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Spencer Rascoff - Lessons from 15 Years in Tech

Please give a round of applause for mr spencer rascoff stage is all yours well, thank you for having me. What I'm going to talk about is my career thus far and kind of my constant attempt to try to find something to do that I love if I leave you with nothing else it's do something that you love because we all spend way more time at work than we do at home for better or for worse on dso you have to love what you do or else is just not worthwhile so uh, you know, with that I'd say I started out sort of as a kid like most kids wondering whether I should I try to be try to be an athlete, a baseball player or a basketball player as you can see from these pictures that didn't seem very likely given my minimal athletic prowess ahs a kid I then like many kids moved on to thinking maybe I should be a cowboy, which was another passion of mine but I quickly learned that also being a cowboy probably wasn't the right career choice for me it had some things I like but it's certainly not some others ...

um and then I thought maybe I should be a hairdresser or perhaps a model uh neither of those were going to be very likely careers for me either, so I knew I had to do something different and so, like many of you, perhaps I started with some summer jobs, and my first real summer job was at fox broadcasting back in the early nineties, actually, when there were four tv networks at the time and fox was just getting started, this was when the simpsons was in its prime. It was when beverly hills now to know and the first melrose place, the first everyone's not going on the first melrose place had just come out on by worked in the research department at fox on dh this was fascinating for me because I had never been exposed to the incredible amount of of quantitative data that content creators we're using even back that over twenty years ago to program content on dh. So I was doing things that summer, for example, trying to help fox decide how to counter program the olympics, the summer olympics that we're on nbc. And so we're analyzing reams and reams of data around which sports did certain demographics tend to, like, therefore the, you know, women in this particular age group were likely to watch this sport on nbc, so we should air this episode this repeat of the simpsons, which skewed towards this other demographic. So how do you counter program the olympics and you know the analytics have come so far over the last twenty or twenty five years but even back then there was a thirty person research department at fox making these types of programming decisions so it was interesting it was fun it also took a lot of the romance for me out of the television industry because it taught me at an early age that actually a lot of of ah broadcast television is really created by by data and bye bye numbers which is great as a business person but can be a little bit a little bit romance killing a teenager then did to jobs in media because I was really interested in media one at bloomberg where I was a reporter actually writing covering local news in new york in their newsroom and one on nbc news in l a on both of those experiences were also really interesting to me kind of understanding how the media what business model is how reporters produce content, what their life is like as a reporter and that's been incredibly valuable to me through my career as you'll see when I tell the hot wire in the villa stories p r has been a big part of both of those companies but for me I decided that trying to make the news rather than report on the news was going to be more interesting and in particular I didn't love the sensationalism of of broadcast news at the time that was the summer of the o j simpson crisis at the time on by spent much of that summer actually chasing down friends and relatives of nicole simpson and ron goldman and others trying to get them on camera to talk about it talk about this tragedy and it felt overly sensationalistic to me and it wasn't kind of hard enough news and you know, there were certain aspects of it that really weren't for me so my my search to try to figure out what to do with my life continued on guy was lucky enough to convince some people in cambridge t let me into their school and I then followed the conveyor belt from the ivy league to wall street like so many people do andi I did summers at bear stearns may she rest in peace and allen and company allen and company and investment bank which is so mysterious that they don't even really exist on the internet which which is pretty incredible and when I talked about brazil a story many years later you'll find that that it was fun for me to help have allen company help are alright poet zillow many years later so I worked at bear stearns and allen and company on I ended up at the vampire squid itself goldman sachs and golden sex I was in the mergers and acquisitions group and I liked investment banking it's a great way to start your career to get a lot of responsibility to very young age on I wouldn't trade that for anything but one of the criteria that I always have when I'm at a company and when I'm at a job as I try to look at people ten or twenty years later at that company and I read mentioned lincoln influencers I'm lucky enough to actually be a lincoln influencer and I just wrote a block post on length and about this very topic I try to look at someone ten or twenty years down the road and think do I want that person's life not their job but their life in its entirety the whole thing everything from their work life balance to the type of work they do the compensation their family relationships like everything because there's a decent chance that all things being equal you'll end up in that position ten or twenty years down the road and when I was in investing banking I looked at that and I knew I did not want that life and there were a couple of reasons for that one I just found it to be not operational enough it's very transactional we were during mergers and acquisitions advice we would go into a company say ok we think you should sell this division here the buyers will run a sale process will get you top dollar a fort or on the buy side let's go by this division or buy this company and there are these expected synergies from the transaction we collected a large investment banking feet and then we'd move on and I would never be there to see the rest of the story play out to know whether it was a good sale or a good purchase andi I found that to be very psychically un rewarding um in addition, the work life balance of investment banking is notoriously complex I guess tio to put it kindly, I saw far too many people on their way to their kids you know, six birthday party and their cell phone would ring and they would have to fly off to frankfurt on a moment's notice and you know, not see their family for weeks at a time and I didn't really want that for my life. So I moved from new york to san francisco to private equity to a firm called tpg capital or texas pacific group, which is a fantastic buyout firm they buy and sell very large companies companies you've all heard of like petco and uh uh continental airlines and uh what burger king many other companies j crew that you'd be familiar with um and I enjoyed private equity, but again it wasn't for me and what wasn't for me about it was a lot of the values created in private equity through structuring through had a structure, the balance sheet when you buy a company, how much debt at what types of debt terms can we use when we buy this company? How do we structure the balance sheet? A lot of people find that incredibly fascinating. I am not one of them. I can read about sheet, but I take no great pleasure in reading a balance sheet. I'm much more interested in the income statement or in the business plan, or talking to customers or designing products. Those air things about companies that are more interesting to me then had a structure, tranches of debt. Um, so I knew private equity probably wasn't for me. And again, you know, here I am a restless and dissatisfied a person in their early twenties, and along comes the internet, and this was nineteen, ninety nine in san francisco. Private equity firms like tpg, we're trying to figure out what to do about the internet because the rock stars of wall street we're no longer david bonderman, a tpg and david rubin, senate, carlisle and steve schwartzman at blackstone and henry kravis that take care of those with the titans of the eighties and nineties, but all of a sudden, by the late nineties, it was mike moritz, its sequoia and bill gurley, a benchmark, and john doar, kleiner perkins and those were the guys that were on the covers of all the magazines, and they were the ones that were getting all the accolades because of their success investing in the internet and importantly, they were the ones attracting all the investment dollars from endowments and pension funds. A lot of investment money was flowing from private equity into venture capital because of the internet bubble. And so private equity firms like tpg did three things pretty much uniformly the big ones, two of which were incredibly stupid in retrospect, and one of which was pretty