#806: How Rich Barton Built Expedia and Zillow from $0 to $35B — Audacious Goals, Provocation Marketing, Scrabble for Naming, and Powerful Daily Rituals

**Tim Ferriss** (0:00)
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 Saka 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 co-founded 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, sort of 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. My first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, which made everything else possible, is built around the acronym and framework DEAL. D-E-A-L. Define, Eliminate, Automate and Liberate. Now, of course, after you define all the things you want, your metrics, 80-20, blah, blah, blah, then you want to get rid of as much as possible, eliminate. But sometimes there are things that are a huge hassle, like expense management, for a lot of companies, which you can't get rid of. They are essential to your business. But today, thank God, you can automate it. And there is no better way to do that than with today's sponsor, Ramp. Ramp is a free corporate card that automates away your entire expense process. They are incredibly fast growing and incredibly well reviewed for good reasons. The moment your team makes a purchase, Ramp handles everything. Receipt matching, categorization, approval, the whole works. Switching to Ramp is like hiring a full time employee just for expense management. And Ramp makes it easy to migrate from your current corporate card with their complimentary white glove onboarding service for new members. More than 25,000 businesses trust Ramp, including my good friends at Shopify and the Boys and Girls Club of America, which is why they were just named number one in spend management by G2. And now for a limited time, you guys, listeners of The Tim Ferris Show can get $250 when you join Ramp. Just go to ramp.com/tim. That's ramp.com/tim.
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