I’m excited to share that I’m building a new business. It’s called Adeft. I’m inviting you to watch me build it in public. It could all fail. But I’m betting we’ll win. We’re on to something. If you stick with me, I’ll show you. I’ll be sure to share insights along the way.
Adeft is the culmination of everything I’ve learned over a lifetime of business building, mostly through hard lessons. I’ve been a founder multiple times, vp of product, chief of staff, product manager, consultant, marketing director, mortgage loan officer, promoter, performing artist, indie record label owner, telemarketer, paper boy, and the weird kid going door-to-door selling stuff in neighborhood. I’ve worked in AI, SaaS, mobile apps, the auto industry, legal industry, music, mortgage industry, and more. I gained some interesting perspectives from varied vantage points over the years that might seem like they shouldn’t fit together, but I promise you it all does. Every win and loss led me here to Adeft, in the very first industry I worked in after undergrad - home finance.
If I’m completely honest, I absolutely hated the mortgage industry by the time I left it years ago. For six years, I worked my way up from the very bottom to a leadership role spearheading growth for a multi-state brokerage. I hated the antiquated systems, the layers upon layers of middlemen taking a cut, the fact that pure salesmen were valued over knowledgeable advisors, and I hated the way a large swath of the industry seemed to prey on customers rather than serve them.
So much has changed in the mortgage industry since then. Dodd-Frank brought much-needed sanity and guardrails. The people I know who stayed in the business fought against the things that drove me out. They succeeded because they built their businesses with consistency and grit, leading with integrity and a dogged focus on customer service. Some of my closest friends built incredible books of business in the decades since we first met in the trenches.
For the past few years of my 15+ year career in tech and startups, I’ve been building at the bleeding edge of AI applications and agents. Just in the past six to eight months I’ve witnessed a giant leap in what is possible with these systems. The implications are profound, not just from a technology product development point of view, but also for what it means for basic business operations. It is clear to me that a new opportunity has opened up to not just reimagine technology products, but to reimagine the business itself.
At the end of 2025, I started exploring the real estate and mortgage problem space. It grew increasingly attractive the more I dug in. As a self-employed California homeowner with three recent mortgage transactions under my belt, I gained a new perspective on the problem set that I didn’t have years ago when I was in the business.
Before writing any code, I listened to the people who live inside this industry every day. Real estate agents, loan officers, processors, and borrowers themselves. I asked about their experiences, not my ideas. I’ve now done more than 30 of these interviews and ride-alongs. What I learned gave me conviction that the problems in this industry are big, expensive, and very much worth solving. Conviction strong enough that I started a company, convinced a brilliant co-founder to move to San Francisco, assembled advisors who know mortgage and AI deeply, signed an office lease in San Francisco’s Jackson Square, and completed the training for my California MLO license.
I’m telling you this so you know I’m not a tourist or a tech guy selling mortgage software. I’m all in and have big ambitions to make the system work better.
What to expect from Building Adeft
My plan is to publish a new issue every couple of weeks. While I use AI extensively for most aspects of the business, I’m writing this newsletter with my own voice, not AI. I want it to be real, valuable, and human. Which also teases some of my thinking about how Adeft should show up in the industry.
Expect field notes from interviews, experiments, decisions we’re wrestling with, changes in direction, and of course some thinking about the product itself. I’m writing this newsletter for the self-employed and self made, business builders, operators applying AI to business problems, and all of the people want the real estate and mortgage industry to work better, especially for the self-employed. I’m writing about a company being built, in real time, and you get to watch, including the parts that don’t work.
My ask
If you think you can help with an introduction or just want to get involved, please reach out. I want to hear from you.
Specifically, I’m interested in connecting with California mortgage brokers, CPAs that work with small business owners, and self-employed people who just went through the mortgage wringer or are planning a new transaction. Introductions would be gold. I’m trying to learn more about their experiences.
I look forward to sharing my journey with you.
More soon.
Jeremiah