Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris.
Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world -class performers.
People who are arguably the best at what they do.
How do they do it? What are their influences?
Favorite books, frameworks, lessons learned, things that you can apply to your own life, and I have someone you may not have heard speak before on the podcast today, Rich Barton, close friend of Chris Sacca and some other guests we've had.
He is the co -founder and co -executive chairman of Zillow, a company transforming how people buy, sell, rent, and finance homes.
Before Zillow, Rich founded Expedia within Microsoft in 1994, and successfully spun the company off as a public company in 1999.
He served as President, CEO, and Board Director of Expedia, and later cofounded and served as non -executive chairman of Glassdoor.
He has done so many different companies.
And he has a lot of stories from the trenches, a lot that you can use that is tactical and practical.
He's also super fit, super active.
I would say a great father and husband.
He is an incredible human being, full stack.
And that's part of the reason I really wanted to have him on the show.
We did it in person.
We covered a lot of ground.
And I think you're going to enjoy it.
I loved it. So, with just a few words from the people who make this podcast possible, we'll get straight to the meat and potatoes and a wide ranging conversation with none other than Rich Barton.
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I know Eddy Cue a little bit, he's a friend, and there was a point at which I like to observe magic product things, and of course, Apple has tons, but my typical morning news setup is I'm kinda doing my email and sifting through things while I drink my coffee, and I've got my iPad set up next to it rolling CNBC quietly on mute, and at one point a couple years ago, I moused off the left edge of the screen and it seamlessly went onto the, and all of a sudden my mouse was on the iPad and I was like oh my God, it just decided because it was the same guy logged in, it's an extended monitor.
And I texted it immediately.
I'm like oh Eddie. Why do you have CNBC playing concurrently?
Is that just old habits die hard or is it let's see if anything cataclysmic or monumental has happened that I need to be aware of?
It's my favorite source of news because business news is generally happy.
They just don't wallow in the bullshit and regular news makes me feel bad and CNBC, at best, makes me feel good and most of the time is just mid, that's fine, and I get the news.
I'm interested in business and companies and strategy and trends and it is a pretty funny channel.
It kind of gets on repeat.
You don't need to watch it very long, But they get good interviews, too, so.
I usually don't have the volume on.
I have the closed caption scrolling, and then if something catches my eye, I'm like, oh, I gotta do it.
So let's take a closer look then at the other screen.
You have your coffee.
Yeah. What time is this?
Yeah, I'm a pretty early riser.
6 .30 I get up, usually, and long before Sarah, my wife.
And so these hour and a half, two hours I get in the morning are nice.
My kids have all left the house now.
There was a routine when my kids were in the house that was obviously very different and really fun.
I can talk about that.
But now I have two hours of just catch up on the stuff in my news feed, which is my inbox, my email inbox.
I'm kind of old school that way.
And as I go through that, I'm catching up on the news on my iPad.
I have a smoothie every morning with lots of stuff.
What's the stuff? No supplement kinds of things but lots of...
Cat testicles? I am not one of those guys.
I am not one of the longevity supplement people, but I'll tell you what's in it.
It's about three or four ounces of oat milk, ice, an apple – used to be a banana, I've switched to two -thirds of an apple – pistachios, macadamias, a handful of blueberries.
my favorite electrolyte, I'm getting ready for my workout, it's not very big.
My favorite electrolyte is prokary sweat.
The Blue Can Man I had a lot of that when I lived there as an exchange student.
My nutritionist says that's the one.
And I'm like okay, I'd been taking another one, using another one.
She's like nope, this is the one.
And not much, a prune.
Prune. A prune, because.
Keeps things moving.
Keeps things moving and that's very important.
You know, young people out there don't really realize how important that is yet, but as you age, you realize how that can affect your day, really.
Having everything moving.
Here's a little hack.
I'm not really a hacky guy, but I do have a lot of quirks, I guess.
Hyperice, you know that company that makes the, okay, they have a thing, I think they bought a bunch of products, but there's a back one called the Venom.
You must've run into that.
I think it heats and vibrates.
Oh. So I actually, for my whole kind of 45 minutes of that routine at the kitchen table with a lot of light coming in as soon as the sun's up.
I have it on repeat.
I'm wearing that venom.
Oh, my God. That loosens everything up, too.
And you mentioned before your workout, so this is all pre -workout.
Yeah, I need to get things going and feel settled, a little bit settled, and bringing on before I work out.
Coffee helps, too. Coffee helps all that.
Yep, and I don't drink a lot of coffee.
today I had a little too much because I'm off time zone a little bit, but I'll have one, maybe two cups.
And that'll be the caffeine for the day.
So I go through that, and once everything's, you know, make my ablutions and change into my workout stuff – Rinse your face with some holy water.
And pretty much every day, I do a workout.
I can't really get my mind right without that.
All right. So we're going to talk about the workout for people who are audio -only.
This guy it looks like a, I don't know how you, Marvel character meets Abercrombie and Fitch model, not to mention scion of business.
It's unfair. I don't know how I got the short straw on this genetic inhabit lottery, but we're gonna talk about the training because I have this working pet theory that longevity may be inversely correlated with the number of things that you do for longevity.
In other words, there are a few things that really matter, But then there's a long tail of things of questionable value that also have unknown Uncharted side effects.
Yeah, so when you start throwing in the kitchen sink plus plus at your body the likelihood of you Heading in the wrong direction is probably higher or just as high my observation is the harder you push against something the harder it pushes back and I think the people who are pushing really hard at the longevity and the supplement thing and the whole day scheduled out.
Lifestyle thing is to improve, health span.
Yeah, most of that is probably not very useful.
Yeah, there's some basics.
Maybe the most important basic is when I was younger and my kids were in the house, because I got up early, I was the get the kids to school parent while Sarah became more beautiful.
She stays up late. And I love to cook.
I've had several jobs as a kid growing up where I was a short order chef and worked in a lot of kitchens and I loved to cook.
And so our house is set up.
We have a kitchen island with a big bar, with stools, and the cooktop is on the other side.
And whenever the kids wandered downstairs bleary eyed, I was their short order breakfast chef and anything they wanted, I would make, which was so fun.
It was like the breakfast buffet with the four seasons or something.
But whatever they wanted, And I could whip it up really, really fast because you get that skill in wasting when you're a short order chef.
My younger boy had some kind of ADHD stuff and started taking those, the meds, I can't remember how old he was, 10, 12.
And those meds make kids, it's an appetite suppressant.
Oh for sure, yeah. So maybe, and I was a typical parent, our primal urge is to feed our children, that's it.
Like feed and care for our children, and that is the overriding program.
That kind of puts everything else down.
And so I got to the point where I was so worried about how skinny he was, and he wasn't eating the rest of the day.
He was hungry in the morning.
And I would make a 12 -egg frittata and put potatoes in it and sausage in it.
And he down the thing.
And I'm like, okay.
He's good for the day.
The anaconda diet. Just one huge meal and it works.
Yeah, and the punctuation on this one, aside from that just being really quality time, regardless of what kind of mood the kids are in, it's just really quality.
I cherish it. I took a picture most days, okay?
Totally candid. There's no posing.
I would sneak a picture every day, and now I have a folder called The Breakfast Club on my, you know, in my picture, my iPhone pictures, and I have like 1 ,000 pictures, and it's a time series of these kids growing up.
It's a virtual possession, but it's my most prized possession.
Alright, we're gonna double click on a bunch of things we passed over.
Let's hop for the entrepreneurial set listening.
This is also related to more than just pure entrepreneurship, but let's see if this is dead end or if it takes us somewhere.
Who was Brad Chase?
Brad Chase? Yeah, what impact did he have on your life?
And he was a great guy.
He was my first real boss out of college.
It's not quite right, but it's close to right.
Brad was a group product manager at Microsoft. Microsoft was my, I'll call it my first job out of college.
It had, this is 1991, Microsoft had only about 3 ,000 people at the time.
And just for reference, because I have no idea, how many employees do you think they have now?
It's gonna be a multiple of that.
Of course. 300, 400 ,000.
Yeah, orders of magnitude.
multiple orders of management, two to three.
And the product managers were kind of this elite little group of really smart people and we weren't very big.
And he was my boss and we were working on MS -DOS -5, which maybe I would say we'll have to go two standard deviations at in your audience distribution curve to find anybody who really knows what MS -DOS -5 was, but it was a really big operating system for Microsoft at the time and we made an upgrade.
And the feature was, we broke the 640K barrier, which you're not gonna engage on the geeky stuff.
It was a really big product, and my job was to create the packaging, manage the manufacturing, and figure out how to get this physical product into the egg head.
Some of you will remember egg head.
Egg head was a retail software store, and to push the product out into egg head.
That was my first job, and Brad was a guy who, he's one of my mentors.
I only worked for him for a short period of time.
I was a big idea thinker.
Big risks, big bets, and he encouraged me.
At a very young age, he funded me to take a really big swing at something and supported me in it and it failed miserably.
So that's the book project.
Yeah. You want to tell people about it?
Well, I don't know how that interesting is other than the lesson of take big swings.
It is, but the details help paint a picture.
that people can conjure a visual in their head.
It's become a huge series.
It's a series for dummies, blank for dummies.
And the book that the Dummies series was founded on was DOS for Dummies, believe it or not.
It was like the bestselling book about software of all time.
And I was like, I'm a young product manager, I wanna sell more MS -DOS 5 upgrades.
And I was like, okay we have all these software retailers where people go.
But the really big thing at the time, believe it or not was Barnes and Noble and Borders bookstores.
Bookstore experience was huge back then and DOS for dummies sold millions and millions of copies of this book in Barnes and Noble and borders.
And so I was like, why don't we do a bundle with DOS for dummies and have that be the manual for the upgrade.
Bundle it together, the book and the upgrade seems reasonable and distribute it through bookstores.
How brilliant! And so I went and met with one of the Riggio guys at Barnes and Noble.
I met with the guy who created the Dummies series, this guy John.
So I met with all these people.
We designed the product.
It was really, I was feeling pretty, like a big deal.
Built a bunch of it at probably cost us eight to 10 bucks a unit.
Which is a lot for COGS, right?
Cost of goods sold.
I can't remember how many we built, but it was at best a C, you know, maybe a D.
What was the retail price?
You hit the problem.
The problem was, People are going in to buy a $12 book.
And it was a $54 price tag or a $49 price tag which is basically what the software cost at Egghead.
And it kind of looked a bit too much like a book.
I kind of made it look like a book.
It wasn't the greatest cover.
Anyway, I'm embarrassed about what it looks like now.
I have one, of course, as a reminder.
But yeah, the shock value was too much. People didn't realize there was software in it.
And so we ate a bunch. We ended up getting rid of all the inventory.
But it was not a success.
And the amazing thing, depending on where your audience is in their careers, you work at a lot of places out there, and great organizations encourage innovation, encourage big idea people to take big swings, and do not punish them when it doesn't work out according to plan.
If that happens too many times, maybe there's a pattern and somebody should go find another job.
But Brad Chase, back to Brad, he sat me down and I thought I was, for my review, and I thought I was gonna, who knows.
It was a $10, $20 million mistake.
I was a young kid. I remember distinctly, he said, all right, what's your next big idea?
Amazing that Microsoft was and is as an amazing organization because of that kind of culture.
How have you, if you have sort of taken that forward into companies that you've built, or just philosophically, or operationally speaking, how do you encourage that?
Because there must be some constraints on things so that you don't light the whole house on fire, right?
How do you think about enabling people to innovate?
You don't want learned helplessness where they're afraid to do anything.
at the same time that you don't want some rogue trader taking and then tears turns or whatever.
Yeah, it's really hard. But everything ultimately boils down to the people that you hire and the people you choose to work with and the people you keep.
And saying your culture is X, Y, Z is very different from having people who channel those traits that you want.
And so my method for doing this is to make sure we're really diligent about finding those innovators and the entrepreneurs, sometimes who the intrapreneurs, let's call them, the inside entrepreneurs, and protect them a little bit, because sometimes they're different.
And mainline corporate culture sometimes rejects, often rejects, the innovators and the ones who want to disrupt whatever, just rock the boat a little bit.
And you really do need to rock the boat to innovate.
And so the leadership needs to hire, cultivate, protect, and invest in those people.
Yeah. The foreign bodies, they don't get rejected by the corporate immune system.
Which is just, it's just natural, you know?
All right, so let's come back to one thing you mentioned.
You said in effect, not totally true, but let's consider Microsoft first job out of college.
What was the actual first job out of college?
It was, you know, I was one of these high performers.
Oh, confession coming.
Yeah, I was just one of those kids, you know, I went to Stanford and Was an engineer or a consulting?
No, but it was funny there's a good story here I mean Story, but we'll tell it.
Yeah. Yeah, man. I was like success kid like do well loved that identified that way and so of course Whatever the hardest job that came to interview at Stanford when I was a senior, of course, that's a job I wanted.
