Tom Voutsos

Marine veteran, CEO of @LadderUpHousing.

[The Blade @toledonews]

LadderUp Housing is a Toledo-based organization that helps renters who are not yet able to qualify for a mortgage work toward homeownership. https://t.co/flVnJzKPnl

[Tom Voutsos @TomVoutsos]

@mcuban and that equity allows a startup to recruit talent they can't pay for in the early days. Every member of our team is making 25%-50% less than what they could make at their prior jobs (in our case Citi, Rocket, consulting). That equity incentive distributes talent throughout the economy instead of concentrating it in the largest corporations.

[Tom Voutsos @TomVoutsos]

Returns pull capital into impact. Capital compounds the impact. That's the loop AI just started.

[Tom Voutsos @TomVoutsos]

@mcuban is right that AI makes business more complicated. The flip side: the cost of handling that complexity collapsed. Which makes whole new customer segments viable, like working families the old cost structure priced out.

Impact ventures can finally deliver real returns without starving the mission. @ladderuphousing is the test case: 90 homes rented to families while they build credit, then we sell them the house they live in. For every family we house, 9 more apply. Our small team built the mortgage-readiness software in-house. A fraction of the people, time, and cost it would've taken before AI. That's how we reach the other 9.

[Mark Cuban @mcuban]

I’m not a doomer an AI at all. I think the nature of work, particularly entry level jobs will change.

Ai will make business more complicated and competitive. Not less. Which means more layers where humans have to make decisions before the next process can happen

And there will be millions, if not more, local models.

We will we modify and train them for our lives and the businesses we create. Just leveraging the foundational models for things we don’t have access to.

Maybe the new gig economy will be the models that represent our lives and the knowledge and experiences each one of us train those models on, and we get hired by companies for access to those models ?

Thoughts ?

[Rustandy Center @RustandyCenter]

Congratulations to the Chicago Booth class of 2026! The team at the Rustandy Center has enjoyed watching their journeys over the past few years, and we are excited to see what they go on to achieve. Join us in celebrating the graduates and this significant milestone.

[Rustandy Center @RustandyCenter]

We are excited to announce the finalists of the 2026 John Edwardson, ’72 Social New Venture Challenge. The seven teams will pitch their social ventures to a panel of distinguished judges and compete for $400,000 in prize money on Wednesday, May 27.

Read: https://t.co/eWoiLfTNSK

[CITIUS MAG @CitiusMag]

Was Sabastian Sawe’s world record not even the craziest marathon performance of the day?? 🤯

Vincent Mauri ran his first marathon the Glass City Marathon in Toledo, OH, this morning… and won in 2:05:54, becoming only the fourth American ever to break 2:06.

The 25-year-old @NDXCTF and @SunDevilTFXC alum won by 15 MINUTES running solo on a USATF-certified course. Mauri finished his collegiate career in 2025 with PBs of 3:59.05 (mile), 7:50.33 (3000m), and 13:34.03 (5000m).

[Tom Voutsos @TomVoutsos]

The 2025 HMDA data just came out. I want you to pull all the records for purchase mortgages originated in low to moderate income census tracts in the [Your Area's] MSA. I downloaded the modified LAR found at https://t.co/jvwYpVGgeY. It is in a zip file that you can analyze in my [folder you downloaded the zip file to]. Strip the data so it only includes [County you want to analyze]. Use JavaScript in the browser to fetch and process the census tracts to identify which ones are LMI. Once you've done that. I want to know who were the top 10 lenders by number of loans originated. Give me the number of loans each originated. Include the lender name next to the lei. How many of these loans were FHA or VA? Include in the table median loan amount and then add another column in table for average LTV.

[Tom Voutsos @TomVoutsos]

Want to know who's originating mortgages in LMI census tracts in your market? You can do it in 5 minutes — without crashing your computer trying to open the HMDA file.

[Tom Voutsos @TomVoutsos]

1- Download the zip file at https://t.co/Cjxv3yYr2J. Do not open it, it is a very large file.
2- Give the following prompt to Claude Cowork using Opus 4.7:

[Tom Voutsos @TomVoutsos]

said, it should not take military service to have access to such a beneficial loan product. The history of the VA home loan program demonstrates that it works. Legislation should be passed to create a similar product for all first-time homebuyers.

