Joining us today in the Deep End is Lauren Self. Lauren is the founder of Roots Homes, a fractional home ownership company, that allows you to build equity in your home while paying rent, which recently raised a $2.2M seed round. In this conversation we explore how Roots is finding the missing middle between renting and buying, helping ensure home-ownership comes with flexibility and how Roots is increasing access to the American dream. ---- View the full series on Housing: https://www.beondeck.com/deep-end/housing

Joining us in The Deep End today for our housing series is Kim-Mai Cutler, a partner at Initialized who invests in proptech, real estate, and climate. Kim's background as a financial markets reporter and early-stage venture startup enthusiast, allowed her to broaden her reporting to include the intersection of the industry and public policy. In 2014, her essay on TechCrunch titled "How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained)" sparked almost a decade of public advocacy that changed a number of state laws in California around housing and zoning. As our first guest for this housing series, it’s only fitting that we invited Kim to help us understand why housing is a key problem worth solving, what are the implications around the current state of things, and what different bottlenecks founders can work on. We hope this conversation will give you a nuanced understanding of a complex market and practical tactics for building in housing.

Over the past two years, we've interviewed 100+ people for our podcast, The Deep End. Now we're relaunching The Deep End as a multi-media publication, focused on problems worth solving. In the first series, we are tackling an issue that affects us all: access to housing. Our house provides us with a sense of belonging and serves as a sanctuary where we can retreat from the chaos of the world. Once we accept the importance of housing, our focus needs to shift to how we can make it more accessible. We kick off the series with an introduction to housing as a problem. We look into why it's a problem worth solving and what are the bottlenecks to doing so – technology, culture, regulation, and more. Then, over the next few weeks, we talk to Lauren Lorraine Self from Roots Homes, Kim-Mai Cutler from Initialized, Will Jarvis from ValueBase, Peter Light from Lumen Energy and Riley Meik to understand the bottlenecks to housing, and explore possible solutions. Through this, we try to form a mental map of the problem: understanding its societal importance, the current bottlenecks to progress and setting out some of the most impactful solutions. In doing so, we hope to give the audience the tools and knowledge to build, invest or support some of the solutions to these challenges. Housing is not an easy problem to solve, but we believe it is a problem worth solving. So let’s get going. Episodes notes and more: https://beondeck.com/deep-end/housing

Joining us in The Deep End today is Vignan Velivela. Vignan is the co-founder and CEO of AtoB, a fintech payments platform modernizing the trucking industry’s financial system, which raised a $155M Series B last year. He was also a part of the On Deck Founders’ third cohort. We are taking a short break from our series on access to housing, to talk to Vignan about one of the biggest challenges facing us at the moment: transportation and logistics. In this episode, we cover the central and essential role of trucking in America’s economy, why the trucking industry’s financial systems were ripe for disruption, how far away we are from self-driving trucks, and what the future of transportation looks like in the coming years.

Joining us in The Deep End today is Tory Reiss. Tory is the CEO and co-Founder of Equi, an alternative investment hedge fund. Tory previously co-founded Archblock, a decentralized alternatives marketplace, and Harvest Money, an AI-driven debt management platform. We’re taking a quick break from our series on starting companies, to take a quick dive into the world of fintech. Our conversation with Tory today centers around how you can take control of your financial destiny and Tory’s journey from a Google Docs to starting Equi.