From Poker Star to Unicorn Founder — Nima Ghamsari, CEO/Co-Founder of Blend

In this episode, Miguel Armaza sits down with Nima Ghamsari, CEO and Co-Founder of Blend, a company transforming the $40+ trillion consumer lending industry, by delivering speed and efficiency to mortgage lenders to navigate a complex industry.

Blend is a newly minted unicorn that has raised almost $400 million in equity from some of the top VCs in the industry, including Canapi Ventures, Temasek, General Atlantic, 8VC, Greylock, Peter Thiel, and many more!

Prior to Blend, Nima was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, where he co-founded its commercial group focused on major data challenges for the financial sector. Nima is also a former semi-professional Poker player and talked to us about some of the parallels between entrepreneurship and the game of Poker.

When Nima Ghamsari was accepted to Stanford University, he received full financial aid to cover his tuition, yet he still needed money to afford room and board. So he turned to online poker and started playing several hours a week. He became so good at it, that he started making hundreds of thousands of dollars as a Stanford college student and continued playing for seven years until 2011. Not only did he make a lot of money through this experience, but Poker also taught him lessons about money that would later come in handy throughout his entrepreneurial journey.

Upon graduation, Mr. Ghamsari joined the Financial Institutions group at Palantir, just as the 2008 financial crisis was unfolding and spent the next three years helping big banks manage their mortgage portfolios and helping reduce borrower default rates. More importantly, he also learned the $10 trillion mortgage industry was mostly run on paper with antiquated practices and old software providers. Seeing how one of the most crucial industries of the country was in dire need of modernization, Nima and a couple of his Palantir colleagues decided to leave the company and launch Blend.

Getting Started

In the early days of Blend, the team experimented with multiple ideas within the mortgage industry. They found so many problems that needed solving, that they spent the first 18 months looking for the initial opportunity. Rather than launching multiple products at once, Blend started by fixing the mortgage origination application process.

The historical way of getting a mortgage was through multiple iterations of physical exchange of documents, which made the process time-consuming, inefficient, and frustrating for both sides. So, Blend decided to build a platform that could use existing consumer data to help lenders make faster decisions. Nima realized fixing one subatomic part of a large problem and making it 10 times better could lead the company to make a big difference for their clients.

Seven years later, Blend’s SAS solution processes $2–3 billion of mortgages on a daily basis and serves over 250 banks working with millions of consumers. Starting with a game-changing product in a small area, helped the company find product-market fit and continue expanding to adjacent services.

Culture and The Road Ahead

Over the last few years, Nima has increasingly realized the importance of company culture. As a firm with exponential growth, he considers humility to be one of the most important traits and says Blend can’t afford to have team members with big egos, “we can’t have high ego people at blend anymore, because it just creates so much disruption. Doesn’t matter how good you are”. In fact, he has seen some of the most humble and confident people, use their confidence to power through obstacles, and use it to create the grit Blend needs to succeed. Humility is also important for Nima because he recognizes Blend doesn’t know everything and they have to keep learning and getting better. To this day, Nima still interviews and talks to candidates across the board and likes asking them simple questions that reveal a lot about their worldview.

The company is also looking for Impact-oriented people. In Nima’s own words, “impact has to always be the primary function of success, because the money follows from that, not the other way around”. Moreover, understanding you are making a positive impact on your customer’s lives will motivate company employees and drive overall better results for Blend.

When you understand Blend’s ambitious plans, it becomes evident just how important company culture is for them. Going forward, Mr. Ghamsari expects Blend to be a combination of 100 businesses adding value in many related ways. So he is continuously thinking about how to set up the company so all businesses and employees can work with each other.

Entrepreneurial Advice

Reflecting back on his years of entrepreneurship, Nima has a few lessons to share.

• It’s important for the founding team to have clearly defined roles and responsibilities early on. Otherwise, you will be slowed down.
• Try to find a problem you can improve 10x and overinvest in the product to make your customers successful. A continuous focus on the customer will help you find ways to add value and keep identifying areas where you can continue growing.
• Finally, over-investing and establishing a company culture early can pay high dividends, ”every regret I’ve had at Blend has been a people-related regret (…) I regret where I knew better and I didn’t listen to my gut.”

About Blend

Blend helps lenders streamline the customer journey for any banking product from application to close. Its Digital Lending Platform is used by Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, and over 250 other leading financial institutions to acquire more customers, increase productivity, and deepen customer relationships. The company enables customers to process more than $3.5 billion in mortgages and consumer loans per day, helping millions of consumers get into homes and gain access to the capital they need to lead better lives. To learn more, visit blend.com.

Nima’s Bio

Nima Ghamsari is the CEO and co-founder of Blend, a Silicon Valley technology company transforming the $40+ trillion consumer lending industry. Blend’s cloud-based technology, for mortgages and consumer banking, delivers speed and efficiency to lenders so they can serve the modern borrower and safely navigate the industry’s changing rules and regulations. Prior to Blend, Nima was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, where he co-founded its commercial group solving major data challenges for the financial sector. After the 2008 financial crisis, Nima worked directly with major banks and agencies to develop and implement software enabling underwater borrowers to avoid foreclosures while saving financial institutions billions of dollars.