smart. The two incredibly stupid things were they many of them set up incubators, and in the case of tpg we created one with, I think was golden sachs and mckinsey and excel set one up with k k r and, uh um uh, blackstone set went up with morgan stanley and ban and bcg. And there were all these incubators that were created between leading private equity firms, leading consulting firm and a leading investment back. And the idea was between these three companies, blue chip brands. They would somehow get together and sort of through the magic of synergy somehow create incredible internet companies, even though it wasn't the skill set of either of those three disciplines. Private equity, investment banking or consulting tpg created one called tpg evolution partners. It didn't go as planned. Most of the other ones that I mentioned went even worse on dat was a very, very sort of one of the three, one of the two dumb things that that we did, another dumb thing that we did was we raised the side fund, a couple hundred million dollars side fund separate from the four billion dollars investment fund that were manage, urging on behalf of limited partners, and that side fund made side investments in late stage internet companies, basically anything that a blue chip vc brought to this this type of fun, they would go ahead and invest it. Now, those of you that pay close attention to what's happening and silicon valley are probably seen yourself hold on, this is exactly what's happening again, right? We have the rise of the re rise of incubators, of which I'm involved in a couple of them as a mentor, and we have the rear eyes of these side funds, where people who aren't full time venture capital investors, whether because there operators, entrepreneurs or their private equity investors or there actors or actresses or musicians, are all of a sudden starting to invest in in venture capital, you know, as an asset class, oh, god is history repeating itself, and maybe you know, these air definitely signs of that. That trouble may be afoot. Eso anyway, investing that side fund of a couple hundred million dollars was also a big, big mistake. Aa lot of money was lost. What I learned from that was venture capital is harder than it looks, especially if you do it part time on nights and weekends on def, you don't know what you're doing. Tpg was great buying big giant fortune one thousand type companies, uh, with debt and improving their operations and selling them for an incredible return. Doing venture capital investing is a different vehicle, a different animal entirely. So, too dumb things. One smart thing. What do we do? It was smart. We looked at our existing portfolio companies and said, how can we take advantage of this new thing called the internet? So, for example, j crew was a portfolio company at the time on dh at the time, for those of you remember much about the j crew, bad brand j crew was a catalog company, and we turned the whole company's focus towards the internet at the time. And j crew became one of the first catalog companies that successfully migrated from off like cattle x to the internet and became one of the first offline brands retail brands. That had mohr of their transactions coming from the web that from their retail stores and so j crew dot com is incredible success story and was part of this kind of error. But how do we leverage our portfolio companies onto the internet? The other thing we did was we created a company from our airline relationships and if you rewind the how our story for a second the tpg story tpg got its start by buying continental airlines out of bankruptcy in nineteen, ninety two by buying america west airlines out of bankruptcy in nineteen, ninety four and by selling much of their continental stick to northwest airlines. So by the time I got to tpg in the late nineties, they controlled three domestic airlines and also controlled ryan air, which is the largest carrier in europe, sort of the southwest airlines of europe. So they had a lot of airline experience, and we said to these airlines, we said, hey, let's, get together and create a consortium company to compete with priceline in the discount travel space and to try to get it off the ground and try to recruit people. I came up with the idea of calling it project purple demon because again, similarities between this this tech environment and the last bubble, you couldn't recruit anybody unless you had a cool project name when you were in stealth mode on dso, newco didn't really didn't really like the world on fire, so we called it project purple demon, which eventually became hot wire on dh hotwire was started by these six airlines, three of which tpg basically owned or controlled at the time, and the idea was create a consortium to compete with priceline. We pitched this these two, these airlines, I was the junior guy on the deal, we raised seventy five million from these airlines, and from tpg, we were at the business plan, we got the company off the ground, and we hired spencer stuart to recruit a management team, because this isn't really what tpg does tpd doesn't start companies, and I and my other partner from tpg, who worked on the deal, started interviewing people to be the ceo to start the company, because all we have is a business plan and some money in the bank and some contracts from some airlines, and we found two types of people, and this sort of resonates from what reid hoffman was talking about around hustle, we found fortune one thousand type executives that had never roll the or had been twenty or thirty years since they rolled that their sleeves, and you ate cold pizza and did whatever it takes to make a start up succeed, and we thought, you know, I don't I don't know if they have what it takes to take this idea and turn it into a business to run a startup and then we saw people that were very experienced in the internet which at the time that two or three years at ebay or exciter, lycos or alta vista and we're like well, you know the internet is so new they don't really have that much expertise why don't we do it ourselves? And so my partner and I left tpg he became ceo I was ceo cfo had a product kind of everything all sorts of other stuff in the early days on dwi start this company called hotwire the airlines thought it was a pretty cool idea they said all right so we can own equity and something that competes with priceline why don't we also form a company at the same time to compete with travelocity and expedia so they'll be purple demon to compete with price? I don't know b what they called t two or travelocity terminator was the code name t two was met to compete with expedia on dh travelocity and we had teepees you've said you know we're not in the business of creating companies were doing this kind of is a one time this purple demon hotwire thing why don't you hire consulting firm that's sort of what they do and the airlines these same airlines hired bcg boston consulting group to create t two, which became orbits many years later, and so orbits and hotwire were started it basically the same time to address different customer segments. We did a couple things, right and hotwire, we did a couple things really, really wrong. One of the things that we did right was how we structured the equity ownership of the company. We gave the airlines all nonvoting stock, very different from how the airlines created orbits, remember, or the airlines hired bcg toe work for them to create orbits here. Tpg created the idea and gave equity to the airlines. So we give nonvoting stock to the airlines. Why did it matter? Well, we were able to focus on hotels right from the very beginning, which is how all the money is made in the travel industry is in the hotel industry, not the airline industry. The airlines viewed orbitz or travelocity, terminator as a way to lower their distribution costs, not as a way to create a what value, so they did not want orbits to move towards the hotel side of the industry. They wanted orbits to focus on selling airline ticket, and here we are, fifteen years later still, and the reason that orbits his market cap is just a couple hundred million and expedia's market cap is ten billion, and priceline's market cap is forty billion is because priceline and expedia, huge hotel businesses and even to this day orbits has a very small hotel business has compared with these other companies because of the equity ownership of how orbitz got started first how hot wire got started um so the the other interesting thing that we did was we put some of the actually all the equity up for grabs and so the way the equity was actually distributed across these six airlines was based on how many tickets they sold each year. So for example, at the end of the year we would see ok united airlines flew twenty percent of all the seats in the united states that year and let's say they sold forty percent of all the tickets through hot war how are sold that year? Well, united would earn twice as much equity in the company as they deserved. Where did that equity come from? It came from united in northwest and continental so it created this competition where each airline was incentivized to sell more and more inventory through hot war in order to steal share from others. I've seen a lot of other consortium