Zillow

“No, I can't remember exactly, but it was down by eight a.m. It had tipped over and was sad and sick and dead by eight a.m. Of the launch day. Like, yeah, it immediately crashed.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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.”

“You're mistaken if you think we're trying to replace the agent and replace the industry.”

“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.”

“In 2019, the site had 1.5 billion views, but it rose to more than 9.6 billion views in 2020.”

“He had that personal technology column, and so I flew to DC to go pitch Walt, to give Walt a preview, secret preview, and we did that with several reporters, and we asked that it be embargoed until such and such a date, and Walt, just because he was Walt, kind…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“We charge around, you know, five to seven percent of the transaction to be the market maker.”

“The way people did it was to just basically watch the market in their local neighborhood, right? Which was kind of hard to do, but if you keep some basic tabs on homes around your, you, or like yours that are being sold, what they're listing for, what they're …”

“Many do, but we have two hundred and thirty-five million users a month, many of them real estate agents.”

“Now we run all of these, you know, galactically complex artificial intelligence models and just feed as much raw data as we can get our hands on into these machines, these software machines, and see what comes out. And then, of course, we get to test the resul…”