There was strategic planning at Disney, there was the investment banking training program analyst program, and there was the strategy management consultant, and those were the big ones.
And it was the most competitive, hardest to get, so that's how I got tracked.
And I took a job as a strategy consultant in Cambridge, right out of college.
I knew pretty damn quickly it wasn't for me.
Was it about BCG, or it was - It was a spinoff of BCG.
Okay. Called Alliance Consulting Group.
Great group of people.
Super smart. It was going into a recession, though, in 1989, and so a lot of people ended up losing their jobs.
However, the interesting thing was one of my besties at Stanford, Nina Roberts, who was an engineer with me, we were both interviewing for all the same jobs.
And you know, she didn't get the big job.
But she got this little tech company in Seattle, you know, Microsoft, which of course I knew.
Like the companies that I really loved were Microsoft, Apple — all I needed to do was by Microsoft and Apple stock back in 1989.
That would've been a yeah.
I wouldn't be talking with you now.
Microsoft Apple I liked Patagonia.
That was a brand that I identified with.
Anyway, Nina got the job as a product manager at Microsoft. She went to Seattle, I went to Cambridge and we kept in close touch and I knew pretty quickly it wasn't for me and she knew Microsoft was the place for me and was on the horn with me every week saying you gotta come out here, you gotta come out here.
and so it took about a year to finally get the flight out and the job offer.
How did you know it wasn't for you?
What about it wasn't for you?
Because there are some people who thrive in those environments, right?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
You know, a trite answer would be dressing up in a suit and tie and wearing uncomfortable shoes wasn't for me.
I like to go barefoot.
Yeah. That really wasn't what it was.
You know, it kinda makes you feel important when you dress up.
And I was presenting things to CEOs and stuff.
It did feel important.
And I got a really good business school education in competitive strategy, the Michael Porter stuff.
I basically got an MBA in this one year.
What I discovered about myself, and I discovered it there.
I probably knew it before, but I hadn't really focused on it, was I believe the world is somewhat divided.
It isn't totally binary, but it's a continuum.
But it's maybe a barbell, clients and servers, Okay, which is kind of a geeky software architecture reference, but people get it.
There are all of these industries that are set up to be service provision industries – lawyers, doctors, consultants, academics.
And the benefit of these industries is you get to indulge your curiosity and see lots of different – deal with lots of different clients and lots of different problems, but but sometimes with consulting, you're not seeing things through to the finished product.
And it was apparent to me really quickly that I derived my jollies, on the other hand, from being a builder and the client.
I actually loved what the clients were doing more than what we were doing when I was a consultant.
So it became clear to me that I was a client and I wanted to build things.
I derived my jollies that way.
And so I started looking.
And it was good to discover at a pretty young age.
And then I got to Microsoft and it was like, I was a kid in a candy store, I never left the place.
Thank god for, Nina, was it?
Nina. Wow. I hope she still gets a box of chocolates.
Yeah, we're still close, she's great.
All right, so let's talk about then, Microsoft and Expedia.
How does this happen?
I'll just leave it broad.
Well, back to the earlier conversation we had about taking big swings and intrapreneuring, the how on how this happened is that Expedia was a quote venture startup inside of Microsoft and then it spun out and we can get to that.
But the real reason I even got into it and left the operating system group was that my wife Sarah who you just saw is a doctor and she was applying to she was in medical school at Northwestern and was applying to her residencies she's an ob -gyn and there's only one residency OB -GYN residency in Seattle, where I lived, with only six or seven residents a year, in one of the most attractive residencies in the country, so super competitive.
We were engaged, and then soon married.
After that, we got married pretty young.
I was like, well, she's not gonna match out here in Seattle, so I'd better get ready to move to New York City, or this probably would have been New York City where she matched.
This was during the Windows 95 launch. I left the Windows 95 team, and I went to the consumer division at Microsoft, which was kind of small.
Now this is gonna maybe sound like a side quest, but when you say you moved, did you just put in a request?
Like, how easy is that to do?
At great companies, it's relatively easy.
Relatively easy, okay.
Especially for people who are tagged as high potential, but it's still not easy, of course.
Brad, who was my boss at the time, couldn't believe we're launching Windows 95, this is going to be the biggest launch of all time in the software industry, or maybe one of the biggest product launches of all time.
I don't know if you remember that … I do.
… if you were aware.
It was a big deal. About six months before we launched, I had a big job there.
I interviewed for jobs over in the consumer division and took on a portfolio of multimedia CD -ROMs. The reason I did this – I was interested in consumer marketing, obviously – but the and I wanted to start a company.
And it wasn't gonna be an operating system.
Okay, like this just wasn't gonna happen for reasons that we don't need to get into.
But the government made clear to Microsoft at one point.
So I figured it was gonna be a consumer software company and I wanted to go learn that.
And the folks over there were fantastic.
Microsoft was fantastic.
And I took on a portfolio of CD -ROMs. Some of you out there will not even know what that is.
It's kind of basically precursor to the internet.
It's the thing your doctor gives you that you can't make any use of with all your images.
It's true. It's true.
And some artists, some musicians still hand out CDs.
It's the artifact that your doctor gives you.
It was the last, what came in the red envelopes at Netflix.
Anyway, but these things were like, Wikipedia before Wikipedia was called Encarta.
And it was a multimedia CD -ROM and one of the products in my portfolio of like rando ideas was an Encarta, so an encyclopedia of travel guides.
This is really good, you take a whole bookshelf, a whole shelf of travel guides, cram it down onto one CD -ROM, pictures, audio, wow, what could be better for travel planning?
And that was one of them.
And I remember going into my first product review with Bill Gates and others, which was kind of every six months, every year, kind of thing that the product people did.
And I was used to business plans for billions of dollars from the operating system group, and I was responsible for this thing.
And I'm like, Bill, this is tiny.
The whole travel book industry in the US is maybe 100 million dollars.
And that's the whole thing.
And so really, A, there's not an opportunity.
And B, you can't travel with the CD -ROM.
There were no, like the laptop at that point was this compact suitcase that weighed 20 pounds.
I'm like, that's when you want the travel guy when you're traveling.
So even though I know it's your idea and it's kind of fun, it's not gonna work.
That said, I demoed EZ Saber on Prodigy.
Prodigy was an online service.
Okay, and I was a geeky online guy, right.
And EZ Saber was a tool for travel agents to use at home on Prodigy to access the airline reservation systems. so it wasn't meant for consumers, but I could get access to it on Prodigy.
And I demoed that for him, he actually knew about it, I demoed that for him, I'm like, this is a change of the world thing, if we can have consumers be able to do this, then we can become the largest, e -commerce wasn't a word then, we can become the largest seller of travel in the world.
That was my pitch and my dream.
The pitch further went, and fund me on the outside, because I'm going to have to move to New York because my wife, she's not going to match out here and this doesn't want to be a Microsoft business anyway.
It's travel first, software second, not software first, travel second.
He agreed with all that.
He thought it was an awesome idea.
He also liked that we could rebuild all of the mainframes on Windows NT, which was a different conversation.
So he loved it. He green lit it.
He was my first venture capitalist. He said, no, don't go do it on the outside.
Do it here. We have a great team we'll put together.
And I'm sure Sara will match her residency at University of Washington.
I had a high degree of confidence.
That was the end of that.
She did match. I honestly, to this day, don't know if there was any thumb on the scale.
I doubt he had that kind of power, but she matched.
I stayed in Seattle.
He had promised me that he'd consider spinning it out if it got big enough, and then that's what happened.
So we spun in the height of the internet bubble, which is so bubbly that people today who think we're in a bubble have no concept.
I mean, you remember.
1999. I moved out right before the Thelma and Louise car went off the cliff.
I moved out to the Bay Area in 2000.
It was crazy. What impeccable timing.
We all thought we were the smartest people in the world.
We really did. We all thought those people in New York City just didn't get it.
And then there was comuppance, but Expedia was a really good business.
I was working for Balmer at the time, and I asked Steve for a hundred million dollars to spend on a television advertising campaign because I said, we are becoming.
We can do this. We are in the pole position.
We can build the biggest brand in travel." And Steve laughed at me like, no, we don't do that.
I said, well, dogshit .com is going public right now at a billion dollar valuation.
Wasn't quite that. It was like 500 million which seemed big at the time.
Really dumb stupid stuff in my closet .com was going public.
You know, put it on the web.
Anyway, and I was like, the public markets will give us $100 million.
And it'll cost, basically, nothing.
And so let's give this a try.
Let me spin this thing out.
It's a good HR experiment, human resources experiment, too.
Now, just to explain to folks, why does spinning something out makes sense?
What are the advantages of doing that, to them and to you?
OK, I mean, the financial answer to that is unlocking value that is stuck in a company.
and this happens a lot.
That's kind of the most uninteresting one.
Unlocking value, meaning?
It's not getting valued by the shareholders as being part of Microsoft, okay?
But if you take it public or do something outside of Microsoft, all of a sudden?
It could attract its own investor base that we're interested in that, in particular, okay?
So if there's a conglomerate discount, generally speaking, in the public markets, where the more stuff you have in a big company, the less the individual businesses are valued.
There was a period of American business history where conglomerates actually got a premium.
Like in the GE the Jack Welch GE days and Honeywell and there were all these big conglomerates.
And then the pendulum swung the other way.
Microsoft could have cared less about the financial play though, however.
I pitched it mostly as an HR experiment.
Microsoft was getting so big at the time that people could hide out in random corners of Microsoft and as long as Windows NT, the operating system, succeeded or Office, Microsoft Office, succeeded, they could make a lot of money off their stock options.
And so, that's basically a compensation accountability disconnect, okay?
And so, some of the best people at Microsoft, there was this field of dreams, wild opportunity outside of Microsoft, even though it was the place everybody wanted to work at the time, probably still is.
There were great people, I'll just say like me, like I would not have stayed.
I would have gone out and started something on the outside cause the opportunity was so great.
And so Steve Ballmer understood this really well.
So it's like a talent retention pitch. Sort of, sort of.
And so he's like, yeah, we'll take a flyer on it.
And that was great.
And Greg Maffei, who was the CFO at the time, he became my chairman and he was really supportive.
He and I still work together.
He's been a great mentor to me.
We took 150 people out of Microsoft. We gave them the choice if they wanted to stay or come, all but I think two people, we had 150 of us, all but two people, decided to come, take the adventure, give it a rip.
I was 32 years old, 31, 32 years old.
Now were you pitching those people yourself?
Yeah. What was the pitch?
Because it's going to be different than the pitch to Ballmer, right?
Yeah, way different.
I mean, it was, I had had this idea for a while, Well, and so the people I recruited back to an earlier comment I made, the people that were on the team were the people who were the adventurers and the ones who wanted to – who would have left, okay?
And so this was all about the adventure.
The hardest sell was not the people.
It was the spouses.
And I remember several dinners like with an S1 for those – you know, it's an IPO document with our Expedia draft of the S1 lying on a dinner table at Wild Ginger in Seattle with A skeptical spouse, the S -1 is highlighted, and there's annotation.
And I'm having to answer like, you know, those were my toughest investors actually.
It worked out really well, maybe too well.
Because Expedia was a real business.
We actually were profitable and growing like crazy.
I mean obviously, digital travel agent made a lot of sense.
And so when Thelma and Louise went off the cloud, as you say, we were already public.
Okay. And we'd gone to the moon.
and the stock price had gone up.
We crashed back down, but we had a real business.
And, very shortly, popped back up on the climb and just climbed from there, and we're very successful.
Microsoft, however, crashed with Thelma and Louise, and it took 17 years for Microsoft to re -achieve the same stock price it had in November of 99 when we spun Expedia out, so the HR experiment kind of failed.
How long did it take Expedia to recover, or to get back on the climb?
I mean, to re -achieve the all -time high, probably a couple of years.
Yeah, but a couple versus 17.
Yeah. But the valuations were a bit nutty, right?
So it was obvious that Expedia was on the right path very quickly and there was kind of a flight to quality with internet investors, which meant, find the profitable, recent IPOs, which there were not many and let's invest in those.
But we were one. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.
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Maybe this is not a good question, but I have to ask how did you learn to pitch?
How did you learn to pitch different stakeholders because you're talking about employees Ballmer gates Spouses, but that is a skill set Persuasion.
Yeah, how did you develop that?
It just must have been an innate thing that got a lot of exercise as I was growing up I was an engineer by degree but I was never a practicing engineer.
I was an engineer because I liked technology.
I was a geek. I was a geeky geek.
What type of engineer?
I was - The story there kind of answers the question.
I was an industrial engineer theoretically, but I wanted to go study in Italy my junior year.
Now, industrial engineer would be like, you end up going to a smart design or one of those types of companies?
Or how are you thinking your path would unfold?
It's not a degree anymore at Stanford. It's called management science and engineering and then there's a kind of a symbolic systems thing.
The industrial engineering degree which kind of sunsetted was really a kind of manufacturing efficiency.
I got it. OK. I got it.
Optimization, simulation, lots of computer work going in.
