager at Betterment, the largest automated investment … If you think about it, traditionally, if you want to buy a home or refinance your mortgage, you have a realtor, mortgage broker, and they work with a host of third parties, most notably a title and escrow agency to put the deal together. It that, for us, is the kind of ecosystem that we think the real estate industry is heading toward, and we’re excited to play a role in it. I think, fortunately, everyone was able to recognize what was going on around us, but if anything, just improve our resolve for the space that we were in and the problems that we were solving. This year, obviously, we’re seeing first of all this year has been immensely challenging and hugely challenging for so many people in so many different ways, and for many industries, as well. About Spruce. The home is your biggest financial asset, your biggest financial liability, and so having your only options be to refinance or to sell a home, a process which takes, ordinarily, upwards of 40 to 50 days, is not serving most people. We’ve been lucky enough to be able to double the size of our team in 2019, and each new member has added something truly unique to our culture and expertise. That was an interesting setup for us. They weren’t hiring for a full-time role. “In these uncertain times, innovative mortgage lenders and real estate companies that support digital transactions are providing essential services to consumers, ensuring that critical moves are still possible and refinancing loans to help cover necessary expenses,” said Patrick Burns, Spruce co-founder and CEO. Fortunately, the team was phenomenal at building products and creating that value for the customers. I did the Master’s Degree where I spend not a lot of time studying in an academic sense, and really a lot of time using statistics in a very applied sense to things like gambling, behavioral finance problems, things like statistical biases that we all have very innately and it’s because of the way we evolve, but that comes out in the way we make decisions and so on. So, your Series A, your honeymoon, and most recently, the Series B, in the middle of COVID. This was around 2011, which was right around the time when applications of statistics and data science were becoming prevalent, democratized, and used in the working world. I’ll give you an example here. FCT. Onwards to Culture. What’s the next hurdle that we have to cross? Back to Overview. So instead of being fearful of that, I would think that people should embrace that idea and become a student of why the problem still exists that other people have tried to solve it. And if you got any value either from this episode or from the show itself, share it with a friend. Fortunately, I was able to do that. Alejandro: Amazing. Also, remember, if you need any help, whether it is with your fundraising efforts or with selling your business, you can reach me at, Peter Briffett On Disrupting 400 Years Of Banking And Financial Services In 24 Months, This Entrepreneur Raised $70 Million To Arm Healthcare With Live Insights, Ariel Katz On Raising $70 Million To Arm Healthcare With Live Insights, How To Stop Losing Investor Interest During Fundraising, He Built A Billion-Dollar Business By Reinventing Urban Mobility, Sam Zaid On Building A Billion-Dollar Business By Reinventing Urban Mobility. We face some interesting problems at Betterment. We felt strongly that we couldn’t attack this problem just as a software layer on top of the traditional infrastructure. Oops! That was, in a sense, also very formative for me. : How much capital have you guys raised to date, Patrick? There’s an ecosystem of companies in the way that there is for personal lending or banking or bank management, or frankly, just the broader app ecosystem of products and services that the world is real estate is brought into that dimension as well. Patrick Burns - Co-Founder - Spruce Holdings Inc. | LinkedIn In fact, you don’t really want to have a truly original idea because if you’re solving a problem that matters to a lot of people, hopefully, a lot of people have faced that problem and thought of a way that it could be better. I think it’s such an empowering component of things. I’m thankful for your dedication every day, night, and weekend to upholding our values and to achieving our mission. Receive the latest title industry news, straight to your inbox. The companies that we worked with and that we enabled with all these interesting different financial products to sell equity in your home, to sell and lease back your home, to get a mortgage, all these things. : Sure enough, it took us over two years and really, really crazy steps to get through that process, but now, coming out of the other side of it, we are incredibly well-positioned to serve online companies that want to operate in New York, California, Texas, Florida, and everywhere because we’ve taken on those regulatory hard roles and being able to overcome that. I was always very driven by a sense of curiosity about how things work in the world and driven by a desire to learn. Patrick Burns On Raising $50 Million To Enable In Real Estate … What we tried to remember, and what I think was always true, is that things like what we’ve experienced this year, if anything, build our conviction for the fact that people need something more convenient, something with more options than the traditional real estate transaction. I started to get the sense that what was happening was that this was a new frontier for fintech; what nowadays, you would call proptech, was then just seemed like an actual revolution of fintech. I think it taught me this lesson of having to stay focused on the customer journey. We provide these products and services to these online companies, but instead of the manual process, we replace it with automation, data science, API calls instead of phone calls, and digital experiences instead of in-person meetings. 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