companies created since then who is the one that's most notably in the media and you can really you know when you see consortium companies created at their inception, you can almost right their whole future based on how the company is structured around the equity compensation and today, you know, looking at that hole of, for example, is they're trying to figure out, you know, should there be an independent company, should they be sold? What should imagine she'd be like, what should the goals be? A lot of their strategic conundrum is wrapped up in their ownership structure. On dh video is a different company, a consortium company and a related or slightly different space. But again, when you see these consortium companies being created it's very important to think about how the ownership structure. So we did those two things, right? We did one thing really, really wrong, which hopefully, you know, you can take away for your businesses. I know I have for my feet my businesses after power, and that was the messaging around them. Marketing, explaining hotwire is really complicated, okay? And I went back to check out the press release. This is launch day in two thousand, and this is the press release just to see how convoluted it was at the time. Hotwire, the new online travel service. New launches site delivers big savings without guessing games completely new concept backed by the most trusted brands, offers a faster and easier way to buy travel online, which was new at the time at significant savings, basically nine different reasons that consumers should use hotwire and if you read the actual press once it gets even more complicated to use hotwire consumer simply enter desired destination and the dates they was to travel within seconds, customers were quoted a low price and given thirty bob about the blood incredibly complicated the why should I use hotwire when your friend says to friend a cocktail party, there was not a clean answer, it was nine different things just in the launch press release, and what we realized after two or three years of spending tens of millions of dollars with its convoluted messaging is that it has to be so sure and so simple, because if you can't even communicated in a pressurized, imagine how hard it is in a thirty second tv spot or even worse, in the search engine results on google, where you have, you know, six words or now on mobile advertising, where you have three words to communicate, why are users should use your service? And so eventually we ended up with cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap power is cheap if you want to know why it's cheap, we'll have this section, a website that explains airlines have extra seats they want to sell them without business travelers trading down to this type of price, and so we don't take the flight time blood, but like cheap didn't mention this chief and it took two or three years and fifty to seventy five million dollars wasted money to figure out that you had to distill the marketing message down justice simply as possible. So um things were going well andi company was on an upswing and then nine eleven happened and not eleven was obviously a tragedy in two thousand one for the company and the country rather for the country and the the world but also for the company on d was tragedy for the company because firstly we had tens of thousands of travelers stranded around the country that couldn't be re accommodated planes were grounded for ten days and so we had all these customers all over the country that we had to handle re accommodations for um uh several of us including me lost friends or family in nine eleven and I was personally quite distraught from it because I was on the united flight from newark to sfo twenty four hours earlier. So is literally on the same flight number the day before I was literally at the millenium hilton twenty four hours which got crushed the very next day giving a speech tio hotel companies there so it really touched the company it touched me it was very traumatic and then further complicating things we had sold a couple of tickets to the hijackers not on september eleventh but on september tenth the ones that put the people in position from maine to boston logan were actually bought through our s o we had fbi agents and all sorts of other government agencies just some of whom are coming to light in the news nowadays nsa and other other organizations kind of crawling all over hot wire and trying to figure out who knew what when and you know what can they trace digital footprint fingerprint wise through all of this so it was very, very difficult time for the company it was not at all clear that we were going to survive we did it down round we did layoffs on dh it sucked just to put it succinctly that was two thousand one and what we did was we focused we got up off the mat on dwi turned around as best we could and by two years later in two thousand three we hired goldman sachs mild firm to take the company public which was going to be incredibly gratifying and fun and exciting for me and instead expedia came knocking and bought the company for about seven hundred million and hot where became a part of expedia, expedia and it's still a very important part of expedia today so I moved up to seattle because my fiance had gotten into med school at u dub and so I want to be in seattle not san francisco where hot words based on move to seattle around the hotel business expedia and hotels dot com for about a year and I missed entrepreneurialism I missed being part of something new and small something where I could make a big difference expedia was about seven thousand employees at the time it was a great company but it was very difficult to move the needle as an individual in a company that large it was also about ten years old at the time eight to ten years old and the pace of innovation and technology company at that at that stage sometimes slows down and this is something I worry a lot about was illo because illo is now seven her employees seven or eight years old very similar to what I got to expedia and so I think a lot about how do we make sure that zillow stays innovative and we can talk about this? You know when we talk a little bit more about zillow so I left expedia after a year essentially with the management team of expedia with the first twenty or so employees who left to start zillow and the reason that we left to start zillow was in two thousand six online real estate looked a lot like online travel did in nineteen ninety eight they were frustrated consumers who didn't have access to information you know rewind the travel story for second remember before online travel happened he'd be on the phone with a real estate agent and here she sorry travel agent here she would be typing right? You said I want to fly from san francisco new york tio and you know how much is that? What times and all you wanted was jumped through the phone and see what computer screen are you looking at and why can't I see it right and that's what expedia did it turn around the computer screens so that the consumer had access to the same information? The same secret database? Well, we saw something pretty similar in realistic. We saw these secret databases that only professionals had access to the mls data county courthouse down all sorts of interesting information which was on ly professionally available and it felt to us let shopping for a home was like being in a dark room where only the realtor held the flashlight. The realtor would show you a home for sale or maybe another home for sale. But as a consumer all you want to do is turn on the lights and that's what? We tried to do it. So we turned on the lights so you have information not just on homes for sale but also on for sale by owner listings, new construction listings, foreclosures rentals, prior sale data going back fifteen years hundreds of thousands of make me move listings this is when an owner posted dream price for their home and information on every home in the neighborhood kind of prototypical view of zillow is this god's eye view where you can see what every house is worth so we created what we call this living database of all homes this is what is unique to zillow has compared with other real estate sites it's that we've information on every home in the country not just homes for sale and we call it living because a third of all the homes in the country have been updated by owners or agents so much as wikipedia is a living database of all the world's information zillow is a living database of all the property information in the u s and from a business standpoint what we like about this living databases it attracts this huge audience of buyers and sellers renters and homeowners and then professionals either real estate agents, mortgage providers renter rental professionals we're home related service improvement professionals spend thirty four billion dollars a year trying to attract this audience so that's the opportunity that we saw when we created zilla the strategy that we followed is something that we did not invent it's something that we've copied from companies like open table or linked in or zack doc or now uber many companies air following a similar strategy and it will become clear when I explain what our strategy