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

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Tim Ferriss Show - Episode #806: How Rich Barton Built Expedia and Zillow from $0 to $35B — Audacious Goals, Provocation Marketing, Scrabble for Naming, and Powerful Daily Rituals

Introduction

In Episode #806 of The Tim Ferriss Show, Tim Ferriss welcomes Rich Barton, the co-founder and executive chairman of Zillow, and the founder of Expedia. Known for transforming how people buy, sell, rent, and finance homes, Rich shares his journey from founding Expedia within Microsoft to building Zillow into a $35 billion enterprise. The conversation delves into Rich's entrepreneurial mindset, marketing strategies, company naming conventions, board memberships, and personal rituals that contribute to his success.

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1. Personal Routines and Work-Life Balance

Rich Barton begins by discussing his disciplined morning routine, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing "making" over "managing." He allocates three to four hours each morning to engage in creative and generative activities such as podcasting and writing before addressing emails and administrative tasks. This approach aligns with the principles from Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek, particularly the DEAL framework (Define, Eliminate, Automate, Liberate).

Notable Quote:

"The moment your team makes a purchase, Ramp handles everything. Receipt matching, categorization, approval, the whole works." [08:31]

Rich also highlights how sponsors like Ramp and Crescent Family Office support his focus on creative endeavors by automating expense management and handling complex financial planning, respectively.

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2. Early Career and Founding Expedia

Rich recounts his early career at Microsoft, where he worked under Brad Chase, his first real boss out of college. In 1994, Rich founded Expedia within Microsoft as a venture startup. Although an initial project to bundle DOS upgrades with "DOS for Dummies" failed ([16:02]), it taught him valuable lessons about innovation and risk-taking.

Key Points:

• First Job: Strategy Consultant at Alliance Consulting Group post-college.
• Expedia's Spin-Off: Recognizing Microsoft's conglomerate discount, Rich successfully spun off Expedia in 1999, taking it public and contributing significantly to its growth.

Notable Quote:

"The harder you push against something, the harder it pushes back." [11:07]

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3. Founding Zillow: From Idea to Launch

Post-Expedia, Rich co-founded Zillow with Lloyd Frank in 2003, identifying the inefficiencies in the real estate market. The conception of Zillow stemmed from their frustration with the opacity of home pricing data. During an unsuccessful attempt to auction homes online, they discovered the Zestimate—a real-time, algorithmically driven home value estimator.

Key Points:

• Provocation Marketing: Rich emphasizes using provocative features like the Zestimate to generate buzz and drive user engagement.
• Naming Strategies: Rich shares insights on naming companies, advocating for unique, memorable names with high Scrabble points (e.g., Expedia, Zillow).

Notable Quotes:

“We discovered the Zestimate, which was our killer feature.” [60:35]

“A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of identifying a really big problem, but it is just a small opportunity.” [54:34]

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4. Marketing Strategies: Provocation Marketing

Rich elaborates on Zillow’s provocation marketing tactics, which involve creating features and data-driven tools that generate strong emotional responses. This strategy not only builds brand awareness but also fosters user engagement through features that challenge industry norms.

Key Strategies:

• Data as Marketing: Utilizing housing data to create newsworthy content.
• Provocative Features: Features like the Zestimate that incite discussions and media coverage.

Notable Quote:

“Provocation marketing with a heart, with the end consumer's best interests in mind, that's a winner.” [66:03]

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5. Company Naming: Rules and Techniques

Rich shares his methodology for naming companies, drawing parallels to Scrabble. He advises using rare letters (like Z, X, Q) to create distinctive and memorable names. He also emphasizes the importance of simplicity, evoke positive associations, and ensuring the name can be easily turned into a verb.

Rules for Naming:

1. Use Rare Letters: Z, X, Q for distinctiveness.
2. Keep It Simple: Prefer fewer syllables.
3. Evocative Meaning: Names should evoke positive associations.
4. Verb-Friendly: Names should be easy to turn into verbs.
5. Double Letters and Palindromes: Enhance memorability.

Notable Quote:

“Pick the super rare letters. They are very distinctive. They jump off a page when you read.” [80:03]

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6. Board Membership and Venture Capital

Rich discusses his experiences serving on various boards, including Netflix, and his role as a venture partner at Benchmark Capital. He underscores the significance of company culture and the importance of hiring the right people to foster innovation. Rich also shares insights on the responsibilities and dynamics of board memberships, advising that boards should focus on strategy and coaching rather than bureaucratic obligations.

Key Points:

• Culture Over Policies: Building a culture that embraces innovation by hiring entrepreneurial thinkers.
• Board Responsibilities: Acting as advisors and coaches, not just administrative overseers.
• Venture Capital Influence: How interactions with firms like Benchmark have shaped his entrepreneurial strategies.

Notable Quote:

“Having a big brand that customers know and love... and then look down your funnel and look into the workflow of the business you're in...” [76:59]

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7. Self-Care and Health Rituals

Rich emphasizes the critical role of self-care in sustaining long-term entrepreneurial success. He shares his personal health regimen, which includes zone 2 cardio, weightlifting, yoga, and activities like snowboarding and tennis. Rich highlights how a disciplined approach to health enhances both his physical well-being and mental clarity.

Key Points:

• Morning Rituals: Structured routines prioritize creative work.
• Physical Activity: Regular exercise to maintain energy and reduce stress.
• Work-Life Integration: Balancing family life with professional responsibilities to ensure personal well-being.

Notable Quote:

“I need to find people who are great at managing... Everything is falling apart.” [08:31]

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8. Book Recommendations and Personal Interests

Rich shares his passion for fiction, recommending books like Oceans and Stars by Mark Halpern, works by Haruki Murakami, and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. He advocates for reading fiction as a means of mental relaxation and creative inspiration, contrasting it with the demands of business literature.

Recommended Books:

• Oceans and Stars by Mark Halpern
• A Winter's Tale by Mark Halpern
• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
• The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu

Notable Quote:

“Escape into a fiction novel for me is just a fantastic release.” [123:52]

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9. Closing Remarks and Advice

In the final segment, Rich offers advice to aspiring entrepreneurs and leaders. He emphasizes the importance of passion, the willingness to take risks, and the value of building strong, supportive teams. Rich also touches on the significance of developing effective leadership skills and fostering a culture that encourages innovation and collaboration.

Key Advice:

• Embrace Provocative Ideas: Challenge industry norms to stand out.
• Prioritize Health and Family: Ensure personal well-being to sustain professional success.
• Build a Strong Team: Surround yourself with passionate and capable individuals.
• Effective Leadership: Develop skills to coach and empower team members.

Notable Quote:

“Building magic stuff for masses of consumers that they want to talk about with their friends, unprompted, on the sidelines of the soccer game... You’re definitely onto something.” [67:58]

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Conclusion

Tim Ferriss wraps up the episode by highlighting the comprehensive insights Rich Barton provided on building successful enterprises like Expedia and Zillow. Rich's blend of strategic marketing, innovative naming conventions, and dedication to personal wellness offers valuable lessons for entrepreneurs aiming to create lasting and impactful businesses.

Final Quote:

“Tim, I should just. I should thank you. You perform a good service. You provide a good service for a lot of people with this pod and with your books.” [139:14]

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• Morning Routine and Automation:

  "The moment your team makes a purchase, Ramp handles everything. Receipt matching, categorization, approval, the whole works." [08:31]

• Longevity and Health Habits:

  "The harder you push against something, the harder it pushes back." [11:07]

• Hiring and Culture:

  "Everything ultimately boils down to the people that you hire and the people you choose to work with and the people you keep." [20:19]

• Provocation Marketing:

  “Provocation marketing with a heart, with the end consumer's best interests in mind, that's a winner.” [66:03]

• Company Naming:

  “Pick the super rare letters. They are very distinctive. They jump off a page when you read.” [80:03]

• Board Dynamics:

  “Having a big brand that customers know and love... and then look down your funnel and look into the workflow of the business you're in...” [76:59]

• Self-Care Importance:

  “I need to find people who are great at managing... Everything is falling apart.” [08:31]

• Book Recommendations:

  “Escape into a fiction novel for me is just a fantastic release.” [123:52]

• Leadership and Team Building:

  “Building magic stuff for masses of consumers that they want to talk about with their friends, unprompted, on the sidelines of the soccer game... You’re definitely onto something.” [67:58]

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Resources and Additional Information:

• Rich Barton's Companies:

  • Zillow
  • Expedia
  • Glassdoor
  • Avvo

• Recommended Books:

  • Oceans and Stars by Mark Halpern
  • A Winter's Tale by Mark Halpern
  • Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
  • The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu

• Subscribe to Five Bullet Friday:

  • Visit tim.blog/fivebulletfriday to subscribe to Tim Ferriss's weekly newsletter.

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates Rich Barton's insights and experiences shared during his conversation with Tim Ferriss, providing valuable lessons on entrepreneurship, marketing, leadership, and personal well-being.

Transcript

[Tim Ferriss]

Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss 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 Sacca 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 with none other than Rich Barton. My first book, the four Hour Work Week 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 Ferriss show can get $250 when you join RAMP. Just go to ramp.com tim that's R A M P.com/tim cards issued by Sutton bank member FDIC terms and conditions apply. Listeners have heard me talk about making before you manage for years. All that means to me is that when I wake up, I block out three to four hours to do the most important things that are generative, creative, podcasting, writing, etc. Before I get to the email and the admin stuff and the reactive stuff and everyone else's agenda for my time. For me, let's just say I'm a writer and entrepreneur. I need to focus on the making to be happy. If I get sucked into all the little bits and pieces that are constantly churning, I end up feeling stressed out. And that is why today's sponsor is so interesting. It's been one of the greatest energetic unlocks in the last few years. So here we go. I need to find people who are great at managing and that is where Crescent Family Office comes in. You spell it C R E S S E T Crescent Family Office I was introduced to one of the top CPG investors in the world. Crescent is a prestigious family office for CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs. They handle the complex financial planning, uncertain tax strategies, timely exit planning, bill pay wires, all the dozens of other parts of wealth management and just financial management that would otherwise pull me away from doing what I love most. Making things, mastering skills, spending time with the people I care about. And over many years I was getting pulled away from that stuff at least a few days a week and I've completely eliminated that. So experience the freedom of focusing on what matters to you with the support of a top wealth management team. You can schedule a call [e-mail] Tim that's spelled C-R E S S E T CrescentCapital.com Tim to see how Crescent can help streamline your financial plans and grow your wealth. That's crescentcapital.com Tim and disclosure. I am a client of Crescent. There are no material conflicts other than this paid testimonial. And of course all investing involves risk including loss of principal. So do your due diligence.

[Rich Barton]

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before My hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question now it is in a perfect time.

[Tim Ferriss]

What if I did the album?

[Rich Barton]

I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. Ferris show. I know Eddie Q a little bit, his friend. And there was a point at which I like to observe magic product things. And of course Apple has tons. But my typical morning news setup is I'm kind of doing my email and sifting through things while I drink my coffee. And I've got my iPad set up next to it, rolling CNBC quietly on mute. And at one point a couple years ago, I moused off the left edge of the screen and it seamlessly went onto the. All of a sudden my mouse was on the iPad and I was like, oh my God. It just decided because it was the same guy logged in. It's an extended monitor. Yeah. And I texted him immediately. I'm like, oh, Eddie.

[Tim Ferriss]

Why do you have CNBC playing concurrently? Is that just old habits die hard or is it. Let's see if anything cataclysmic or monumental has happened that I need to aware of.

[Rich Barton]

It's my favorite source of news because business news is generally happy.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, got it.

[Rich Barton]

I just don't wallow in the bullshit. And regular news makes me feel bad and CNBC at best makes me feel good. And most of the time is just mid. That's fine. And I get the news. I'm interested in business and companies and strategy and trends and it is pretty funny channel. It kind of gets on repeat. You don't need to watch it very long. But they get good interviews too. I usually don't have the volume on. I have the closed caption scrolling and then if something catches my eye, I gotta do it.

[Tim Ferriss]

So let's take a closer look then at the other screen.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

You have your coffee?

[Rich Barton]

Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

What time is this?

[Rich Barton]

Yeah, I'm a pretty early riser. 6:30. I get up usually and long before Sarah, my wife. And so these hour and a half, two hours I get in the morning are nice, pristine. My kids have all left the house. Now there was a routine when my kids were in the house that was obviously very different and really fun. I could talk about that. But now I have two hours of just catch up on the stuff in my newsfeed, which is my inbox, my email inbox. I'm kind of old school that way. And as I go through that, I'm catching up on the news on my iPad. I have a smoothie every morning with lots of stuff.

[Tim Ferriss]

What's the stuff.

[Rich Barton]

No supplement kinds of things, but lots of cat testicles. I am not one of those guys. I am not one of the longevity supplement people. But I'll tell you what's in it. It's about 3 or 4 ounces of oat milk, ice, an apple. Used to be a banana. I've switched to kind of two thirds of an apple. Pistachios, macadamias, a handful of blueberries. My favorite electrolyte. I'm getting ready for my workout. It's not very big. My favorite electrolyte is Procari sweat.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, the blue can, man. I had a lot of that when I lived there as an exchange student.

[Rich Barton]

My nutritionist says, that's the one.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

And I'm like, okay. I'd been taking another one, using another one. She's like, no, this is the one. Not much a prune.

[Tim Ferriss]

Prune.

[Rich Barton]

Prune. Because.

[Tim Ferriss]

Keeps things moving.

[Rich Barton]

Keeps things moving. And that's very important. You know, young people out there don't really realize how important that is yet, but as you age, you realize how that can affect your day really having everything moving. Here's a little hack. I'm not really a hacky guy, but I do have a lot of, what quirks, I guess. Hyperice, you know that company that makes the. Okay. They have a thing. I think they bought a bunch of products, but there's a back one called the Venom. You must have run into that.

