Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Aug 12, 2019 8 tweets 2 min read Read on X
In the category of "It's obvious that there are huge chunks of the economy which need one SFBA-startup quality workflow web app", I give you blend.com , which did that for mortgage origination at banks / credit unions / independent mortgage originators.
It's one of those magically mundane things. The business process here is extremely well-understood; the actual front end and backend processes in the US for mortgage origination are, and this is a technical term, a roaring pyroclastic tire fire.
I went through Blend's white labeled process while trying to get pre-approval to hopefully help a family member out, and literally sent a human two emails "Sorry only have 15 minutes so no possible way this is done today" "Erm ignore the last I think it's ready for you."
This is helped by me being preternaturally organized but sufficient data entry for a mortgage application being collectable in 15 minutes is pretty stunning to me, even with all of the documents ready to go.
If you want to read about mortgage origination and understand why "Hmm this seems like a frontend-heavy web application that one could reasonably deliver in a hackathon" is not coextensive with the actual solution, see
amazon.com/Digitally-Tran…

(Disclaimer: read critically.)
A non-obvious challenge here is that the most important consumer for a home mortgage is not obviously the person buying the house, it is the GSE or other financial system entity which is going to securitize the mortgage.

They have *much* more exacting requirements.
And, structurally, they will *never* talk to the person buying the house, the bank that person has the down payment at, the HR department certifying that that person is gainfully employed, etc etc, *but* they have a lot of very specific questions for *all* of these people.
And so the mortgage loan originator has to have all their paperwork together and pre-reviewed prior to sending it over to the securitizing party.

And if they don't? Well, then they're at substantial risk of either eating the home loan or carrying it on their books for 7+ years.

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More from @patio11

Jun 14
I think the so-called Bitcoin treasury companies have just reinvented exchange tokens: there is an asset with X real world utility but not naturally leverageable. It should flow to place in world where most leverage is bolted onto it; immediately incentive compatible. Repeat 100x
And then “Holy %}*]^ how did so much of it end up in a place with grossly deficient risk management?!”
(I understand that MicroStrategy is the opposite of leveraged exposure from the common shareholder’s perspective but if someone with hands on keyboard believes they are allowed leverage if they hold more exchange tokens then the model happens regardless of whether that is true.)
Read 18 tweets
Jun 4
(n.b. This is extremely well-known among companies which have a business process where you sign things. Most of them use a signature to demonstrate solemnization rather than authorization or authentication.)
As I've mentioned previously, solemnization is a sociolegal tripwire to say "There are many situations in society and in business where you're Just Talking and up until this exact moment we have been Just Talking *and after this point* We Were Not Just Talking. Do you get it?"
People who are unsophisticated about this think that the signature is somehow preventing someone from retroactively changing the terms of the contract. People who are unsophisticated say thinks like "Oh use digital signatures to PROVE that that has not happened. Sounds great."
Read 11 tweets
May 27
Apparently Japan Post is debuting the most obvious improvement in addressing for last two decades: address virtualization.

You sign up with them and get a short alphanumeric code. Their DB holds a pointer to physical address. If you move, you tell them, pointer changes.
And then when dealing with an e-commerce merchant instead of doing the traditional laborious address entry (which in Japanese usually requires redundantly providing the pronunciation of the address as well) you just give them the code.
This follows some more limited experiments with address virtualization, like the double blinding of addresses used in e.g. P2P marketplaces, where neither buyer nor seller strictly need to know where other lives if packages can move between them expeditiously.
Read 6 tweets
May 23
Listening to @_rossry ‘s new podcast about drug development and the first episode about operational competence issues in clinical trials is giving me flashbacks.
Link, inciting comments, and story time:

developmentandresearch.bio/meri-beckwith/
Ross and Meri discuss how clinical research organizations, who are essentially GCs sitting between pharma labs and sites which actually have clinical staff that can see patients, often are other than competent at meat and potatoes execution.
Read 21 tweets
May 6
Interesting article about falling backwards into founding a non-profit and then doing policy advocacy work, which had a number of points which resonated with me: Image
There is another paragraph about feeling turbocharged imposter syndrome when talking to subject matter experts and then realizing they’ve spent 0.01% of their career on *exactly* your new problem and so you understood it better than they do as of about day four or so.
Read 9 tweets
Apr 23
In today's very surprising example of things an LLM could be good at:

I had a print failure while running a resin print in the wee hours of the morning.

Debugging these is a bit maddening. They arise from a combination of software, math, chemistry, and unpredictable chaos.
They're also very underdocumented. (In what is surely a first in the history of manufacturing.)

The community is spread between various Facebook groups and Discords, and writes little down formally. Most recorded lore is in YouTube videos, and aimed at low-skill enthusiasts.
And when a print failure happens, all you have to go on is the symptom to figure out where to start investigating. You'll see e.g. a sheer within a print or a melted rump instead of a dragon or, as happened with me yesterday, a build plate wrenched to 30 degrees off level.
Read 10 tweets

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