Meet 4 Evening/Weekend Entrepreneurs in the 1st Alumni New Venture Challenge

Dylan Hall, Evening MBA Alum, Safe Rate, Midwest

Safe Rate mitigates risks associated with mortgage borrowers and investors by offering a mortgage that works with your financial situation.

I did not know I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I was motivated by problems, I wanted to be somewhere where I felt my success would be measured. If you’re going into an uncertain situation you have to create structure and then ultimately create value.

Booth gave me access to the idea of entrepreneurship. I think part of the reason you don’t think about entrepreneurship is you don’t see other people doing it. Being in class at Booth and hearing entrepreneurs speak was really enabling for me. It gave me the confidence to do this and started it for me. Once my co-founder and wife Shima and I started speaking to people in the mortgage market from borrowers to investors, we came to understand some of the difficulties in implementing a shared responsibility mortgage. We’ve had to figure out how to make the investors, borrowers and regulators happy and how we make money out of all of this. Now that I think we can come to market our growth might be more feasible because we’ve done so much of this front load of work.

When you show a borrower that the payment goes down, when the house price goes down, it connects to this idea of fairness. That’s really what’s kept us going, the world should be this way. Some people will still make their mortgage payment when their home isn’t worth as much as it used to be- we’re getting them protection and saying, we’re going to lower your monthly payment because it’s not your fault, you’re a good borrower. From a financial point of view it almost makes sense for you to walk away, but you’re willing to pay your mortgage because you value your home so much. We’re giving them payment relief and they can still contribute money into their local economy. As people consume in those areas, you start to get the rebound and you get out of this vicious cycle. We’re trying to turn this into a movement of sorts and say this is the way home financing should be.

In the course of our networking, we’ve been offered consulting work and projects we can slice up, so it’s become a small family business at this point. One hard part about entrepreneurship is you’re laser focused on your project but then you may miss out on other opportunities. One thing I don’t like about Silicon Valley when I did an edtech start-up there- they were like you have to do this one thing and it has to be your focus and I remember thinking well I have to pay my student loans. I do think there needs to be more stories about how most people do entrepreneurship because you have competing requirements and someone doesn’t just come in and give you a million dollars, you have to find it on your own. You have to believe in yourself. Professor Waverly Deutsch said if you’re the one who’s so passionate about it, you’re the right one to sell it. If I’m the one who believes in it, then ultimately I’m the one who can make it happen.