is the strategy is built a product on desktop and mobile which tracks a big audience invite professionals to come in and connect with that audience for free, then start start offering those professionals some type of premium services to increase their engagement with consumers, then start iterating on your modernization. But also, after a couple of years of free of inviting people in the marketplace to interact free, then start figure out how to make money off it, then start providing software tools to these professionals. So open table is the prototypical example here, right? So you might use open table but a restaurant reservation. But next time you're in one of the restaurant's look at the hardware or the software behind the maitre d's desk it's open table. And it powers everything about the restaurant from who sits at which table to how you know which which server turns tables most quickly to who does the best job of up selling wine and dessert. Tio what the snail mail addresses are of their frequent diners. So provides software tools to the small businesses so that you can become deeper embedded in their work flow and then take the profits from the business and reinvest in product to grow audience and then increasingly in advertising to grow audience. So this b to b b to see kind of dual marketplace is very hip in the valley now. And again companies are doing it in different verticals zack talk is doing for doctors over tables doing for restaurants were doing for real estate agents reach locals trying to it for a lot of small businesses yelp is doing it linked in is doing it for recruiters so we have fifteen plus people at salo that do recruiting and when they come into the office every day they use linked ins b two b software to do their job to manage lead flow to figure out tio market their listings are listings of open jobs to keep track of candidates and linked in has has announced plans to go deeper into the whole review process so all the you know annual review process of which employees did well which ones didn't the reason they're doing all that is when the sales person calls us and says hey do you want to buy more media from us more ads on linked in we noticed that the jobs for software developers air filling in twelve days and you know you had sixty three applicants for that job and your media on late in drove fifty four of those leads we noticed last review period that eighty percent of your top performers who got your highest review actually came from leads that linked in drove would you like to buy more ads from us so that is what lincoln is doing for recruiters that's what we're doing for real estate agent and again, it's it's a it's not a not a strategy that we invented, but it's something that we're that we're following it's definitely working for us and you know, the this sort of culminated on some level in an ai po two years ago out years ago this month which it's funny to think of it it culminating because and I was just a financing of that it's just another way to raise capital on dh you know, it's it's an exciting and fun way to do it because then you're in the public eye, but it also has some baggage. So this is, you know, this is the glamorous life of an ipo road show. This is basically what it is for two weeks is me and the cfo sitting in a conference room with somebody who manages, you know, ten or twenty or one hundred billion dollars on bmi trying to convince them why they should want to buy shares in zillow and, you know, there's there's, some goofing around of people making disease that's our cmo on our cfo and our chairman, you know, this is the pricing meeting where you can tell who the investment bankers are probably the ones in the army's ties are the and then here the junior investment bankers trying to figure out what's order for dinner for for the senior investment bankers and this is the investment bankers trying to convince you to pressure I p o really low so that it pops a lot, which is a whole other conversation that we can talk about. And and then this is you know what happens when you have aa successful aipo? Um and, uh then fortunately, it was the night of the u two show in new york, so we got to celebrate becoming beauty show. And then, as all good event should should end. This is me in the cfl late night doing karaoke e after an exhausting couple weeks of r I p o process somewhere in chinatown in new york. So so why are investors excited about zillow? This is the slide that I call the cbos slide, which, if you compare it with acronym, stands for you two seem to speak before or you're very clairvoyant. It's an interesting graphic from a big outside shareholder, of course, of course, that's what it is, this is what we see in other countries. So in australia, five point three billion and commissions to real estate age and the market leader in australia has a three point, four billion dollars market cap. In the u k four point one billion and commissions to real estate agents in the u, k and the market leader is a two point seven billion dollars market cap in the u s agents earn sixty billion or fifty nine billion year and commissions, and the market leader zillah has a one point seven billion dollar market. So the very short version of the investment thesis for why people are bullish on scylla is basically this that we're just getting started relative to the size of the market in the us on dh you know we don't sell homes were not a brokerage, we don't actually collect commissions, we sell ads, not houses, but agent commissions is a good proxy for agent advertising on dh that's what we what we go after so anyway, it's been a busy two years since the ipo, we bought six companies all in the interest of time I'll skip this slide, but what I did want to talk about was was are designed culture because I think this is relevant to a lot of other people's online businesses. So zillow is a combination of the word zillions of pillows zillions has meant to evoke the left brain of real estate, all the data around buying a home, you know, we'll go up and the price will go down in price you know what you know what's the data and pillows is supposed to be the squishy right brain of real estate. They kind of place where you rest your head at night, you know? Well, can I see my kids growing up in this house and, you know, well, I want to grow old in it. So that's, what zillow is on dso we've really tried to build the company and the brand around the combination of those two things and there's a real data and design culture. So just as an example, this was the old home page. Very, you know, zillions e this is the new home page, much more pillowy. And rather than sit there and debate, you know, which is the better one, we just maybe test the heck out of everything. And that one works better. Five point seven percent lower bouts, right after significant a b testing. So that's what the home page looks like right now. Another example, you know, kind of a silly example, but you could see what would begin tactic and half should the photos of homes beyond the left or on the right? Well again, instead of sitting around debating which one should perform better, we just test it, and it turns out that photos on the right perform better. Better pages per visit, better contact rate, lower bounce rate, better to put photos on the right so at any point time, there are thousands of these tests going on at zillow, both on desktop and mobile, and in the aggregate they really add up. The most significant moment in the company's history happened in two thousand seven, much more significant than our two thousand eleven I po and that was when I vividly remember sitting at my desk watching the live stream of wwdc of watching steve jobs demo the app store explain that an iphone had been out for almost two years at the time, believe it or not, before there were maps it's, hard for us to even, you know, dropped that, but hey said, ok, we're going to have an ap story, people can develop aps and this is what it's you know, this is how it will work, and I vividly remember getting it from a task running over to my co founder and saying this is going to change the way real estate information is consumed. We have to pivot the company towards this, and we absolutely did at that moment painted the whole company towards it. It paid off ah, year later, when steve jobs demoed the ipad and he de mode zillow on the ipad. Because we were that one of the first companies to actually ship an ipad product, and so that was incredibly fun and rewarding just a year or two later to watch, you know, watch what an impact it can have on the company. And so today, fast forward, we've got twenty four different aps across every platform we monetize even better on mobile because somebody looking at a listing on zillow on mobile has three times the propensity to contact an agent, then someone looking at the same home on the desktop. So we love mobile it's ninety four homes viewed every single second on mobile on the po two years ago that was twenty homes a second, so that's the type of growth that we've seen in just two years on mobile? Um, we've also again, this is this, I think is something that you can take away from people that run online businesses between mobile and desktop. We've taken a lot of design