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Many of the categories we’ve invested in, including tech-enabled amenities, smart apartment technology and digital workflow and management, generate significant operational savings and drive productivity for rental property owners in an economic downturn and will likely see continued strong investment.

All those tech-driven foods are still around, but they don’t tempt consumers the way they once did. Instead, the fastest growing categories in the food business are built on an entirely different vocabulary: gourmet, artisan, healthy, organic, nutritious, sustainable, local, homemade.

Opendoor was built from the ground up to do what it does. It has a culture that’s fixated on driving down costs and passing them on to customers. It’s hard to imagine that a company used to software margins can transform its culture without a tremendous amount of pain.

Sam looks for digital breadcrumbs from someone's past that hint at their trajectory: "And so to the extent people have written blogs or posted things on Twitter or created some artifact that I think of that they've sort of buried in time that I can go find, that's often amazing, because you get a chance to see people over a long period of time."

Three major forces creating headwinds for aspiring small business owners