The team is in great shape, the coaching staff, the front office. Just things feel really good chemistry-wise across the board.
StockX's live marketplace will harness the Internet's natural ability to facilitate a better way to transact certain segments of ecommerce. We are going to bring the kind of trading platform and visibility to tangible products that financial and commodities markets have used for decades.
A lot of the problems in the mortgage world, people said, were because our competitors were evil. But a lot of it was a lack of technology - bad processes and systems.
To process and close models in 50 states and 2,000-plus counties with the myriad of, just, tens of thousands of different regulations, customs, vendors - it's a monster. So the only way to do that is with technology. It really is rocket science.
A mortgage transaction is very complex, very complicated, and very localized - the rules are not just by state but by county, sometimes even by municipality.
The efficiency, credibility, and liquidity of the financial markets have been foundational to the largest economy in the world.
You have a lot of great teams in the NBA. I watched San Antonio against Dallas, and they're two great teams, and there are great teams in the east, as well. So it takes time to gel, as we've all seen.
Urban renewal always happens as a symphony of events, and part of the symphony is innovative, optimistic developers with the ability and willingness to transform historic properties.
Ironically, the original Detroit Stock Exchange once sat less than a thousand feet from StockX headquarters here in downtown Detroit. It is only fitting that we are going to build the next iteration of the world's most efficient market invention almost in the same spot.
The Midwest has, I think, incredibly hardworking people. You know they're going to be successful because, quite honestly, I cannot work with people from the East Coast - a little bit of variance on the coast - I'm from Ohio, and I understand that.
We get a lot of emails, a lot of suggestions on the kinds of ideas and things that people would like to do. There's a lot of good ones, but a lot of them are something that the franchise couldn't or wouldn't endorse, just as being not consistent with what the NBA would want or, probably, what we would even want, too.
Detroit's a good investment because, first of all, the entry fee for everything is lower. And, you've got the talent that is here that is ambitious and motivated, so you're going to get in on a much lower cost structure in every way, shape, or form from labor to buildings to whatever.
We like scalable companies that we think we can grow - because of our expertise, operational is consumer-facing. For the most part, consumer-facing, technology-driven process, driven sometimes if they're call center or into the sales type of stuff associated with it.
Keep your debt low, and ask, Can your operational expertise make an impact? Then you're taking away a lot of the risk.
I'm still focused on the flagship businesses: Quicken Loans and RockBridge, the title company, and some of the board stuff in the gaming.
It's all about connectivity - not just technical connectivity but geographic connectivity. That's what makes a city go.
People have things that happen between them. I certainly don't keep grudges.
When there were first rumors of us going after LeBron, some fans wondered how we could do that after all that happened. But after the 'Sports Illustrated' letter, every fan is thrilled to have him back. That was so heartfelt.
Detroit in its heyday - let's say, 1920s to the '60s - was never a huge downtown-living thing. People lived in the neighborhoods.
Every loan that we did in the City of Detroit in the 10 years they studied - between 2005 and 2014 - were conventional FHA, VA loans with average interest rates of 6%.
