Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Twitter dukes it out with Meta's Threads, New York City seeks to regulate A.I. in hiring, and Opendoor's CEO navigates a tricky housing market. Have a restful weekend.
- Just keep building. In 2022, the real estate technology business Opendoor became a Fortune 500 company for the first time. It debuted at No. 425 with $8 billion in revenue. At the end of that year, the company's CFO Carrie Wheeler took over as CEO from cofounder Eric Wu. That meant that in 2023, Opendoor was a woman-led Fortune 500 business for the first time.
Opendoor was one of 52 Fortune 500 companies to be led by a female CEO when the Fortune 500 was published last month. And Wheeler was one of 12 women hired to those CEO jobs within the past year.
On this year's Fortune 500, Opendoor ranked No. 266 with $15.6 billion in revenue. That's a big leap from the previous year—but it's been a rocky journey. The housing market has been chaotic and unstable amid rising interest rates. For a company whose value proposition depends on homeowners being willing to sacrifice some profit in exchange for ease and convenience, low home prices are a challenge. Tech-based peers in the real estate industry, like Zillow and Redfin, long ago gave up on flipping homes.
"The macro is uncertain, but real estate isn't going away," says Wheeler. "People are still moving...So nothing about our actual focus and mission has changed...We're focused on making sure that we are going to leave this cycle better than we came into it." She says Opendoor is focused on becoming "leaner and meaner"—and indeed, the company laid off 22% of its workforce in April.
Before joining Opendoor first as a board member, then as CFO, then as CEO, Wheeler spent the bulk of her career in private equity at TPG. She says that her PE experience has helped her run a real estate business. She says that in PE she saw "different industries, different CEOs, and different industry structures" as well as "good management, how to lead teams, how to make strategic business decisions, how to think about capital allocation, how to test your investment thesis on a regular basis." Opendoor is a business that "has inventory, cares about terms, and cares about managing its balance sheet," she adds.
"All those things from private equity have helped me here," she says.
Opendoor's stock is down around 30% over the past year, trading under $4 today. But Wheeler's Fortune 500 ambitions aren't fading. "We aspire to be on the list for many, many years to come," she says. "Because that means we're executing. We think we're building a very, very big business."
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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