mortgage
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Tushar Garg Learned Real Estate by Selling One House. Then He Rebuilt the Move.
A computer scientist became a realtor to study one stubborn transaction. A decade later, his most useful lesson is still the same: stand close enough to the customer to see where the system blinks.
Steve Thompson
Steve Thompson is President and CEO of PrimeLending, the Dallas-based national mortgage lender that operates as a subsidiary of PlainsCapital Bank under Hilltop Holdings. He oversees roughly 1,300 loan originators nationwide along with the company's National Operations, Capital Markets, Joint Ventures and Marketing organizations. A UCLA economics graduate with an MBA from UC Irvine's Merage School, Thompson climbed from a regional sales manager who joined PrimeLending in 2011 to president in 2017 and to president and CEO in 2020, and he was named a 2023 HousingWire Vanguard for his leadership of the mortgage company.
Jeffrey Walker
Jeffrey Walker is the co-founder and CEO of CredEvolv, a fintech SaaS platform that turns declined loan applicants into mortgage-ready borrowers by connecting lenders, consumers, and HUD-certified nonprofit credit counselors in a single ecosystem. A four-decade mortgage-industry veteran who held senior roles at Fannie Mae, Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, CitiMortgage, and SunTrust, Walker left the corporate ladder to attack a problem that kept him up at night: hundreds of thousands of creditworthy Americans denied home loans every year. Under his leadership CredEvolv has served 36,000+ consumers, earned him a HousingWire Vanguard Award, and landed him on Inman's Best of Finance list four years running.
Karl Jacob
Karl Jacob is a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of LoanSnap, an AI-driven mortgage startup that pitched itself as the fix for a $13 trillion industry. Over more than two decades he founded or led companies including Dimension X (sold to Microsoft), Keen/Ingenio (sold to AT&T), Cloudmark (sold to Proofpoint) and Coveroo (sold to Zazzle), became one of Facebook's earliest advisors in 2005, and angel-invested in dozens of startups. LoanSnap raised roughly $100 million from backers like True Ventures, Richard Branson's Virgin Group, Reid Hoffman and Joe Montana before unraveling amid lawsuits, regulatory fines and an eviction between 2022 and 2024.
Mitchell Dunn
Mitchell Dunn is a licensed mortgage consultant at Loan Factory (NMLS #1378534) who specializes in down payment assistance, DSCR investor loans, FHA and conventional financing. A former credit analyst, he is licensed across California, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky and Texas, and is known for helping self-employed borrowers and clients who have been told 'no' elsewhere.
Thuan Nguyen
Thuan Nguyen is the founder and CEO of Loan Factory, the No. 2 mortgage brokerage in the United States. A Vietnamese refugee turned UC Berkeley grad, he became the No. 1 loan officer in America in 2021 and 2022, and the first broker to cross $2 billion in annual loan volume. He runs the company out of San Jose and built MOSO, an in-house digital mortgage platform that now powers a network of more than 2,000 loan officers.
Vishal Garg
Vishal Garg is the Indian-American founder and CEO of Better.com, the online mortgage broker that went public via SPAC in 2023. A serial entrepreneur since his early twenties, he previously co-founded MyRichUncle, which became the second-largest private student lender in the U.S. before collapsing in the 2008 financial crisis. Known for his blunt communication style - including the infamous 2021 Zoom firing of 900 employees - Garg has built multiple companies at the intersection of finance and technology while living in Manhattan with his wife and three children.