It's the design of making things more efficient.
Yeah, kind of like the operations, research, finance department.
That's right. That's other places.
That's right. Yeah.
I did it just because it was a bachelor of science, not a bachelor of arts, and it was the most business -y of the engineering disciplines.
At Stanford, they called it imaginary engineering because the mechanical and the electrical folks didn't respect us, and probably deservedly because we were more interested in business.
But anyway, I did this because I had all these other interests and skills around persuasion and people and entrepreneurialism and already at that point I was an undergrad.
Already, already. As a kid I had all that.
I probably was a good pitch person already But had a lot of support and exercise of that you mentioned Italy in passing So we're gonna come to Italy but how did you get that exercise when you're younger?
I went to Italy. So I got off the Industrial engineering track and Stanford was awesome.
I came back and I like well, you can't get a accredited degree now I'm like, I don't care and Nina's dad was a professor at the time and he said well Stanford you can self -design an engineering degree So let's just design one for you.
So I designed one. So my degree is called general engineering colon industrial economics, anyway.
Unlike a lot of kids today, I worked real summer jobs.
My kids generally did, actually my kids have worked real summer jobs.
So you're talking like busboy, what about that?
Yeah, I mean my daughter, I was thinking what their jobs are, but my daughter spent, you're gonna know this place, after Gurneys was redone, it became like this club scene, this is out in Montauk.
Once they got fancied up?
I got a super fan. Took away the day passes for the locals you bastards.
Anyway, yep. Yep, so she was, it was after her sophomore year in college I think.
Refreshing sophomore year.
And I'm like, honey, you've got a place to stay out in the Hamptons.
You don't need to get on the track, the track that every smart kid is supposed to take.
You don't need to do that, why don't you get real experience?
So she came and lived in our house out in Montauk and was the, who's the person that stands at the counter when, the hostess at the club part of Gurney's.
Okay, where there's like $2 ,000 tables.
Yeah, that's quite an education.
It's an amazing human nature job.
Oh my god. She had a crazy, successful, interesting learning experience.
Yeah, and we had fun watching it happen.
And we also got tables set.
Anyway, when I was a kid, I was the ice cream man, so I ran my own ice cream business.
This is in Connecticut.
I went to high school in Connecticut.
I learned how to do house painting as a crew member of a buddy of mine.
And then after one year of doing that, well, I could bid the jobs myself and I could hire a crew.
And so I had my own painting company for a couple years, which was hugely profitable for a kid.
I mean, I made a ton.
I had to pay for all my expenses at college, not my tuition.
My parents covered the tuition.
But I had to pay all my other expenses.
So making, back then, and I would make like $15 ,000 or $20 ,000 in the summer painting, and that was boatload of money.
And so I had run my own businesses.
I knew I liked. And why did you go to Italy at all?
Why did I wanna go when I was in school?
I have no Italian heritage as you can probably tell.
But I went to Italy and Greece when I was in high school with my Latin teacher.
And just had these awesome kind of kid high school trips.
And while I was in Italy, I literally fell in love with the whole vibe.
The food, the wine, the girls, the family, culture, the kind of work is not that as important, you know?
And I kind of fell in love with it and kept going back.
So I went to study.
And then after I sold Expedia to Barry Diller, we were public and Barry Diller bought it.
And we had three little kids and I was leaving after very well.
I wanted to give space to the next team and I said, let's go back to Italy.
And so we moved to Florence for a year after we sold expedient I mean who I was talking about before she was living there married to a European guy And I'd gone to Stanford there when I was a junior and I kept in touch with the woman who ran the Stanford program Linda and so we kind of moved to Florence and went back to school and and learned how to paint and started road biking.
Anyway, so I loved the whole Italy vibe.
Let's take a closer look at the Barry Diller transaction.
How did that come to be and what were the most important aspects of that deal?
Could be a deal structure, could be timing, could be anything but how does that even happen?
Yeah, so Expedia had been public for maybe four years and had become very successful and pretty big, You know pretty highly valued in the market and I think it came about I mean Barry was kind of interested he was building a Interactive conglomerate called I .c.
I see right USA networks and then I think he owns most of the popular dating apps things like that I mean I see buys a lot of stuff and then spun it out as match comm yeah, you know and Yeah, he was post his media career He got into interactive media and he started buying stuff and they got a guy his kind of key corporate development strategist and all -around great freaking guy who worked for him was a young guy named Dara Kazushahi.
Mm -hmm. I may be mis -crediting or giving you too much credit, Dara, but probably not.
Dara's idea was consolidate the players in the online travel space, that it was already big, but it was going to be much bigger.
and Microsoft was the majority owner, but didn't have anybody on the board even.
65 % of the company didn't have anybody on the board. Greg, they knew me, and they trusted Greg Maffei, who had left as CFO and was running a company.
That is an unbelievable level of trust. It just didn't matter to Microsoft, right?
Yeah, I guess it did.
Just didn't matter.
Just has a percentage of the total.
And at some point, somebody came in, I won't name names, somebody came in and said, we need to focus at Microsoft. We need to get things focused.
We're too scattered.
And the easy thing to do was to take a big offer from very Diller.
And so they did. Was a bit of a two -step deal.
The IAC and Dara and Barry bought Microsoft 65%.
And then maybe, so we were public but captive to IAC.
And Barry Diller was my chairman for a while, and then maybe eight months later, bid for the rest of it.
And consolidated it down.
Or I think they kind of pushed us to buy the number two player, which was hotels .com.
And so we matched those things together, and I moved on at that point.
So when in that journey, the Expedia journey, did you feel the highest high?
For instance, I would imagine when you were working summers and on your way sorta through high school and college, there was probably a moment, I'm just guessing here.
But when you had your first big summer with that painting gig and made 15, 20 grand, Like, my God, you must have fell rich. Yeah, we went to the high lie.
You know how high lie is?
Took the crew to the high lie.
Yeah, so with the Expedia journey, was it the talent with the Barry Dillard transaction?
No. Because there's mixed emotions there, right?
Yeah. And I didn't control the company.
I learned that, henceforth, I would control the companies that I started.
No, I mean, that was great and it made sense and it created value.
No, the highest highs were, I mean, probably around the spinout and the IPO.
There's kind of a funny IPO story that my wife, Sarah, was pregnant with our first child, Will, during the roadshow.
So this is November of 1999.
It's really pitching to the buy side.
So it's pitching to the mutual funds, to the investors.
And it used to be, I think now is a lot more on Zoom, which it should be by the way.
But it was a rite of passage back then for companies going public.
And a lot more companies went public then.
And it was 15 cities over three weeks, five meetings a day, six meetings a day, chartered private plane with banker team, CFO and CEO zipping around the country.
Okay, exhausting and exhilarating and repetitive and kind of boring.
Also really fun. Anyway, so Sarah was pregnant.
And she wasn't due until December, but we had been on the road for two and a half weeks already.
we'd filled the book 30 times over, which means we had a lot more demand.
We knew the offering was going to be successful.
These were back in the days when the offerings were a little bit managed to the advantage of the inside banker people.
But anyway, that's a different story.
So it was going to work.
The IPO was going to work.
And I called the Red Show off a day early.
I flew back to Seattle exhausted.
I get in bed at like one in the morning after getting home, Sarah is super pregnant.
I get a tap on the shoulder at 3 AM.
And she said, she's an OB, so she knows what's going on.
Although that's not always the case, but she knows what's going on.
And she said to me, honey, this is IPO day.
If our baby is born on the IPO day, do I really have to name him Expedia, which is what I promised the team?
And then we went to the hospital and while the IPO was happening, my son was being born, that was, yeah, my oldest was being born and so that was actually the high point right there.
Wow. All right, now we're tracking the path.
So now you're painting a vase of fruit in Florence, living the life of a.
Naked, it was a naked woman, it was like.
It was like drawing.
There we go. Charcoal.
There we go, all right.
Charcoal, charcoal drying of naked lady and changing poses every 10 minutes.
What could be a better way to learn art?
What a lovely way to learn art.
And living the life of a refined gentleman, pasta and wine and culture and road biking.
Little cap, maybe. Little cap, of course, no helmet.
Little helmet? Taking Italian classes in the morning.
Yeah, yeah, espresso here and there.
Sounds like a great life.
It was fun. So how the hell does Zillow happen?
Did he start getting fidgety?
I mean, what happens there?
Yeah, I was still pretty young, so probably those three.
I was like 35, 36, and I was hoping art, music, thought I might write books, whatever, you know, find the next chapter, because I really didn't need to, I had enough to take care of myself for the rest of my life.
but something I discovered, I was still on a few boards, including the IAC board which had bought Expedia and Netflix where I'd been on the board since like 2000, and still I'm still on that board, and a couple others.
So, I was still involved in the business world from a kind of in a long distance way.
Though I had an amazing time learning experience, I didn't find my next calling, and I was still really curious about the business world and what was going on.
So I knew that I had, we weren't gonna stay in Italy.
We were gonna move back, and I was gonna do something else, which is great to learn.
And we did. Did it in Florence for a little over a year.
We spent a few months skiing with the family, which was really fun, in the mountains.
And you came to the US.
Came back to Seattle.
I am going on a hunting expedition.
Did you already have an inkling of what you were gonna do?
A little bit. I didn't know if I really had another startup in me because I knew how much work it was and I'd adjusted my life to prioritize some things I hadn't prioritized when I was younger like living well and family and body and mind.
And I was very curious in all kinds of different things.
So the venture capital opportunity was available to me to go be a GP at a venture capital firm and I was kind of headed in that direction.
And then my Zillow co -founder Lloyd Franke was a guy I went to Stanford with and did Expedia with.
He was still at Expedia and he got fired by our good friend, Eric, who was running Expedia, at the time, probably for good reason, awesome guy, really smart.
I won't follow up on that.
It's a fun story, but Lloyd.
So Lloyd got fired and Lloyd's like, Wait, wait, wait, don't move to California.
Let's just sit in office and brainstorm for a while.
And so we did. And we went through a bunch of ideas.
He went off on one that was kind of Dropbox.
Before Dropbox, it was obvious that the cloud storage thing was going to be huge.
And I said, go figure that out.
See what it costs. And so he disappeared for a couple of weeks, so we were sharing an office.
And he came back and he's like, yeah.
100 % this is going to work, but there's no profit.
There's going to be Microsoft and Google are going to give this away.
Where were you guys brainstorming?
We were brainstorming and his dad his dad was a stockbroker where he had an extra couple of rooms in his office and he just gave them to us.
New York City? No, no, this was Seattle.
Oh, Seattle. Seattle yeah, yeah.
So we're in Seattle cause we didn't sell our house in Seattle when we moved in, we moved back to our house.
But we were looking for a new house, we were maybe going to move to California or something in Seattle, our family was getting bigger.
And so we went through a series of ideas and then at one point I said hey, you know back when we started Expedia, we also wrote a plan for an electronic stockbroker, matchmaking service, all the classified categories basically, and all the kind of agent categories were all obvious that we were on a little team of people researching big ideas inside of Microsoft. How would the web change industry?
And so we had all these plans.
Expedia was one of the ideas.
There was a basically to create a digital real estate marketplace.
And I dusted that off.
I said, hey, what about that?
I mean, you're looking for a house right now.
It's really freaking hard. This is 2003, and I can't get the price of a home online.
I can't even get the address, because the industry had been very good at defending their special data.
Making it opaque. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And we were the Power to the People guys, we were the guys who freed all that information for the regular traveler.
And we were like, well, wants to be Power to the People here too, right?
And we couldn't believe that it hadn't changed, and so that was the dawn of Zillow.
Yeah, so he convinced me not to move, and I said, well, I'll be CEO, but I'm not gonna work that hard. He's like, don't worry, I'll do it.
Just be CEO, I need you to be CEO, because you'll have to raise money and stuff.
All this trick in the book.
So, maybe I am a four -hour working cat kinda guy.
I said, look, I don't wanna do it full -time.
Like you can use my name.
Of course, he was like, yeah, sure, whatever.
You can do whatever you want, Rich, knowing I'd be sucked in.
Let the line out. He totally managed me.
of the other bag. I think I'm in charge now.
Lloyd was in charge.
So when you say you're brainstorming, right, there's an entire universe of possibilities, what constraints or criteria are you applying to that brainstorming?
What are you looking for?
I think most great idea is that there's just a big, obvious problem.
I like consumer stuff.
And so that means the way I interface with the world, the way we all interface with the world is rife with problems. And all those problems are business opportunities.
And when you see a particularly big, oh my god, why is it this way, those are probably the bigger opportunities.
And it's almost as simple as that.
We identified this big dislocation.
We knew 100 % that there would be a leading digital real estate marketplace in the U .S. At some point.
At some point. There's an inevitability.
Inevitability. And business model?
Who knows? Who cares?
It's a giant. It's a big pond.
And so my business criteria for doing stuff is, is it a big pond, and are there good fishermen?
Because the travel CD -ROM wasn't big enough.
