Zillions of Pillows and Why Culture Matters - Spencer Rascoff, Co-Founder of Zillow Group [S2.E1]

Welcome to Season 2 of Scaling Up! 


My guest on this episode is Spencer Rascoff. 


Spencer looms as a large figure in the US tech scene – twice he
has co-founded billion dollar businesses. His first, the travel
website HotWire was sold to Expedia, and it was there, he met
Rich Barton – the Expedia and Glassdoor founder. Together, with
several others, they then set off and co-founded Zillow.


Zillow is now all things real estate in the US – for anyone
looking to buy, rent, value a house, or obtain a mortgage, you
have significant interaction with Zillow. It is now a US$2.7 b
revenue, US$11b market capitalisation business (at the time of
recording). Spencer was CEO for 9 years, and is now on the board.


I often find guests who are no longer in the day to day grind
makes for a great interviewees, as they have had time to reflect
without bias. There was a temptation to go wide in our
conversation, but I felt it could have spread Spencer’s wisdom
too thinly. Instead I decided to really focus in on a topic that
I know is close to his heart as well as mine – the importance and
power of people and culture when scaling businesses.
 Spencer is a culture evangelist – he has seen first hand
how and why culture is a leading indicator of business
performance. Importantly to note,  this was not always his
belief and it was great to hear how his views have evolved. I
also loved his views on managing cultural merges – Zillow did 16
acquisitions in his time  - as well as why employees who he
describes as ‘culture carriers’ can adapt to any job inside an
organisation.


If you love what you hear – Spencer hosts his own podcasts, among
them Office Hours is in my opinion just a mandatory listen.


Plenty of people have got in contact with regards to previous
episodes, and the TDM team loves getting feedback. It makes this
project worthwhile You can always find me on twitter -
@eddiecowan, and TDM is constantly keeping the world up to date
with great insights and views as well -  @tdm_growth





This podcast is created and published for informational and
entertainment only. It is not financial advice. Transcripts may
contain occasional errors in fact.