Writing
Writing by Helly Shah
Essays and columns on mortgage technology, pricing, and what happens when you rebuild home lending as software.
Columns elsewhere
Essays
- The System Wasn’t Built for People Like Us. That’s Why We’re Rebuilding It.The founding manifesto: why two immigrant first-time homebuyers — Helly Shah and Arjun Lalwani — got flattened by the mortgage process and started building the company that became Ralo.
- Why I Left Google Maps to Fix MortgagesHelly Shah on leaving Google Maps engineering to co-found Ralo, an AI-native mortgage brokerage — and why the mortgage industry is a software problem wearing a paperwork costume.
- What a Goldman Sachs Rates Desk Taught Me About Mortgage PricingHelly Shah, former Goldman Sachs interest-rate quant and co-founder & CTO of Ralo, on how mortgage rates are actually made — and why borrowers see so little of that machinery.
- Two Builders and the Year We Learned to Share a BrainHelly Shah on co-founding Ralo with Arjun Lalwani: two University of Washington CS grads, opposite temperaments, a year of building an AI mortgage company as a two-person team in New York.
- Too Many Layers Between the Bread and the ButterHelly Shah on margin stacking: why B2B layering keeps innovation from reaching consumers, and why Ralo builds its own tools so the efficiency lands with the borrower instead of vendors.
More on Substack
- The Load-Bearing ExcuseHow gaining skills can quietly erode your boundaries.
- The Pocketing ProblemAI has made everything cheaper to build and nothing cheaper to buy.
- The Decision That Outlives the CompanyHow personnel choices shape a company long past the original idea.
- AI Is Flattening the Language of PrivilegeHow much of professional “voice” is training, not originality.
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