[Tom Voutsos @TomVoutsos]

Zero down mortgages do not have to be high-risk, and the VA home loan program proves it. The VA home loan is a zero down product. Did you know VA home loans performed better than Fannie, Freddie, and FHA loans during the crash in 2008? https://t.co/JGILTRozs6

[Tom Voutsos @TomVoutsos]

Poor underwriting of income in low to no down payment mortgage products, exemplified by NINJA loans (no income, no job, no assets), had the expected, negative result. As a Marine veteran, I am grateful that I had access to the VA home loan program to buy my home in 2021. That

[Tom Voutsos @TomVoutsos]

Here's a quick way to decrease interest rates for homebuyers and increase affordability without relying on the Fed. Did you know Fannie and Freddie provide a government-backed guarantee to second homes and investment properties (up to 10 per person)? Fan and Fred should only provide that guarantee to primary residences. By doing so, it would increase MBS investor activity for these types of loans, driving down rates. Investors and people who can afford a second home don't need a government assist.

[Tom Voutsos @TomVoutsos]

Markets like Austin and Phoenix show what happens when you have pro-housing policy. The quickest way to better pricing is increasing supply. Policies that don't encourage more supply, or inhibit it, will raise prices in any market, especially housing.

[Tom Voutsos @TomVoutsos]

It's exciting that the Senate passed the ROAD to Housing Act earlier this month. But at its core, the bill is sticks and carrots focused on getting localities to adopt more pro-housing policies. Nothing is stopping local governments from enacting these types of policies immediately.

[Tom Voutsos @TomVoutsos]

Each region, each state, each locality has different housing needs and priorities. A one size fits all approach will never work. Local leaders need to be held accountable by their residents. Communities inadvertently choose to have higher housing costs based on the leaders they elect.

[Tom Voutsos @TomVoutsos]

India as the future dominant power in Asia. Despite advances in robotics in China noted in one of the graphs, the necessity caused by population decline in South Korea and Japan will see robotic innovation rapidly accelerate. Look for anti-robotic sentiment in certain regions in China to rise with youth unemployment continuing to increase.

[Tom Voutsos @TomVoutsos]

Past performance does not guarantee future results. China benefitted from regular leadership changes that enabled the decentralized economic boom that occurred across the country since Deng. These leadership changes allowed for meritocracy instead of political power consolidation that might negatively affect growth. China will only continue on this trajectory to the extent that Xi allows.

[Balaji @balajis]

In retrospect, all the China cope over the last decade or so was really just the stealth on the Chinese stealth bomber.

Hide your strength and bide your time was Deng's strategy. Amazingly, denying China's strength somehow also became America's strategy.

For example, all the cope on China's demographics somehow being uniquely bad...when they have 1.4B+ people that crush every international science competition with minimal drug addiction, crime, or fatherlessness...and when their demographic problems have obvious robotic solutions.

Or, for another example, how MAGA sought to mimic China's manufacturing buildout and industrial policy without deeply understanding China's strengths in this area, which is like competing with Google by setting up a website. Vague references to 1945 substituted for understanding the year 2025.

One consequence of the cope is that China knows far more about America's strengths than vice versa. Surprisingly few Americans interested in re-industrialization have ever set foot in Shenzhen. Those who have, like @Molson_Hart, understand what modern China actually is.

Anyway, what @DoggyDog1208 calls the "skull chart" is the same phenomenon @yishan and I commented on months ago. Once China truly enters a vertical, like electric cars or solar, their pace of ascent[1] is so rapid that incumbents often don't even have time to react.

Now apply this at country level. China has flipped America so quickly on so many axes[2], particularly military ones like hypersonics or military-adjacent ones like power, that it can no longer be contained.

A major contributing factor was the dollar illusion. All that money printing made America think it was richer than China. And China was happy to let America persist in the illusion. But an illusion it was. Yet another way in which Keynesianism becomes the epitaph of empire.

[1]: https://t.co/LoxJeQHzkj
[2]: https://t.co/MRzErwuMv9

[Tom Voutsos @TomVoutsos]

moving to decentralization. The same forces could easily occur in a place like China, which has far more diversity (geographic, economic, demographic) than most people realize. Xi's focus on maintaining power for life will eventually negatively affect China. That's why I see