You said 100 million, that's the entire market.
Plus you're not going to carry a briefcase that you're doing weight training in inadvertently to read the thing.
A lot of entrepreneurs make this mistake of identifying a really big problem, but it is was just a small opportunity.
And then there are ones where like, I know Bill Gurley was on the pod, you know, a couple years ago talking about the Uber thing, the inside, you were involved there a little bit.
I was one of the first three advisors when it was called UberCab LLC, yeah, way back in the day.
And for people who didn't pick up Dara.
Yeah, oh sorry, Dara's the CEO. Current CEO of Uber.
He was the CEO of Vixpedia after, you know, two after I left as well.
Anyway, a lot of people make the mistake, is what I was gonna say, of identifying a real problem, but it's just too small.
Uber kinda to some people, a lot of people looked too small because it was a black car, Tam, the total addressable market.
But the insight that you and Gurley and Travis and I guess JCal and others had, was that actually, no, it was gonna, it was gonna take not just the black car market but taxi, transportation and then ultimately more.
It can expand the total addressable market, right?
That's right. Car ownership.
Yeah. Just transportation.
And of course obviously it's beautifully played out that way.
It took a little while to see, but it's amazing.
Anyway, so big pond, good fishermen, after identifying the big problem.
And I guess that was the guiding thing here.
I knew—Loyd and I knew there would be a digital real estate marketplace, we didn't what the business would be, we didn't know how we were gonna play, and we started poking at ideas for attracting audience with software.
And we made a couple of big mistakes before we landed on the solution, yeah.
What were some of the big mistakes, and how costly, how risky were they?
Pretty small venture numbers at that point and Lloyd and I were funding it, ourselves.
You know, we put the first five million bucks total in with a couple of friends.
So costly, but not that costly.
But the first idea we were...
Side note also, Garrett Kamp did with Uber early on.
He did too. He wrote, yeah, I didn't realize that.
Yeah. There was self funding for a while.
Wasn't expensive. Yeah.
It wasn't overly expensive, but.
It's a good way to go as a second -time founder or a non -first -time founder if you actually have some resources.
Because you end up with more of the company down the road.
I love Girly. We're really close.
but by the time Guerrilla or the venture capitalists come in, if they're writing the first check, they're going to end up with a big chunk of the company, which is great, especially if you get somebody like Bill.
But we were able to do it ourselves.
We were enamored of Google, everyone was at the time.
The magic business model that they sort of discovered or innovated, iterated on that came from another company was the AdWords, the digital auction -based market place.
You said it came from another company.
Yeah. I might not know that wrinkle.
Yeah, it did. Meaning they acquired something or they - I'm thinking what's the guy's name who did that startup incubator factory?
Gross? Oh, Bill Gross?
Yeah, yeah. I may be getting this wrong - Am I making this an IdeaLab?
He did IdeaLab. A lot of companies kind of spun out of that, but one of them was a search engine whose name I'm forgetting.
We can look it up later maybe.
Put it in the show notes, yeah.
And but the whole basis of the search engine was AdWords.
Oh, wow. And so did Google acquire that, or are they just being a better mousetrap?
I think the latter, but I'm not an expert.
All right. Regardless, I don't to speak out of turn.
We'll put the story in the show notes.
OK, right. There's a good story there, I'm sure.
Why I brought it up was we were enamored of auctions.
Auctions have huge geek appeal for mathy idealists.
And we were like, well, obviously, the US housing market should be at auction, and that's the most efficient mechanism for price discovery, okay?
Which, of course, it is.
And we were like, okay, so that's our business.
We're gonna auction homes.
And what we learned trying to auction a home that our buddy Jordan got us kind of on consignment was that, well, two things.
One, to have an auction work, you kind of need a real -time liquid market, OK?
Duh. OK. So you need all the bidders there at the same time.
OK, well, the housing market doesn't work that way.
It's just, you know, it's a long period of time.
You want to show it to a lot of bidders.
That didn't work. The second thing, which is obvious, is until all those innovators out there, if you have to educate your customer on how to buy the thing that you're doing, it's like a radically new way to do it, from decades or hundreds of years of ingrained human behavior, it's a pretty heavy lift. It's got to be super -duper simple, obvious, and 10 times better than the current way.
And just, we didn't check any of those boxes.
But in pursuit of price discovery, we found the zestimate, which was our killer feature and the visual on the zestimate that's in my head that kind of popped in in our collective heads on the home auction web experiment, was a real time estimated value algorithmically driven as your Google map zooming over neighborhoods looking, we wanted prices on every roof, because everything should have a price.
The timing of that is pretty wild, right?
It's just like how things line up because, I mean, how long had the aerial view been around prior to you guys?
It was short, right?
There were no smartphones.
guns. But it was obvious.
I was like, whoa. And then I also had in my head, homes are for American homeowners often times their largest asset and the bulk of their wealth.
And people care a lot about it.
So I knew they wanted to know the value.
I knew that was catnip.
I knew in my gut, I knew that was, we did the team knew it was candy.
And I'm like, oh, it's an investment.
and so let's plot the zestimate, the home value like a stock chart.
And so the aerial view with the numbers, any home's value laid out like a stock chart.
Those were the two things.
And when we discovered that, we were kind of off to the races.
Okay, so at the time, was it just rentable infrastructure, AWS, you get it going, you launch and it's up to the right, just a nice smooth rocket launch?
Is that what happened?
AWS didn't exist. I know.
— You bated me. No, dude, man, this was like Server in a Closet.
Yeah, this was Server in a Closet.
Isn't it true you forbade Christmas lights or something?
You're like preserving electricity and compute power and all this stuff?
I don't remember that.
All right, got it. The things of lore.
David Beitel, who was our CTO at the time, and still is, and was CTO at Expedia with with me too, he may have told that story somewhere, so it may actually be right.
Yeah, I believe. I remember our launch blog post with Garrett, who worked for David, like doing the, what's the professor?
It's Doc from Back to the Future.
Three point two gigawatt.
Whatever. Because we launched and millions of people showed up because Walt Mossberg, who was, who is the equivalent, is there any equivalent of Walt Mossberg now?
No? It's like the Oprah of tech at the time, right?
I mean god and walt loved it and walt published and millions of people came on day one and of course The server in the closet tipped over For a while and it was painful, but amy batinsky who was running our marketing at the time said don't worry we'll make lemonade out of lemons and the headline the next day in the san francisco chronicle was house porn site zillow launches and falls over because it's so popular or something, you know something like that and And she's like, yeah, that's gonna be good press.
Anyway, I'm a big believer in the product being the most important part of the marketing mix, if that makes sense to you.
Gearly actually challenged us when we launched.
He was on the board. Benchmark and TCV were our A round funders.
And he was on the board at the time.
And we had had kind of a spend advertising dollars mindset at Expedia because we really needed to grow exposure for the brand.
And Gearly said, well what if we didn't have of any marketing budget.
And that launched, we were like, no way, you can't do that.
But that made us think a lot more creatively about the features that we built, the way we built them, and then the way we PR communicated them.
And I've since developed a pretty good playbook around I guess what I would call provocation marketing.
When you have really provocative feature that you know people are gonna feel emotional about one way or the other and they're gonna talk about it, you're onto something.
And what are some aspects of that toolkit or the playbook?
Yeah, I mean having data, having a stream of data that people are interested in at Glassdoor, which I did with Bob Homan, who was at Expedia with me as well.
Glassdoor is another example of that.
When you have constantly changing data that people are interested in, you can almost think about feeding that data to hungry consumers in a Bloomberg -like way.
And so the playbook that Amy kind of put together was building a PR data distribution infrastructure down to the local.
Remind me who Amy is, sir?
Amy was our marketing chief at Zillow.
She's still on the board today.
And she was really creative about recognizing that there's an infinite news hole for housing data at local newspaper level, once upon a time.
And if you could wire that up to just feed, constantly feed, the endless appetite.
Housing is just an important topic, right?
And there's always space in the paper for a story on housing and changing prices.
And so we set up a mechanism to feed that data, which was a terrific brand builder for us rather than spending ad money.
And then just having this estimate be so provocative, like high school boyfriends, house philanthropists, development team that are trying to figure out who's a good target, whatever.
It's a lot– I know you had a lot of fans.
I think the Arizona Attorney General was a fan.
That's a deep cut. No, but this is of interest to me because...
...there is opposition also.
Oh yeah. Right? A lot of the...
My God, I mean the number of...
I don't think they were actual ulcers, but just the rollercoaster ride that I was also on with Uber from a regulatory mobbed up local fill in the blank perspective.
Yeah. it was just non -stop battles.
And that was just part of the deal.
If you wanna. And actually part of the playbook.
Honestly, it's the same provocation marketing.
It's the exact same thing.
It's exactly the same.
So what happened with you guys?
Yeah, I mean, we were provocative to some of the industry players who are big lobbyists.
The taxi commission, Uber's case.
In our case, a lot of the real estate professional associations.
A lot of voters. They're not thrilled.
They're not thrilled.
Or they think they're not thrilled.
They don't realize until later that it could be helpful.
But whatever. They were provoked.
No industry likes change.
Most people don't like change.
I'm one of the people that loves change.
But most people don't.
And so we were seen as a theory.
And you may like change when you're the instigator of the change.
Well, that's awesome.
It leaves me more open to change coming from the outside, too, though.
I do believe. I do believe.
And I mean, obviously, this is just human nature.
Yeah, but the equivalent of the Taxi Commission and the Uber case was these real estate professionals.
And a lot of places, we had them lobbying to have us outlawed. They're not licensed.
How can they make an appraisal?
You know, whatever thing they're going to make up.
We knew we were on really strong legal ground.
And so we weren't so worried about that.
But the strategy for combating that resistance was literally probably the same thing you guys did at Uber, which was, we knew the legislators, state legislators, not to mention federal legislators, were big fans of the site and the service, okay?
And so all we had to do was make sure we just activated that latent love for the product itself and made it obvious that this way is the future way.
And the lobbyists got nowhere, and it was overcome.
Yeah, in the case of Uber, I don't wanna make this overly about Uber, but also turns out when people have something that is incredibly convenient and useful, they do not want it taken away.
No. And if elected officials like the service or are even ambivalent about the service, they do love getting reelected.
And man, oh man, if there are a lot of your constituents using that app and you take it away, they're not gonna be super happy about it.
Power to the people, baby.
I mean, like, you build magic stuff for masses of consumers that they wanna talk about with their friends unprompted on the sidelines of the soccer game, or what have you.
Have you tried Uber?
Have you tried Zillow?
Have you tried Expedia, whatever.
It's like you're definitely on to something and having popular support, as we're learning politically right now, is having big populist support is ultimately where the power is derived.
So sometimes you can go too far.
We don't need to talk about that.
But of course you can go too far.
And in fact, it may be that you need to go too far to establish where the frontier is.
All right. Well, I can't not take the bait on that one.
What does going too far look like?
I was thinking specifically of Uber.
Oh, all right. Because some cities, municipalities...
Oh, sure. You can push too hard. You can push too hard and learn some lessons about how much leash you're going to be given by the popular support.
Yeah. Because it does tip into a point where like with Airbnb, this is not a story...
I'm not an investor or anything, but they did piss off some homeowners in certain cities, not just the hotel owners.
So they found the line, and I think they managed it really, really well because they lead from the heart.
I think other companies may have not obviously led from the heart and had difficulty.
At Zillow, our job was a little easier.
But also, with those battles, I remember there were, early on, a number of locations that were incredibly important.
Not just from a ride volume perspective, but from a precedent setting perspective.
So if you win a few of those precedent setting battles, then you don't necessarily have to do like a full frontal assault on the next 10 locations.
Because people have gotten the message, you can be a little more diplomatic about it.
Which people figure out over time.
But then there's the next country, and then whatever.
Anyway, there's always something.
But provocation marketing with a heart, with the end consumer's best interest in mind, that's a winner.
So if you were teaching a class, maybe you already have, I have no idea, related to provocation marketing.
All right, there you go, you get to choose, you can go back to your alma mater or wherever it might be.
You're teaching a class, what would other elements of the class be?
Other resources, principals, anything at all?
While I try to figure out a structure here on the fly to give a couple other examples of stuff that I've been involved with, so I co -founded Glassdoor, which many people out there may know.
And our provocation data marketing feature was how much money did people make?
Not individuals, but the product manager at XYZ Company or the developer or the customer service representative.
And our model was we knew that salaries was kind of a little bit taboo for a lot of people.
So it was inherently secret and provocative.
And then Robert Homan, who is my co -founder, and the team, they had data collection problems because it was ultimately user -generated content.
People would need to share their salaries in a way that we believed in order to get enough data to provide anything interesting to everybody else.
And so their innovation, after kinda hand cranking it with survey, their innovation was give to get.
You show me yours, I'll show you mine.
Very good. That's very clever.
Very clever. So hey, I'll give you a little taste but if you wanna see any more data, you gotta share your salary and your title and your company.
