Better.com

"[Better.com](http://www.Better.com) wasn’t just another pitch deck full of dreams. It had just reported more than $200 million of net profit in its latest year – real numbers, not projections. More impressively, it was fundamentally changing how people got a mortgage: instead of the usual multi-week ordeal, it had developed technology to approve a loan in a single day. This wasn’t incremental innovation. It was groundbreaking. No one had done it before. I would also be teaming up with the most prominent tech investor in the world, SoftBank, who had been championing this company before I entered the picture, and I took great comfort from their enthusiasm and willingness to put huge amounts more capital to work than they had already invested in the previous two years. I was captivated. Here was a profitable, fast-growing disruptor, and I had the means to bring it to the public market. It felt like the perfect alignment of opportunity, timing and ambition. But beneath the excitement, a quieter force was at play: fear of missing out. And afterwards, as one banking analyst put it succinctly: Better ended up being ‘the exact wrong company at the wrong time’."

"This time is never different. We always come full circle back to the same point. I also believe the traditional banking model is fundamentally broken, as the rise of the ‘neobanks’ (the online internet banking apps) shows. I have been an active investor in those, making a handsome profit from Monzo and taking a longer-term outlook on US mortgage company [Better.com](http://Better.com), where I found myself at the crossroads of two powerful forces: a market high on tech euphoria, and a personal curiosity about a financial tool I had never used before – the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). My vehicle was named Aurora, alluding to my arctic roots, and was my first venture into this world. SPACs were everywhere, promising speed, flexibility and the chance to participate in what felt like the next chapter of innovation. This actually turned out to be two bubbles that would soon converge."