Landis: The Path Home

By Roelof Botha on behalf of Team Sequoia

A couple years ago, in the midst of Charlotte, North Carolina’s ongoing real-estate boom, a woman named Dow found a house she knew would be perfect for her, her partner Eric, and their 10-year-old son. But when she applied for a loan she got some heartbreaking news: her credit score wasn’t high enough to qualify for the loan they would need. As prices rose daily, she worried her longtime dream of homeownership was slipping away.

Then Dow heard about a company called Landis, launched by co-founders Cyril Berdugo and Tom Petit. She learned that Landis could buy the home for her, rent it to her family temporarily, and guide her through a tailored plan to save, pay down debt, and build her credit to the point where she could take over the mortgage herself.

That’s exactly what happened. Thirteen months later, Dow and Eric got the keys.

My own introduction to Landis came in the Stanford classroom of my former professor, Garth Saloner, during the “Pitch a VC” portion of his Formation of New Ventures course. In front of 80 pairs of watchful eyes, I give entrepreneurs live feedback on ideas I’ve never heard before, and periodically turn to the crowd, The Office-style, to discuss how it’s going. It’s an anxiety-inducing experience. However nervous the founders might be, I always perspire profusely.

On this day, though, I was also particularly moved by what I was hearing. Here was an opportunity to enable an incredibly important moment in a customer’s life — helping them find a place where they could build memories and stability for their family. Landis runs on financial literacy coaching, not just transactions.

It took me a moment to wrap my head around the complexities and what-ifs. But as Cyril explained his and Tom’s vision, I began to understand why they believed that the problems keeping homeownership out of reach for so many really are solvable. While renters often imagine a massive gulf between them and a place of their own, the truth is most, like Dow, don’t actually need tens of thousands of dollars in the bank to qualify. They just need help understanding things like which debts they should prioritize, which credit cards to keep open and which to close, and where and how to save.

Not only did Cyril and Tom have a transformative idea, but meeting them felt like the partnership version of love at first sight. Together, they have the technical and industry expertise they need to succeed. Even better, they are original thinkers, right down to their unconventional arrangement as co-CEOs. They have a contract unlike any I’ve seen before, outlining the specific values that guide their decisions — from openness and transparency to high integrity. It says a lot about them, and it is perfectly consistent with Landis’ mission-driven approach. In an industry where would-be homeowners too often find themselves with few allies, Cyril and Tom’s goal is about people, not just money. A profitable model is simply the fuel that allows them to help more families make their way home.

That’s why we are glad to lead Landis’ series A and join them on their mission to empower new homeowners. America’s wealth gap is even wider than its income gap. Along housing lines the numbers are especially stark, with median wealth of homeowners reaching nearly 89 times that of renters even before COVID-19 pushed up housing prices in many markets. But by partnering with agents and lenders to support its customers, Landis can be part of making homeownership more accessible. Many of their customers are not only first-time homeowners, but the first in their family to own a home. When they are empowered to build wealth, so are their children, and their children’s children. Each new “place to call home” can make a difference for generations to come.