elements from mobile and brought them to desktop, so for example, this is what zillow used look like on the desktop map above list below. Then we shipped ipad map left list, right? And the two interact with each other, and this was a much better design paradigm, and so we brought the ipad designed over to the desktop, and so now we've got matt left on dh list right on the desktop, a design philosophy that came from ipad. Likewise, we built the ability to draw your own neighborhood on ipad first, I love how it worked brought her over to desktop. We've also copied the design of these pages from mobile first, um uh, I'll skip this, um, customer acquisition. So reed talked about the importance of customer acquisition for businesses, small or large. Obviously it is everything for us all. Customer acquisition all marketing begins with the product building something cool that people love that they want to use, they want tell their friends and family about um, but we've also done a great job of using p r and specifically data pr, where zillow is basically a news resource now for housing data, and I'll show you ah, show you a real here of what I mean by that, according to the real estate website, is a lot of this is interesting. The white house, as a house is worth two hundred eighty three million dollars, could be worth even more, but is there a high crime area? Congress has a great time to bag a real estate bargain, so we partner with real estate website zillow dot com to figure out the top ten places to buy diana olick is in washington with new numbers from my wife's favorite website zillo the housing market has hit bottom that's the bold call from real estate website zillow we turn to stan humphries chief economist was zillow potency from zillow thanks if you look at the latest ilo report twelve out of twelve months we've had appreciation you could start your research by going to a site like villain if you have an android phone there's an app available for zillow people I'm going to build this company to one hundred million dollars company right next to zillow zillow so that was that was shark tank that was a guy pitching to build a competitive and mark cuban saying good luck with that but anyway so you know we've seen other companies do something similar basically we have a data bureau we have that ten or fifteen people economists like phds stand who saw their doctor stand on freeze based the nation's foremost expert on housing now runs this team that produces all sorts of interesting data on housing it's amazing how the media is gets back to my bloomberg and nbc news you know revelation kind of from twenty years earlier in my career it's hard being a reporter they come in the morning it to produce content every single day a lot of now with online three or four stories a day sometimes more and not to mention you know fifty tweet today that are expected from them so it's hard for them to actually produce that type of content well if you do it for them if you package and produce this type of content it can really taken really grow your brand it has for us to social has been a big part of our brand that says distribution it's paid off with huge traffic growth on dh traffic growth as compared with competitors what I'll skip to now is just the advertising focus of our so this is a slide that shows brand awareness in our category so if you ask americans to name a real estate web site thirteen point one percent will say zillow five point nine percent will say amazon amazon doesn't have a real estate section okay, so what this decision interesting is if you do this for other categories name a travel web site we've done this ninety percent say expedia priceline name a health care website ninety percent say weapon the name of finance website ninety percent say yahoo finance or cnbc dot com this is the only category on the web with the possible exception of educational video content where which has a very, very low brand awareness. There is no category leader in this space and we intend to change that even though we're the biggest category looking how low our awareness is when you ask people name a real estate web site so we're doing that of course through product development but also through advertising so I'll just show you now are two commercials that were running if you can play the one on the left first please this is the first day of my life where I was born running way out in the rain suddenly everything changed their spreading blame gets on you're not just looking for a house you're looking for a place for your life so just a comment before we play the second spot on the positioning here back to the hot wire story you know think about what the media messages here as compared with other media you've seen the category usually when you see media in this category there's a real estate agent literally physically standing in between you and the house handing you the kids right and you think about our our imagery here mom sitting privacy brought home kid on lap mobile on her own terms in control and then when she's ready she wants to talk to an agent to help her go see that's very different imagery then what you've seen in the category andi if you could show the second spot please did you get him out so what do you think of the house has got a great kitchen but did you see the school rating all right oh baby kind of go ok daddy all right dad did school okay but what about my parents I don't think around okay just love this way look at it it's next to a park two what do you think you're not just looking for a house you're looking for a place for your life I've seen it a million times and I still jumped up so it's okay this is what people say on twitter every time the place has been out for three days and it's constant that zillah commercial sure knows how to make a girl cry this is just within the last couple minutes omg this villa commercials fantastic uh that's all commercial where the dad that's in the armies in the house accusers should ever a zillo I swear to god I started crying at the end of that commercial uh that damsel commercial almost made it crying like w t f your company is called scylla you shouldn't be making me feel anything azula commercial just made me cry what the crap? The zillo commercial with the army guys so cute omg pound happiness uh well emotional I just saw the pounds of commercial and cry my eyes out pound support our troops number one the zilla commercial made me cry and number two what is allowed number three still crying so it's fun for me I watch it like all day long basically but that's the opportunity I mean we're big butt a lot of people don't know what is allow it's amazing the first spot is a band called bright eyes which maybe you're cooler than me I didn't know bright eyes before we chose them but when that's about place people tweet all the time like oh my god I love bright eyes never heard never heard of zillah before can't believe bright eyes you know sold their their songs to zillow so a lot of people have heard of that indie band in the first on the second one is the lumineers which I think more people have probably heard of but anyway so that's what we're up to it so it's been a fun seven years so far I think I finally found what I want to do on its this um it's not being a cowboy or being an athlete and I hope you will find your passion as well on dh happy to answer any questions either you have or from the internet thank you good friends with him in years pumping my fist in the background for that one I'm sure we've got some in studio I know you've got a couple but lined up I I have a question so you traced a long history of sort of finding you just said, you know you traced your career and at the very new prisons and I found my passion is it uncommon? Did it freak you out? I think I know there's a lot of folks out there in the internet world they're trying to find that that's one of things that creative lives trying to do is tap into people's passions and let them try things with low risk they confined what is it they're meant to do in the world was that your word is like fifteen years ago it was better than that because I found it hot wire so I was like I found it in my mid twenties and I love rolling up my sleeves and building something with other people I love storming a hill and saying, you know let's go storm that hill together and invest in making private equity is very ivory tower you're very isolated you're kind of alone in your own office with your own assistant and that you're sort of in your own world and start ups are not like that start ups are our trench warfare and that for me is energizing it's much much higher risk I mean it's andi it's not that part is not for everyone and it's not for everyone at all life stages write another important thing is you gotta figure out what you want to do it which particular stage in your life not sure I have another start true startup like literally started to kick in screw legs two desks in my in my in my future I don't know maybe I will see but it's you know you got to do it in a particular time when it's right for you and for your family fantastic go ahead your question right my name's maggie and you have a nontraditional tech background or entrepreneur background a couple of times or in the last