Rich Barton
Co-Founder and Co-Executive Chairman, Zillow Group · 1 appearance on the record.
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founderexecutiveinvestor@Rich_Barton ↗hopperanddropper.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Rich Barton founded Expedia inside Microsoft and co-founded both Zillow and Glassdoor. He served as CEO of Expedia and completed two tenures as CEO of Zillow, while also serving on the board of Netflix.
33statements → 12claims → 7claims resolved → 57%fully supported → 4/5average certainty → 1.55/5average debate potential → 6said about them ↓
4 supported 1 partly supported 2 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 4 not checkable as stated how the 12 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
12 assertions · 3 opinions · 12 insights · 6 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 12 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 7 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Rich argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Barton: Microsoft formed a travel agency to access airline reservation systems
“We knew that if we started a travel agency, that from an equal access perspective, we ought to be able to plug into these electron, these big mainframe based reservation systems that ran the industry and act like a travel agent. And if we got discriminated aga…”
Their most notable contradicted claim
Barton: In 2005, consumers could not find home listings or addresses online
“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.”
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Rich Barton on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Rich Barton said on How I Built This that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Barton believes every home in the country ought to be for sale
“Every home in the country ought to be for sale at the right price.”
Rich Barton: Zillow is not trying to replace real estate agents
“You're mistaken if you think we're trying to replace the agent and replace the industry.”
Barton: You only need to see slightly further ahead than others to win
“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.”
Barton: Coining a made-up brand name is harder but much more valuable
“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 …”
Two-syllable brand names sounding like dog names make the best verbs
“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.”
Barton: Aggregate consumer demand first, and business models and partners follow
“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…”
Barton: Pre-Zillow real estate was like a dark grocery store
“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.”
Shopping for residential real estate functions primarily as aspirational consumer entertainment
“Shopping for homes is entertainment because it's, you're dreaming.”
Barton: Highly targeted in-product advertising is perceived as valuable content, not spam
“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 …”
Barton: Zillow's pivot to digitizing transactions required startup leadership
“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…”
Zillow charged 5% to 7% of transaction values as a market maker
“We charge around, you know, five to seven percent of the transaction to be the market maker.”
Barton admits Zillow's pandemic stock surge outpaced its actual business value
“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.”
Barton: COVID accelerated any pre-existing trend by at least five years
“Pick your trend that preexisted COVID, and I'll show you something that was accelerated by at least five years during COVID.”
Barton spoofed travel agents on Prodigy to access airline reservation systems
“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.”
Barton pitched Bill Gates on a graphical online travel booking service
“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.”
Barton: Microsoft formed a travel agency to access airline reservation systems
“We knew that if we started a travel agency, that from an equal access perspective, we ought to be able to plug into these electron, these big mainframe based reservation systems that ran the industry and act like a travel agent. And if we got discriminated aga…”
Barton's Microsoft team secretly pivoted Expedia from MSN to the open web
“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.”
Barton: In 2005, consumers could not find home listings or addresses online
“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.”
Barton: Auctions Are an Interesting Price Discovery Mechanism for Real Estate
“We thought auctioning was quite interesting as a price discovery mechanism. Basically, it's pretty hard to figure out what a house was worth.”
Barton bought Zillow.com for $9.99 instead of Homes.com for $5 million
“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.”
Barton: Before Zillow, there was no resource for automated home valuations
“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 …”
Barton: Great marketplaces require unique, hard-to-find pricing and transaction data
“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.”
Barton: Interactive rooftop valuation maps were an obvious viral killer product
“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…”
Zillow's founders wrote personal checks to secure early real estate data licenses
“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…”
The other half of the tape: Rich Barton's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 6 times in 2 episodes on How I Built This. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Rod Cuthbert 5Nirav Tolia 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2024 5 mentions in 1 episode
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Expedia & Zillow: Rich Barton | Jun 14, 2021 | 37m |