TECHONOMY DETROIT • SEPTEMBER 12, 2012 • DETROIT, MI Entrepreneurship and Detroit’s Emerging Tech Hub Speakers: Jack Dorsey, Chairman, Twitter, and CEO, Square Dan Gilbert, Chairman, Rock Ventures, Quicken Loans Moderator: David Kirkpatrick, Techonomy Kirkpatrick: So now we get to the really fun part, if it hasn't been fun already, which I hope it has been. So Dan Gilbert, come on up. I know you're in this room. Please join me. This double whammy of Dan Gilbert and Jack Dorsey that we're going to serve up now, I don't think you've seen anything like it. I hope it's as good as I think it's going to be. Dan is -- [APPLAUSE] There he is. Thank you, man. He has been a big supporter of this event, I've got to tell you. I appreciate it continuing. Gilbert: They were selling these shirts outside. I bought one. Kirkpatrick: What do you think about us trying to do this thing in Detroit? Gilbert: This conference here? Kirkpatrick: Yeah. Gilbert: I think it's great. I think that any time folks especially from out of town can come to Detroit, talk about technology, talk about all the great things not only things on here, but that's going on nationwide to give us some framework to what is happening, I think it's a great thing. Hopefully this is just the beginning. Kirkpatrick: Awesome. You know, you told me that Quicken Loans -- you have a line about it, I don't know if I want to feed it back to you, but what kind of company you think Quicken Loans is in terms of technology. I'll just say it. You said: Quicken Loans is a technology company that just happens to do loans or something like that. Gilbert: Did I say that? Kirkpatrick: It's a nice line. So that is a really good thought. And it's interesting, like MasterCard has a similar thing they say: We are a technology company that happens to just do credit cards. Chevron has been advertising that. It's a very smart way to think about any company. But it is still a quite rare way to think about companies. So if I were to summarize why we're here. We want more companies to think that way. Gilbert: Absolutely. Especially a company that is not necessarily selling a physical good or something -- I think there was a panel earlier where people were talking about manufacturing, actually, the need to make things and to sit in things and look at things and to drive things. That's still a very important part of the economy. When you're in a businesslike ours, which is the home lending business, you're really just acquiring information, curating that information and moving that information, if you think about it. Because mortgage, yes, it's true it's a loan, at the end of the day you're writing a check and there's an interest rate. FOR MORE TRANSCRIPTS AND VIDEO FROM TECHONOMY, VISIT WWW.TECHONOMY.COM TECHONOMY DETROIT • SEPTEMBER 12, 2012 • DETROIT, MI But for us, technology has completely transformed our company -- not even transformed it, but become our company. Because what we do is we process and close loans in 3,000 counties, in 50 states out of a centralized environment. And everything moves with technology and by technology and some form of a process. The better we can get at technology -- we have, I believe, 7 or 8 hundred and growing full-time technology people right here in Detroit just on the Quicken Loans side and we're hiring a bunch more and looking for a bunch more. So we grow through technology. What we sell is a commoditized product that's not a real physical product. So we're going to beat everybody by having a great experience for our clients, which is definitely pushed through by technology. Kirkpatrick: What do you think about the idea, though, that there's hardly a company around that doesn't need to have some version of that mentality? Gilbert: I believe that. I mean, I believe it's true. I think that not having the focus of your company, or whatever it is you're doing, be not on technology, not willing to invest in it is absolutely going to be a killer thing for you. If it's not going to be next year, it will be the year after or in five years. Kirkpatrick: You don't mean "killer" in a bad way. Gilbert: Yeah. Here in Detroit killer is a bad. You know, you don't say like -- West Coast they have certain terms. I've gotten caught that way before because people say words, and it means the opposite. I mean killer in a bad way. It's going to hurt your company, and it's going to be a situation where you're going to wish you invested in it years ago. Because these things, even technology, although there's some things that happen overnight with it, there's still time that has to go by. You have to invest in the people and get them up to speed, and the technology doesn't happen -- I know some of our technology people are here. I know sometimes we push them like we would like it to happen overnight. But it doesn't always happen overnight. So you have to invest in it and realize it will pay off for you if you do the right things. Kirkpatrick: Let's just go to something more urgently relevant to Detroit. One of the things that has blown me away, I have to say, since we started coming to Detroit and talking to your people and researching what was going on here is the incredible commitment you personally and the companies that you operate have made to the city. And I guess a lot of people who are from Detroit may have heard this before. But I would like you to explain here, for our national -- we've got a thousand people on the Livestream last I checked, by the way. Why have you made such a big set of commitments to downtown Detroit. Give us a summary. I heard somebody today say you had 3 million square feet. Last I heard it was 2 million. You must have just bought a new building. Gilbert: It's actually 2 million of office space and retail. And it's a million square feet of parking, but I don't think everybody always uses parking in the square footage. Kirkpatrick: No, they don't. But it sounds good to say 3. Go ahead. Gilbert: It does. I think it's something like -- Kirkpatrick: Two is not bad. Gilbert: Two, and 4,200 parking spots, which we all know in Detroit, in any big city they're always in demand, parking spots. But anyway, our commitment really comes from two different places. One of is myself and a lot of our people, leadership, as well as people who have been at the company for a long time, and even some new folks have been born in Detroit, raised in Detroit or raised around Detroit if not in the city. FOR MORE TRANSCRIPTS AND VIDEO FROM TECHONOMY, VISIT WWW.TECHONOMY.COM TECHONOMY DETROIT • SEPTEMBER 12, 2012 • DETROIT, MI My personal situation is my father and my grandfather were both born in the city and had small businesses in the city. So there's a definite affection for the city and huge motivation to see Detroit become something very, very special. Especially in light of what's happened here over the last several decades. So there's that the piece of it. But the other piece of it is not so much from the altruistic standpoint. It's from a competitive standpoint, from a business standpoint. Like I told you earlier, when you asked, we are a technology company. If we were not a technology company, we are a marketing company. And maybe after that we're a lending company. So if you want to attract the kind of brains, and a lot of them are around this area, and whether they're coming out of Michigan State or University of Michigan or Wayne State or the dozens of other great universities around here, or they're just people maybe who didn't even graduate and who also are just technology-minded folks, they want to be in an urban core. There's no secret, and it's nothing special to Detroit, that people in their 20s and 30s and coming out of the universities and elsewhere want to be in a vibrant, exciting urban core. Our view was, look, we're not going to be as competitive to get those kinds of folks in our business if we're in a nice building in the suburbs here. It's not just going to happen, because this generation coming up and even older, that's not where we want to be. So it's two-fold. Kirkpatrick: Well, I know you also have a belief that -- I mean, first of all, it's rarely been a case where one person has had the ability to sort of, or the will, to have such an impact on creating an urban core. You had an incredible pallet of raw materials here that were being seriously underutilized. But the degree to which you've sort of taken that bull by the horns, to mix some metaphors here, has been incredibly impressive.