couple days we've heard people talk about work with people who are like you or look for people who are like you what are some aspects of your nontraditional brac background that you brought into your work and that you would highlight two people to maybe brush up on? Well, the analytics and quantitative side of working on wall street is indispensable in anything that you do, and so I definitely bring that it's not just financial acumen but it's feeling comfortable with numbers? I mean, we look at numbers all day long and so there's not a single meeting I walk into where there's not, you know, a hundred times of paper with data thrown all over the table and and so that's, you know, it's always not on a balance sheet and they talk about, you know, debt structuring I'm all I'm all in on that type of thing, um, I think, uh um, you know, the people from different backgrounds is interesting like I've seen who was it? It was, uh, was it ah, instrument and that was it was there being being forget one one of the you know incredibly successful company in the valley is talking about I saw him speak to that a couple weeks ago he said one of the great things about their company is that people come from all walks of life, from design and from art and from, you know, academia, et cetera and I absolutely agree with that I think that different people from different perspectives as long as they shared the passion for building that particular product that's what they have in common it's not they want to particular school or they all ward a particular company before the particular company thing is interesting because we have so many people it zillah from expedia literally the first twenty people on probably forty of the first sixty people came for experience um and that was great early on, but there comes a point where you start to run the risk of group think it's still really valuable though even our top twenty or so people probably fifteen or so all we're on expedia together and there is a shared trust that when you know when my lead death who worked for us that experience says to the vp of engineering from experience says the ceo says to me whatever about how long it will take to do something or why something is hard or why someone is easy it's better we all know this together perfectly long time through a couple different platforms to a company from products and that I think is really valuable but but from a strategy standpoint, you have to be aware of groupthink great, great answer anymore and we got another one in the second row there tell if you are and you know my name is bob wolfenstein. Our product is called geo help its location based customer service a part of our scaling uh uh we're planning on including the ability to essentially have independent agents in multiple locations as we call them business clusters so it's not really a city it's ah, much smaller entity you mentioned that you were using linked in to do some expansion there. Wonder if you could gives more information on how to use linked into recruit independent resellers? Well, we buy media on lengthen. Um I forgot the names of the different products, but we also use lincoln for passive recruiting to try to identify cannons and reach out to them. Um we also by media and use glass door uh, quite a bit as well. Um uh uh, you know, the other most of our this part might not apply to you, but you best employee source for us is referrals. Probably at least half of our employees have come from employees referrals with a distributed geography model. It might be a bit more complicated, so I do think you're going to have to heated by media or actively recruit recruit passive candidates through linkedin is a way to reach out to people that would be it fits but maybe once you get local enough clusters you khun building robust referral programs referrals are tricky because you want them to be generous enough to incentivize behavior but not so general generous is to skew behavior because you know, if it's too generous because there's some companies here to pay twenty thousand dollars to employees that recruit friends and that to me is that's a lot where the employees it has been a long time recruiting. Yeah, well, part of that but their incentive might be a little screwed up. Well, I know that guy is not the best developer, but you know, if I get twenty grand he's not that bad he's probably good enough, you know, it's like three thousand dollars like just enough to say thank you to the employees, but not so much just to excuse his behavior. Great, great, thanks a lot. That was a great presentation. I just wanted to get your opinion on how you think about competition particular when you getting started. I thought zillah is more about disrupting the real estate space, but it sounds like the model is now helping the brokers be more efficient given to make tools to make more transactions. How did you think about it when used to start it and we have to I think we heard from glenn common yesterday, right? And how do you think about those guys, or do you think about the competition much? So the we're not a broker were not an agent, we don't, we sell ads, not house is on dh, so the expedia analogy isn't even really the right analogy. We're more like trip adviser, actually, where a place you go to research and kind of learn all sorts of stuff. But if you actually want to book something than you go to a travel agent like expedia or an offline traveling now it just so happens the trip advisor is changing the business model to become more of it a travel agent. But, you know, humor me. Um, the, uh, when we looked at the industry at the same time, the redfin looked at the industry, for example, we both are two companies reach pretty different conclusions, the conclusion that they reached I don't wantto speak for for glenn, but I could say, well, is, you know, agent commissions or too high, we can come in and try to lower commissions by offering a rebated to scout model and that's how they were going to disrupt we look to the industry and said, you know, the role of the real estate agent is going to change because this information asymmetry is going to be rectified by the internet so let's empower consumers so they have the same information as the professional then whatever they choose to do between them in the professional that's up to them and so we looked at web md a lot strategically we said, you know, web md has changed the role of the doctor because now when you go to the doctor, you're all the same information used to be that the doctor had this secret database that you didn't have access to you like, literally secret database, you're offline in books or or online, and now you get you pull out your phone and you got the weapon d apple or the young? Well, whatever you got all the same stuff that they have while you're sitting in the office. So the role of the doctor has changed now and, you know, does that affect their competition? I don't know, probably not maybe maybe not, but weapon be makes a lot of money selling media and still empowers the consumer. So that's, what we're more about and some people call, you know, sort of I've been called when I speak of business schools, frankly, I usually get sort of called a wimp, I guess you could say, you know, from business school students were like, you know, bring down the commission in the six percent thing is too high. It's a cartel. You know, the agent doesn't do anything and I'm usually like ok, how many of you ever bought a house and almost nobody like? Ok, try buy a house and tell me and let's let's. Talk about that. Because buying a house is expensive. It's infrequent it's emotional. When we sold hotwire, the part I left out of the story was we have two former golden emanate bankers. Me and the other guy from tv was also golden. Having a banker. What do we do? When we saw how our experience we hired goldman sachs, why did we do that? We knew exactly what they were going to. We had just done it. So, like we knew how they were going to run the sale process. We paid them a ten million dollars feet to go inside when they saw the company. But you know what? It was worth it. Why? Because I think they got ten million and one more dollars for the sale of the company on dso as long as an agent earns one more dollar than for you as a buyer so that the commission than you know, than let him have it in my perspective, so it's a different a different approach than others john howard, I'm working the medical travel space to layer on service component my questions actually more general, you talked about your ipo process, I think there's something valuable we could we could probably learn from your experience in balancing the external with the internal like trying to keep working while you're out shopping around. You talked about that? Absolutely, I was really worried about what impact the ai po would have unemployed culture employee morale we had, like most start ups we have had and have a very transparent culture uh, everybody knew our financial results, I suspect creative lives, various playing with your food is better than most start ups are and a year or two before the ipad, all we had to start clamping that down a little bit. I worried a lot about what would that do to the corporate culture? Turns out that all that