Good morning, Broadsheet readers. As Twitter clashes with Meta threads, New York City explores regulating AI in hiring, and Opendoor's CEO tries to navigate a tough housing market, we hope you have a great weekend.
– Just keep building. In 2022, real estate technology company Opendoor became a Fortune 500 company for the first time. The company debuted at #425 with $8 billion in revenue. Later that year, the company's CFO, Carrie Wheeler, took over as CEO from co-founder Eric Wu. This means that in 2023, Opendoor became the first Fortune 500 company led by a woman.
When the Fortune 500 list was released last month, Opendoor was one of 52 Fortune 500 companies led by a female CEO, and Wheeler was one of 12 women hired into those CEO roles in the past year.
On this year's Fortune 500 list, Opendoor ranked 266th with $15.6 billion in revenue. It's a big jump from last year, but it's been a tough road. The housing market has become increasingly chaotic and volatile amid rising interest rates. Low home affordability presents a challenge for a company whose value proposition depends on homeowners being willing to sacrifice profits in exchange for convenience. Real estate tech companies like Zillow and Redfin gave up on home flipping long ago.
Carrie Wheeler, CEO of Opendoor
“Despite the macroeconomic uncertainty, the real estate industry is not going away,” Wheeler said. “People are still on the move, so our actual focus and mission hasn't changed. We're focused on leaving this cycle better than we went in.” Wheeler said Opendoor is focused on coming out “leaner and stronger,” and in fact, the company laid off 22% of its workforce in April.
Wheeler spent most of his private equity career at TPG before joining Opendoor as first a director, then CFO and then CEO. Wheeler says his experience in PE helped him run the real estate business. In PE, he saw “different industries, different CEOs, different industry structures” but also “great management, how to lead a team, how to make strategic business decisions, how to think about capital allocation, how to regularly test an investment thesis,” Wheeler said. Opendoor is a company that “carries inventory, cares about terms, cares about managing the balance sheet,” Wheeler added.
“All the experience I had in private equity helped me here,” she says.
Opendoor's shares have fallen about 30 percent over the past year and are currently trading at less than $4. But Wheeler's Fortune 500 ambitions remain undiminished. “We want to stay on the list for years to come,” he says. “Because that means we're executing. We think we're building a very large business.”
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Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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This story originally appeared on Fortune.com.
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