If you work for Opendoor, the online real estate platform, you might consider polishing up your resume. The chair of the company’s board recently let it slip that he thinks the firm could stand to 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 felt that the majority of the people at his company were expendable. “There’s 1,400 employees at Opendoor. I don’t know what most of them do. We don’t need more than 200 of them,” Rabois remarked. He added that “the advent of AI and other technologies” made the workforce reduction a “simple problem” to solve.
Rabois’ apparent disinterest in maintaining a majority of Opendoor’s workforce is somewhat humorous given how well the company’s been doing lately. Indeed, the company’s stock is up 500 percent this year. That said, the stock performance appears to largely be the result of a wave of retail investors becoming interested in the firm due to online advice spread by a hedge fund manager. As a result, the company has been dubbed a “meme stock,” which Rabois disputes.
It’s unclear whether Rabois’s ruthless comment was just an effort to inspire confidence in the profitability of the company. After all, if you fire almost everybody at a firm, there’s a much bigger chance you’ll turn a profit.
The stock soared this week, but other developments also helped buoy investor confidence—namely, the appointment of former Shopify executive Kaz Nejatian as its new CEO. CNBC notes that “investor” pressure had spurred the exit of former Opendoor CEO Carrie Wheeler. On Thursday, the company’s stock rose a whopping 78 percent, before dipping down 13 percent on Friday, the outlet notes.
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 management. “These people were working remotely. That doesn’t work. This company was founded on the principle of innovation and working together in person. We’re going to return to our roots.”
Rabois also took the opportunity to dunk on the company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, noting that, under its previous leadership, the firm had gone “down this DEI path,” and that Rabois intended to “fix all that.” Gizmodo reached out to Opendoor for more information about its apparent plan to upend its workforce.
