87: Lower CEO Dan Snyder - building wealth through home ownership
By purchasing a home at 24, Dan Snyder experienced the value of homeownership at an early age. As a result of that experience, Dan decided to found Lower, a bootstrapped fintech focused on helping people build wealth through home ownership. Lower raised a $100 million Series A in June of 2021 and proceeded to grow the team exponentially to about 800 people over the last year. Dan joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built By Humans podcast to discuss the importance of having strong core values, investing in training front-line managers, and constantly recruiting for new talent. A key part of being a mission-driven company is making sure the people you hire are aligned to that mission. If you don’t believe in the value of home ownership, you probably shouldn’t work at Lower. An underrated benefit of raising institutional capital is raising the level of awareness the market has about your product or service. Building and maintaining a high-performing team is always going to be harder and take longer than you think. Companies should always look to keep their bench full by recruiting across all areas of business regardless of need. Managing people is very difficult and it is only something you do well when you’ve had the right amount of reps. Make sure to invest early in training your managers (especially newly promoted ones) as they are critical to your ability to rapidly scale out a team. Hire people who do more than they think. The easiest way to lose motivation is by making your team feel like they cannot chase opportunities because they need approval before taking action.