Thank you for spending the time to ask me these questions. It’s a pleasure to be here. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA in a low-income neighborhood. That being said, I was entrepreneurial from the very beginning. I grew up selling candies, cookies, and chips throughout the early years of my life within elementary, middle school, and high school. From revenue earned from my entrepreneurial activities,I was able to help my parents pay their rent and I was able to take community college classes to help support my education and my extracurricular activities. Entering MIT, I came in wanting to be an aerospace engineer and that’s what I studied and majored in. My initial plan was to go to grad school to advance the field of aerospace engineering. At the end of my senior year, I took a class known as New Enterprises and I realized that things that I learned from that class I had already practiced for many years when I sold candies, cookies, and chips to help support my parents financially. From that class, I decided not to go to grad school and instead work on the startup with a team from the class I took at MIT. Therefore, instead of grad school, I spent the next year taking more entrepreneurial classes to conduct market research, to make sure that the business model made sense, to make sure that we could solve a unique solution that hasn’t been solved before. In addition, I spent time understanding both the business and the technology so I spent time understanding cutting edge technology to make sure that we could be innovative in an industry that is not as innovative. Thinking outside the box on what could be possible if we use new technology to solve old problems and processes is what led to the creation of elphi.

elphi is a mortgage origination startup so we focus primarily on the mortgage industry. From my experience I’ve never taken out a mortgage so I needed to research the space which was very difficult to research at the beginning. Our team was unfamiliar with the industry so we conducted a lot of market research to understand the problem. The first problem we found was the secondary market trading where lenders sell and buy loans from one another on a secondary market. The space was too fragmented and we felt that blockchain technology could help integrate and modernize legacy systems with a platform that complied with regulation and provided transparency to the secondary trading market. However, entering the space proved difficult without proper guidance so we sought after advisors who were familiar with the secondary market trading and origination space. From a group of advisors that we were able to gather informationfrom, with more than 20 years of experience in the industry, we learned that mortgage origination was an extremely complicated process; a process that had many small issues that added up to an origination time of 45 days. If we could find a solution to all these small problems, we could cut the origination time by at least half to 20 days or less. That’s when we decided to tackle the mortgage origination space because the issue lied within the entire origination process. We applied and were accepted to the DCU FinTech Innovation Center, an accelerator program in Boston, specialized for FinTech startups, and from this we gained exposure to end users of an origination software. After many hours of market research, we realized that legacy systems made it difficult to keep up with the market. Existing loan origination systems could not innovate fast enough and people who used their software had many workarounds for issues they faced using thesoftware to originate mortgages. The people themselves who used the software were efficient. They worked hard. But the software could not keep up with them. We found out that the users serve the software instead of the software serving the user. We needed to create a software that was completely customizable, user-friendly (easy to use), and powerful enough to withstand the times of innovation. What we came up with was a software solution that catered to the internal processes of the lenders’ mortgage origination team. Using our software, lenders did not have to change their internal processes to use the software and the software was flexible enough to conform to the complicated processes of the end users. In other words, to put it in words that make more sense, we became the “Google sheets” of mortgage origination. Borrowers canapply from the lender’s website with a customizable form and the data flows seamlessly to the loan origination system where you would have users which were the loan officers, processors, underwriters, and closers could move the mortgage application to their respective parties so they could close a loan.

An important part of starting a business is creating a diverse team with it with a diversity of skills back in the dress, different parts of the company. So there's something that we learned at M I T. Which is, um, that they're three different types of people, which is a hacker hustler and a hipster, a hacker, someone that's in charge of the technology, um, hustlers, someone that is able to close deals and in charge of the business and then a hipster, someone that is able to handled the marketing efforts able to handle a lot of designs. Um, the park management product itself. Um And so that being said, um, I became the hacker I needed to to leave the development efforts of the software, Um my the rest of the other co founders and are two other co founders. Um, they let the financial operational partnership and defund reason efforts off the company we met in school. So from that class, I met my co founder who is the CPI boat of the company. Um, and we spent a lot of time, um, doing market research to make sure that we could effectively address issues within the industry, Um, and from that. So after we spent a lot of time and we confirm that it was an issue within the mortgage industry after graduation, we immediately became full time to gain traction in credibility in this space.