The Scene
With Bilt Rewards, Ankur Jain thinks he’s hit on one of the “category-defining” startup ideas that only come along a few times in a decade — and he thinks he can turn it into a $10 billion business with no more than 200 employees.
Jain has had this kind of confidence for a while. The son of former InfoSpace CEO Naveen Jain, he founded his first company at 11, sold his contact-management app Humin to Tinder in 2016, and set up Kairos, a venture studio for other founders. His idea with Bilt is that renters should be able to earn credit card-style rewards for paying their landlords on time and boost their credit score in the process.
Launched in 2021 with backing from Blackstone and Starwood Capital, Bilt processes rent payments for over 70% of the top multifamily housing managers in the US — one in four apartment-dwellers in America pays their rent on its platform. It handled more than $36 billion in rent payments last year, earning fees from those landlords for processing them, and its last fundraising round valued it at $3.25 billion. Chaired by former American Express CEO Ken Chenault, Bilt is now expanding into offering similar benefits for mortgage payers, and for users who frequent restaurants, gyms, and other businesses near their homes. Here’s how Jain explains his plan.
The View From Ankur Jain
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson: How should people understand what Bilt Rewards does?
Ankur Jain: $700 billion a year is spent on rent and $4 trillion a year is spent on mortgages. It started off [with the idea that] if you’re paying your biggest expense every month, you should get rewarded and should build your credit. But from there, it’s now opened up all of this commerce around it.
Why did you start the company?
At the end of 2017, I had just left Tinder. I started getting all these calls from VCs pitching me these garbage companies. It was like, ‘We’re building this NFT crypto purse wallet company, and you can have this crypto-kitties thing that you can do here.’ I remember walking around San Francisco, thinking to myself, ‘These guys are putting $100 million each into these companies, and nobody here can afford rent. What happened to solving these trillion-dollar problems in housing, and health care, and student loans?’ I wanted to go work on these problems.
How have you gone about scaling the company?
We’ve been very adamant about not scaling quickly, even today. Honestly, it’s one of the things that petrifies me the most as a CEO. I spend time with so many of my peers and friends who were founders of companies in [earlier decades], and they were disruptive, and fast-growing, and hungry. And it blows my mind how dysfunctional these companies have become. They’re slow, they’re bureaucratic, they’re full of politics — and these are tech companies.
How are you trying to avoid that fate?
Headcount is the No. 1 issue that happens. People start just hiring to solve problems, and most companies start to structure. We did this at Tinder. It was a huge mistake. You keep engineering together, and marketing, and product. Inevitably, it becomes, ‘Well, engineering didn’t get it done on time.’
We’re built to run as pods; our company is made up of eight mini startups, and we cap teams at 25 people. [Each one] includes a [general manager,] front-end engineers, back-end engineers, product design, product management, and marketing. You have your own mini sub-brand identity, inspired by the military squadron concept. In the Navy, every squadron has a [version] of the Navy logo that’s like their team’s logo. So we create this branding and they get their own swag. It’s a way to create more camaraderie within your group, but you’re still part of this continued business.
You’re not going to be able to go from $3 billion to $10 billion with just 200 people?
I really think we can. Every step of the way, we keep asking ourselves, why do people throw people at problems? And how do you do that in a way that’s automated [instead]? We don’t just launch random merchants on our system. With restaurants, we took six months and we built integrations for self-service onboarding for all the major point of sale systems and booking platforms.
This is why I didn’t take venture money. When you take venture money, everybody wants you to do quick markups and just growth. That was a mistake I made in my last company. This time around, we said, ‘We’re trying to build a multidecade business.’ If it takes me an extra six months, who cares?