Dan Vasquez // Photo: Trevor Long
Dan Vasquez's rise to lead the future of artificial intelligence (AI) at Rocket Mortgage began when his uncle and mentor, David Vasquez, quit his CPA job and turned his computer programming hobby into a full-time job.
At the time, Vasquez was 12 years old and spent a lot of time with his uncle who lived two blocks away.
“In the 1990s, if you needed anything computer-related and you had a small business, you would call my uncle,” Vasquez recalls. “He ran his own consulting business and was one of the pioneers of working from home.”
When Vasquez was in middle school, his uncle offered to pay him if he came to his home office during the summer to learn the latest in technology programming.
“I'm too busy to sit down and learn this stuff, but you're young and you seem to have a passion for this,” he remembers his uncle saying. “You learn it and teach me, and when you hit certain milestones, I'll write you a check and it could be your summer job.”
“It was my first paycheck, my first job where someone was paying me,” Vázquez recalls with a look of amazement.
Over the summers that followed, he began working with his uncle, traveling with him to work and doing light tasks. He says that throughout his high school and college years, he and his uncle were almost like partners.
“I think growing up in an environment where I was held accountable for the entire solution alongside my clients really taught me a lot,” he says.
Vazquez joined Rocket Mortgage's predecessor company, Quicken Loans, in 2013 and has since led the team that developed some of the company's most innovative products.
He was the software architect for the company-wide team that built and launched Rocket Mortgage, unveiling the company's digital automated mortgage application process in a 2017 Super Bowl commercial.
He is especially proud of his leading role in developing True Rocket, a program that changed the company’s login and account system, making it more secure and customer-friendly with a single sign-up across all different Rocket properties.
“It's allowed the business to move forward technologically and get to where it is today,” he says.
Vasquez says the goal of the AI is to deliver the Rocket experience to customers in the best possible way, wherever they are.
“Right now, we use AI primarily to empower our team members and allow them to focus on the customer,” he says. “Our philosophy is that we want to let machines do what they're good at, and let humans do what they're good at.”