We promise you'll be anonymous.
And do a company review.
How is this even? People screwed that up.
We're the only person with that position.
And we have protocols for that.
We did have protocols for that.
But it worked, really.
And we also then solicited feedback on what it's like to work at the company.
And, you know, CEOs are kind of public figures.
So, OK, we're going to let you review the CEO performance.
And we knew all those things would provoke.
We knew some CEOs would go crazy.
You know. So there's another example while I'm formulating a framework.
Another one is with another former Expedia guy, Marc Brittain.
We founded a company called Avvo which was in the legal space.
And we decided to rate attorneys, systematically rate attorneys.
This had never happened before.
It was just kind of like trip advisor for attorneys.
You could kind of trip advisor for anything, right?
These are business models that are well -trodden now, but these were It was kind of innovative back in the day.
And of course, we were gonna get sued because we were rating attorneys.
Yeah, definitely a great way to kick the hornet's nest. Some investors, when we were raising money I remember traveling around, you know, doing the Sand Hill shuffle with Mark and I remember some people saying, well, is this legal?
Can you rate people?
You know, you're gonna get sued.
You know, I'm not gonna invest. And we were like, yeah, we're gonna get sued.
Did you see Die Hard?
You remember Die Hard where the German terrorist leader is waiting for the last lock to open and he needs the power to go down in order to be able to get the bearer bonds out of the Nakatomi Plaza safe, okay?
And the people are like, how is he going to get the power to go down?
And he said, ladies and gentlemen, I'll give you the FBI. And they came in on those things, and the FBI, the playbook said, all right, cut the power.
Yeah, yeah. Boom! I was like here come the suits I'll give you the FBI. It was perfect because it created all kinds of noise.
I'm struggling with the structure.
Well here, let's go with the lawsuits.
All right. So the Sand Hill Shuffle for people who don't get that reference.
So Sand Hill Road, if you could imagine going to like, this is not gonna be the best comparison, but you go to like Kuwait and there's a shopping mall with Balenciaga and Prada and all the fanciest brands, all the aspirational brands and Well, if there were such a place, but it was all the highest -end venture capitalists, that would be Sand Hill Road.
And now it's more distributed, but still, it's a thing, right?
If you go stay at the Rosewood, and you're right around the corner.
That's got its own stories.
That's a strange place.
But. Fantastic. Fantastic.
Love that one. Fantastic.
And then you have you name it, right?
Everybody's there. All the big players.
And so, that's the Sand Hill Shuffle.
So why not be afraid of lawsuits?
What did you guys know that the guys who said no?
I'm not gonna touch now.
The ten foot pool the founder CEO, Mark Britton Was my general counsel at Expedia and he worked Securities Exchange Commission prior to that.
He was a real attorney.
Mm -hmm And the way we did it we were 100 % convinced of our legal grounds Yeah, and so people could still just consume so much energy right?
No doubt So we raised money to deal with that but we knew it was going to be pretty cheap lawsuits.
And we could provide the legal, most of the legal billing ourselves anyway.
And so it would be cheaper than hiring some fancy firm.
We were convinced. And after we won the first few suits, they lost steam.
The lawyers lost steam on suing.
So it caused some venture capitalists to not do it.
But the more disruptive -oriented folks were like, yeah.
Great. So what happened with Ava?
It did pretty well, it did pretty well.
We had trouble, so in a kind of trip advisor for legal sort of way, it did really well.
Ultimately, these kind of trip advisory digital middlemen who were kind of SEO on one side, collecting Google search traffic on one side and trying to monetize leads on the other.
As time wore on, a lot of those business models got somewhat disintermediated.
And so the protection against that That is usually to go down into the workflow — the transactions of the of the industry, which is say what we've done at Zillow or what Expedia does.
So could you explain that just one more time?
And maybe an example would be helpful.
So let's just say there's TripAdvisor for X, like you said.
They're kind of harvesting traffic on the SEO side, so their pages are engineered in such a way.
That's right. Maybe also using ad spend to drive traffic to these reviews, which are then monetized on some level.
That's right. Some people can't see, but by selling those leads out the other side of the marketplace.
So literally a lead middleman.
You got it. You got lead giants.
How would they get it disarmed, intermediated?
Well, Michael Porter, Five Forces would say, look, if you have an overdependency on any supply of customers, you're strategically exposed, for obvious reasons.
If you have an overdependency on any supplier, you're strategically exposed.
And so business strategy 101 says, diversify your sources of customers and your sources of supply so that nobody gets too much leverage over you.
Also, it's like a single point of failure, right?
Absolutely. Oop. Factory went down because of XYZ.
That's a problem. We're dealing with that right now in the country because COVID discovered that we had lots of supply chain single points of failure.
Anyway… We don't need to sidetrack on that.
In that example, if you're primarily getting your traffic from Google—paid or free—you're developing a serious dependency on Google, and Google, of course, in its own search for increased value, starts looking vertical, which means down into your business.
And so people probably noticed over the years that Google started doing reviews, and then they did their own, so they're doing their Yelp reviews, and their TripAdvisor reviews, and then they started doing airline schedules, and hotel bookings, and restaurant reservations, and, and, and, and so when the big guy that you're getting all your customers from starts taking more than passing interest in your business model because they want to capture more value, you'd better figure out something else.
So strategically speaking, my defense against that in my digital marketplaces has been twofold.
One, build a giant brand that customers know and love.
And therefore, most of your traffic and customers comes directly to your App Insights.
You have to have a brand to do that in order to have power.
and then two, look down your funnel and look into the workflow of the business you're in, be it travel or real estate or legal or jobs, you know, for the verticals that I've done stuff in, and make sure you become digitally integral to the workflow, you're building tools for the industry, ultimately maybe even doing the transactions, okay, and having a platform for the transactions.
And that, in a nutshell, is what Zillow's long -term strategy is.
We're basically building a super app, a one -stop shop application for anybody who's renting or buying soup to nuts, everything integrated, all the professionals plug in and workflow.
And that, we have a big brand, we source almost all of our customers directly, not all, but most, and we're embedded in the workflow solving real customer problems and the business is great and growing.
All right. So I haven't forgotten about the provocation marketing class.
However, I think this is a great place to buy you some more time and talk about naming.
Okay, oh. How do you name companies?
You saw that live post. As a road, I played around with blogging like all of us.
It really stuck with some, and it didn't with others.
I probably only had like 10 posts on my blog.
But one of them was naming, because I've had a lot of fun naming companies.
mm -hmm and I gave advice on naming I think the title of post the site it's honest called hopper and dropper comm which is a fly -fishing term but which is nobody's gone to it's I only had 20 visitors Tim being one lucky 21 I have a few rules about naming first when you're trying to brand a company if you're building a consumer brand especially you have kind of two broad ways you can go The easy way and the hard way and I'll forgive the four hour work week in the four -hour body you know but i'll tell you that there are no shortcuts you take the shortcut to the long road my coach jimmy says yeah
anyway the easy way is if you're building a travel site to call it hotels .com airlines .com you know you name it every category has a literal word .com and the advantages to that are it's easy to explain to people what you do yeah and the disadvantages to that or you don't own any brand of equity because you can't own a word that previously exists, and so you're non -distinct and non -distinctive.
There's an in -between way, which is to use an existing word but make a new application of it, Apple, computer, Amazon .com, and that's viable, but you have to build a new definition for that word, which those companies obviously did successfully.
The hard way, and the best way, I think, for consumers is to make up a word. Make up a word. which is super hard because you have to tell people what the word means, you have to define it for them, but once you do, you own that word. The definition of that word is years and only years.
And so I like the hard path because I like building brands, and with provocation marketing, I think I can get a big audience early, which begins to familiarize people with the brand.
So I was confident in my ability, my and my team's really, ability to do that.
Okay, so now, when you're making up a word, what do you do?
and I think this is what you're referring to.
Okay, so high point Scrabble letters, do you play Scrabble?
It's been a minute, but yes, I play Scrabble.
Okay, you know that there are different point numbers on each letter as you play Scrabble.
And do you remember what the high point ones are?
I don't. Okay. Z is 10.
X is 10, that's the highest point you can get.
A, E, I, O, U, are one.
Here's why, Q is 10 too, here's why.
Z, X and Q are super rare letters.
AEIOU are super common. And so rule number one is pick the super rare letters and pick them because they're very distinctive.
They jump off a page when you read, they stick in people's brains in a way that's not crowded.
So all my stuff has Z's and X's and some Q's actually, too.
Rule number two, fewer syllables is better than more.
I kind of learned this lesson with Expedia.
Expedia was too many syllables.
It's worked out fine.
We've overcome that the company's overcome that now, but in hindsight, it was a lot.
I liked it because of rule number three, which is it was evocative of positive things, speed, expedition.
So, it said adventure and speed and that all felt good in that word. But fewer syllables, I think two syllables is the sweet spot because I also want it to be a good dog name.
So if the word could be a good dog name, you're onto something.
You can call for it.
Zillow! Anyway. Another one is it can be turned into a verb pretty easily.
So pick a word that can be turned into a verb.
So probably a dog name and verb probably means it ends in a vowel sound.
And then the last one is people, double letters and palindromes are good too.
So anything that is a unique word form, double letters, People remember.
They jump off the page.
And palindromes are words that are the same forward and backward spelled, right?
So just interesting, interesting words.
Anyway, that's my handbook.
Palindrome, like my friend Mike Kim back in the day.
I was struggling to think of one.
I couldn't pull one on the slide.
Well done. Taco Cat?
It's a good game. So you're in the game space.
It's Taco Cat. That is a funny game, isn't it?
So stupid. It's great.
It's so fun. It was so good.
So I'm thinking of double letters.
So there are names Expedia had.
X. Has an X. X speed.
Good connotation with pre -existing words or concepts.
Yeah. Maybe one syllable too long.
Then you've got Zillow.
Zillow, that's sweet spot.
Kind of named it, I'm imagining this Labrador retriever, right?
And starts with a Z.
Like how many words start with a Z?
That's great. And two double letter L L, soft ending.
Double letter but I'm not sure because I am not speed with my scrabble.
Glass door. The glass door in the mid, you know, in the middle.
It was pretty evocative of having people peer—is transparency.
Power of the people in transparency is a big thing and we really liked kinda looking in through the glass door inside of a company.
Two syllables, not a great dog word, you know, but two double letters so it kind of jumps off the page.
It's I would say we get kind of a B on that.
But Robert did a very good job with marketing that.
All right, so if you need more time, I'm not gonna forget about it, the provocation marketing curriculum.
And it could just be one seminar.
It doesn't have to be ongoing.
Just if that complicates the envisioning process.
Find a seven deadly sin zone, something that is emotionally core to us okay, that you know is gonna incite an emotional response.
All right. Okay, so some topic that people are emotional about.
And then, go address some sacred cow, some taboo or sacred cow in that space.
Most of the ideas that you could probably think of with that outline would be really negative.
And then get rid of all those.
Because I do believe a cheap way to get attention is to scare people, okay, but I think it's cheap.
It's a cheap way to lead is to scare people.
Effective, but cheap.
And it doesn't make people feel good to be scared.
So if you're building a brand and a service, you want people to be provoked, but feel good or tickled or entertained.
And so that is where I would head with the seminar.
And then and we end up brainstorming about getting people's ideas for that.
Let's touch on briefly, mention Bill Gurley, of course, famous venture capitalist, he's been on the show, brilliant guy, also quite hilarious.
And local. And local.
Hey Bill. Yeah, he's right down, right a couple blocks from where we're sitting right now.
You have spent time at Benchmark Capital, which way back in the day, I mentioned this to Bill, when I first moved to Silicon Valley, a book was recommended to me called Eboys, way back in the day.
Exciting. And putting aside how Bill may or may not feel about it, we didn't really get into it.
I'm sure there's lots of stuff that could stand some fact checking, but it was incredibly inspirational and so entertaining.
I mean, this was the heyday, right?
I mean, this was just rocket ships everywhere.
So fun to read. So you've spent time at and with Benchmark.
What led you to that?
Was that kind of biding time until you figured out which next big swing to take?
What was the motivation?
And then also, what did you learn there or what came into greater resolution or clarity while you were there?
Yeah, okay. So, as we chatted about before, when I was coming with my family back from sabbatical, I'm a big believer in the sabbatical in Italy, and was considering the next career move, I got to know first Bruce Dunleavy at Benchmark and then Bill and the other guys.
I did read e -boys then, too, which was romantic in a weird way but for business geeks like me and you, maybe, romantic.
And I also knew that I had a personality that did want to have my fingers in a lot of stuff.
Mm -hmm. I did. I did.
I knew that. I liked to do lots of things and I wanted to do lots of things and I could do lots of things.
I could think about lots of things.
And so in the course of trying to figure out, prior to Zillow, trying to figure out what to do, I got to know those guys really well.
They invited me to a bunch of stuff to sit in on stuff.
I knew I would be good at that.
I knew I liked doing that.
