Max Simkoff - Redesigning the Home Buying Experience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 47]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
This week's episode of Founder's Field Guide is brought to you by SnackMagic. Want to treat your global team, in-office employees, clients, or sales prospects with the perfect gift? SnackMagic is the only 100% customizable snack and swag service that allows recipients to build their own snack stash. Whether you want to thank your global team, need goodie bags for your upcoming hybrid event, or want to stock your office pantry, the menu offers over 1,000 types of snacks and sips, covering just about every preference. To learn more and get 10% off your first order, use code PATRICK at snackmagic.com/patrick. That's snackmagic.com/patrick.
To hear more about SnackMagic, stay tuned at the end of our episode where I sit down with SnackMagic founder, Shaanak Amin to talk about the history of the business, how it operates and what they are planning for the future. If your startup doesn't have the right compliance certifications, you can't close major customers. It's that simple. Vanta is trusted by over 1,500 SaaS companies to automate the time consuming and expensive process of preparing for a SOC 2, HIPAA or ISO 27001 audit.
With Vanta's continuous monitoring solution, you avoid hosting auditors on site and taking hundreds of screenshots to prove that you're compliant. Here's how it works. Integrate with your cloud provider and tools, check off items on the customized to do list and let Vanta continuously monitor your security so you can focus on growing your business. Founder's Field Guide listeners can redeem a $1,000 off coupon at vanta.com forward slash Patrick. That's vanta.com forward slash Patrick.
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types.
Founder's Field Guide is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all of our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:02)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:27)
My guest today is Max Simkoff, Founder and CEO of Doma. Max founded Doma in 2016 after experiencing the pain and manual process associated with title insurance and real estate transactions. With a background in predictive analytics, Max built Doma to bring a digital first approach to a historically manual and labor intensive process. In our conversation, we cover the history behind mortgage closings, where title companies fall into that process and how Doma is using technology to improve the client experience.
We also discussed Max's formative experiences at his previous venture, Evolv and the lessons he's learned from taking Doma from an idea to a public company. There are many great lessons in this episode and Max's entrepreneurial energy shines throughout. Please enjoy this conversation with Max Simkoff.
So where to begin this conversation? I think we're going to go all over the place, probably to level set with the audience. It would be good for you to describe what Doma does, just at a very high level for those that haven't heard about it. And then we'll probably go all the way back to your early entrepreneurial days and dive into things like machine learning and modern product and all sorts of fascinating topics. But first, just tell us what Doma does and what you do for customers.

**Max Simkoff** (3:39)
Doma has built a technology platform that at its core uses machine learning to remove most of the friction and frustration, time and now expense involved with closing mortgage. We're structured in the footprint today of a title company. Title companies are responsible for managing residential real estate closings, which is an odd thing for me to kind of get my arms around when I was researching, you know, where does the ownership sit of closing a mortgage? But because title companies are responsible for basically closing the transaction, that means everything. Not just underwriting this weird arcane product called title insurance, which we can talk separately about.
But setting up the escrow, funding your earnest money, doing the disbursements, paying the realtor's commission check, getting all the docs signed, recorded at the county recorder's office, title companies are responsible for all of it. So we're in the business of applying technology and ML to that entire process and making it go much faster and be a lot easier than it's ever been.