David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…Sure, yeah. Let’s move quickly into tech themes then which is one of our favorite parts of the show. I had a tech theme written down that I’m going to mention them and we’ll link to this in the show notes. There was a great, great interview with Rich Barton in the New York Times a couple years ago. The interview was focusing on, like, “you’re like this hit maker. You have Expedia, you have Zillow.” Rich was intimately involved in the origins of Glassdoor, and Avvo, and many other marketplace-based, really important marketplace-based businesses. “What’s your secret?” and Rich said, the thing that I think about is: “What piece of marketplace information do people crave and don’t have?” I think that’s really interesting. Zillow’s like a perfect example of that. Like I want to know what my home’s worth, you know, and I don’t have that. Once you give that to me, I’m like a mouse in a lab turning the wheel to get the cheese. I want to know every week what’s my home worth. I think that was a really good example. The other one I want to throw out quickly, Kathleen, that you've talked about a bit on this show, isn’t so much at the normal level of technology themes for us on this show, but we talk – being a VC and working with management teams and entrepreneurs and founders – hiring and building your organization from a people perspective takes as much as time as anything else in the business, if not more time. We always talk about like, “Oh, it’s so important to hire athletes.” Like, not literally athletes, although literally athletes can be great too. And people talk like, “Well, what does that really mean?” I think Zillow and your M&A strategy is a great example of that, of people who are very smart, very flexible in their thinking and can adapt and over time play multiple roles, because that’s what you need in a startup. You can’t predict exactly where the market is going to go, where your product is going to go, your organization. And I think you guys have done a really good job both in your hiring obviously of your management team, but also your acquisitions of looking for these types of people who can evolve their thinking and evolve their abilities as a company does, because that’s going to be the constant in a high growth industry. Right, that’s absolutely true. I can give you a couple of specific examples from that acquisition. Susan Daimler who now runs StreetEasy here in New York City, which is why I’m standing right now, she came to us by way of acquisition of the company bifolio that she and her husband Matt started. And as we needed a new leader for StreetEasy, Susan and Matt stepped in and now they play a key role in the StreetEasy business. So they went from running a very small company that was focused on sharing of information among co-shoppers to now running StreetEasy. So, a perfect example of that. Justin LaJoie who was the founder of Diverse Solutions, we’ve recently divested Diverse Solutions, but Justin is still with us running an entirely different product line. So, we definitely look. We look for culture fit and a broad ability. Subject matter expertise is important but it’s not the critical piece and you will see that throughout our management team as we all move around in different roles and expand our skill sets.…

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