And then a condition with Lloyd Frank of doing the Zillow thing and taking the CEO title, I said, look, you know I'm going to do a bunch of other things, too.
I'm going to start more companies, and I'm going to do the venture capital thing.
And he's like, all good, No problem.
And so as a way to keep myself stimulated and seeing lots of stuff and get down to the valley, I was in Seattle, which was not really a venture pop -ed at the time.
Cloud computing hadn't happened yet.
We did have Amazon, Expedia, and Microsoft. But you know.
And so the action on the cutting edge was down in the valley.
I had some boards I was on down there as well.
And so I took the venture partner job with Benchmark, which is a pretty ill -defined position, as a way to keep me going to the valley and keep me in the flow of the latest stuff.
And I really loved that.
I do believe that ended up benefiting all the other stuff I was doing as well.
I really loved that team.
I love that team to this day.
How did it benefit the other things?
Was it just seeing around corners, getting an idea of what's coming before most other people have a chance to?
Yeah, and thinking of new ideas for companies too.
But I'm a big believer, there are some companies that hold on to their people and say, you can't go do other things.
Don't sit on other boards.
I really like executives that are on my teams to have another board. And if you love it, set it free.
If you're scared about losing people and you're being too retentive, that means you're too insular, probably.
And you've got to give to get.
If you give time and get interested in other business models.
You help them, but you end up learning a bunch of stuff for your own company.
I've learned so much from sitting on the board of Netflix that I've imported to my other companies.
Can you explain, just for folks who may not be familiar, what does it mean to sit on a board?
What does that actually mean?
It depends board to board, I'm sure, on responsibilities and expectations, but along with that, you must have lots of requests to join X, Y or Z boards.
How do you choose the boards to be a part of?
OK. What it means to sit on a board is when a company's private, it means help the CEO and the leadership team build the company.
So it's really being an advisor and a coach and somebody with a lot of business building experience to help pick the right strategy.
You're not running anything, but you're basically coaching the entrepreneurs who oftentimes are less experienced, sometimes not, but oftentimes less experienced.
And I would always recommend assembling a board of people with real experience who are going to be engaged.
And so it's a company -building exercise.
And then when fundraising is time to fundraise, it can totally help with the next fundraising, can help with recruiting.
One of the very best at this is, I mean, there's so many good ones.
Bill is really good, as you've seen in the Uber case, at really helping build companies.
OK, and a public company is a little different.
Yeah. I had one thing.
And I've never been on a board, but.
Really? Yeah. No, I've dodged it, I guess, in a sense.
So you have a negative impression?
No, no, it's not a negative impression.
You dodged it? Well, I feel like, yeah, dodge is a strong verb to use.
So that was missile coming at you, and you...
I felt like at the time when these opportunities have come up that I did not have clear criteria, and I don't want to commit to things reactively.
Which is part of the reason why I'm asking you.
Okay, got it. And also, it seems like, and definitely correct me if I'm wrong, But another responsibility of a board is to fire leadership if it comes down to that.
So it can be better roses and looking forward to the future and a lot of good things, but it also comes with responsibilities to handle the tough times.
Those are probably the most, especially for a public company, those are the most important times too.
When you're company building as a private company, it's a little less important.
That's good context.
But it's something that I've been not necessarily reconsidering because I think you should I think you'd be good.
Okay. Tell me Well, you're a coach. Yeah, that's all it is Okay I mean it's what it's what a primarily is you're instinctively a coach and You have a lot of experience sets and you look for look far analogies you look for, you know, oh this situation here is a lot like this other situation and that that makes you a good communicator and That is oftentimes what good coaching is It's I kind of in I shouldn't say inadvertently because it's not inadvertent but informally do that already, right, with a lot of the founders that I'm involved with.
Which is fine, too, but it's that same, in the best of circumstances, it is that same way on a board, okay?
And those are the only boards that I'm involved with, is those that are really there to coach and give advice.
Sometimes, oftentimes, in a public company, when you get into the public markets where your responsibilities are a little different, You have these hardcore responsibilities to represent shareholders.
And the only real power you have is kind of capital allocation a little bit and who's the CEO?
Capital allocation meaning how do they spend their funds or their...
Raising money, spending money, usually not to the budgetary, but big, big acquisitions, whatever.
Big changes in the cap table, in the balance sheet that will affect shareholders.
Yep, got it. Oftentimes, public companies, depending on their age, usually as they get older, they stop acting like a private board where it's really about the strategy in coaching and helping in building and then becomes more about institutional shareholder services rates directors.
What is that? Oh wow.
OK, so they're like the lawyers competing to have to go to the ratings on avocado.
Kind of. OK. Kind of.
And then when a board. This is something I haven't heard anything about.
If a board tips into, let's call them, professional directors who are really worried about their board director reputation, It becomes more about them and process and C -Y -A.
Cover your ass. Yeah, because you want to get sued?
Whatever. If you don't want to look bad, whatever.
Versus, let's build a company.
Yeah, that doesn't sound fun.
I really actually never had a board tip into that.
Had some boards that evolved into finger pointing and what have you, but in the private space, right?
So I'm on a few public boards, but they're all really their strategy.
And how can we grow?
And how can we help you?
And how's the team doing?
and so if I don't get a good ISS rating, which I have some of the worst there are out there.
Really, I do. Wait, wait, who actually determines the rating?
I don't really know the process and I don't really give a rip, but some survey, it's a stick -up job, these things.
They, they. Stick -up job, like, give us what we want or else.
Look, it's like bond ratings, whatever, like, these ratings firms, they do ratings and then they sell consulting services to their customers.
It's just a classic, you know.
And mutual funds and ETFs, whatever, hire them, and they can't track every company, so they look at the ratings and how we should vote on the proxy issue.
And blah blah blah.
Anyway, I've got very low ratings for lots of nonsensical reasons, but I don't care.
I personally don't care, but a board that's full of directors who really do care is not as...
It's not as fun. framework for you, which you asked.
So Greg Maffei, who's on my board at Zillow and who I've worked with for a long time, I've mentioned already, and Jay Hoeg kind of gave me the same advice.
Jay's another venture capitalist who I work a lot with.
We're on boards together.
Construct. A good construct that Greg told me early in my career was, is it local?
Is it fun? Is it lucrative?
Yeah, it's a good place to start.
Those are good starting points.
So you can zoom now a little bit, but you really don't want to spend your life traveling.
So that's another thing that put me on the sidelines is I knew a few people who, they just seemed like traveling salesmen in a sense.
It was like George Clooney from Up in the Air when he was just traveling around in a different city every other week.
Soul crushing. Yeah.
It's not quite that way.
But yeah, I mean, so local is, Greg when he laid it out for him, he's like, it's gotta be two out of three at least. If it can be all three, trifecta, score.
And lucrative meaning, potentially lucrative, like, the business is, you would buy the stock.
Right. As a gross stock.
You know, so. And this is as good a point as any, to just explain the, I guess, compensation structure.
How does it work? You get an equity grant, you have options to invest over time, and I suppose it depends on the state of the, and stage of the company.
Private companies often are not compensated because you're the venture capitalist. Right.
Okay? So you're the funder.
So you're doing it because you've had already, you already own a chunk of the company.
So that's your compensation.
And most startups, most private companies can't afford to pay.
Now, the late -stage startups, the forever startups now, like I'm sure stripe directors make a lot of money.
Public companies, it's really just salary bands based on the size of the company.
I mean it's like for most mid -cap public companies, I would guess it's 200 to $350 ,000 a year.
Most companies, for big meetings, committee meetings, whatever, not a huge chunk of time.
So, it's nice, and then usually they enable the directors to choose if they wanted, if some part has to be in stock and some could be in cash.
Anyway, I had a ton of experience with those.
So, fun, local, lucrative.
Potentially lucrative.
Potentially lucrative.
And fun has got to be like, it's a proxy for it, maybe it's a cool company, whatever, that's fun, but really, it's the boardroom dynamic.
You look around the table and at the leadership team and are these interesting, is it a collegial everybody's rowing together in the same boat kind of situation or is it a we got old factions fighting and these guys want that and these ones want that and like, you know, run away.
Less game of thrones.
Yeah, exactly. Like, no fun.
No fun. Alright, so we're drinking our carbonated Japanese citrus, yes.
Use your coconut water.
feeling very well hydrated and infused, and that is as smooth slash awkward a segue as possible to do a callback to something you mentioned earlier, which was, da da da da da, and then I started paying attention to things I had neglected before that, including health and body, things like that.
So when did that happen?
Was it a gradual development of wellness habits, self -care or was there a reckoning at some point?
What happened? Yeah, I mean, I think for a lot of people it's a health reckoning for them or for somebody else that kind of shocks them into, you know, maybe an overlay of general age, you know, the substrate is age and ultimately everybody probably figures this out and some later, sooner than others.
What is your age now?
I have no idea. I can't tell.
Ok, God, wow, you really held onto the youthful glow.
Everything's falling apart.
Really, Gaby, oh God.
American history acts as of 10 years ago and then that's just the crow's feet are turning into crow's legs.
But you seem to be very active.
I am, and for me, it was that same thing.
It was a catalyst, a pretty sudden external catalyst. It's not my health, but my wife's and children's.
And so I have three kids, Will, Josie, and Russell.
And Josie and Russell are twins, and twin pregnancies are high risk, definitionally.
And so I was aged maybe 35, 34, running Expedia as a really young public company CEO. The company's doing great, but I had to deal with stuff like 9 -11, you know, during the travel business.
And I had been a pretty, not quite sleep under the desk but kind of work all the time kind of guy for a long time, because I love my work, whatever.
We socialized with Microsoft people and Linux media people, and this was our lives.
We talked about it at dinner.
So, I was pretty neglectful.
While I was a weekend warrior type basketball player and tennis player and snowboarder, I didn't yet realize that I had to maintain myself in order to be able to do those things.
So, I was just working too hard, working all the time.
When Sarah was pregnant with Josie and Russell, she went into labor really early.
We were on our way up to Whistler.
And she was, for those who understand these things, I think she was 27 weeks pregnant out of a 40 -week typical gestation period, which is very early.
It's not very, very early, but it's danger early.
And so we were driving on our way.
So I was like, I think something's going on.
Let's go stop by the hospital.
So we stopped by the hospital just so her OB could check her out.
and she was like, partially dilated and like, just some small contractions.
And Sarah thought nothing of it.
You know, the shoemaker's kids have no shoes.
Sarah's like, oh fine, I'll just keep the seat reclined as we drive up to Whistler.
And her doctor, Edith, said, not only are you not going up to Whistler, you're not going home.
You are gonna be admitted to the hospital and we're gonna put you on muscle relaxants.
So that began at kind of a six week, like, very scary period of my life and her life where she was in the hospital making sure that the babies didn't get born.
I was taking care of my three -year -old Will.
And then everything turned out great.
She carried them to 35 weeks or something, 36 weeks.
Kids are perfect. The birth was a little hard, the kids were perfect, and it all worked out.
But in the course of that period of time, it got me to reassess my life and how I lived in my life and what my priorities were and how I needed to take care of myself mentally and physically, I kind of had the realization that for sustainability, I was gonna have to start doing a bunch of things.
If I wanted to do the things I love to do for the long term I was gonna have to really build my foundation.
I decided to quit my job at that point too.
I was still CEO, IAC had just acquired the company and I made the decision at that point but that this lifestyle was not, I didn't need it.
So needed a change.
And what were some of the changes?
Like how did you layer things in?
Did you boil ocean all at once?
And I was like, alright, here are the 12 new things I'm starting, did you layer it in?
And would you have done anything differently?
I started just exploring things.
The big change was we moved to Italy six months later, or maybe eight months later.
And I developed a whole new set of things I did when we were living in Italy.
Like I took up road biking, which is a very Italian, a social Italian thing to do, which was great.
It was great for making friends too.
But I had a period of time after that where I was in Seattle.
And I started, I remember the first real class the kind of thing I'd ever done was hot yoga.
And I was like, wow, this is amazing.
I feel incredible after I come out of that class and it's strength and some conditioning, I guess.
And really interesting and kind of a mental thing too.
And I started doing that.
And then, I didn't hire a trainer until much later, but I eventually got there.
I didn't lift weights for a long, long time.
I was more just kind of running.
I took up running. I ran a couple of marathons.
You know, I discovered my body was not built for...
my joints were not built for marathons.
Anyway, I did a bunch of things, Tim, recognizing that I felt better when my body felt better and my mind felt better when my body felt better.
And it's just built over time to the age I am now where like the physiology of what's happening to my body and my bone density and my muscle mass at my age, it's like, I'm like continually been ramping up how much I do, A, because it makes me feel good, but B, because I'm just age wise deteriorating.
And if I want to snowboard, I've snowboarded 35 days this year.
And it's been amazing.
and like, if I wanna keep doin' stuff like that, I've gotta be strong.
So what does the current regimen look like?