[Tim Ferriss]

I think it heats and vibrates. Yes. Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

So I actually, for my whole kind of 45 minutes of that routine at the kitchen table with a lot of light coming in, as soon as the sun's up, I have it on repeat. I'm wearing that Venom. Oh, my God. That loosens everything up.

[Tim Ferriss]

And you mentioned before your workout, so this is all pre workout.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah. I need to get things going and feel settled a little bit settled and brain on before I work out.

[Tim Ferriss]

Coffee helps too.

[Rich Barton]

Coffee helps all that. Yep. And I don't drink a lot of coffee today. I had a little too much because I'm off time zone a little bit. But I'll have one, maybe two cups and that'll be the caffeine for the day.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, Got it.

[Rich Barton]

So I go through that and once everything's. Make my ablutions and change into my workout stuff.

[Tim Ferriss]

Rinse your face with some holy water.

[Rich Barton]

And pretty much every day I do a workout. I can't really get my mind right without that.

[Tim Ferriss]

All right, so we're going to talk about the workout for people who are audio only. This guy looks like a I don't know how you Marvel character meets Abercrombie and Fitch model, not to mention scion of business. It's unfair. I don't know how I got the shorts drawn. This genetic habit lottery. But we're going to talk about the training because I have this working pet theory that longevity may be inversely correlated with the number of things that you do for longevity. In other words, there are a few things that really matter. But then there's a long tail of things of questionable value that also have unknown uncharted side effects. So when you start throwing the kitchen sink plus plus at your body, the likelihood of you heading in the wrong direction is probably higher or just as high.

[Rich Barton]

My observation is the harder you push against something, the harder it pushes back. And I think the people who are pushing really hard at the longevity and the supplement thing and the whole day scheduled out lifestyle things to improve healthspan. Yeah, most of that's probably not very useful. There's some basics and maybe the most important basic is when I was younger, my kids were in the house because I got up early. I was to get the kids to school parent. While Sarah became more beautiful. She stays up late. And I love to cook. I've had several jobs as a kid growing up where I was a short order chef and worked in a lot of kitchens. And I love to cook. And so our house is set up, we have a kitchen island with a big bar stools and the cooktop is on the other side. And whenever the kids wandered downstairs bleary eyed, I was their short order breakfast chef. And anything they wanted I would make, which was so fun.

[Tim Ferriss]

It was like the breakfast buffet with the Four Seasons or something.

[Rich Barton]

Whatever they wanted, I had it. I could whip it up really, really fast because you get that skill when you're a short order chef. I have my younger boy had some kind of ADHD stuff and started taking those. The meds. I can't remember how old he was. 10, 12. And those meds make kids. It's an appetite suppressant.

[Tim Ferriss]

Oh, for sure.

[Rich Barton]

Okay. So maybe, you know, and I was a typical parent. Our primal urge is to feed our children. That's it. Like feed and care for our children. That is the overriding program that kind of puts everything else down. And so I got to the point where I was so worried about how skinny he was and he wasn't eating the rest of the day. He was hungry in the morning and I would like make a 12 egg frittata, like put potatoes in it and sausage in it. And he'd down the thing and I'm.

[Tim Ferriss]

Like, okay, you've accomplished the Anaconda diet. Just one huge meal and it works.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah. And the punctuation on this one, aside from that just being really quality time, regardless of what kind of mood the kids were in, is just really quality. I cherished it. I took a picture most days. Okay. Totally candid. There's no posing. I would sneak a picture every day. And now I have a folder called the Breakfast Club on my, you know, in my picture, my iPhone pictures. And I have like a thousand pictures. And it's a time series of these kids growing up. It's a virtual possession, but it's my most prized possession.

[Tim Ferriss]

All right, we're going to double click on a bunch of things we passed over. Let's hop for the entrepreneurial set listening. This is also related to more than just pure entrepreneurship. But let's see if this is dead end or if it takes us somewhere. Who was Brad Chase?

[Rich Barton]

Right, Chase.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah. What impact did he have on your life?

[Rich Barton]

He was great guy. He was my first real boss out of college. It's not quite right, but it's close to right. Brad was a group product manager at Microsoft. Microsoft was my, I'll call it my first job out of College. This is 1991. Microsoft had only about 3,000 people at the time.

[Tim Ferriss]

And just for reference, because I have no idea how many employees do you think they have now? It's going to be a multiple of that, of course.

[Rich Barton]

300, 400,000.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah. Orders of magnitude multiple.

[Rich Barton]

Orders of magnitude two to three. And the product managers were kind of this elite little group of really smart people. We weren't very big and he was my boss and we were working on Ms. DOS 5, which maybe I would say we'll have to go two standard deviations at in your audience distribution curve to find anybody who really knows what ms.doS5 was. But it was a really big operating system for Microsoft at the time and we made an upgrade and the feature was we broke the 640k barrier, which you're not going to engage on the geeky stuff. But it was a really big product. And my job was to create the packaging, manage the manufacturing and figure out how to get this physical product into the egghead. Some of you will remember Egghead. Egghead was the retail software store. And to push the product out into Egghead. That was my first job. And Brad was a guy who. He's one of my mentors. I only worked for him for a Short period of time. I was a big idea thinker, big risks, big bets. And he encouraged me at a very young age. He funded me to take a really big swing at something and supported me in it. And it failed miserably.

[Tim Ferriss]

Is this the book project?

[Rich Barton]

Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

You want to tell people about it?

[Rich Barton]

Well, I don't know how that interesting is other than the lesson of take big swing.

[Tim Ferriss]

It is, but the details help paint a picture. People can conjure a visual in their head.

[Rich Barton]

All right. It's become a huge series as a Series for Dummies. Blank for Dummies.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

And the book that the Dummies series was founded on was DOS for Dummies, believe it or not. It was like the best selling book book about software of all time. And I was like, I'm a young product manager. I want to sell more Ms. DOS five upgrades. And I was like, okay, we have all these software retailers where people go. But the really big thing at the time, believe it or not, was Barnes and Noble and Borders. Bookstore bookstore experience was huge back then. And DOS for Dummies sold millions and millions of copies of this book in Barnes and Noble and Borders. And so I was like, why don't we do a bundle with DOS for Dummies and have that be the manual for the upgrade, Bundle it together, the.

[Tim Ferriss]

Book and the upgrade seems reasonable.

[Rich Barton]

And distribute it through bookstores. How brilliant. And so I went and met with one of the Riggio guys at Barnes and Noble. I met with the guy who created the dummy series, this guy John. So I met with all these people. We designed the product. It was really. I was, you know, feeling pretty like a big deal. Built a bunch of it at probably cost us eight to ten bucks a unit.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, okay.

[Rich Barton]

Which is a lot for cogs, right? Cost of goods sold, I can't remember how many we built, but it was at best a C, you know, maybe.

[Tim Ferriss]

A D. What was the retail price?

[Rich Barton]

You hit the problem. The problem was people are going in.

[Tim Ferriss]

To buy a $12 book and it.

[Rich Barton]

Was a $54 price tag or $49 price tag, which basically what the software cost at Egghead. And it kind of looked a bit too much like a book. I kind of made it look like a book.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

It wasn't the greatest cover anyway. I'm embarrassed about what it looks like now. I have one, of course, as a reminder. But yeah, the shock value was too much. People didn't realize there was software in it. And so we ate a bunch. We ended up getting rid of all the inventory. But it was not a success. And the amazing thing, depending on where your audience is in their careers, you work at a lot of places out there. And great organizations encourage innovation, encourage big idea people to take big swings and do not punish them when it doesn't work out according to plan. If that happens too many times, maybe there's a pattern and somebody should go find another job. But Brad Chase back to. Brad sat me down. I thought I was for my review and I thought I was going to, who knows? It was a 10, $20 million mistake and I was a young kid. And he said, I remember distinctly, he said, all right, what's your next big idea? Amazing that Microsoft was and is an amazing organization because of that kind of culture.

[Tim Ferriss]

Wow. How have you, if you have sort of taken that forward into companies that you've built or just philosophically or operationally speaking, how do you encourage that? Because there must be some constraints on things so that you don't light the whole house on fire. Right. How do you think about enabling people to innovate? You don't want learned helplessness where they're afraid to do anything. At the same time, you don't want some rogue trader taking on Bear Stearns or whatever.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah, it's really hard. But everything ultimately boils down to the people that you hire and the people you choose to work with and the people you keep. And saying your culture is XYZ is very different from having people who channel those traits that you want. And so my method for doing this is to make sure we're really diligent about finding those innovators and the entrepreneurs sometimes who the intrapreneurs, let's call them the inside entrepreneurs and protect them a little bit because sometimes they're different. And mainline corporate culture sometimes rejects, often rejects the innovators and the ones who want to disrupt whatever, just rock the boat a little bit. And you really do need to rock the boat to innovate. And so the leadership needs to hire, cultivate, protect and invest in those people.

[Tim Ferriss]

The foreign bodies, so they don't get rejected by the corporate immune system, which.

[Rich Barton]

Is just, it's just natural, you know?

[Tim Ferriss]

All right, so let's come back to one thing you mentioned. You said in effect, not totally true, but let's consider Microsoft first job out of college. What was the actual first job out of college?

[Rich Barton]

I was one of these. High performance confession coming. Yeah, I was just one of those kids. I went to Stanford and was an engineer, management consulting.

[Tim Ferriss]

Was it really odd?

[Rich Barton]

No, I know, but it was funny. There's a good story here. I mean, I don't know if it's a good story, but we'll tell it. Yeah, man. I was like, success kid, do well. Loved that, identified that way. And so, of course, whatever. The hardest job that came to interview at Stanford when I was a senior, of course that's the job I wanted. There was strategic planning at Disney. There was the kind of investment banking training program, analyst program, and there was the strategy management consultant. And those were the big ones. And it was the most competitive, hardest to get. So that's how I got tracked. And I took a job as a strategy consultant in Cambridge right out of college. I knew pretty damn quickly it wasn't.

[Tim Ferriss]

For me, but like BCG or who was.

[Rich Barton]

It was a spin off of bcg, okay, Called Alliance Consulting Group. Great group of people, super smart. It was going into a recession, though, in 1989, and so a lot of people ended up losing their jobs. However, the interesting thing was one of my besties at Stanford, Nina Roberts, who was an engineer with me, we were both interviewing for all the same jobs. And she didn't get the big job, but she got this little tech company in Seattle, Microsoft, which of course I knew. The companies that I really loved were Microsoft, Apple. All I needed to do was buy Microsoft and Apple stock back in 89. That would have been. Yeah, I wouldn't be talking with you now. Microsoft, Apple, I liked Patagonia. That was a brand that I identified with. Anyway, Nina got the job as a product manager at Microsoft, and she went to Seattle, I went to Cambridge, and we kept in close touch. And I knew pretty quickly it wasn't for me. And she knew Microsoft was the place for me and was like on the horn with me every week saying, you got to come out here. You got to come out here. And so it took about a year to finally get the flight out. And the job offer.

[Tim Ferriss]

How did you know it wasn't for you? What about it wasn't for you? Because there are some people who thrive in those environments, right?

[Rich Barton]

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. A trite answer would be dressing up in a suit and tie and wearing uncomfortable shoes. Wasn't for me. I like to go barefoot. That really wasn't what it was. It kind of makes you feel important when you dress up. And I was presenting things to CEOs and stuff, and it did feel important. And I got a really good business school education in competitive strategy, the Michael Porter stuff. I basically got an MBA in this one year. What I discovered about myself and I discovered it there. I probably knew it before, but I hadn't really focused on it was. I believe the world is somewhat divided. It isn't totally binary, but it's a continuum. But it's maybe a barbell. Clients and servers. Okay. Which is kind of a geeky software architecture reference. But people get it. There are all of these industries that are set up to be service provision industries. Lawyers, doctors, consultants, academics. And the benefit of these industries is you get to indulge your curiosity and see lots of different deal with lots of different clients and lots of different problems. But oftentimes with consulting, you're not seeing things through to the finished product. And it was apparent to me really quickly that I derived my jollies, on the other hand, from being a builder and the client. I actually loved what the clients were doing more than what we were doing when I was a consultant. So it became clear to me that I was a client. I wanted to build things. I derived my jollies that way. And so I started looking and it was good to discover at a pretty young age.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

And then I got to Microsoft and it was like I was a kid in a candy store. I never left the place.

[Tim Ferriss]

Thank God for Nina.

[Rich Barton]

Was it Nina?

[Tim Ferriss]

Wow. I hope she still gets a box of chocolates.

[Rich Barton]

We're still close. She's great.

[Tim Ferriss]

All right, so let's talk about then Microsoft and Expedia. How does this happen? I'll just leave it broad.

[Rich Barton]

Well, back to the earlier conversation we had about taking big swings and intrapreneuring. The how on how this happened is that Expedia was a venture startup inside of Microsoft and then it spun out and we can get to that. But the real reason I even got into it and left the operating system group was that my wife Sarah, who you just saw, is a doctor and she was applying to. She was in medical school at Northwestern and was applying to her residencies. She's an OB GYN and there's only one residency OB GYN residency in Seattle where I lived with only six or seven residents a year and one of the most attractive residencies in the country. So super competitive. We were engaged and then soon married. After that we got married pretty young and I was like, well, she's not going to match out here in Seattle, so I better get ready to move to New York City or this probably would have been New York City where she matched. This was during the Windows 95 launch. I left the Windows 95 team and I went to the consumer division at Microsoft, which was kind of small now.

[Tim Ferriss]

This is going to maybe sound like a side quest, but when you say you moved, did you just put in a request like, how easy is that to do?

[Rich Barton]

At great companies, it's relatively easy.

[Tim Ferriss]

Relatively easy, especially for people who are.

