Zillow Co-Founder Spencer Rascoff's Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Nicole Lapin** (1:02)
I'm Nicole Lapin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand.
It's time for some Money Rehab.
In the last few years, new business applications in the US have been coming in at record highs. This means many Americans are looking to turn their hobbies into jobbies. And there are receipts. There are many factors at play here, but one biggie is the very public surge in layoffs since 2020 And some of these furloughed employees have decided that this was their sign that they needed to try their hand at entrepreneurship, or they started a business because they had no other choice in order to put food on their table. I'd argue that another big reason for the uptick in new small businesses is the rise of the founder-creator-influencer category. There are more resources than ever to start your own business, but not all of these resources are good ones. You don't need to have run a business successfully in order to start an Instagram and say you have, right? So if you're thinking of starting your own business, I want you to be informed by the brightest minds out there who will give you real advice, not any of the phony hacks and shortcuts and clickbait out there. So today I'm bringing on one of those bright minds, serial entrepreneur Spencer Rascoff. And if you don't know who Spencer is, you're about to. You'll also hear how he feels about the term serial entrepreneur. Here he is.
Spencer Rascoff, welcome to Money Rehab.

**Spencer Rascoff** (2:29)
Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

**Nicole Lapin** (2:31)
I'm excited to have you. You have so many success stories. Co-founder and former CEO of Zillow, co-founder of Hotwire, sold to Expedia, investor in more than 100 startups now with 75 & Sunny.
What else would you like to really highlight? Because if I keep going through this, it's going to take the whole episode.

**Spencer Rascoff** (2:49)
You're very kind.

**Nicole Lapin** (2:50)
So let's start with the big lessons from Zillow. I think some of our listeners are going to be curious about that as a case study.
In your series, How to Startup, you say that Zillow didn't start with the idea. It started with the team. I find that so interesting. Can you tell that story?

**Spencer Rascoff** (3:05)
Sure. And actually, this is true of a couple of my startups where people who wanted to start a company together just kind of hung out and started exchanging ideas and thinking about what they're passionate about. And that's how we started Zillow. So I had sold my company Hotwire to Expedia, and I had been at Expedia for about a year and decided it was time to do something more entrepreneurial. And so I left with two other folks who were execs and actually the founders of Expedia.
And then we added one or two more folks. And we sat in a conference room for, gosh, maybe three months or more, just talking and kind of shooting the shit and about, you know, what's important to you? What services do you love? What are you doing in your life right now?
And all three of us were buying houses all at the same time.
And we quickly realized that here we were in 2005, and the Internet was more than 10 years old. And there still was no category-defining company that empowered the consumer. There were plenty of real estate websites at the time. But those real estate websites all prioritized the industry, the real estate agent, the brokerage, the multiple listing service. And so we had this idea to try to build something that was consumer first in the real estate space. And Zillow was born.

**Nicole Lapin** (4:18)
So interesting that you were just sitting around shooting the shit, as you say. I think of it differently. I think of like a problem first and then say, hey, is anyone going to fix this problem? And I kind of look around and I think, oh crap, that's going to be me. So I guess there are two ways to look at this. Neither way is better. But just to be clear, you didn't start the business just for the sake of starting a business, right?