HOW TO DO SOMETHING NOBODY HAS EVER DONE

In 2017, Ankur Jain had sold a company to Tinder, had become its VP of product, and was hating the conversations he was having. He was living in San Francisco, where Silicon Valley types would talk about solving big problems and bettering the world—“and then the kind of stuff I would keep hearing about was, like, ‘We’re building crypto stickers,’” Jain says. This in a state where the median household price had hit twice the national mark, and in a city that over the past five years had seen median home prices nearly double. And it wasn’t as if the housing stock had astronomically improved. “The more these things became expensive, the less you got as a consumer,” he remembers realizing. “In what world of private sector markets does that make sense? And that, to me, spells opportunities to change a whole model.”

Even some highly educated, relatively well-paid San Franciscans—buoyed by lucrative jobs yet awash in student loans—could not afford to buy a house there, and homeownership nationwide had been largely dropping for more than a decade. “Then the worst part is, everyone tells you that the only way to ever build wealth in your life is homeownership,” Jain says. This was made even more annoying by the fact that what people did spend to put a roof over their heads—often, especially for young people, paying rent—helped their homeownership hopes very little, even as nearly half of American renter households paid more than 30 percent of their income on the expense. As far as Jain could tell, reliably paying rent only sapped one’s savings. Since few renters could pay rent via credit card, their reliability rarely, if ever, translated into an improved credit score despite rent being so many people’s largest monthly expense. It didn’t even earn you cash back or points like buying gas or groceries or airplane tickets did. Rent was an exceptionally big drag—which was, in its way, exciting.

Jain had been developing a theory of profitable betterment: Take young people’s biggest problems—ones surrounding massive sums of expenditure, like student loans and healthcare costs as they and their parents age—and see if entrepreneurs could reshape them to actually improve one’s life trajectory. “It’s like the age-old adage of ‘Follow the money,’” says Jain. “Where are people having to spend money? If you give consumers a