[Rich Barton]

Tagged as high potential. But it's still not easy. Of course. Brad, who was my boss at the time, couldn't believe we're launching Windows 95. This is going to be the biggest launch of all time in the software industry. Or maybe one of the biggest product launches of all time. I don't know if you remember that. I do. It was a big deal. And about six months before we launched, I had a big job there. I interviewed for jobs over in the consumer division and took on a portfolio of multimedia CD ROMs. And the reason I did this, I was interested in consumer marketing, obviously. But the reason I did this was that I was going to have to leave Microsoft and I wanted to start a company. And it wasn't going to be an operating system. Yeah, okay. This just wasn't going to happen for reasons that we don't need to get into. But the government made clear to Microsoft at one point. So I figured it was going to be a consumer software company, and I wanted to go learn that. And the folks over there were fantastic. Microsoft was fantastic. And I took on a portfolio of CD ROMs. Some of you out there will not even know what that is. This is kind of basically precursor to the Internet.

[Tim Ferriss]

It's the thing your doctor gives you that you can't make any use of with all your images.

[Rich Barton]

It's true. And some artists, musicians, still hand out cds.

[Tim Ferriss]

It's the artifact that your doctor gives you.

[Rich Barton]

It was what came in the red envelopes at Netflix anyway. But these things were like Wikipedia before Wikipedia was called Encarta, and it was a multimedia CD rom. And one of the products in my portfolio of rando ideas was an Encarta. So an encyclopedia of travel guides. This is really good. You take a whole bookshelf, a whole shelf of travel guides, cram it down onto one CD rom. Pictures, audio, wow. What could be better for travel planning? And that was one of them. And I remember going into my first product review with Bill Gates and others, which was kind of every six months, every year kind of thing that the product people did. And I was used to business plans with billions of dollars from the operating system group. And I was responsible for this thing. And I'm like, bill, this is tiny. The whole travel book industry in the US is maybe $100 million. And that's the whole thing. And so really, A, there's not an opportunity, and B, you can't travel with the CD rom. There were no. Like, the laptop at that point was this compact suitcase that weighed 20 pounds. I'm like, that's when you want the travel guy, when you're traveling. So even though I know it's your idea and it's kind of fun, it's not going to work. That said, I demoed Easy Saber on Prodigy. Prodigy was an online service.

[Tim Ferriss]

Oh, yeah, okay. And I was bringing back the memories.

[Rich Barton]

Geeky online guy, right? And Easy Saber was a tool for travel agents to use at home on Prodigy to access the airline reservation systems. Okay. So it wasn't meant for consumers, but I could get access to it on Prodigy. And I demoed that for him. He actually knew about it. I demoed that for him. I'm like, this is a change the world thing. If we can have consumers be able to do this, then we can become the largest E. Commerce wasn't a word. Then we could become the largest seller of travel in the world. That was my pitch and my dream. The pitch further went and fund me on the outside because I'm going to have to move to New York because my wife, she's not going to match out here. And this doesn't want to be a Microsoft business anyway. It's travel first, software second. Not software first, travel second. He agreed with all that. He thought it was an awesome idea. He also liked that we could rebuild all the mainframes on Windows nt, which is a different conversation. So he loved it. He greenlit it. He was my first venture capitalist. He said, no, don't go. Do it on the outside. Do it here. We have a great team that we'll put together. And I'm sure Sarah will match her residency at University of Washington.

[Tim Ferriss]

High degree of confidence.

[Rich Barton]

That was the end of that. She did match. I honestly, to this day don't know if there was any thumb on the scale. I doubt he had that kind of power. But she matched. I stayed in Seattle. He had promised me that he'd consider spinning it out if it got big enough. And then that's what happened. So we spun in the height of the Internet bubble, which is so bubbly that people today who think we're in a bubble have no concept. I mean, you remember. Oh, yeah, 1999.

[Tim Ferriss]

I moved out right before the Thelma and Lewis car went off the cliff. I mean, I moved out to the bay area in 2000.

[Rich Barton]

It was crazy time.

[Tim Ferriss]

Impeccable timing.

[Rich Barton]

We all Thought we were the smartest people in the world. We really did. And we all thought those people in New York City just didn't. And then there was comeuppance. But Expedia was a really good business. I was working for Ballmer at the time, and I asked Steve for $100 million to spend on a television advertising campaign. Because I said, we are becoming. We can do this. We are in the pole position. We can build the biggest brand and travel. And Steve, like, laughed at me, like, no, we don't do that. I said, well, dogshit.com is going public right now at a billion dollar valuation. Wasn't quite that. It was like 500 million, which seemed big at the time. Really dumb, stupid stuff in my closet. Dot com was going public, put it on the web anyway. And I was like, the public markets will give us $100 million and it'll cost basically nothing. And so let's give this a try. Let me spin this thing out. It's a good HR experiment. Human resources experiment, too.

[Tim Ferriss]

Now just explain for folks, why does spinning something out make sense? What are the advantages of doing that to them and to you?

[Rich Barton]

Okay. I mean, the financial answer to that is unlocking value that is stuck in a company. And this happens a lot. That's kind of the most uninteresting one.

[Tim Ferriss]

Unlocking value, meaning it's not getting valued.

[Rich Barton]

By the shareholders as being part of Microsoft.

[Tim Ferriss]

Right. But if you take it public or do something outside of Microsoft, all of a sudden, it could attract its own.

[Rich Barton]

Investor base that were interested in that in particular. Okay? So if there's a conglomerate discount, generally speaking, in the public markets, where the more. More stuff you have in a big company, the less the individual businesses are valued. There was a period of American business history where conglomerates actually got a premium, like in this ge, the Jack Welch GE days, and Honeywell. And there were all these big conglomerates. And then the pendulum swung the other way. Microsoft could have cared less about the financial play, though. However, I pitched it mostly as an HR experiment. Microsoft was getting so big at the time that people could hide out in random corners of Microsoft. And as long as Windows nt, the operating system, succeeded, or Office, Microsoft Office succeeded, they could make a lot of money off their stock options. And so that's basically a compensation, accountability, disconnect. Okay? And so some of the best people at Microsoft there was this field of dreams, wild opportunity outside of Microsoft, even though it was the place everybody wanted to work at the time, probably still is. There were great people like, I'll Just say like me, like I would not have stayed. I would have gone out and started something on the outside because the opportunity was so great. And so Steve Ballmer understood this. Really well, got it.

[Tim Ferriss]

This was like a talent retention pitch.

[Rich Barton]

Sort of. Sort of. And so he's like, yeah, we'll take a flyer on it. And that was great. And Greg Maffei, who was the CFO at the time, he became my chairman and he was really supportive. You know, he and I still work together. He's been a great mentor to me. We took 150 people out of Microsoft. We gave them the choice if they wanted to stay or come all But I think two people, we had 150 of us all but two people decided to come. Take the adventure, give it a rip. I was 32 years old. 31, 32 years old.

[Tim Ferriss]

Now were you pitching those people yourself?

[Rich Barton]

Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

What was the pitch? Because it's going to be different than the pitch to Ballmer, right?

[Rich Barton]

Yeah, way different. I mean I had had this idea for a while and so the people I recruited, back to an earlier comment I made, the people that were on the team were the people who were the adventurers and the ones who wanted to. Who would have left. Okay. And so this was all about the adventure. The hardest sell was not the people, it was the spouses. And I remember several dinners like with an S1 for those who know it's an IPO document with our Expedia draft of the S lying on a dinner table at Wild Ginger in Seattle with a skeptical spouse. The S1 is highlighted and there's annotation. And I'm having to answer those were my toughest investors. Actually it worked out really well, maybe too well because Expedia was a real business. We actually were profitable and growing like crazy. Obviously digital travel agent made a lot of sense. And so when Thelma and Louise went off the cliff, as you say, we were already public and we'd gone to the moon. The stock price had gone to the moon. We crashed back down, but we had a real business and very shortly hopped back up on the climb and just climbed from there. We're very successful. Microsoft however, crashed with Thelma and Louise and it took 17 years for Microsoft to re achieve the same stock price it had in November of 99 when we spun Expedia out. So the HR experiment kind of failed.

[Tim Ferriss]

How long did it take Expedia to recover or to get back on the climb?

[Rich Barton]

Not 17 to re achieve the all time high.

[Tim Ferriss]

Probably a couple years, but a couple versus 17.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah, but the valuations were a bit nutty. Right. So it was obvious that Expedia was on the right path very quickly and there was kind of a flight to quality with Internet investors, which meant find the profitable recent IPOs, which there were not many, and let's invest in those. But we were one.

[Tim Ferriss]

Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. And I've known the team since 2008 or 2009. But prior to that I wish I had personally had Shopify in the early 2000s when I was running my own e commerce business. But the tools then were absolutely atrocious and I could only dream of a platform like Shopify. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or getting ready for your ipo, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run and grow your business without the struggle. And once you've reached your audience, Shopify has the Internet's best converting checkout to help you turn browsers into buyers. Shopify powers 10% of all E commerce in the United States and Shopify is truly a global force as the e commerce solution behind Allbirds, Rothys, Brooklinen and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across more than 170 countries. Plus Shopify's award winning help is there to support your success every step of the way. If you have questions, established in 2025 has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? So sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com Tim all lowercase go to shopify.com Tim to start selling today with Shopify. One more time shopify.com maybe this is not a good question, but I have to ask. How did you learn to pitch? How did you learn to pitch different stakeholders? Because you're talking about employees, Ballmer Gates, spouses. That is a skill set.

[Rich Barton]

Persuasion.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah. How did you develop that?

[Rich Barton]

It just must have been an innate thing that got a lot of exercise as I was growing up. I was an engineer by degree, but never a practicing engineer. I was an engineer because I liked technology. I was a geek.

[Tim Ferriss]

What type of engineer?

[Rich Barton]

Initially the story there answers the question. I was an industrial engineer theoretically, but I wanted to go study in Italy my junior year.

[Tim Ferriss]

Now industrial engineer would be like you end up going to a smart design or one of those types of companies or how are you thinking your path would.

[Rich Barton]

It's not a degree anymore. At Stanford it's called management science and engineering. And then there's kind of a symbolic systems things. The industrial engineering degree, which kind of sunsetted was really a kind of manufacturing efficiency. I got it. Okay. Optimization, simulation, lots of computer work going into the design of making things more efficiently.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah. Kind of like the operations research, finance department.

[Rich Barton]

Other places I did it just because it was a bachelor of science, not a bachelor of arts. And it was the most businessy of the engineering disciplines. At Stanford they called it imaginary engineering because the mechanical, the mechanical and the electrical folks didn't respect us, probably deservedly because we were more interested in business. But anyway, I did this because I had all these other interests and skills around persuasion and people and entrepreneurialism and.

[Tim Ferriss]

Already at that point, undergrad already.

[Rich Barton]

Already as a kid I had all that. I probably was a good pitch person already, but had a lot of support and exercise of that.

[Tim Ferriss]

You mentioned Italy in passing. So we're going to come to Italy. But how did you get that exercise when you were younger?

[Rich Barton]

I went to Italy. So I got off the industrial engineering track and Stanford was awesome. I came back and I like, well, you can't get an accredited degree now. I'm like, I don't care. And Nina's dad was a professor at the time and he said, well, at Stanford you can self design an engine engineering degree, so let's just design one for you. So I designed one. So my degree is called general engineering Industrial economics. Anyway, unlike a lot of kids today, I worked real summer jobs. My kids generally did. Actually. My kids have worked real summer jobs.

[Tim Ferriss]

So we were talking like busboy.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah, I mean my daughter. I'm just thinking of what their jobs are. My daughter spent. You're going to know this place. After Gurney's was redone, it became like this club scene. This is out in Montana.

[Tim Ferriss]

Once it got fancied up. Took away the day pack passes for the locals. You bastards.

[Rich Barton]

Anyway, yep, yep. So she was. It was after her sophomore year in college, I think. Refresh. Yeah, sophomore year. And I'm like, honey, you've got a place to stay out in the Hamptons. You don't need to get on the track. The track that every smart kid is supposed to take. You don't need to do that. Why don't you get real experience? So she came and lived in our house out in Montauk and was the. Who's the person that stands at the counter when.

[Tim Ferriss]

The hostess.

[Rich Barton]

The hostess at the club part of Gurney.

[Tim Ferriss]

Oh God.

[Rich Barton]

Okay. Where it was like $2,000 tables.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

That's quite an education job.

[Rich Barton]

It's an amazing human nature. Human nature job.

[Tim Ferriss]

Oh, my God.

[Rich Barton]

She had a crazy, successful, interesting learning experience. Yeah. And we had fun watching it happen. And we also got table set. Anyway, when I was a kid, I was the ice cream man. So I ran my own ice cream business. This is in Connecticut. I went to high school in Connecticut. I learned how to do house painting as a crew member of a buddy of mine. And then after one year doing that, like, well, I can bid the jobs myself, you know, and I can hire a crew. And so I had my own painting company for a couple years, which was hugely profitable for a kid. I mean, I made a ton. I had to pay for all my expenses at college, not my tuition. My parents covered the tuition, but I had to pay all my other expenses. So making back then, I would make like $15,000 or $20,000 summer painting. And that was a boatload of money.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

And so I had run my own businesses.

[Tim Ferriss]

Got it. All right.

[Rich Barton]

I knew I liked.

[Tim Ferriss]

And why did you go to Italy at all?

