At $25bn market cap, would it be worth Tesla/Elon's time to just buy Ford - get the E - and then sell Ford to Renault or another European manufacturer looking to get scale through mergers?
810 karma · joined March 24, 2011
We're for people who look at the world and wonder "why isn't this more simple"
The 'industry' would like you to think you cannot sell your own home.
We think you know your home, its value and the local area better than any estate agent.
And you definitely are the best person to open the front door and show people around your home.
We launch in August with an experience so delightful that it'll dominate dinner table conversation for years.
Ultimately we're turning selling and buying homes into an experience that takes just one click. That you'll have confidence to hit.
I previously founded Unmortgage, where I secured a £500m partnership with Allianz and raised £10m pre-product, pre-revenue.
Come join us and help build the brand everyone is going to talk about.
If you're the best at what you do, or young and hungry, we'd love to speak to you.
We don't 'fill roles'. We attract amazing people and help them work on things they are excited about.
For an informal chat, here's my availability: http://free.co.uk/thanks
Business is about people more than it is about product.
During onboarding at Free I read a story book that is the epitome of every product team ever.
All those little assumptions we make, might get us to elephant or snake. When all we're trying to do is get back to mum.
And while we all communicate, if that communication gets us to dad, we're still in the wrong place.
It was frustrating before. But now I know all of these UX faux pas...
Thanks BuiltForMars for taking away my blissful ignorance.
Hi, I’m Ray.
I founded Unmortgage, the new way to buy a home without a mortgage.
After securing a partnership with Allianz for an initial fund of £500m and also the largest seed round in Europe (probably ever) of £10m, I’ve stepped down as CEO to work on something new.
I have designed a new business that adds such value to people’s lives that they trust us for buying essential financial services: mortgages, insurance, high-Speed broadband.
I’m looking for someone to work side-by-side with me.
The goal is to be up-and-running within a few months and generating several million pounds worth of profit by this time next year.
I have several potential venture and private equity backers to help us grow, but I’m keen to get as far as we can bootstrapped.
There is additionally an opportunity to roll-up 7 existing businesses which generate over £1bn in revenue today. They would cost c.£200m to acquire. Hence lining up private equity.
Just to provide a flavour of my ambition.
Happy to chat and answer any questions - I tend to be an open book, as I find that is the best way to learn and build trust: rayhan@rafiqomar.com
Millions of people are stuck in the rent trap, with no way to own a home. At Unmortgage we are reinventing homeownership to bridge the widening gap between renting and buying with a mortgage.
We are funded for the next 3 years after the largest seed raise in Europe and are looking for people to join us at this early stage.
We work in a Agile (XP+TDD) team in a stunning office above Bank station, London. The Stack is React, Python running on Kubernetes in Google Cloud. Everyone gets their hands dirty and there are no silos allowed.
I'm the CEO and would love to hear from passionate developers who believe in making a difference. Please contact me on ray@unmortgage.com
I thought it might help to share our motivations for eventually listing our company vs taking more VC:
a. The public markets force transparency. This aligns with our values.
b. Governance enforced by VCs (especially in the UK) is largely founder-unfriendly. There are no prefs, investor majority consents or other unfair terms in company governance when you’re public.
c. Secondaries - shares sold by employees or early investors - can be sold at any time, at fair market value.
d. Capital raising - debt or equity - as a public company comes with fewer strings.
e. Friends and family and supporters can participate - especially from their retirement accounts. This is really important - the wealth creation being broad has a real good-news feel. Sharing the wealth.
f. Trust is built with the public - I feel - more when you’re publicly listed and ‘established’.
The ‘downsides’ of quarterly market updates I’m sure are more intense than it feels from the outside, but I’d like to think our growth story happening in a public sphere will help build trust so when we do need more capital a broader base of investors feel confident engaging with us.
Thoughts welcomed.
But when the premium came out at over 4x my existing renewal quote I became less enthused.
And then I saw the Excess Charge (for making a claim) was £1,000 vs the £250 norm, I ran away to the nearest comparison site to find vanilla home insurance.
I think the conversion process might need looking at to make the benefits less nakedly focused on cost.
Unmortgage started with a simple idea: Don't get a mortgage, get a crowd.
As of this week this idea became something that is genuinely helping people realise their homeowning dreams.
I'm excited and am hoping to share this journey with people equally passionate about changing the world for the better.
We're super lean and very early stage - http://unmortgage.com - yes, we release early and ugly to validate.
Looking for a full stack developer who wants to use data to change the way people make decisions about their single largest purchase: starting with automating conveyancing.
We exist to help those no-one else is helping.
This principle guides us so that we focus on genuinely changing people's lives, rather than incremental value add.
I'm on ray@unmortgage.com - or call me on 077 95 27 35 52 for an informal chat.
Absolutely no remote workers please.
We're fixing the broken housing ladder with DIY Shared Ownership.
Unmortgage offers a completely new way for people to get on the housing ladder without needing to take out a mortgage.
Occupiers get capital to buy a home worth up to ten times their income with only a 5% deposit.
It also opens up owner-occupied residential property as an asset class for pension funds, who earn inflation-linked rent on the portion the occupier doesn't own.
More info at http/angel.co/Unmortgage
We have track record of building beautiful products [0]. We're hiring for a back-end dev to turbo charge this new app and help people find property properly [1].
Market-rate salary, freedom to be creative, no hassle work environment.
rayhan@wigwamm.com
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/fn8wrfml1f5vbzs/wigwamm_property_a...
What has been the feedback so far? And what have you planned for a next iteration (if any)?
It's not realistic, but would be an interesting controlled experiment.
Napkins are my notebook of choice.
We build apps for real estate. Looking for a Python dev who enjoys building discrete API services for our apps to call.
Contact Rayhan for a chat: 077 952 73 552
The main considerations will be:
- Set routes/paths the drones must follow, taking I to account altitudes that minimise traffic with other things high up (buildings, aircraft, UFOs) - emergency procedures and a risk assessment for each foreseeable eventuality (not that hard considering the lack of other traffic 'up there') - limits on the amount of drones in the air within constrained geographic localities.
It is likely that this could all be agreed for a single trial city well before 2015 rolls around. This isn't rocket science...
And in all honesty, this would benefit Amazon, because then they don't require drone pilots. Just programme the 'lanes', rudimentary GPS and proximity sensors and keep the speed down so that collision-avoidance can be activated with sufficient time.
Seeking co-founder. We build cool sh*t. Led by someone with serious domain experience, our team of four needs one more in a senior technical role.
Call Rayhan for a quick chat if you're interested: 077 952 73 552.
A car is fairly intuitive to drive. Driving licenses are required for safety.
The comments you make are akin to performing in a sports car, where concentration and accuracy is key.
You car analogy would fit if you had PCs as a F1 car and tablets as a Mini. F1 car is for speed and requires perfecting to get the tyres working right. A Mini, you can pretty much drive through all sorts of faults and be none-the-wiser, because performance just isn't an issue. Well, 90% of the time. :)
As you suggest, I simply must be using PCs wrong. But then, the ipad doesn't need an instruction manual, or to be used perfectly, for me to use that right.
What's ironic, though, is OS X out pop-ups Windows 7/8 with annoying prompts and notifications.
Again, tablet OSs just aren't prone to this, so people 'feel' more comfortable using them.