If you work for OpenDoor, an online real estate platform, you might want to consider polishing your resume. The company’s chairman recently let it slip that he thinks the firm could lose almost all of its employees.
During a recent appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street,” Keith Rabois, a former member of the Paypal mafia , told a reporter that he believes most of the people at his company are expendable. “Opendoor has 1,400 employees. I don’t know what most of them do. We don’t need more than 200 of them,” Rabois noted. He added that “the advent of AI and other technologies” has made reducing the workforce an “easy problem” to solve.
Rabois’ apparent lack of interest in keeping the majority of Opendoor’s workforce is somewhat humorous, given how well the company has been doing lately. Indeed, the company’s stock is up 500 percent this year. However, the stock’s performance appears to be the result of a wave of retail investors becoming interested in the firm due to online advice circulated by a hedge fund manager. As a result, the company has been dubbed a “dumb stock,” which Rabois disputes.
It’s unclear whether Rabois’s blunt comment was simply an effort to inspire confidence in the company’s profitability. After all, if you fire almost everyone in the firm, you’re much more likely to make a profit.
The stock rose this week, but other developments also helped investor confidence, namely the appointment of former Shopify CEO Kaz Nejatian as the new CEO. CNBC notes that “investor” pressure prompted the exit of former Opendoor CEO Kerry Wheeler. The company’s stock surged 78 percent on Thursday before falling 13 percent on Friday, according to the Outlet.
Rabois had more to say about his efforts to transform the online real estate platform: “The culture was broken,” he said of the firm’s previous leadership. “These people were working remotely. It’s not working. This company was founded on the principle of innovation and working together in person. We’re going back to our roots.”
Rabois also took the opportunity to harp on the company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, noting that under previous management the firm had gone “down this Dei path” and that Rabois planned to “fix all of that.” Gizmodo reached out to OpenDoor for more information on the apparent plan to improve its workforce.