[Rich Barton]

Why did I want to go when I was in school? I have no Italian heritage, as you can probably tell, but I went to Italy and Greece when I was in high school with my Latin teacher and just had these awesome kind of kid high school trips. And while I was in Italy, I literally fell in love with the whole vibe. The food, the wine, the girls, the family culture. The kind of work is not that as important. And I kind of fell in love with it and kept going back. So I went to study. And then after I sold Expedia to Barry Diller, we were public, and Barry Diller bought it, and we had three little kids, and I was leaving after Barry bought. I wanted to give space to the next team, and I said, let's go back to Italy. And so we moved to Florence for a year after we sold Expedia. In fact, Nina, who I was talking about before, she was living there, married to a European guy, and I'd gone to Stanford there when I was a junior, and I kept in touch with the woman who ran the Stanford program, Linda. And so we kind of moved to Florence and went back to school and learned how to paint and started road biking. Anyway, so I love the whole Italy vibe.

[Tim Ferriss]

Let's take a closer look at the Barry Diller transaction.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

How did that come to be? And what were the most important aspects of that deal? Could be deal structure, could be timing, could be anything. But how does that even happen?

[Rich Barton]

Yeah. So Expedia had been public for maybe four years and had become very successful and pretty big, pretty highly valued in the market. And I think it came about, I mean Barry was kind of interested. He was building a interactive conglomerate called iac, right. USA Networks.

[Tim Ferriss]

And then I think he owns most of the popular dating apps, things like that. I mean IAC buys a lot of stuff.

[Rich Barton]

Yep. And then spun it out as match.com and, and he was post his media career. He got into interactive media and he started buying stuff. And a guy, his kind of key corporate development strategist and all around great fricking guy who worked for him was a young guy named Dara Khazrshahi.

[Tim Ferriss]

Okay, I recognize that name.

[Rich Barton]

I may be miscrediting or giving you too much credit Dara, but probably not. I think this was Dara's idea was consolidate the players in the online travel space that it was already big, but it was going to be much bigger. And Microsoft was the majority owner but didn't have anybody on the board. Even 65% of the company didn't have anybody on the board. They knew me and they trusted Greg Maffei who had left as CFO running company.

[Tim Ferriss]

Unbelievable level of trust.

[Rich Barton]

It just didn't matter to Microsoft. Yeah, I guess just didn't matter just.

[Tim Ferriss]

As a percentage of the total.

[Rich Barton]

And at some point somebody came in, I won't name names. Somebody came in and said we need to focus at Microsoft, we need to get things focused. We're too scattered. And an easy thing to do was to take a big offer from Barry Diller. And so they did. It was a bit of a two step deal. The IAC and Dara and Barry bought Microsoft 65% and then maybe. So we were public but captive to IAC and Barry Diller was my chairman for a while and then maybe eight months later bid for the, for the rest of it and consolidated it down. I think they kind of pushed us to buy the number two player which was hotels.com and so we mashed those things together and I moved on at that point.

[Tim Ferriss]

So when in that journey, the Expedia journey, did you feel the highest high? For instance, I would imagine when you were working summers and on your way through high school and college, there was probably a moment, I'm just guessing here, but when you had your first big summer with that painting gig and made 15, 20 grand, my God, you must have felt rich.

[Rich Barton]

We went to the High Line. You know the High li is. Yeah. Took the crew to the High Line.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah. So with the Expedia journey. Was it the tail end with the Barry Dillard transaction? No, no.

[Rich Barton]

Because there's mixed emotions there. Right?

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

And I didn't control the company. I learned that henceforth I would control the companies that I started. But no, I mean, that was great, and it made sense and it created value. No, the highest highs were probably around the spin out and the ipo. There's kind of a funny IPO story that my wife Sarah, was pregnant with our first child, Will, during the roadshow. Okay, so this is November of 1999. It's really pitching to the buy side. So it's pitching to the mutual funds. To the mutual funds, to the investors.

[Tim Ferriss]

Okay, got it.

[Rich Barton]

And it used to be, I think now is a lot more on zoom, which it should be, by the way. But it was a rite of passage back then for companies going public, and a lot more companies went public then. And it was 15 cities over three weeks, five meetings a day, six meetings a day. Chartered private plane with banker team and CFO and CEO zipping around the country, exhausting and exhilarating and repetitive and kind of boring. Also really fun. Anyway, so Sarah was pregnant, and she wasn't due until December, but we had been on the road for two and a half weeks already. We'd filled the book 30 times over, which means we had a lot more demand. We knew the offering was going to be successful. These were back in the days when the offerings were a little bit managed to the advantage of the inside banker people. But anyway, that's a different story. So it was going to work. The IPO was going to work. And I called the roadshow off a day early. I flew back to Seattle exhausted. I get in bed at like one in the morning after getting home. Sarah's super pregnant. I get a tap on the shoulder at 3am and she said, she's an OB, so she knows what's going on. Although that's not always the case, but she knows what's going on. And she said to me, honey, this is like IPO day. If our baby is born on the IPO day, do I really have to name him Expedia? Which is what I promised the team. And then we went to the hospital. And while the IPO was happening, my son was being born. My oldest was being born. And so that was actually the high point right there.

[Tim Ferriss]

Wow. All right, now we're tracking the path. So now you're painting a vase of fruit in Florence, living the life of a naked.

[Rich Barton]

It was a naked woman. It was life drawing. There we Go. Charcoal life drawing.

[Tim Ferriss]

There we go.

[Rich Barton]

All right.

[Tim Ferriss]

Charcoal drawing of naked lady changing poses every 10 minutes.

[Rich Barton]

What could be a better way to learn art?

[Tim Ferriss]

What a lovely way to learn art. And living the life of a refined gentleman. Pasta and wine and furniture and road biking. Little cap, maybe.

[Rich Barton]

Little cap, of course. No helmet. Little. Taking Italian classes in the morning.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, yeah. So here and there. Sounds like a great life.

[Rich Barton]

It was fun.

[Tim Ferriss]

So how the hell does Zillow happen? Yeah, do you start getting fidgety? I mean, what happens there?

[Rich Barton]

Yeah, I was still pretty young, so probably 03. I was like 35, 36. And I was hoping. Art, music, thought I might write books, whatever, find the next chapter because I really didn't need to. I had enough to take care of myself for the rest of my life. But something I discovered, I was still on a few boards, including the IAC board, which had Bottixmedia and Netflix, where I'd been on the board since like 2000. And still, I'm still on that board and a couple others. So I was still involved in the business world from a kind of long. In a long distance way though I had an amazing time learning experience. I didn't find my next calling and I was still really curious about the business world and what was going on. So I knew that I had. We weren't going to stay in Italy, we were going to move back and I was going to do something else, which is great to learn, you know. And we did did in Florence for a little over a year. We spent a few months skiing with the family, which was really fun in the mountains.

[Tim Ferriss]

And you came to the US I am going on a hunting expedition. Did you already have an inkling of what you were going to do?

[Rich Barton]

A little bit. I didn't know if I really had another startup in me because I knew how much work it was and I'd adjusted my life to prioritize some things I hadn't prioritized when I was younger, like living well and family and body and mind. And I was very curious in all kinds of different things. So the venture capital opportunity was available to me to go be a GP at a venture capital firm and I was kind of headed in that direction. And then my Zillow co founder, Lloyd Frank, who was a guy I went to Stanford with and did Expedia with, he was still at Expedia and he got fired by our good friend Eric, who was running Expedia at the time, probably for good reason. Awesome guy, really smart.

[Tim Ferriss]

I won't follow up on that.

[Rich Barton]

A little bit. We don't need to. It's a fun story, but Lloyd got fired. And Lloyd's like, wait, wait, wait. Hey, don't move to California. Let's just sit in an office and brainstorm for a while. And so we did. We did. And we went through a bunch of ideas. He went off on one that was kind of Dropbox. Before Dropbox, it was obvious that the kind of cloud storage thing was going to be huge. And I said, go figure that out. See what it's cost. And so he disappeared for a couple weeks that we were kind of sharing an office and came back. He's like, yeah, 100% this is going to work. But there's going to be no profit. There's no profit. Like this is going to be. Microsoft and Google are going to give this.

[Tim Ferriss]

Where were you guys brainstorming?

[Rich Barton]

We were brainstorming in his dad's. His dad was a stockbroker. He had an extra couple rooms in his office and he just gave them to us.

[Tim Ferriss]

New York City.

[Rich Barton]

No, no, this is Seattle.

[Tim Ferriss]

Oh, Seattle.

[Rich Barton]

Seattle, yeah, yeah. So we're in Seattle because we didn't sell our house in Seattle when we moved to Italy. We'd moved back to our house, but we were looking for a new house. We were going to maybe move to California or something in Seattle. Our family was getting bigger. And so we went through a series of ideas. And then at one point I said, hey, you know, back when we started Expedia, we also wrote a plan for an electronic stockbroker matchmaking service. All the classified categories, basically, and all the kind of agent categories were all obvious that we were on a little team of people researching big ideas inside of Microsoft. How would the web change industry? And so we had all these plans. Expedia was one of the ideas. There was a. Basically to create a digital real estate marketplace. And I dusted that off and I said, hey, what about that? I mean, you're looking for a house right now. It's really freaking hard. This is 2003 and I can't get the price of a home online. I can't even get the address. Because the industry had been very good at defending their special data, making it opaque. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we were the power to the people guys. We were the guys who freed all that information for the regular traveler. And we were like, well, wants to be power to the people here too, right? And we couldn't believe that it hadn't changed. And so at that, that was the dawn of Zillow. Yeah. So he convinced me not to move and I said, well, I'll be CEO, but I'm not going to work that hard. He's like, don't worry, I'll do it. Just be CEO. I need you to be CEO because you have to raise money and stuff.

[Tim Ferriss]

The oldest trick in the book.

[Rich Barton]

So maybe I am a 4 hour work kind of guy. I said, look, I don't want to do it full time. You can use my name of course. He was like, yeah, sure, whatever. You do whatever you want. Rich, knowing I'd be sucked in, let the line out. He totally managed me. Yeah, I think I'm in charge now. Lloyd was in charge.

[Tim Ferriss]

So when you say you're brainstorming, right. There's an entire universe of possibilities. What constraints or criteria are you applying to that brainstorming? What are you looking for?

[Rich Barton]

I think most great idea is that there's just a big obvious problem. I like consumer stuff. And so that means the way I interface with the world, the way we all interface with the world is rife with problems. And all those problems are business opportunities. And when you see a particularly big, oh my God, why is it this way? Those are probably the bigger opportunities. And it's almost as simple as that. We identified this big dislocation. We knew 100% that there would be a leading digital real estate marketplace in.

[Tim Ferriss]

The US at some point.

[Rich Barton]

At some point.

[Tim Ferriss]

Inevitability.

[Rich Barton]

Inevitability and business model. Who knows, who cares? It's giant, it's a big pond. And so my business criteria for doing stuff is is it a big pond and are there good fishermen?

[Tim Ferriss]

Right. Because the travel CD ROM wasn't big enough. Right.

[Rich Barton]

You said small pond.

[Tim Ferriss]

100 million. That's the entire market. Plus you're not going to carry a briefcase that you're doing weight training with inadvertently problems to read the thing.

[Rich Barton]

A lot of entrepreneurs make this mistake of identifying a really big problem, but it is just a small opportunity. And then there are ones where I know Bill Gurley was on the pod a couple of years ago talking about the Uber thing. What could be the insight you were involved there? A little bit.

[Tim Ferriss]

I was one of the first three advisors when it was called Uber Cab llc. Yeah. Way back in the day.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

And for people who didn't pick up Dara. Yeah, sorry, Dara is the CEO, current CEO of Uber.

[Rich Barton]

He was the CEO of Expedia after, you know, two. After I left as well. Anyway, a lot of people make the mistake, is what I was going to say of identifying a real problem. But it's just too small. Uber kind of to some, a lot of people looked too small because it was a black car tam total addressable market. But the insight that you and Girly and Travis and I guess JCAL and others had was that actually, no, it was going to take not just the black car market, but taxi transportation and.

[Tim Ferriss]

Then ultimately more, it can expand the total addressable market.

[Rich Barton]

That's right. Car ownership, just transportation. And of course, obviously it's beautifully played out that way. Took a little while to see, but it's amazing. Anyway, so big pond, good fishermen. After identifying the big problem, and I guess that was the guiding thing here, I knew Lloyd and I knew there would be a digital real estate marketplace. We didn't know what the business would be, we didn't know how we were going to play. And we started poking at ideas for attracting audiences with software. And we made a couple of big mistakes before we landed on the solution. Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

What were some of the big mistakes and how costly, how risky were they?

[Rich Barton]

Pretty small venture numbers at that point and Lloyd and I were funding it ourselves. We put the first 5 million bucks total in with a couple of friends. So costly, but not that costly. But the first idea we were.

[Tim Ferriss]

Side note also what Garrett Camp did with Uber early on, he did too.

[Rich Barton]

He wrote, I didn't realize that, yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

There was self funding for a while. It wasn't expensive, it wasn't overly expensive.

[Rich Barton]

But it's a good way to go as a second time founder or a non first time founder if you actually have some resources because you end up with more of the company down the road. I love Gurley. We're really close. But by the time Gurley or the venture capitalists come in, if they're writing the first check, they're going to end up with a big chunk of the company, which is great, especially if you get somebody like Bill. Okay. But we were able to do it ourselves. We were enamored of Google. Everyone was at the time. The magic business model that they sort of discovered or innovated, iterated on, that came from another company was the AdWords, you know, the digital auction based marketplace.

[Tim Ferriss]

You said it came from another company. Yeah, I might not know that wrinkle.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah, it did.

[Tim Ferriss]

Meaning they acquired something or they.

[Rich Barton]

I'm thinking, what's the guy's name who did the startup incubator factory? Gross.

[Tim Ferriss]

Oh, Bill Gross.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah. Yeah, it was. I mean, I may be getting this wrong.

[Tim Ferriss]

Am I making this Idealab?

[Rich Barton]

He did Idealab. There was a lot of companies kind of Sort of spun out of that. But one of them was a search engine whose name I'm forgetting. We can, you know, look it up later. And. But it was the whole basis of the search engine was, oh, wow.

