The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 33 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
Business managers will usually accept large checks to increase their personal bonuses
“Most, most managers of businesses, when you write a big enough check, will take it, because they get a bigger bonus.”
Barton: Zillow runs complex AI models to predict home values
“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…”
Barton: 'Beta' is a tech euphemism for releasing buggy products
“We figured we'd open it up as a beta, which was a cute way that technologists have of releasing buggy products.”
Barton: Walt Mossberg broke Zillow's launch embargo by three hours
“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…”
Barton: Zillow crashed by 8 a.m. on launch day from traffic
“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.”
Barton: Zillow reaches 235 million monthly users
“Many do, but we have two hundred and thirty-five million users a month, many of them real estate agents.”
Barton: Zillow's original founding goal was end-to-end real estate e-commerce
“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.”
Zillow maintained traffic but slashed its 150-person staff during the 2008 crash
“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…”
Barton: Egghead Software Held First Midnight Madness Sale for MS-DOS 5
“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…”