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.