[Tim Ferriss]

So did Google acquire that or they just be in a better mousetrap?

[Rich Barton]

I think the latter, but I'm not an expert. All right, regardless, I don't want to speak out of term.

[Tim Ferriss]

We'll put the story in the show notes.

[Rich Barton]

Okay. Right. There's a good story there, I'm sure. Why I brought it up was we were enamored of auctions. Auctions have huge geek appeal for mathie idealists. And we were like, well, obviously the US Housing market should be at auction, and that's the most efficient mechanism for price discovery, which of course it is. And we were like, okay, so that's our business. We're going to auction homes. And what we learned trying to auction a home that our buddy Gordon got us kind of on consignment was that, well, two things. One, to have an auction work, you kind of need a real time liquid market. Okay, duh. Okay. So you need all the bidders there at the same time. Okay, well, the housing market doesn't work that way. It's just, you know, it's a long period of time. You want to show it to a lot of bidders. That didn't work. The second thing, which is obvious, is, and to all those innovators out there, if you have to educate your customer on how to buy the thing that you're doing, it's like a radically new way to do it from decades or hundreds of years of ingrained human behavior. It's a pretty heavy lift. It's got to be super duper simple, obvious, and ten times better than the current way. And just. We didn't check any of those boxes. But in pursuit of price discovery, we found the Zestimate, which was our killer feature. And the visual on the Zestimate that's in my head, that kind of popped in our collective heads. On the home auction web experiment was a real time estimated value algorithmically driven as your Google Maps, zooming over neighborhoods, looking. We wanted prices on every roof because everything should have a price.

[Tim Ferriss]

And the timing of that is pretty wild, right? And it's just like how things line up because, I mean, how long had the aerial view been around prior to you guys?

[Rich Barton]

Short.

[Tim Ferriss]

It was short short.

[Rich Barton]

And there was no iPhone. There were no smartphones. But it was obvious. I was like, whoa. And then I also had in my head, homes are for American homeowners, oftentimes their largest asset and the bulk of their wealth. And people care a lot about it. So I knew they wanted to know the value. I knew that was catnip. Okay. I knew. I. In my gut, I knew that was. We did. The team knew it was candy. And I'm like, oh, it's an investment. And so let's plot the zestimate, the home value like a stock chart. And so the aerial view with the numbers, any home's value laid out like a stock chart. Those were the two things. And when we discovered that, we were kind of off to the races.

[Tim Ferriss]

Okay, so at the time, was it just rentable infrastructure? Aws. You get it going, you launch, and it's up to the right. Just a nice, smooth rocket launch. Is that what happened?

[Rich Barton]

AWS didn't exist.

[Tim Ferriss]

I know. You knew that. You baited me.

[Rich Barton]

No, dude, man. This was like server in a closet. Yeah, this was server in a closet.

[Tim Ferriss]

You forbade Christmas lights or something. Like, you're, like, preserving electricity and compute power and all this stuff.

[Rich Barton]

I don't remember that. I remember, but David.

[Tim Ferriss]

Things of lore.

[Rich Barton]

David Beitel, who was our CTO at the time and still is and was CTO at Expedia with me, too. He may have told that story somewhere. So it may actually be right. Yeah. I believe I remember our launch blog post with Garrett, who worked for David, doing the what's the professor?

[Tim Ferriss]

It's Doc from Back to the Future, 3.2 gigawatts, whatever.

[Rich Barton]

Because we launched and millions of people showed up because Walt Mossberg, who's the equivalent. Is there any equivalent of Walt Mossberg now?

[Tim Ferriss]

No, it's like the Oprah of tech at the time. Right?

[Rich Barton]

I mean, God. And Walt loved it. And Walt published and millions of people came on day one, and of course, the server in the closet tipped over for a while, and it was painful. But Amy Butinsky, who was running our marketing at the time, said, don't worry, we'll make lemonade out of lemons. And the headline the next day in the San Francisco Chronicle was, house porn site Zillow launches and falls over because it's so popular or something. You know, something like that. And she's like, yeah, that's going to be good press. Anyway, I'm a big believer in the product being the most important part of the marketing mix, if that makes sense to you. Gurley actually challenged us when we launched. He was on the board. Benchmark and TCV were our A round funders, and he was on the Board at the time. And we had had kind of a spend advertising dollars mindset at Expedia because we really needed to grow exposure to the brand. And Gurley said, well, what if we didn't have any marketing budget? And that launched? We were like, no way, you can't do that. But that launch, that made us think a lot more creatively about the features that we built, the way we built them and then the way we PR communicated them. And I've since developed a pretty good playbook around, I guess what I would call provocation marketing. When you have really provocative feature that you know people are going to feel emotional about one way or the other and they're going to talk about it, you're onto something.

[Tim Ferriss]

What are some aspects of that toolkit or the Playbook?

[Rich Barton]

Yeah, I mean having data, having a stream of data that people are interested in at Glassdoor, which I did with Bob Homan, who was at Expedia with me as well, Glassdoor is another example of that. When you have constantly changing data that people are interested in, you can almost think about feeding that data to hungry consumers in a Bloomberg like way. And so the Playbook that Amy kind of put together was building a PR data distribution infrastructure down to the board.

[Tim Ferriss]

Remind me who Amy is.

[Rich Barton]

Amy was our marketing chief at Zillow. She's still on the board today. And she was really creative about recognizing that there's an infinite news hole for housing data at local newspaper level once upon a time. And if you could wire that up to just feed, constantly feed the endless appetite. Housing is just an important topic. Right. And there's always space in the paper for a story on housing and changing prices. And so we set up a mechanism to feed that data which was a terrific brand builder for us. Rather than spending ad money and then just having this estimate be so provocative. Like high school boyfriend's house philanthropist development team that are trying to figure out who's a good target, whatever. It's a lot of applications, Lots of applications.

[Tim Ferriss]

I know you had a lot of fans. I think the Arizona Attorney General was a fan.

[Rich Barton]

That's a deep cut. Wow.

[Tim Ferriss]

No, but this is of interest to me because there's opposition also. Oh yeah, right. And a lot of. I don't think they were actual ulcers, but just the roller coaster ride that I was also on with Uber from a regulatory mobbed up local. Fill in the blank perspective. It was just non stop battles. And that was just part of the deal. Right. If you want.

[Rich Barton]

And actually part of the playbook.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

Honestly, all right. It's the same provocation, marketing. It's the exact same thing. It's exactly the same. Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

So what happened with you guys?

[Rich Barton]

Yeah, I mean, you know, we were provocative to some of the industry players who were big lobbyists.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

You know the taxi commission in Uber's case.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

In our case, A lot of the real estate professional associations, they were not thrilled.

[Tim Ferriss]

A lot of voters, they were not. They were not thrilled.

[Rich Barton]

They're not thrilled, or they think they're not thrilled. They don't realize till later that it could be helpful. But. But whatever. Yes, they were initially provoked. No industry that likes change. Most people don't like change. I'm one of the people that loves change, but a lot of people, most people don't. And so we were seen as a. We were.

[Tim Ferriss]

You may like change when you're the instigator of the change.

[Rich Barton]

Well, that's, you know, awesome. It leaves me more open to change coming from the outside, too, though. I do believe. I do believe. And I. And I. And I. I mean, obviously this is just human nature, right? Yeah. But the equivalent of the taxi commission in the Uber case was these real estate professionals, and a lot of places we had them lobbying to have us outlawed. They're not licensed. How can they make an appraisal, Whatever. Whatever thing they're going to make up? We knew we were on really strong legal ground, and so we weren't so worried about that. But the strategy for combating that, that resistance was literally probably the same thing you guys did at Uber, which was we knew the legislators, state legislators, not to mention federal legislators, were big fans of the site and the service.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

Okay. And so all we had to do was make sure we just activated that latent love for the product itself and made it obvious that this way is the future way. And the lobbyists got nowhere and it was overcome. Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

In the case of Uber. I don't want to make this overly about Uber, but also turns out when people have something that is incredibly convenient and useful, they do not want it taken away.

[Rich Barton]

No.

[Tim Ferriss]

And if elected officials like the service or are even ambivalent about the service, they do love getting reelected. And man, oh, man, if there are a lot of your constituents using that app and you take it away, they're not going to be super happy about it.

[Rich Barton]

Power to the people, baby. I mean, you build magic stuff for masses of consumers that they want to talk about with their friends, unprompted, on the sidelines of the soccer game or what have you. Have you tried Uber. Have you tried Zillow? Have you tried Expedia? Whatever. It's like you're definitely onto something. And having popular support, as we're learning politically right now is having big populist support is ultimately where the power is derived. Sometimes you can go too far. We don't need to talk about that. Of course you can go too far. And in fact it may be that you need to go too far to establish where the frontier is.

[Tim Ferriss]

All right, well, I can't not take the bait on that one. What does going too far look like?

[Rich Barton]

I was thinking specifically Uber, but.

[Tim Ferriss]

Oh, all right.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah, but because it did, you know, in some cities, municipality or Airbnb, you.

[Tim Ferriss]

Can push too hard.

[Rich Barton]

You can push too hard and learn some lessons about how much leash you're going to be given by the popular support. Because it does tip into a point where, like with Airbnb, you know, this is not a story. I know this guy's a little bit. But it's not a story I'm intimate familiar with, nor was I an early investor or anything. But you know, they did piss off some homeowners, you know, in certain cities, not just the hotel owners.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

And you know, so they found the line and I think they've managed it really, really well because they lead from the heart. You know, I think other companies may have not obviously led from the heart and had difficulty at Zillow. Our job was a little easier also with those battles.

[Tim Ferriss]

I remember there's were early on a number of locations that were incredibly important. Not just from a ride volume perspective, but from a precedent setting perspective. So if you win a few of those precedent setting battles, then you don't necessarily have to do a full frontal assault on the next 10 locations because people have gotten the message. You can be a little more diplomatic about it, which people figure out over time.

[Rich Barton]

But then there's the next country and then whatever. Anyway, there's always something. But provocation marketing with a heart with the end consumer's best interests in mind, that's a winner.

[Tim Ferriss]

So if you were teaching a class, maybe you already have. I have no idea. Related to provocation marketing. All right, there you go. You get to choose. You can go back to your alma mater, wherever it might be you're teaching a class. What would other elements of the class be? Other resources, principles, anything at all.

[Rich Barton]

While I try to figure out a structure here on the fly to give a couple other examples of stuff that I've been involved with. So I co founded Glassdoor, which many people out there May know. And our provocation data marketing feature was how much money do people make? Okay, not individuals, but the product manager at XYZ Co. Or the developer or the, the customer service representative. And our model was we knew that salaries was kind of a little bit taboo for a lot of people. So it was inherently secret and provocative. Okay. And then Robert Homan, who is my co founder and the team, they had a data collection problem because it was ultimately user generated content. People would need to share their salaries in a way that we believed in order to get enough data to provide anything interesting to everybody else. And so their innovation, after kind of hand cranking it with survey, their innovation was give to get. You show me yours, I'll show you mine. Very good.

[Tim Ferriss]

That's very clever.

[Rich Barton]

Very clever. And say, hey, I'll give you a little taste. But if you want to see any more data, you got to share your salary and your title and your company. We promise you'll be anonymous, you know, and do a company review.

[Tim Ferriss]

Have people screwed that up where they're the only person in that position? I guess that has to be.

[Rich Barton]

And we have protocols for that. Yeah, we did have protocols for that, but it worked, really. And we also then solicited feedback on what it's like to work at the company. And you know, CEOs are kind of public figures. So okay, we're going to let you review the CEO performance.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

And we knew all those things would provoke. We knew some CEOs would go crazy. So there's another example. While I'm formulating a framework. Another one is with another former Expedia guy, Mark Britton. We founded a company called Avvo, which was in the legal space. And we decided to rate attorneys systematically. Rate attorneys. This had never happened before. It was just kind of like Trip Advisor for attorneys. You get kind of TripAdvisor for anything. Right. This was. These are business models that are well trodden now, but these were kind of innovative back in the day. And of course we were going to get sued because we were rating attorneys.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, definitely a great way to kick the hornet's nest.

[Rich Barton]

Some investors when we were raising money, I remember traveling around doing the sandhill shuffle with Mark and I remember some people saying, well, is this legal? You're going to get. Can you rate people? You're going to get sued. You know, I'm not going to invest. And we were like, yeah, we're going to get sued. You know. Did you see Die Hard? You remember Die Hard where the German terrorist leader is waiting for the Last lock to open. And he needs the power to go down in order to be able to get the bearer bonds out of the Nakatomi Plaza safe. Okay. And the people are like, how is he going to get the power to go down? And he's like. He said, ladies and gentlemen, I'll give you the FBI. And they came in on those things and the FBI, the playbook said, all right, cut the power. Anyway, that was exactly the launch strategy of Ava. It was like, here come the suits. I'll give you the FBI anyways. Perfect. Because it created all kinds of noise I'm struggling with.

[Tim Ferriss]

Well, here, let's go with the lawsuits. All right, so the sandhill shuffle for people who don't get that reference. So Sandhill Road, if you could imagine going to. This is not gonna be the best comparison, but you go to Kuwait and there's a shopping mall with Balenciaga and Prada and all the F brands, all the aspirational brands. Well, if there was such a place, but it was all the highest end venture capitalists, that would be Sandhill Road. And now it's more distributed. But still it's a thing, right?

[Rich Barton]

Oh, yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

If you go stay at the Rosewood and you're right around the corner, that's got its own stories. That's a strange place, but fantastic. Fantastic.

[Rich Barton]

Love that, love that bar.

