Rich Barton

“When we were preparing to go public, a person I called a number of times was Rich Barton. He was the founder CEO of Expedia, then Zillow, then Glassdoor. And he had a lot of really good advice for me on Whether to go public? His answer was yes. He's like, do y…”

“The very best CEOs, and I put people like Barton and Vinny off in there. Even Mark at Meta has said this. They believe being public makes them run sharper. And one other negative of these companies staying private forever is they're not getting that feedback.”

“Being an entrepreneur is the art of the possible. Right? You have to will things into existence. And he said, you know, you constantly think about what can go wrong. When you're an entrepreneur, oftentimes you have to suspend disbelief and just think about wha…”

“MS-DOS-V was the first time that Egghead Software, which was the big retailer, software retailer at the time, had ever seen, they ran a midnight madness sale on the first day that the DOS-V upgrade was released, and they had people camping out and lining up ou…”

“There was a service on Prodigy that enabled me to access directly the airline and hotel reservation systems. I could spoof being a travel agent.”

“I showed him Prodigy, and it was all a command line really ugly thing, but I talked about how I could see him doing a Kind of a Windows version of this and giving it to consumers could be a complete game changer for consumer empowerment. And he agreed, yeah.”

“You don't have to see too far into the future. If you can see a little bit further into the future than the rest, you know, you can really get way ahead.”

“Creating a new word is very ambitious, and very long-term, and very difficult. But if you are successful, you completely own that word in the dictionary, so to speak, and you get to fill it with whatever meaning you can infuse into it. So it takes, it's a lot …”

“Since then, I've liked two syllables. I think that's the most memorable. I think having it sound like a dog's name, a good dog's name can be turned into a verb.”

“We were building for MSN, which we recognized wasn't going to probably succeed as a platform. And so we quietly pivoted to building a web app and we kind of didn't tell anybody. And so we launched, we never launched on MSN, we launched on the broad internet.”

“These are about empowering consumers and then let the chips fall where they may from an industry perspective, right? Building for the future of what consumers want was what we were trying to do, and we were really secondarily thinking about the organization of…”

“Like, it's 2005, and the web has been around for now nine years or 10 years, but still, I couldn't get pictures of homes and complete listings and prices and addresses even. Like, I couldn't get the address of a home I was shopping for online.”

“It was, I liken it to shopping in a dark grocery store with a flashlight, you know. Worse than that, the flashlight is being held by an agent who You have to ask to point it at something.”

“We thought auctioning was quite interesting as a price discovery mechanism. Basically, it's pretty hard to figure out what a house was worth.”

“And it cost nine 99 to buy the URL, which I was kind of cheap, and people wanted to sell us homes.com for five million dollars, and I was like, but I can make up a word and spend nine 99.”

“We knew the elements of building a great marketplace, and it was unique and rich content that was difficult to find elsewhere. Having all kinds of pricing information, having historical transaction pricing information.”

“Every home in the country ought to be for sale at the right price.”

“We fantasized about having that godlike, that bird's eye view, looking down on the rooftops and neighborhoods and having little prices on, having little numbers, you know, values on every roof, and then having that updated every day, and we thought that was ju…”

“And so we didn't get the market leader at the time, wouldn't do business with us, but there were two other companies that would, because we just kept writing bigger checks. Lloyd and I are digging into our checkbooks to do it, but we wrote shockingly large che…”

“Most, most managers of businesses, when you write a big enough check, will take it, because they get a bigger bonus.”

“When you can have super targeted, relevant advertising in the product experience, it isn't viewed as intrusive or advertising by the consumer. It's actually viewed as valuable content. And so a real estate agent advertising alongside a listing to say, hey, if …”

“Our dream right from the start was to bring e-commerce to real estate. With right through to the transaction and to take all this kind of frustration and inefficiency and scariness out of the transaction.”

“Truthfully, our traffic held up quite, quite nicely throughout the whole thing, but because of massive uncertainty around business model and the pretty high expense burn rate we had, because at the time we had about 150 People at the company. This was the most…”

“We had accomplished the kind of first false summit That we were after in amassing a huge audience that we empowered with information they hadn't had before. But as we were speaking about before, we had not yet streamlined and integrated and digitized the trans…”

“Obviously the company isn't in reality that much more valuable in the space of one year, which just highlights how the stock price is not the business.”

“Pick your trend that preexisted COVID, and I'll show you something that was accelerated by at least five years during COVID.”