The Most Founder Mode CEO Working Today Isn’t the Founder: Opendoor’s Kaz Nejatian

Kaz Nejatian explains how he went from Shopify CTO to refounding Opendoor as CEO in 16 days, tethering his pay entirely to stock performance.

• Nejatian became Opendoor CEO 15-16 days after a single Sunday phone call, after originally planning to spend his entire net worth to take the company private.
• He took a $1 salary with performance stock units structured like options, with zero value below a strike price — explicitly to avoid incentivizing managed decline.
• Entire Opendoor executive team turned over within two quarters of his joining; only one original member remains.
• Most enduring companies are built on first derivatives of their core business: Union Pacific sold land, Google sold ads, Shopify became a payments and merchant services company.
• Shopify exited logistics in ~3 weeks of internal decision-making because third-party alternatives (Walmart, DHL, startups) had made Shopify’s warehouse play redundant.
• RSUs are structurally harmful to CEOs because they incentivize delaying inevitable decline rather than driving outcomes.
• At Opendoor’s company-wide hackathon, a home project manager with no coding background automated his own job using Cursor and Gumloop; Nejatian now evaluates employees on whether they default to AI as the first performance criterion.
• Toby Lütke applies a near-zero discount rate to the future, values weeks and 10-year horizons, and treats quarters as nearly useless measuring units.

2026-03-12 · Watch on YouTube