time that you guys spend tell your employees all the gory details about your financial results doesn't really matter that much because they don't care what the employees really care about is what's the strategy what's the vision? Why should I show up for work every day? What the hell am I doing here? And actually as a public company ceo and much more well trained because I'm always in calms mode because I'm much spent all day long talking about the company on dso I'm much better in talking to employees about the strategist up, they really care about no, they don't know what's our cash balance and what's the quarter coming in at and what our accounts payable to cash in, but I don't care about that. S o the transparency thing hasn't been an issue as long as you keep being really communicative about the strategy and again, you know, linked and jeff weiner is an amazing job of this that linked in where I think the employees there feel every bit as focused and energized as they did when they were private. In fact, maybe even more so the other piece is not letting people obsess about the stock price, and so we have basically a prohibition on checking the stock price if you're ever caught checking the stock price at work, it's like, not cool when I know people do it secretly, but you're not allowed to be caught talking about stock prices because it doesn't matter what's matter that stock price three, five, ten years from now matters a lot in that stock price today doesn't matter at all. You're the one doing the work and also trying to get financing when we were when we were financing way were we were too pretty transparent with the culture, but I mean, I was on the border. I was involved in another company that did a fundraise that I think was much too transparent about the fundraise with the employee based perfectly candid you know, every meeting with the v c they did have the whole you know, hold fifty person one hundred person company okay here's how it went and they have a extremely transparent and it it created a culture where the employees were overly focused on it because it's just a financing about I mean the phrase that reviews of island hopping is terrific on dh you don't want everybody no swim across yeah, well, you know it's come across but it's you it's your job is the ceo to make sure they don't have to you want them focused on how to make life on this island awesome and then you'll get them to the next island through great fundraising if you have everyone worried about look the shark there and oh my god, look at the giant wave there which is kind of what if you do play by play on a fundraise for six months very much these things can take everyone's worried about the water and not worry about the land great question and great answer thank you so much they're gonna go to the next as I've said a couple times with more than one hundred countries tuning in from all over the world want to hear from you spencer so fantastic first I just want to say that you're amazing and zillow rules omg has the name of in the chat room wants to know when u s are expanding to canada uh question stern canadian thing short answers I don't I don't know real estate unlike travel or some other verticals doesn't have the same obvious synergies when you expand internationally you're starting from scratch from a brand to get the data to get the listings to sell the advertising it's not like when expedia launches in canada they've all these american travelers that use expedia dot com to buy a canadian travel always getting travels that use experience at sea aided by american hotels we don't have that they're very few cross border transactions so we have not moved internationally at all which has been a little frustrating because it's such a big part of the expedia legacy so much of expected value is in their international expansion so I don't know we haven't decided but but but I will just say that it's you have to make that decision in your own business in a very company by company basis it would be very easy for us to just rush international and you see companies like like groupon for example that expanded internationally very very quickly and now they're trying to figure it all out you know that a lot of their challenges that they're facing or because they rushed headlong internationally and way haven't I made that mistake perhaps we've made the other mistake waiting too long, but anyway we're being very, very thoughtful about it. What do you think are some of the triggers that people should be looking for when it might be time to two international wait scratch? I think I guess for me we're in for businesses domestically real estate, mortgages, rentals in helmand permit and in each of those businesses we really compete on two notes for the consumer for professional because we provide software tools for professional as well as tools for the user. So we're kind of in eight businesses where we have dedicated competitors across in each of those eight businesses, so I feel like we pretty much have our hands full right now. I would say to try to answer questions directly as possible when I when I start feeling really good about that we're going to win in, you know, five of eight, six of eight then maybe it's time to open up a second front, but right now we're fighting eight wars of which, you know, it's not it's, not clear that we're going to win all eight of them yet thank you, anything else from the internet because I know that because I saw a long line of absolutely just take one more I know where we're a minute later, my producer is giving me that what you're doing, but I know we're not really time. Please do you want more? Right? All right, so this one is from bandy kind of follows up on this gentleman's question. Can you speak to the specifics of how you keep your seven hundred employees company agile and operate as a start up? Yes, thank you. The big thing is we have very small product development teams, so we have twelve teams that air five to fifteen people each. So a team that focuses on community features a team that focuses just on the map page, a team that focuses on traffic growth hacking. It seemed that focuses on mortgages. Rentals have a permanent center, and each of those teams have a p t, a protein lead that is basically a ceo of their own little startup. They have dedicated design test bill saw for developers, et cetera on dh. They run their own a little company. They have their own product, you what's above the cut line over the next quarter, what's below the cut line. They have their own business planning process. And then we come together very frequently for each of those prague teams to share information for another. So we all stayed coordinated, but each of those teams is very autonomous and and not only does that help us ship product faster, but it makes it much more interesting and fun place to work especially the berry in seattle, which is where our two of our centers of gravity are from a development standpoint it's hard to recruit and retain great developers s and giving them a lot of autonomy and making them feel like they can actually make a difference in a small you know, within a smaller unit is very, very important. And in seattle we compete with mostly with microsoft and amazon for talent and that's a real point of differentiation and creative life great um on dh I'm sure that this helps you when you're recruiting talent as well. So it's you know, being able to make a difference is compared with being a cog in the wheel is pretty, you know is a pretty good message for employees, so this one is actually from from mrs parker brain and our mr sparkle brain perhaps way mr brocco brain and this is more of a consumer question but about zillow spencer, could you please comment on how much value is added when a video tour, a residency or hotel is posted along with still photos probably less than people think I guess is the short version it's I mean, we have lots of virtual tours that either on zillow or you can link off photo quality is incredibly important I think video is much less important fifty five to sixty percent of our visits now are on mobile smartphone or tablet being able to flick through really high res photos on the ipad for example or other tablets is super important but most real estate video is just kind of zooming in and out of still photos and I don't I personally don't think that that's super valuable to the user I don't have data to support that I wish I did we do have lots and lots and lots of data to support that high res photos generates more leads on a per listing basis so if you're selling your home, make sure your real estate agent is putting incredibly high quality photos all over the web most agents upload their listings to an mls in the mls believe it or not to save money compressed all the photos and then when they get syndicated around the web they're a little thumbnail size and that's it you don't do that that's really bad sweet I'm going to inject a question of my own so one of the things that we talk about the company's creative live as you know and we realize that there's a ton of creativity in business and we're not wednesday creativity is not just drawing painting, photography, filmmaking design your story a trajectory seems like you're an