Generally speaking, I'm sure there are exceptions on maybe travel or go to various places, but what does the general regimen look like?
Probably a couple hours total of zone -two -y type stuff, you know, bike, rowing, maybe tread, my knees kinda are not great running but the treadmill, a softer treadmill works, but the Peloton is my favorite one there, and then weightlifting different body parts, maybe four times a week, and then a lot of just play stuff.
A lot of snowboarding, and play sports.
I play tennis, I like to do a lot of stuff with my body and the world, yeah.
How do you fit that in?
You got a lot going on.
You like building, you continually, as our mutual friend Chris Sockout has in one of his suggested topics for exploration Where have you been since I asked?
Like you continually put yourself back in the arena.
Right, as a builder, you are on several boards.
I mean, there are demands.
I'm sure there's a lot of inbound that you say no to.
How do you think about the self care?
Is it sort of the first thing that you block and then that's it?
For me now, priority was that is, I mean, my family and my health is essential to my family's health too.
So my family and my health and my state of mind, but I am not operating.
About seven, eight months ago, after my second or third stint as CEO at Zillow, I kind of kicked myself back upstairs.
And so I'm no longer the day -to -day CEO, which is terrific, it's helped.
But I've always been the guy who my joke was, I'm very much a delegator.
I'm very much a pick great people and then give them lots of space.
And actually, a leadership development technique I often coach is for a senior leader or a middle management type leader, I encourage them to really take a vacation and disappear.
And most people think that's gonna be harmful to their business or their career.
And what I try to coach them on is, no, that is actually the way you develop your leaders.
One of the ways you develop your leaders.
Because if you're really disconnected, you're on a surf trip in Indonesia and you have zero connectivity for two weeks, okay?
Do it for two weeks and be disconnected and your teams are gonna have to figure out how to deal with stuff that's important because it's gonna arise.
And you're gonna have to create systems and policies and rules ahead of time that will outlive the surf trip.
That's true but from a leadership perspective sometimes the real leader of an organization is not necessarily the one with the title.
And when somebody's really disconnected, the senior leader is disconnected.
Leadership is sort of an emergent property, okay?
And it kind of emerges.
So this is a long way of saying I kind of have always felt that way about my universe too.
I believe the most secure people are willing to let go and roll the dice on the other people and answer the question, who is your successor?
If you were hit by a bus, who would to take over, and the less secure people, the more insecure people put themselves in a position where they seem indispensable to senior management and couldn't possibly leave. Okay, that person is not promotable.
The person who has cultivated leaders under them, that person is totally promotable, even though that person's more expendable, too.
Right, and so it's that fine thing.
Long winded way of me saying I've always had a lot of things going on, and my joke was if I'm doing my job really, really perfectly I can be on my surfboard. And nobody knows when you don't show up to work if you have eight jobs.
Everybody always thinks you're working on the other thing.
I'm being glib and it gets a little bit of a chuckle but I am a seriously leverage -oriented person.
So it's not that hard. Yeah.
What are other ways that you identify opportunities for leverage or think about leverage?
In a life context it is just surrounding yourself with great people who care, who have skills and who care about whatever the mission is be it building a business or building a family.
Sarah is amazingly smart and capable and cares and like the stuff that she's in charge of is gonna happen well.
That's an unbelievable feature to have in a partner as you're looking for a partner.
and lots of stuff matters in finding a partner.
But it's really a partnership.
If you guys are gonna have a baby, that's a business of sorts, you know?
I think it's mostly about picking the right people.
Any recommendations for people who are hiring folks they have not known for a long period of time?
Any recommendations for the hiring process?
Because a lot of people interview well who don't necessarily perform well, they know what to say.
And reference checks often are conflicted.
Reference checks, I've had the worst luck with taking reference checks at face value.
There's some ways to kinda work with that.
Yeah, two things, I would say.
One is my favorite section of the resume, I guess now LinkedIn.
It's not really a section on LinkedIn, but it's always in the very bottom, which is the interests, Okay.
And I want to get somebody if in an interview situation talking about their interests and why they put them there, and then just asking them basic questions and watching whether or not they have any passion.
To see a real spark.
Because if they put it there, that is what they're interested in, and they'd better be able to light up on it.
When I was earlier in my career, I would always make up business cases around some interest. You know how big is the ski industry because you put skiing whatever, you know, and that was always a fun stepping -off point so Finding people's passion.
I want to find people who are passionate people and then the second thing is get used to Pulling the picture off the mount quickly Firing someone.
Yep. Okay. It's hard when you're early in your career It's not as hard later all of my mistakes as a leader have been leaving, almost all of them, have been leaving the picture on the mound too long, hoping that the arm would get better.
What have you learned in terms of process for firing?
Any approach, go -to phrases, rules?
If you've got someone, you're going on your two -week surf trip.
There's someone below you who is going to fill that leadership void.
And he or she is going to have to fire someone.
And they're like, hey boss, I don't wanna bother you, but this is something I haven't done before.
Give me some advice.
Yeah, don't do it via text, be an upstanding person.
You know, have some courage, you gotta be face to face.
But it's actually not that hard, my advice would be, look if you're not happy with the performance of this person, I guarantee you the person isn't happy either.
Therefore you can increase love in the world by releasing that person to find where that person belongs.
That person belongs somewhere else.
That person's gonna be happy somewhere.
Help that person find that somewhere.
But you're gonna be happier when you release that person, that person's gonna be happier too.
And so if you make it a partnership, if you make it a joint decision effectively, or at least get the interests aligned, which it almost always is, it's not as hard. And when you do that, you naturally are being human.
If you're looking for shared alignment, that means you care.
That means you're showing heart, and having heart in this situation is really important.
Then in terms of the delivery, the conversation, any tips on how to manage that?
You do have to be ready for a lot of stuff to come up and as the person in the power, holding power in this situation, you have to wear it.
You have to understand and be sympathetic and non -argumentative, in order to get people on the same page.
Oftentimes, just like in life with anything, people really do need to get it out and be heard, and that's great.
That's great. And then asking advice on the way out too, for voluntary or involuntary termination, sometimes it's hazy, right?
And soliciting information on the way out for yourself and the organization is often appreciated and often revealing too.
So that's good. In the exit interview?
Exit interview is important in as casual a setting as you can make, as you can muster.
I believe the entrance, the one month post start is a really great time to get observations from new people too.
They haven't been fully indoctrinated yet and they probably are good consultants right then.
So random question, I don't know.
You could be covered in tattoos but what is the story of this tattoo?
Family. All right, five of us in the family things we love so it looks at a quick glance looks like a snowflake but Those are trees.
That's made up of five trees It's a snowflake in total shape and it's a starfish in the negative space Uh -huh, my daughter Josie when she was 16, which is too young to get a tattoo Asked Sarah if she could get a tattoo Or a stir more specifically it would she get a tattoo with her And Sarah's like, pfft, sorry, like, sharp!
And I brought it to me and I was like, okay, but let's design one as a family.
No Wile E. Coyote. The first versions, you know those, on the back of the minivan, the family of five with the stick figure mom and the stick figure, that was what Josie drew.
V1. That's, Josie's very creative, you're creative, honey.
But it was funny, that was the first version And then we were sharing different versions and iterating.
And at some point, Sarah said, maybe we should bring this artist friend, Joe Park, into this.
And he'd never designed a tattoo.
We brought him and he was super psyched to do it.
So then he led the creative iterations and we ended up with this.
They look exactly the same, but they're not.
They're all unique and they form a cohesive whole.
Oh, the trees you're saying.
The trees are unique too.
Mm -hmm. So anyway. They're doing it.
Yeah, I love it. I was the only one who got it in a really visible place and everybody else got jealous because I like to be able to look at it and remember my family.
And we did this maybe five, six, seven years ago.
I thought we'd get more.
Sara's gotten two more tattoos, but I haven't gotten any more.
I think tattoos are, you don't have any, do you have some?
It's very few people have one.
Yeah, I've been considering getting my first, which is in some ways kind of similar.
I'd actually be in a very similar location right here with my dog's paw prints.
It's hard for me to imagine regretting that.
You won't? Yeah, I don't think I will.
Yeah. Yeah. It was interestingly, our older boy Will was of age to get a tattoo.
He was 18, I think, at the time, maybe 19.
But the twins, it wasn't legal to get one in Washington state or most states.
And so Josie was actually going to high school for a year in Spain at the time, and Spain didn't have that restriction.
So she got the design and got it in Spain.
And we have that house in Montana, and Montana doesn't have any restrictions.
So on the way to go skiing one time, Russell went to some sketchy place in Bozeman and got the tattoos, so we all got them in different places.
It's funny. Any other, I mean I guess getting a tattoo is not necessarily a recommendation you're making, but any thoughts for, let's just say there are people listening who are type A or otherwise builders who can sometimes be consumed perhaps by the scale and scope of what they're doing or hope to do.
And they're planning on kids or they have very young kids.
What would your recommendations be to those people?
So the planning ons of the kind of constant delays which there are a lot of, maybe some right here.
There are a lot of out there.
Okay. And I think the fundamental logic is this is an important thing and I don't have enough time Yeah right now and so I'll wait till it's a better time.
Mm -hmm There's never a better time There's never a good time.
So point number one is it's not going to get better It's not gonna feel better and then point number two is We're built for this.
Yeah We are the successful evolutionary product of a lot of people who figured this out.
Which means we have a lot of encoded knowledge about how to do this and how to deal from our bodies and our minds and our relationships and even just how we parent.
It's encoded. A lot of it is encoded.
So, it's, you know what, it's probably gonna work pretty well.
And so, I don't know if I call myself a birther, I'm an encourager of like, Like, let's have more babies.
And I'm a really big believer in how it's such an important part of our own mental health to have, at least for me, to have children.
And from a growth perspective, and it kind of, as we get older, our ego -focus, naturally, the diameter of our ego sphere gets broader and broader, and children just blow it way out.
And that is really a positive for most people to realize that their needs and wants are trivial.
You know, I think that's a positive.
So anyway, I encourage it.
Yeah, for me, it's not a bad timing, looking for better timing thing.
It's more of a navigating the bizarre aspects of modern dating being in my public slash semi -public position and as someone who's all ready for a lot of good reasons slow to trust, getting to a point where I feel like I can pull the trigger.
I think that's solvable but it's not trivial.
I never had to deal with that but I totally.
How old were you guys when you met?
22. In a pub in Cambridge, Mass.
Look at that. Maybe that's my next move.
Go pub crawling in Cambridge.
It's hard though, I totally get what you're saying.
It's hard. For the people with young kids and balancing things, I guess I would just always advise to don't wait for an external catalyst to make sure you're prioritizing your family life and your personal health it's a lot of people out there are not doing that and Eventually it comes home to roost one way or another you know And the sooner you can kind of keep things in perspective.
It's kind of a confidence game in general It's a courage and confidence game in general.
If you have high confidence in your abilities There is no better time for at least the kinds of jobs in the sit -at -a -desk -use -a -computer type jobs, there's no better time in the history of the world to be able to have a good balance between having work and life interweave. I'm a huge believer in what I call cloud HQ, cloud headquarters at Zillow, post -pandemic.
I was a huge believer in office culture before that, but the pandemic opened my eyes to just how much more inclusive the cloud headquarter.
The Matt Mullenweg, Matt was very, you know, he was very influential on me early in the pandemic.
You know, I had him blue jeans, zoom into an early company meeting early in COVID and lay out his game plan for the Distributed Corporation.
And God is super helpful.
Matt Mullenweg, generally associated with WordPress, founder and CEO of Automattic, spelled M -A -T -T -I -C, and pioneer of distributed workforces.
And as a design principle from the outset has built that company to be distributed and, therefore, was very anti -fragile when COVID came along.
And there were some other standout examples.
I mean, Shopify did really well also.
But you're right, I think if this just can't lend itself, I mean modern technology and the options available to some type of balance or the option to pull different levers where it would have been far difficult even ten years ago.
Yeah, but we can generalize and say it's been great for moms, but it's more than just moms. But it has enabled really smart very experienced moms who may have historically decided to take the off ramp into primarily momhood rather than primarily climbing the corporate ladder or just executive leadership.
It's enabled them to come back.
And likewise now for a father, like as long as the company doesn't get angry when they see you in your car on the Zoom because you're at a dentist appointment for your kid or something, as long as like that doesn't make the CEO get angry because that's not the way I did it when I came up and look how great I turned You know, like, I've got to do it this way.
It's like I kinda chuckle when I listen to all that.
I'm like, you people, like, open your minds.
This is just, this opens doors, this doesn't close doors.
Yeah. So let me ask a couple of quick questions.
Yeah. Now they don't need to have quick answers, but just as we start to land the plane, what books have you either gifted a lot to other people or reread yourself?
Either one. I am not your typical person probably, sitting in this seat.
Maybe I am. I am not a non -fiction business book.
Sorry, Tim. No, it's okay.
Yeah, I tend not to read that stuff.
The older I get, I occasionally will read a biography now, but they mean more now the older you get.