[Tim Ferriss]

And then you have you name it, right? Everybody's there, all the big players. And so that's the sandhill shuffle. So why not be afraid of lawsuits? What did you guys know that the guys who said, nuh, I'm not going to touch that with a 10 foot pole.

[Rich Barton]

Well, the founder, CEO, Mark Britton, was my general counsel at Expedia, and he worked securities Exchange Commission prior to that. He was a real attorney. And the way we did it, we were 100% convinced of our legal grounds.

[Tim Ferriss]

People could still just consume so much energy, right?

[Rich Barton]

No doubt. So we raised money to deal with that. But we knew it was going to be pretty cheap lawsuits and we could provide most of the legal billing ourselves anyway. And so it would be cheaper than hiring some fancy firm. We were convinced. And after we won the first few suits, they lost steam. The lawyers lost steam on suing. So it caused some venture capitalists to not do it. But the more kind of disruptive oriented folks were like, yeah, great.

[Tim Ferriss]

So what happened with avva?

[Rich Barton]

It did pretty well. It did pretty well. We had trouble. So in a kind of TripAdvisor for legal sort of way, it did really well. Ultimately, these kind of trip advisory Digital middlemen who were kind of SEO on one side, collecting Google search traffic on one side and trying to monetize leads on the other. You know, as time wore on, a lot of those business models got somewhat disintermediated. And so the protection against that is usually to go down into the workflow of the transactions of the industry, which is, say, what we've done at Zillow or what Expedia does.

[Tim Ferriss]

So could you explain that just one more time? And maybe an example would be helpful. So let's just say there's a TripAdvisor for X. Like you said, they're kind of harvesting traffic on the SEO side. So their pages are engineered in such a way.

[Rich Barton]

That's right.

[Tim Ferriss]

Maybe also using ad spend to drive traffic to these reviews, which are then monetized on some level.

[Rich Barton]

That's right. Some people can't see by selling those leads out the other side of the marketplace. So literally, a lead middleman.

[Tim Ferriss]

Got it. Yeah, lead middleman. So how would they get intermediated?

[Rich Barton]

Michael Porter Five Forces would say, look, if you have an overdependency on any supply of customers, you're strategically exposed, for obvious reasons. If you have an overdependency on any supplier, you're strategically exposed. And so Business Strategy 101 says, diversify your sources of customers and your sources of supply so that nobody gets too much leverage over you.

[Tim Ferriss]

Okay, well, also, it's like a single point of failure, right?

[Rich Barton]

Absolutely. Oop.

[Tim Ferriss]

Factory went down because of xyz. That's a problem.

[Rich Barton]

We're dealing with that right now in the country because Covid discovered that we had lots of supply chain single points of failure. Anyway, we don't need to sidetrack on that. So in that example, if you're primarily getting your traffic from Google paid or free, you're developing a serious dependency on Google. And Google, of course, in its own search for increased value, starts looking vertical, which means down into your business. And so people probably noticed over the years that Google started doing reviews, and then they did their own math. So they're doing their Yelp reviews and their TripAdvisor reviews. And then they started doing airline schedules and hotel bookings and restaurant reservations. And, and, and, and so when the big guy that you're getting all your customers from starts taking a more than passing interest in your business model because they want to capture more value, you better figure out something else.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

Okay. So strategically speaking, my defense against that in my digital marketplaces has been twofold. One, build a giant brand that customers know and love and therefore most of your traffic and customers comes directly to your app insights. Okay? You have to have a brand to do that in order to have power. And then two, look down your funnel and look into the workflow of the business you're in, be it travel or real estate or legal or jobs for the verticals that I've done stuff in and make sure you become digitally integral to the workflow. You're building tools for the industry, ultimately maybe even doing the transactions and having a platform for the transactions. And that in a nutshell is what Zillow's long term strategy is. We're basically building a super app, a one stop shop application for anybody who's renting or buying soup to nuts. Everything integrated, all the professionals plug in and workflow and that we have a big brand, we source almost all of our customers directly, not all, but most. And we're embedded in the workflow solving real customer problems and the business is right and growing.

[Tim Ferriss]

All right, so I haven't forgotten about the provocation marketing class. However, I think this is a great place to buy you some more time and talk about naming.

[Rich Barton]

Okay.

[Tim Ferriss]

Oh, how do you name companies?

[Rich Barton]

You saw that live post. I played around with blogging. Like all of us, it really stuck with some and it didn't with others. I probably only had like 10 posts on my blog, but one of them was naming. Because I've had a lot of fun naming companies and I gave advice on naming. I think the title of the post, the site it's on is called hopperanddropper.com, which is a fly fishing term which nobody's gone to. So I only had 20 visitors. Tim, being one lucky 21, I have a few rules about naming. First, when you're trying to brand a company, if you're building a consumer brand especially, you have kind of two broad ways you can go the easy way and the hard way. And I'll forgive the four hour workweek and the four hour body, but I'll tell you that there are no shortcuts. You take the shortcut to the long road. My coach, Jimmy says, anyway, the easy way is if you're building a travel site to call it hotels.com, airlinetickets.com, you name it. Every category has a literal word, dot com. And the advantages to that are it's easy to explain to people what you do. And the disadvantages to that are you don't own any brand equity because you can't own a word that previously exists. And so you're non distinct and non distinctive. There's an in between way which is to use an existing word but make a new application of it. Apple Computer, Amazon.com and that's viable. But you have to build a new definition for that word, which those companies obviously did successfully the hard way. And the best way, I think for consumers is to make up a word. Make up a word, which is super hard because you have to tell people what the word means. You have to define it for them. But once you do, you own that word. The definition of that word is yours and only yours. And so I like the hard path because I like building brands and with provocation marketing, I think I can get a big audience early which begins to familiarize people with the brand. So. So I was confident in my ability to, my team's really ability to do that. Okay, so now when you're making up a word, what do you do? And I think this is what you're referring to. Okay, so high point Scrabble letters. Do you play Scrabble?

[Tim Ferriss]

It's been a minute, but yes, I've played Scrabble.

[Rich Barton]

Okay, you know that there are different point numbers on each letter as you play Scrabble. And do you remember what the high point ones are?

[Tim Ferriss]

I don't.

[Rich Barton]

Okay, they're z is 10, x is 10. That's the highest point you can get. A, E, I, o, u are 1. Here's why. Q is 10 too. Here's why. Z, X and Q are super rare letters. A, E, I, O, U are super common. And so rule number one is pick the super rare letters. And pick them because they're very distinctive. They jump off a page when you read. They stick in people's brains in a way that's not crowded. So. So all my stuff has Z's and X's and some Q's actually too. Rule number two, fewer syllables is better than more. I kind of learned this lesson with Expedia. Expedia was too many syllables. It's worked out fine. We've overcome that. The company's overcome that now. But in hindsight was a lot. I liked it because of rule number three, which is it was evocative of positive things. Speed Expedition. So it said adventure and speed. And that all felt good in that word. But fewer syllables. I think two syllables is the sweet spot because I also want it to be a good dog name. So if the word could be a good dog name, you're onto something like you can call for it Zillow. Anyway, another one is it can be Turned into a verb pretty easily. So pick a word that can be turned into a verb. So probably the dog name. And verb probably means it ends in a vowel sound. And then the last one is people. Double letters. And palindromes are good too. So anything that is unique, a unique word form, double letters, people remember, they jump off the page. And palindromes are words that are the same forward and backward spelled. Right. So just interesting, interesting words.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah. Anyway, that's my handbook, palindrome. Like my friend Mike Kim back in the day, I was struggling to think.

[Rich Barton]

Of when I couldn't pull one on the fly.

[Tim Ferriss]

Well done, Taco Cat.

[Rich Barton]

It's a good game. So you're in the game. That is a funny game, isn't it?

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

So stupid. That was so good.

[Tim Ferriss]

So I'm thinking of double letters. So there are names. Expedia had X has an X X speed. Good connotation with pre existing words or concepts. Maybe one syllable too long. Then you got Zillow. Zillow, that's sweet spot kind of named it. I'm imagining this Labrador retriever. Right?

[Rich Barton]

Yeah. It starts with a Z. Like how many words start with a Z? That's great. And two double letter Ll, soft ending, double letter.

[Tim Ferriss]

But I'm not sure because I'm not up to speed with my Scrabble.

[Rich Barton]

Glassdoor, glass door in the mid, in the middle. It was pretty evocative of having people. Peer is transparency. Power to the people. And transparency is a big thing. And we really liked kind of of looking in through the glass door inside of a company. Two syllables. Not a great dog word, but two double letters. So it kind of jumps off the page. It's an interesting looking word. I would say we get kind of a B on that. But Robert did a very good job with marketing that.

[Tim Ferriss]

All right. So if you need more time, I'm not going to forget about it. The provocation market curriculum. And it could just be one seminar. It doesn't have to be ongoing. Just if that complicates the envisioning process.

[Rich Barton]

Find a seven deadly sin zone. Something that is emotionally core to us that you know is going to incite an emotional response.

[Tim Ferriss]

All right.

[Rich Barton]

Okay. So some topic that people are emotional about and then go address some sacred cow, you know, some taboo or sacred cow in that space. Most of the ideas that you could probably think of with that outline would be really negative. And then get rid of all those because I do believe a cheap way to get attention is to scare people. Okay. But I think it's Cheap. It's a cheap way to lead, is to scare people. Effective, but cheap. And it doesn't make people feel good to be scared. So if you're building a brand and a service, you want people to be provoked, but feel good or tickled or entertained. And so that is where I would head with the seminar. And then we'd end up brainstorming about getting people's ideas for that.

[Tim Ferriss]

Let's touch on. Briefly mentioned Bill Gurley, of course, famous venture capitalist. He's been on the show. Brilliant guy. Also quite hilarious.

[Rich Barton]

And local.

[Tim Ferriss]

And local.

[Rich Barton]

Hey, Bill.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, yeah, he's right down a couple blocks from where we're sitting right now. You have spent time at Benchmark Capital, which way back in the day? I mentioned this to Bill when I first moved to Silicon Valley. A book was recommended to me called Eboys Way back in the day.

[Rich Barton]

Exciting.

[Tim Ferriss]

And putting aside how Bill may or may not feel about it, we didn't really get into it. I'm sure there's lots of stuff that could stand some fact checking, but it was incredibly inspirational and so entertaining. I mean, this was the heyday, right? I mean, this was just rocket ships everywhere. So fun to read. So you've spent time at and with Benchmark. What led you to that? Was that kind of biding time until you figured out which next big swing to take? What was the motivation? And then also what did you learn there? Or what came into greater resolution or clarity while you were there?

[Rich Barton]

Yeah. Okay. So as we chatted about before when I was coming with my family back from sabbatical, I'm a big believer in the sabbatical in Italy and was considering the next career move. I got to know first Bruce Dunleavy at Benchmark and then Bill and the other guys. I did read Eboys then, too, which was romantic, kind of in a weird way, but for business geeks like me and you, maybe romantic. And I also knew that I had a personality that did want to have my fingers in a lot of stuff. You did? I did. I knew that I liked to do lots of things, and I wanted to do lots of things. And I could do lots of things. I could think about lots of things. And so in the course of trying to figure out, prior to Zillow, trying to figure out what to do, I got to know those guys really well. They invited me to a bunch of stuff to sit in on, stuff I knew I would be good at that I knew I liked doing that. And then a condition with Lloyd Frank of doing the Zillow thing. And taking the CEO title. I said, look, you know, I'm going to do a bunch of other things too. I'm going to start more companies and I'm going to do the venture capital thing. And he's like, all good, no problem. And so as a way to keep myself stimulated and seeing lots of stuff and get down to the Valley, I was in Seattle, which was nice. Not really a venture popbed at the time. Cloud computing hadn't happened yet. We did have Amazon, Expedia and Microsoft, but, you know, and so the action on the cutting edge was down in the Valley. I had some boards I was on down there as well. And so I took the venture partner job with Benchmark, which is a pretty ill defined position, as a way to keep me going to the Valley and keep me in the flow of the latest stuff. And I really loved that. I do believe that ended up benefiting all the other stuff I was doing as well. I really loved that. You know, love that team. I love that team to this day.

[Tim Ferriss]

How did it benefit the other things? Was just seeing around corners, kind of getting an idea of what's coming before most other people have a chance to.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah, and thinking of new ideas for companies too. But I'm a big believer there are some companies that hold on to their people and say, you can't go do other things, don't sit on other boards. I really like executives that are on my teams to have another board. And if you love it, set it free. If you're scared about losing people and you're being too retentive, that means you're too insular, probably, and you got to give to get. If you give time and get interested in other business models, you help them, but you end up learning a bunch of stuff for your own company. I've learned so much from sitting on the board of Netflix that I've imported to my other companies.

[Tim Ferriss]

And you explain, just for folks who may not be familiar, what does it mean to sit on a board? What does that actually mean? It depends. Board to board, I'm sure on responsibilities and expectations. But along with that, you must have lots of requests to join X, Y or Z boards. How do you choose the boards to be a part of?

[Rich Barton]

Okay, what it means to sit on a board is when a company's private, it means help the CEO and the leadership team build the company. Okay. So it's really being an advisor and a coach and somebody with a lot of business building experience to help pick the right strategy. You're not running anything, but you're basically coaching the entrepreneurs who oftentimes are less experienced, sometimes not, but oftentimes less experienced. And I would always recommend assembling a board of people with real experience who are going to be engaged. And so it's a company building exercise. And then when fundraising, it's time to fundraise, can totally help with the next fundraising, can help with recruiting. One of the very best at this is. I mean, there's so many good ones. Bill is really good, as you've seen in the Uber case, at really helping build companies. Okay. And a public company is a little different.

[Tim Ferriss]

May I add one thing, and I've never been on a board, but really? Yeah, no, I've dodged it, I guess, in a sense.

[Rich Barton]

So you have a negative impression.

