Expedia & Zillow: Rich Barton

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2021

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the early 90s, Rich Barton arrived to work at Microsoft just as the world wide web was taking off. He wound up pitching Bill Gates on an idea that was transformative at the time: to let everyday travelers book their own flights and hotels by giving them online access to previously hidden reservation systems. Expedia launched from inside Microsoft but was so successful at transforming the travel industry that it was spun out into a public company with Rich as CEO. Then in 2005, Rich moved on to a new idea with some Expedia colleagues, co-founding Zillow as a way to "turn on all the lights" in another sprawling industry: real estate. When the site launched in 2006, so many people tried to look up their home-value "Zestimates" that the site crashed within hours. By 2020, pandemic-era interest in housing saw Zillow accessed almost 10 billion times. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	When you leave home, can you ever really go back?
0:12.0	Made a version!
0:13.0	Soccer legend Leo Messi and I both left Argentina as kids.
0:17.0	You know you're that piece of a puzzle that doesn't fit anywhere.
0:20.0	To so many immigrants, football is a way to reconnect.
0:23.0	Listen to the last cop in the embedded podcast feed
0:26.0	to hear the latest collaboration from MPR and Fuduro Studios.
0:32.0	So the internet bubble had burst
0:34.0	and the stock market wasn't as interesting to people
0:37.0	but the housing market was on a tear.
0:39.0	And somebody basically drew a stock chart on the board
0:44.0	and said, what if we could create this stock chart
0:47.0	but have it be your house value?
0:49.0	That's when everybody kind of inhaled simultaneously.
0:53.0	They were like, oh, that is interesting.
1:01.0	From MPR, it's how I built this.
1:03.0	The show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists
1:06.0	and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:14.0	I'm Guy Raaz and on today's show,
1:16.0	How Rich Barclays Many Frustrations
	...

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