But I am fully a, I'm a big reader and it's fiction.
And generally good fiction, although I do have. Cheap thrills.
Yeah, yeah, I do. I do.
I really love beautiful, beautiful fiction.
I've always dabbled in the kind of science fiction, magical realism stuff as well.
I believe, for me at least, escape from the cranked up quick twitch, always on alert, operational stuff that business people go to.
Yeah, exactly. To get my brain, my monkey brain, OK?
and to get my monkey brain to relax, escaping into a fiction novel, for me, is just a fantastic release.
So with all that said, what stuff do I like and that I've gifted?
Recently, I gifted The Oceans and the Stars, do you know Mark Halperin?
Oh, no. Okay, he's a guy who's a little older than I am and writes characters that are just about in my phase of life, like a beautiful luscious prose writer, really smart, wrote Soldier of the Great War and A Winter's Tale and Freddy and Frederica, if you've heard of any of these books.
There's a little bit of magic in them.
Magic is a prime character in all these books.
It's this luscious prose and epic stories of war and romance and exploration and relationships, and this latest one I highly recommend.
It's on the edge of retirement just under Admiral or like a low -level Admiral in the U .S. Navy who almost becomes head of the DoD but doesn't get it because he speaks his mind and then he gets commissioned as a rebuke on this new weird ship and I'll just say that and that's a setup for him taking this really more fast attack destroyer into the Middle East. And he's kind of a war guy.
He's a vet. And he's a pretty engaged political, kind of I'd call him an offensive realist in the John Mearsheimer mold.
Kind of hawkish would be perceived as hawkish.
Believes in strong defense.
The protagonist. This is the author, Mark Halperin.
This is his mindset.
So that manifests in basically romantic stories of heroic war efforts, which is, I'm a boy.
I like that stuff. If I recommend it, Oceans and Stars is great.
The only of his that I probably reread is A Winter's Tale, which was my first one I ever read by him.
It's just a beautiful, beautiful story of early 20th century life near New York City and upstate New York.
You might actually like it.
I might dig it. I read Last of the Mohicans just to take a walk through that area and that time period.
Authors, I like. I like Haruki Murakami kind of magic.
McNeil Stevenson is some people don't like his latest book, Polestan.
I don't know if he's the one who wrote Snow Crash.
Okay so you know him.
Snow Crash for kicks.
I had pizza with him in Seattle with a couple of other guys.
And I was like, wait, you do Victorian -era calisthenics with, oh, and you make swords?
Wait, what? I mean, lots of.
And he's got the beard down his.
Oh, amazing beard, yeah.
I actually kind of froze up when I met him.
It doesn't happen to me very often.
He's kind of a hero and he's in Seattle.
He's in guys right there.
Yeah. He's right there so I see him occasionally at our sushi place get scared but his latest polostom I Highly recommend.
Okay. I haven't read it yet.
Some people are giving me grief for it.
It's You know authors when they get successful later than thousand pages.
Well, it's long. What lot of his stuff is long It's not that long.
It's not like like Kryptonamicon or something like that.
Which I loved. Side note.
Me too. But authors, as they get successful sometimes, you know, they have too much power over their editors, and so they get a little self -indulgent, you know?
Which for me, with the beautiful prose writer, I'm like, take me along, fine, I will indulge your self -indulgence.
And I don't mind it.
But this one takes 100 to 150 pages to break into, but then it just goes.
Then it rips. Then it rips, yeah.
So anyway, I highly write, and it's gonna be a trilogy.
And so it's only the first one.
So I'm like, I can't wait.
Anyway, I love, you can tell, I love to read fiction.
And do you lean these days, if you're gifting, do you have you gifted those books that you mentioned?
I have gifted Oceans and Stars, but I'm such a Kindle person.
So many of us are digital readers now.
It's kind of hard to gift. Yeah, it is.
It's more group chat.
Yeah. Book group group chat.
That's how most of the book discovery happens for me now.
have you read any of Ted Chang's stuff?
Oh, man. Who is it?
Okay, so Ted, C -H -I -A -N -G, he has, last I checked, he has two collections of short stories.
And there is one, which I always script the title of.
It's like Stories of Your Life and Other Stories, something like that.
And one of the short stories was the basis for the movie Arrival with Jeremy Renner, amazing movie.
So, one of his shorts was the basis for that.
And then I read that collection and pretty much everyone I read it was just like, I don't understand how this guy does this.
And if they happen to be writers are also just like, sad clown tier, you know?
How does someone even begin to create something like this?
His second collection came out, Exhalation, and I didn't want to buy it because I didn't want to be disappointed.
I was like, there's just no way, right?
Like that first one is appetite for destruction.
Like, yeah, you can't do that twice.
And then the second was just unbelievably good.
And not all of them will hit necessarily, but the ones that hit are just incredible.
And he, and they're like one night read short story, this collection of one night.
I would say a lot of them are one night reads.
Some of them end up being a little bit longer, but he along with other writers to Kenneth Liu, I think is He has the paper menagerie which was actually gifted to me by Matt Mullenweg.
Blends or alternates in a sense between sci -fi and fantasy in this really compelling way.
So you get these like little ginger snacks in between your pieces a sushi.
That sounds right on my own.
Resets. So, highly, highly recommend.
And I think for the longest time, he wasn't, maybe he still isn't a full -time writer.
That's the part that really got me where I was like, okay, he writes technical manuals for A, B or C and then in his spare time he wins Hugo and Nebula awards.
It's like, oh, come on.
Yeah. There's hope for, I always kind of wished I became a writer.
I like to write but I'm not that good and I've never dedicated time to it.
But in that vein, this guy Amor Toles, do you know him?
I'm so glad. I've only read— He was a banker.
I know, finance. Well, that's another one.
Until he was like 40.
No, I know. I've read, the only thing I've read of his is Lincoln Highway which I have I mean, it is such a page turner.
It's so beautifully architected, and I read that.
And I threw someone named Hugh Howey, shook hands with Amor very briefly at a restaurant.
We happened to bump into each other.
And I found out about the finest background.
I was like, you gotta be kidding me.
I know. You gotta be kidding me.
I learned that he was on somebody's pod.
He gave a great pod when Lincoln Highway came out.
Yeah. To somebody who cracks open artists.
It might've been like Brian, Oh, Koppelman.
Might've been Koppelman.
Yeah, very well Koppelman.
who, who, who like gets to artists, right.
And by the way, for people who don't know a quick bit of trivia.
So Brian called men, co -creator of billions and co -writer of rounders and all these movies and TV shows and so on.
Also discovered Tracy Chapman as a musician back in his A and R days.
Really? Yeah. Isn't that wild.
He's a talent. Yeah.
So it wouldn't surprise me if Amor was on he was on there and I, Brian's questions, I think, and didn't know Brian and all this stuff came out.
Yeah. You know. Amazing.
Alright, this is the billboard question.
If you could put anything on a billboard, message, quote, reminder, anything at all, obviously metaphorically, just to get something in front of a lot of people.
You asked this, so I did think about it a little bit, and my initial response that I latched onto Came from that movie bowfinger.
I don't know if you ever saw bowfinger It's a cult classic and a lot of you people out there haven't seen it, but I highly recommended it's Eddie Murphy tour de force And Steve Martin and Heather Graham It's super quirky Eddie Murphy plays two roles in it, which he did for a while and in lots of movies And he plays one of his roles.
He plays a paranoid Hollywood celebrity who thinks, in fact, is being followed by people who are making a movie about him with him starring it, unbeknownst to him.
That's the setup Steve Martin is directing.
And he gets super, he's already a paranoid guy, but he gets super paranoid.
It's like, people are following me.
And he goes to a thing that I don't know what kind of culty LA religion it's representing, but it's called Mindhead.
And he goes in and he has his first counseling with the high priest of Mind Head, and the religion is based on three happy premises.
I'm not going to remember them all, but happy premise number one was something like, there is no giant foot in the sky about to step on me.
Okay? This is like a mantra you have to repeat.
The third one is my favorite, and that is what I was going to put on the billboard, and that is even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won't.
Okay. That goes on my billboard. That or my favorite Burning Man bar ever had the giant neon sign on top of this kind of cozy geodesic dome playing groovy music decorated as an aquarium.
Anybody out there? It's like it was at Burning Man a while ago and it hasn't come back.
It was our favorite spot.
And the sign said, don't panic.
I will say more. That's it, don't panic.
So that's on the billboard, don't panic.
I think a lot of my job as a leader, or naturally or otherwise is to naturally bring people off of their high beta, high swings, high mood swings.
People have a tendency towards fear and panic.
And almost always it's gonna be just fine.
And when it's not, it doesn't matter anyway.
Okay? All right? And it can cause a lot of a happier life and a calmer community and a better, healthier community and family if everybody just takes a little breath before getting scared, you know, or getting – Daishi— Or sending a text or whatever.
Even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won't.
Is that basically related to the don't panic?
Yes, I think so. I think that led me to the don't panic.
I think so. And I'm not saying I actually – I don't move through the world feeling as if I might ignite.
I really don't. But I think a lot of people, especially in the modern newsfeed, iPhone TikTok, Twitter world do feel that way.
And so it's even more important.
It's why meditation is on the rise.
It's why we're looking for escapes.
We're looking to give our brains and bodies just a break from the constant barrage.
And it's causing mental health problems we all are familiar with.
And I think that's part of it.
It's just too easy to get mad or scared or outraged or whatever.
Go take a rafting trip for a week that's disconnected.
That's going to be on the rise.
those are growth businesses, right?
People's sheltering from the digital storm.
Hail storm of doom.
Exactly. That's so unhealthy.
Have you taken any sabbaticals since Italy?
Oh, yeah. I mean, I've had multiple retirements and ...
Now are those failed retirements or did those have an end point where you're like, I'm going to take a year and then I'm going to dust off my gloves and get back.
The Italy one was a failed one, although I suspect it was really young.
The others know it's just been sabbaticals.
How long are they typically?
you know, the Italy one was the longest one.
But I've kind of built shelter into our family's routine now.
So it's just a part of the normal cycle of the seasons.
You know, and a really key component of that.
It's not always achievable, especially now.
Starlink and traveling Starlink and Starlink at my surf camp and Starlink on my Airstream.
Like, it's harder and harder to disconnect.
But disconnection is really a key part of it.
I think disconnection, the behavior you observe when people are disconnected, like with my family when we do, we rafted the Grand Canyon this year with a big group of friends and family.
And when you watch the younger people, it's very unsettling for the first only three or four hours.
And then when they realize it's over, it's a total mean reversion to human behavior, playing games, doing crafts, taking a hike, painting a picture, it's totally beautiful what happens.
And everybody is happy.
But you can't not be happy making a friendship bracelet or playing, Taco Cat, what are we, I don't want to give that away.
I don't want to give your game.
But you can't not be happy when you're doing that and not looking at your phone, highly encourage.
Rich. Tim. So, nice to see you, man.
It's great to see you.
We've covered a lot of ground.
It was fun. Oof. Where, if people want to learn more things about Rich, should they be visitor 22 to your blog?
Yeah, I don't think so.
The blog is totally vestigial.
It's an appendix that needs to be removed.
Hopper and Dropper.
No, yeah, no, man, I don't, the writing thing, I've had a lot of offers to do that with.
I've just never felt like I enjoyed reading any of those, you know, business guy, ego books.
I just don't find them very interesting.
And I don't want to be one of those kind of jerk -offs, you know.
Maybe do a writer's retreat or an MFA, compressed MFA and take a stab at fiction.
Just saying, even if you never publish anything, it's a good muscle to train for a bit, just to play with it.
I'm doing more creative things deliberately now and it feels good.
Like I took up Procreate painting on my iPad during COVID.
So I'm so I feel so good.
And I like, catch myself going back and looking at my works and I should like at a bit of a party and I'll show people what I painted and it's not good, but it makes me feel good.
I did exactly the same thing during COVID, Procreate, and you go through these tutorials.
There's something very soothing about that Australian gal.
Yeah, Oh, who I think works at Procreate.
Oh, who gives the tutorials so many.
Awesome. Yeah. So There's so many good ones.
Is there anything you would like to say, any closing comments, formal public complaints you'd like to lodge?
No, no, I guess I should just, I should thank you.
You perform a good service.
You provide a good service for a lot of people with this bot and with your books, you know, and certain people need it more than others.
And I really don't think people are looking for shortcuts.
That may have been where you started a little bit.
I really just think people are just looking to lead better, happier, slightly more efficient lives, improving lives.
They want to improve themselves.
And you really help people do that and the diversity of the guests that you bring on this pod is really inspiring.
So yeah, it's great.
Thank you. Thanks, man.
It's great to be here.
Yeah, awesome to have you.
Everybody listening, we're going to include everything we talked about in the show notes, Tim .blog slash podcast. If you search Barton, that's going to be the only Barton so you'll find this episode and Until next time be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself and as always thanks for tuning in Hey guys, this is Tim again.
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