[Tim Ferriss]

No, no, it's not a negative impression.

[Rich Barton]

You dodged it. It.

[Tim Ferriss]

Well, I feel like dodge is a strong verb to use.

[Rich Barton]

That was a missile coming at you and you.

[Tim Ferriss]

I have felt like at the time when these opportunities have come up that I did not have clear criteria and I don't want to commit to things reactively, which is part of the reason why I'm asking you.

[Rich Barton]

Okay, got it.

[Tim Ferriss]

And also, it seems like, and definitely correct me if I'm wrong, but another responsibility of a board is to fire leadership if it comes down to that. So it can be better roses and looking forward to the future and a lot of good things. But it also comes with responsibilities to handle the tough times.

[Rich Barton]

Those are probably the most, especially for a public company. Those are the most important times too. When you're company building as a private company, it's a little less important. That's good context, but it's something that.

[Tim Ferriss]

I've been not necessarily reconsidering because I've.

[Rich Barton]

I think you should. I think you'd be gut.

[Tim Ferriss]

Okay, tell me.

[Rich Barton]

Well, you're a coach.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

That's all it is.

[Tim Ferriss]

Okay.

[Rich Barton]

I mean, it's what, it's what it primarily is. You're instinctively a coach and you have a lot of experience sets and you look for far analogies. You look for, you know, oh, this situation here is a lot like this other situation that that makes you a good communicator and that is oftentimes what good coaching is.

[Tim Ferriss]

I kind of in. I shouldn't say inadvertently because it's not inadvertent, but informally do that already with a lot of the founders that I'm.

[Rich Barton]

Involved with, which is fine too. But it's that same in the best of circumstances. It is that same way on a board. Okay. And those Are the only boards that I'm involved with is those that are really there to coach and give advice Sometimes oftentimes in a public company, when you get into the public markets where your responsibilities are a little different. Different. You have these hardcore responsibilities to represent shareholders and the only real power you have is kind of capital allocation a little bit. And who is the CEO?

[Tim Ferriss]

Capital allocation meaning how do they spend their funds?

[Rich Barton]

Raising money, raising money, spending money. Usually not to the budgetary, but big acquisitions, whatever. Big changes in the cap table in the balance sheet that will affect shareholders.

[Tim Ferriss]

Got it.

[Rich Barton]

Oftentimes public companies, depending on their age, usually as they get older, they stop acting like a private board where it's really about the strategy and coaching and helping and building and then becomes more about institutional shareholder services. Rates directors. What is that?

[Tim Ferriss]

Oh wow. Okay. So they're like the lawyers competing to have good ratings on Avvo.

[Rich Barton]

Kind of. Okay, kind of. And then when a board.

[Tim Ferriss]

This is something I haven't heard anything about.

[Rich Barton]

If a board tip is juicy, if a board tips into, let's call them professional directors who are really worried about their board director reputation, it becomes more about them and process and cya.

[Tim Ferriss]

Cover your ass.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah. Because you don't want to get sued, whatever, you don't want to look bad, whatever. Versus let's build a company.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, that doesn't sound fun.

[Rich Barton]

I've really actually never had a board tip into that. I've had some boards devolve into finger pointing and what have you. But in the private space. Right. So I'm on a few public boards but they're all really their strategy and how can we grow and how can we help you and how's the team doing and so if I don't get a good ISS rating, which I have, some of the worst there are out there really I do.

[Tim Ferriss]

Wait, wait. Who actually determines the rating?

[Rich Barton]

I don't really know the process and I don't really give a rip. But some survey, it's a stick up job. These things, they stick up job like.

[Tim Ferriss]

They rate, give us what we want.

[Rich Barton]

Or else look, it's like bond ratings, ratings and whatever. These ratings firms, they do ratings and then they sell consulting services to the customers. It's just a classic. And mutual funds and ETFs, whatever, hire them and they can't track every company so they look at the ratings and how we should vote on the proxy issue and blah blah, blah. Anyway, I've got very low ratings for lots of nonsensical reasons. But I don't care. I Personally don't care care. But a lot of the a board that's full of directors who really do care is like not as, you know, it's not as fun framework for you which you asked. So Greg Maffei, who's on my board at Zillow and who I've worked with for a long time, I mentioned already and Jay Hogue kind of gave me the same advice. Jay's another venture capitalist who I work a lot with. We're on boards together. Construct A good construct that Greg told me early in my career was is it local, is it fun, is it lucrative?

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, it's a good place to start. Those are good stuff.

[Rich Barton]

So you don't want to, you can zoom now a little bit, but you really don't want to spend your life.

[Tim Ferriss]

So that's another thing that put me on the sidelines is I knew a few people who, they just seemed like traveling salesmen in the sense it was like George Clooney from Up in the Air when he's just traveling around a different city every other week.

[Rich Barton]

Soul crushing. Yeah, it's not quite that way. But they. Yeah. So local is Greg when he laid it out for me, he's like, it's got to be two out of three at least if it can be all three. Trifecta score and lucrative, meaning potentially lucrative. The businesses you would buy the stock as a growth stock.

[Tim Ferriss]

And this is as good a point as any to just explain the I guess compensation structure. How does it work? You get an equity grant, you have options to invest over time. I suppose it depends on the state of and stage of the company.

[Rich Barton]

But private companies often are not compensated because you're the venture capitalist.

[Tim Ferriss]

Right?

[Rich Barton]

Okay so you're the funder. So you're doing it because you already own a chunk of the company. So that's your compensation. And most startups, most private companies can't afford to pay. Now the late stage startups, the forever startups. Now I'm sure stripe directors make a lot of money. Public companies, it's really just like salary bands based on the size of the company. I mean it's like for most kind of mid cap public companies, I would guess it's 200 to $350,000 a year. Most companies for big meetings, committee meetings, whatever, not a huge chunk of time. So it's nice. And then usually they enable the directors to choose if they want it and some part has to be in stock and some could be in cash, you know. Anyway, I don't have a ton of experience with those.

[Tim Ferriss]

All right, so fun. Local. Lucrative.

[Rich Barton]

Potentially lucrative.

[Tim Ferriss]

Potentially lucrative.

[Rich Barton]

And fun has got to be like, it's a proxy for maybe it's a cool company, whatever. That's fun. But really, it's the boardroom dynamic. You look around the table and at the leadership team and are these interesting? Is it a collegial, everybody's rowing together in the same boat kind of situation? Or is it a we got old factions fighting and these guys want that and these ones want that and run.

[Tim Ferriss]

Away less Game of Thrones.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah, exactly. No fun. No fun.

[Tim Ferriss]

All right, so we're drinking our carbonated Japanese citrus. Yes. Yuzu, coconut water. Feeling very infused, well hydrated and infused. And that is as smooth slash awkward a segue as possible to do a callback to something you mentioned earlier, which was da, da, da, da, da. And then I started paying attention to things I had neglected before that, and including health and body, things like that. So when did that happen? Was it a gradual development of wellness habits, self care, or was there a reckoning at some point? What happened?

[Rich Barton]

Yeah, I mean, I think for a lot of people it's a health reckoning. For them or for somebody else that kind of shocks them into, you know, and maybe an overlay of general age. You know, the substrate is age. And ultimately everybody probably figures this out, some later, sooner than others.

[Tim Ferriss]

What is your age now? I have no idea. I can't tell.

[Rich Barton]

57.

[Tim Ferriss]

Okay.

[Rich Barton]

God. Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

Wow, you've really held on to the youthful glow.

[Rich Barton]

Everything's falling apart. Look at me.

[Tim Ferriss]

Oh, God. I'm like American History x as of 10 years ago. And then it's just the crow's feet are turning into crow's legs. But you seem to be very active.

[Rich Barton]

I am. And for me, it was that same thing. It was a catalyst. It was a pretty sudden external catalyst. Not my health, but my wife's and children's. And so I have three kids, Will, Josie and Russell. And Josie and Russell are twins. And twin pregnancies are high risk, definitionally. And so I was aged maybe 35, 34, running Expedia as a really young public company CEO. The company's doing great, but I had to deal with stuff like 911 during the. In the travel business. And I had been a pretty, like, not quite sleep under the desk, but kind of work all the time kind of guy for a long time because I love my work, whatever. Like, we all kind of. We socialized with Microsoft people and then Expedia people, and we just lived. This was our lives. We talked about it. At dinner. So I was pretty neglectful. While I was a weekend warrior type basketball player and tennis player and snowboarder, I didn't yet realize that I had to maintain myself in order to be able to do those things. So I was just working too hard, working all the time. When Sarah was pregnant with Josie and Russell, she went into labor really early. We were on our way up to Whistler and she was, for those who understand these things, I think she was 27 weeks pregnant out of a 40 week typical gestation period, which is very early. That's not very, very early, but it's danger early. And so we were driving on our way, so I was like, I think something's going on. Let's go stop by the hospital. So we stopped by the hospital just so her OB could check her out and she was partially dilated and some small contractions. And Sarah thought nothing of it. The shoemaker's kids have no shoes. Sarah's like, oh, fine, I'll just keep the seat reclined. As we Dr. Drive up to Whistler and her doctor, Edie Edith said, not only are you not going up to Whistler, you're not going home, you are going to be admitted to the hospital and we're going to put you on muscle relaxants. So that began a kind of a six week, very scary period in my life and her life where she was in the hospital making sure that the babies didn't get born. I was taking care of my 3 year old will and then everything turned out great. She carried them to 35 weeks or something, 36 weeks. Kids are perfect. The birth was a little hard. The kids were perfect and it all worked out. But in the course of that period of time, it got me to reassess my life and how I live my life and what my priorities were and how I needed to take care of myself mentally and physically. I kind of had the realization that for sustainability, I was going to have to start doing a bunch of things. If I wanted to do the things I love to do for the long term, I was going to have to really build my foundation. I decided to quit my job at that point too. I was still CEO. IAC had just acquired the company and I made the decision at that point, but that this lifestyle was not. I didn't need.

[Tim Ferriss]

It needed change. And what were some of the changes? How did you layer things in? Did you boil ocean all at once? And I was like, all right, Here are the 12 new things I'm starting. Did you. You layer it in and would you have done anything differently?

[Rich Barton]

I started just exploring things. The big change was we moved to Italy six months later or maybe eight months later. And I developed a whole new set of things I did when we were living in Italy, I took up road biking, which is a very Italian, a social Italian thing to do, which was great, was great for making friends too. But I had a period of time after that where I was in Seattle and I started. I remember the first real class kind of thing I'd ever done was hot yoga. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. I feel incredible after I come out of that class and it's strength and some conditioning I guess, and really interesting and kind of a mental thing too. And I started doing that and then I didn't hire a trainer until much later, but I eventually got there. I didn't lift weights for a long, long time. I was more just kind of of running. I took up running, I ran a couple marathons. You know, I discovered my body was not built for. My joints were not built for marathons. Anyway, I did a bunch of things Tim, recognizing that I felt better when my body felt better and my mind felt better when my body felt better. And it's just built over time to the age I am now where like the physiology of what's happening in my body and my bone density, my muscle mass at my age age, it's like I'm like continually been ramping up how much I do A, because it makes me feel good, but B, because I'm just age wise deteriorating. And if I want to Snowboard, I've snowboarded 35 days this year and it's been amazing. And if I want to keep doing stuff like that, I've got to be strong.

[Tim Ferriss]

So what does the current regimen look like? Generally speaking, I'm sure there are exceptions and maybe you travel or go to various places, but what does the general regimen look like?

[Rich Barton]

Like probably a couple hours total of zone 2E type stuff. You know, bike, rowing, maybe tread. My knees kind of are not great running. But the treadmill, a softer treadmill works, but the peloton is my favorite one there. And then weightlifting different body parts maybe four times a week. And then a lot of just play stuff, you know, a lot of play, a lot of snowboarding. And I got into sports, I got to play sports, I play tennis. I like to do a lot of stuff with my body in the world.

[Tim Ferriss]

How do you fit that in? I mean you got a lot going on. You like building you continually, as our mutual friend Chris Sacca has in one of his suggested topics for exploration since I asked him. You continually put yourself back in the arena as a builder, you are on several boards. I mean there are demands, I'm sure there's a lot of inbound that you say no to. How do you think about the self care? Is it sort of the first thing that you block? And then that's it for me now.

[Rich Barton]

Priority wise, that is my family and my health is essential to my family's health too. So my family and my health and my state of mind. But I am not operating. About seven, eight months ago, after my second or third stint as CEO at Zillow, I kind of kicked myself back upstairs. And so I'm no longer the day to day CEO, which is terrific. It's helped. But I've always been the guy who. My joke was I'm very much a delegator. I'm very much a pick great people and then give them lots of space. And actually a leadership development technique I often coach is for a senior leader or a middle management type leader. I encourage them to really take a vacation and disappoint. And most people think that's going to be harmful to their business or their career. And what I try to coach them on is. No, that is actually the way you develop your leaders, one of the ways you develop your leaders. Because if you're really disconnected, you're on a surf trip in Indonesia and you have zero connectivity.

[Tim Ferriss]

For how long?

[Rich Barton]

For two weeks. Okay. Do it for two weeks and be disconnected. And your teams are going to have to figure out how to deal with stuff that's important because they're going to.

[Tim Ferriss]

Have to create systems and policies and rules ahead of time that will outlive the surf trip.

