#107 with Chris Bakke - This Serial Entrepreneur is an Idea Machine

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Shaan Puri** (0:49)
Okay, well, I would typically introduce you, but I don't even know you. So, I only know you from Twitter. So, I'll introduce what I know from Twitter.
You're good on Twitter. You have hot takes.
Don't take yourself too seriously. Like, it's like the perfect thing where it's like a nugget of wisdom wrapped in like kind of like a witty slash jab at something. Yeah, exactly.

**Chris Bakke** (1:12)
That's what we try to go for.

**Shaan Puri** (1:14)
I think you do a good job of it. And so, when Sam was out, I was like, okay, who should I have on? And I tweeted that out. And a couple people said your name. And I was like, oh, good. That's a guy I've been following. And I don't really know. Like, I don't know your story. So, give me like the two, give me the two minute version. And then I'll kind of ask you about whatever's juiciest in there for me. But give me the two minute version. Who the heck are you? You're Chris Bakke, you said, right? That's the way to say it.
Yep. Chris Bakke. And what's your Twitter handle?

**Chris Bakke** (1:41)
It is at Chris J. Bakke. So it's at Chris J. B-A-K-K-E.

**Shaan Puri** (1:47)
That's right. Okay, cool. So what's your story, man? Who are you?

**Chris Bakke** (1:51)
All right. So I have been in the Bay Area for about 11 years now. So I moved from Los Angeles, where I was in college, up to the Bay Area to join a startup right out of college.
And that startup was in the online real estate space. And so we were helping all of these brokers. This is like 2009, 2010, 2011
As the market was rebounding in all of these hot cities, Miami, Chicago, New York, we were helping real estate agents basically manage all of their listings and all of the leasing that they were doing. And so I joined early and kind of just did sales partnerships, biz dab at this company called Rent Juice, and after a couple of years, we had raised a seed and Series A, and that business was acquired by Zillow.

**Shaan Puri** (2:38)
Did you say it's called Rent Juice?

**Chris Bakke** (2:41)
Rent Juice, a very terrible name to try to explain to customers. But yeah, the business was called Rent Juice, not the most fortunate name.

**Shaan Puri** (2:49)
I like the use of Juice. We had Greg Eisenberg on and he was talking about naming your startup.
And he has all these random list of add-ons at the beginning or the end of a name. So it's like, okay, we're doing some of the bank space. Okay, but you can be like Bank Juice, or Bank Buddy, or Bank House, or whatever, right?

**Chris Bakke** (3:09)
Greg is a fan of Bueno, I believe.

**Shaan Puri** (3:12)
Yeah, Bueno, that's right.

**Chris Bakke** (3:13)
So it's a great catchy name, especially for the stodgy, stale real estate industry like something with juice at the end, like, all right, we're going to juice up our listings or something.
So we sold in early 2012 to Zillow, who was just going public in 2012 We were Zillow's second acquisition.
So I stayed at Zillow for about two years and ran business development at Zillow from 2012 to 2014 That was really helping them build out a bunch of new verticals up until 2012, Zillow was really known for the zestiment. Like, you could go on a map and you could figure out what your home is worth and you could contact the broker who would then list it on Zillow. So it was a marketplace of homes. And so we were super interested in doing the same thing for rentals, doing the same thing for mortgages, doing the same thing for interior designers and contractors. So fell in love with the online real estate space, fell in love with marketplace businesses, and then went on to a early stage startup that was coming out of Y Combinator around that same time called 42 Floors. And 42 Floors was building Zillow, but for commercial real estate.