I didn't even know what I was looking at (2011)

In 2011 I was taking a Monday night entrepreneurship class. One night the professor brought in a friend who had started a distressed-mortgage investment firm with his partner the year before. I was intrigued, so I reached out after class. I interviewed on Wednesday and started as an intern the following Monday.

My first task was auditing their first small portfolio of collateral files. I checked that each folder held the note, the mortgage, the assignment & the allonge, with the borrower names, addresses, loan amounts and dates matching across all of them. Then I learned to match the assignors and assignees from one document to the next (the chain of title), to confirm we actually had enforceable paper.

Everything was foreign. I didn’t even know what I was looking at! And there really wasn’t anywhere to go for information, other than the people who had already figured it out.

So that’s where I went. Once a month we met with a group of local investors to talk shop & compare “notes”. Those meetings were critical to how I learned the business.

I was a broke college kid trying to become an indispensable part of the operation. The firm was a year old, so the two founders and I figured it out as we went. I started as the intern and became their first hire. Over the next few years I worked my way through almost every role. I was operations manager, then Director of Acquisitions, then portfolio manager, and eventually I took on the whole trade desk.

Two years ago, after a couple of webinars, we called some of the people who’d attended and asked what we could do better. One of them said I explain things too fast, because I know them so well it’s “like tying a shoe.”

Fair enough - in 2011 I couldn’t tie the shoe.