incredibly creative person and key talk that's just like a little bit about that process and how you think about problem solving for example and it just I can tell by the trajectory of your career that you had a lot of choices and you made a lot of really really good decisions when you ask that the first thing that comes to mind for whatever reason is if you think of that slide I had on the strategy there was one little things that generate a monetization model yeah and you know in a rate is a nice catch all word for you screw up a bunch of times and they keep trying to get it right that's perhaps where we've had the most creativity so for example we now have a really big, really successful business selling um uh consumers to real estate agents basically and it works really well on mobile but it wasn't always that way the first couple liberations of the ad product did not perform at all for real sedation andi it wasn't until we kind of figured out what the right ad product should be sold through the right sales channel with the right pricing model I'll give you a very specific example way used to sell real estate agent advertising on what we call the share of voice calling agent up and say ok, you can show up a quarter of the time or fifty percent of time one hundred percent of time in this zip code for two hundred dollars in love and for the first two or three years we did that well the problem with that is well let's say they buy fifty percent of it is what happens when traffic doubles well now all of a sudden they are still getting fifty percent they just got a huge price cut they're going twice as much exposure for the same out of poverty and our traffic grow so quickly that we rose oh my god this is an incredibly stupid business model we need to do something different because they are alive keeps improving to the advertiser and not to the publisher on dso we switch a fixed number of impression model where now a real estate agent pays a particular out of pocket and shows up a particular number of times we also had to experiment with well that number of times is very different on desktop on mobile app on mobile wet on yahoo real estate which we power et cetera so should we price all those different impressions differently or should we blend it well if you blended the user mixes shifting as more used to dishing towards mobile so you have to try to figure out howto price it with an eye towards where it's going cause it's sold on anyone all this stuff this is how the sausage gets made in companies and most people don't when I think creativity they think you're painting a picture this is another type of creative business creates a business model creativity which you better be pretty good at if you want to run a startup absolutely you go back to the old internet now, can it? All right um I just there's there's commentary going on about sparkle brain you gotta love the chat rooms but what you're actually what you're grabbing a question you're going I do far away so this is a question that a lot of people love to ask entrepreneurs and folks like yourself this one is from zane which is another zane can't be you because here of what is one book that has changed the way that you do business today boy let me to stall for a second I didn't read the start of the view which I which I found interesting uh uh and I would recommend for a lot of people I really like good to great. Um which many people read it's about howto make your company great uh I love tipping point that was you know us for just one book. This's safer? Yeah. Um it's kind of a hackneyed answer I gas and I'm not a religious person but the bible I mean in the sense that learning how to treat people is really important and there's a lot of good stuff in there and again I'm not religious but a lot to be learned from that little book gonna follow questions I can that is not so much about actual specifically prescribe things like the your favorite book, but more when you guys thought about mobile because I know I'm trying to relate what it is that you're doing you built, you know, massive company that your idea it's been incredibly successful, a lot of the folks in the camera there are our individual of solo entrepreneurs are running small teams and you guys made this aggressive move to mobile in a world that I wouldn't have thought would have been mobile friendly who buys a house on their phone and it's really not necessary the buying process, but the connecting process so obviously said mel was important, but give us some advice on how to think about my work, and I know there's a lot of folks I've been amazed at how just how ubiquitous mobile has become across every vertical I think young people that say, oh, mobile will not revolutionize my industry. Maybe there are some exceptions, but I think that is pretty unlikely, you know, I'll give you ah give you a specific example in the mortgage space, the ceo of one of our main competitors says all the time. I mean, the idea that you'd be walking down fifth avenue and on your smartphone be shopping for a mortgage, I mean, that's ridiculous, that I'll never have it, and I looked at our data, and I'm like, um, that's, a third of our usage did so I don't know what world you're living in, but in my world, like that's, what people do, and you may not be walking down that seven, you might be sitting on the couch while you're watching tv that but you're using a mobile device, but your stationery it's happening in every vertical, so okay, but what should the small business person do about it? It's kind of a different a different it's, just like it's, really a trend? Thanks. You're seeing a trend, and if you had some trend advice for those folks that at home thinking about from custom accession standpoint, you have to be where the audience is, and this is where the honest going so, you know, I don't know what specifically means for people's business, whether they need to be buying mobile advertising on yelp or buying mobile search from google, or, you know, or using reach local, or creating their own mobile aps in your own vertical, it depends on each individual, but this is where consumers are going to shop for everything with big, big house you made a big bet on it right needed so early, and I think that's one of the things that I'm trying to find out is there's a lot of folks, a lot of folks in the creative industry that is chewing over trying to get business seekers from the best in the world like you and that you've double dallin mobil's and that is really the scale of this of this change just a sort of put it in your in your brain like there was the shift from, you know, a pen and paper to pcs, and I guess the early eighties, basically there was the shift from unconnected pcs to internet connected pcs, and then I actually think this is a bigger shift it's, bigger than the internet, because we all have computers in our pockets down there all the time to each other it's like it's, not just a little cell phone, it's a computer, and maybe if we called them computers, maybe people would maybe the naysayers would kind of get there faster, which is I'm kind of pleased that they haven't gotten still room for growth, we've got bedrooms till we get headroom let's just take one or two more from the internet, and then we'll wrap it up go ahead, kenneth that sounds great and by the way, we do have diego or a fino and in argentina in the house and massachusetts and you asked about where people were joining us from so this is way just had the start of the view but infinite zero would like to know from you, spencer, how can an inexperienced entrepreneur find mentors and make connections to help guide them in their venture? And maybe did you have mentor that helped you? You know, I didn't have a specific mentor. I mean, my dad was an entrepreneur and my uncles entrepreneur that both really interesting entrepreneurial stories, and so they help give me the fortitude sort of seeing that they were successful leaving established companies and doing, you know, doing their own start ups long before technology they weren't technology start ups, so that help but in this damage, you confined mentors without ever even meeting them. I mean, fred wilson is a really great example which every entrepreneur, every fred wilson's block he's, a very well known new york based bc and his block and his community is commentary on his block. It's ah it's a community of mentorship and I mean, if I were and when my kids get old enough to start becoming, you know, even more entrepreneur than they already are, I will encourage them to do this the old model of a mentor being like somebody that puts their arm around your shoulder and have coffee with every three weeks, and you talk to them about that that's. Not really. What mentorship I mean, that's. One model of mentorship, but that's, not the only model mentorship. Another model. Mentorship is you. You read interesting block post by bill gurley or fred wilson, and you comment on it, and you comments on reid hoffman's post on his lengthen influencer page and other people comment. And then he engages you, and then you talk to him on twitter, and then you've kind of created your own your own sort of pseudo mentor circle, I guess, online. Much respect. Thank you so much. A big, big thank you.