[Rich Barton]

That's true. But from a leadership perspective, sometimes the real leader of an organization is not necessarily the one with the title. And when somebody's really disconnected, the senior leader is disconnected. Leadership is sort of an emergent property, okay? And it kind of emerges. So this is a long way of saying I kind of have always felt that way about my universe too. I believe the most secure people are willing to let go and roll the dice on the other people and answer the question, who is your successor? If you were hit by a bus, who would take over? Okay? And the less secure people, the more insecure people put themselves in a position where they seem indispensable to senior management and couldn't possibly leave. Okay? That person is not promotable. The person who has cultivated leaders under them. That person is Totally promotable. Even though that person's more expendable too. Yeah, right. And so it's that fine thing, long winded way of me saying I've always had a lot of things going on. And my joke was, you know, if I'm doing my job really, really perfectly, I can be on my surfboard. Okay. And nobody knows when you don't show up to work, if you have a job jobs, everybody always thinks you're working. On the other thing, I'm being glib and it gets a little bit of a chuckle, but I am a seriously leverage oriented person, so it's not that hard.

[Tim Ferriss]

What are other ways that you identify opportunities for leverage or think about leverage.

[Rich Barton]

In a life context, it is just surrounding yourself with great people who care, who have skills and who care about whatever the mission is, be it building a business or building a family. Like Sarah is amazingly smart and capable and cares and the stuff that she's in charge of is going to happen. Well, that's an unbelievable feature to have in a partner. As you're looking for a partner. Lots of stuff matters in finding a partner, but like it's really a partnership. If you guys are going to have a baby, that's a business of sorts. I think it's mostly about picking the right people.

[Tim Ferriss]

Any recommendations for people who are hiring folks they have not known for a long period of time? Any recommendations for the hiring process? Because a lot of people interview well who don't necessarily perform well. They know what to say and reference.

[Rich Barton]

Checks often are reference checks conflicted.

[Tim Ferriss]

I've had the worst luck with taking reference checks at face value. There's some ways to kind of work with that.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah, two things I would say. One is my favorite section of the resume, I guess now LinkedIn. It's not really a section on LinkedIn but is always in the very bottom which is the interests. It I want to get somebody if in an interview situation talking about their interests and why they put them there and then just asking them basic questions and watching whether or not they have any passion to see a real spark. Because if they put it there, that is what they're interested in and they'd better be able to light up on it. When I was earlier in my career, I would always make up business cases around some interest. You know, how big is the ski industry? Because you put skiing whatever, you know. And that was always a fun stepping off point. So finding people's passion. I want to find people who are passionate people. And then the second thing is get used to pulling the pitcher off the mount, quickly firing someone. Yep, okay, it's hard when you're early in your career. It's not as hard later. All of my mistakes as a leader have been leaving almost all of them have been leaving the pitcher on the mound too long hoping that the arm would get better.

[Tim Ferriss]

What have you learned in terms of process for firing any approach? Go to phrases, rules. If you've got someone, you're going on your two week surf trip, there's someone below you who is going to fill that leadership void and he or she is going to have to fire someone and they're like, like, hey boss, I don't want to bother you, but this is something I haven't done before. Give me some advice.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah, don't do it via text. Be an upstanding person. Have some courage. You got to be face to face. But it's actually not that hard. My advice would be, look, if you're not happy with the performance of this person, I guarantee you the person isn't happy either. Therefore, you can increase love in the world by releasing that person to find where that person belongs. That person belongs somewhere else. That person's going to be happy somewhere, help that person find that somewhere. But you're going to be happier when you release that person. That person's going to be happier too. And so if you make it a partnership, if you make it a joint decision, effectively or at least align, get the interests aligned, which it almost always is, it's not a heart. And when you do that, you naturally are being human. If you're looking for shared alignment, that means you care, that means you're showing heart. And having heart in this situation is really important.

[Tim Ferriss]

And then in terms of the delivery, the conversation, any tips on how to manage that?

[Rich Barton]

You do have to be ready for a lot of stuff to come up. And as the person in the power holding power in this situation, you have to wear it. You have to understand and be sympathetic and non argumentative in order to get people on the same page. Oftentimes, just like in life with anything, people really do need to get it out and be heard. And that's great. That's great. And then asking advice on the way out too, like for voluntary or involuntary termination, sometimes it's hazy, right? You know, and soliciting information on the way out for yourself and the organization is often appreciated and often revealing too. So that's good. Exit interview Exit interview is important in as casual a setting as you can make as you can muster. I believe the entrance the one month Post Start is a really great time to get observations from new people too. They haven't been fully indoctrinated yet, and they probably are good consultants. Right, then.

[Tim Ferriss]

So random question. I don't know. You could be covered in tattoos, but what is the story of this tattoo family?

[Rich Barton]

All right, five of us in the family, things we love.

[Tim Ferriss]

So it looks, at a quick glance, looks like a snowflake, but those are trees.

[Rich Barton]

It's made up of five trees. It's a snowflake in total shape, and it's a starfish in the negative space. My daughter Josie, when she was 16, which is too young to get a tattoo, asked Sarah if she could get a tattoo or asked her more specifically, would she get a tattoo with her? And Sarah's like, well, you met Sarah, like, sure. And she's like. And I then brought it to me, and I was like, okay, let's design one as a family. Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

No Wile E. Coyote.

[Rich Barton]

The first versions, you know, those on the back of a minivan. The family of five with the stick figure. Mom, that was what Josie drew.

[Tim Ferriss]

V1.

[Rich Barton]

That's. Josie's very creative. You're creative, honey. But it was funny. That was the first version, and we, you know, we were sharing different versions and iterating, and at some point, Sarah said, maybe we should bring, you know, this artist friend, Joe park, into this. And he'd never designed a tattoo. We brought him, and he was super psyched to do it. So then he led the creative iterations, and we ended up. We ended up with this. They look exactly the same, but they're not. They're all unique. They form a cohesive.

[Tim Ferriss]

Oh, the trees.

[Rich Barton]

You're saying the trees are unique too? So anyway, I dig it. Yeah, I love it. I was the only one who got it in a really visible place, and everybody else got jealous because I like to be able to look at it and remember my family. And we did this maybe five, six, seven years ago. I thought we'd get more. Sarah's gotten two more tattoos, but I haven't gotten any more. I think tattoos are. You don't have any, do you have some. Very few people have one.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah. I've been considering getting my first, which is in some ways kind of similar. It'd actually be in very similar location right here with my dog's paw prints. It's hard for me to imagine regretting that.

[Rich Barton]

You won't.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, I don't think I will.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was. Interestingly, our older boy Will was of age to get a TATTOO he was 18, I think, at the time, maybe 19. Team. But the twins, it wasn't legal. They got one in Washington state or most states. And so Josie was actually going to high school for a year in Spain at the time, and Spain didn't have that restriction. So she got the design and got it in Spain. And we have that house in Montana, and Montana doesn't have any restrictions. So on the way to go skiing one time, Russell went to some sketchy place in Bozeman and got the tattoo. So we got them all. We all got them in different places. It's funny.

[Tim Ferriss]

Any other. I mean, I guess getting a tattoo is not necessarily a recommendation you're making, but any thoughts for. Let's just say there are people listening who are type A or otherwise builders who can sometimes be consumed perhaps by the scale and scope of what they're doing or hope to do. And they're planning on kids or they have very young kids. What would your recommendations be to those.

[Rich Barton]

People for the planning? The kind of constant delayers, which there are a lot of. Maybe some right here. There are a lot of out there. Okay. And I think the fundamental logic is this is an important thing and I don't have enough time right now, and so I'll wait till it's a better time. There's never a better time. There's never a good time. So point number one is it's not going to get better. It's not going to feel better. And then point number two is we're built for this. We are the successful evolutionary product of a lot of people who figured this out, which means we have a lot of encoded knowledge about how to do this and how to deal from our bodies and our minds and our relationships and even just how we parent. It's encoded. A lot of it is encoded. So it's. You know what? It's probably going to work pretty well. And so I don't know if I call myself a birther. I'm an encourager of, like, pertinating, let's have more babies. And I'm a really big believer in how it's such an important part of our own mental health to have, at least for me, to have children and from a growth perspective. And it kind of, as we get older, our ego focus, naturally, the diameter of our ego sphere gets broader and broader and children just. Just blow it way out. And that is really a positive for most people to realize that their needs and wants are trivial. I think that's a positive. So, anyway, I encourage it. Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

For me. It's not a bad timing, looking for better timing thing. It's more of a navigating the bizarre aspects of modern dating, being in my public, semi public position and and as someone who's already, for a lot of good reasons, slow to trust, getting to a point where I feel like I can pull the trigger, I think that's solvable. But it's not trivial.

[Rich Barton]

I never had to deal with that, but I totally how old were you.

[Tim Ferriss]

Guys when you met?

[Rich Barton]

22. Wow.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

In a pub in Cambridge, Mass.

[Tim Ferriss]

Look at that. Maybe that's my next move. Go pub crawling Cambridge.

[Rich Barton]

It's hard though. I totally get what you're get what you're saying. It's hard for the people with young kids and balancing things. I guess I would just always advise to don't wait for an external catalyst to make sure you're prioritizing your family life and your personal health because a lot of people out there are not doing that. And eventually it comes home to roost one way or another and the sooner you can kind of keep things in perspective. It's kind of a confidence game in general. It's a courage and confidence game in general. General if you have high confidence in your abilities, there is no better time for at least the kinds of jobs in the sit at a desk, use a computer type job. There's no better time in the history of the world to be able to have a good balance between having work and life interweave. I'm a huge believer in what I call cloud HQ Cloud headquarters at Zillow post pandemic. I was a huge believer in office culture before that, but the pandemic opened my eyes to just how much more inclusive the cloud headquartered the Matt Mullenweg Matt was very he was very influential on me early in the pandemic I had him blue jeans zoom into an early company meeting early in Covid and lay out his game plan for the distributed corporation.

[Tim Ferriss]

People who don't know.

[Rich Barton]

Super helpful. Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

Matt Mullenweg generally associated with WordPress, founder and CEO of Automattic, spelled M A T T I C and pioneer of distributed workforces and as a design principle from the outset has built that company to be distributed and therefore was very antifragile when Covid came along. And there are some other standout examples. I mean Shopify did really well also. But you're right, I think if this can't lend itself I mean modern technology and the options available to some type of balance or the option to pull different levers where it would have been far difficult even 10 years ago.

[Rich Barton]

We can generalize and say it's been great for moms, but it's more than just moms. But it has enabled really smart, very experienced moms who may have historically decided to take the off ramp into primarily momhood rather than primarily climbing the corporate ladder or just executive leadership path. It's enabled them to come back and likewise now for a father, as long as the company doesn't get angry when they see you in your car on the zoom because you're at a dentist appointment for your kid or something. As long as that doesn't make the CEO get angry. Because that's not the way I did it when I came up and look how great I turned out. I've got to do it this way. It's like I kind of chuckle when I listen to all that. I'm like, you people open your minds. This opens doors. This doesn't close doors.

[Tim Ferriss]

So let me ask a couple of quick questions. They don't need to have quick answers. But just as we start to land the plane, what books have you either gifted a lot to other people or re read yourself? Either one.

[Rich Barton]

I am not your typical person. Probably sitting in the seat in that. Maybe I am. I am not a nonfiction business book. Sorry, Tim.

[Tim Ferriss]

Oh, that's okay.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah, I tend not to read that stuff the older I get. I occasionally will read a biography now, but they mean more now the older you get. But I am fully a. I'm a big reader and it's fiction and generally good fiction. Although I do have cheap thrills. Yeah, I do. I really love beautiful, beautiful fiction. I dabble. I've always dabbled in the kind of science fiction, magical realism stuff as well. I believe, for me at least, escape from the cranked up, quick twitch, always on alert operational stuff that business people go with. Yeah, exactly. To get my brain. I have monkey brain. Okay. And to get my monkey brain to relax, escaping into a fiction novel for me is just a fantastic release. So with all that said, what stuff do I like and that I've gifted recently? I gifted the Oceans and the Stars. Do you know Mark Halpern? Okay. He's a guy who's a little older than I am and writes characters that are just about in my phase of life. Like a beautiful, luscious prose writer, really smart, wrote Soldier of the Great War and A Winter's Tale and Freddie and Frederica. I don't know if you've heard of any of these books. There's a little bit of magic in them. Magic is a prime character in all these books. It's this luscious prose and epic stories of. Of war and romance and exploration and relationships. And this latest one is. I highly recommend. It's a kind of on the edge of retirement, just under admiral, or like a low level admiral in the US Navy who almost becomes head of the DoD but doesn't get it because he speaks his mind. And then he gets commissioned as a rebuke on this new weird ship. And I'll just say that. And that's the setup for him taking this really more fast attack destroyer into the Middle East. And he's kind of a war guy. He's a vet. And he's a pretty engaged political kind of. I call him an offensive realist in the John Mearsheimer mold. Kind of hawkish would be perceived as Hawkish. Believes in strong defense.

[Tim Ferriss]

The protagonist.

[Rich Barton]

This is the author.

[Tim Ferriss]

I got it.

[Rich Barton]

Mark Halpert. This is his mindset. So that manifests in. In basically romantic stories of heroic war efforts, which is. I'm a boy. I like that stuff. I recommend Oceans and Stars is great.

[Tim Ferriss]

Oceans and Stars.

[Rich Barton]

The only one of his that I probably reread is A Winter's Tale, which was my first one I ever read by him. It's just a beautiful, beautiful story of early 20th century life near New York City and upstate New York. You might actually like it.

[Tim Ferriss]

I might do. I read Last of the Mohicans just to take a walk through that area in that time period.

[Rich Barton]

Authors I like. I like Haruki Murakami. Kind of magic. Neal Stephenson is like, some people don't like his latest book, Polo Stan. I don't know if he's the one who wrote Snow Crash.

[Tim Ferriss]

Oh, yeah, okay.

[Rich Barton]

So you know him, Snow Crash had.

[Tim Ferriss]

Pizza with him in Seattle with a couple of other guys. And I was like, wait, you do Victorian era calisthenics with. Oh, and you make swords. Wait, what? I mean, lots of.

[Rich Barton]

And he's got the beard.

[Tim Ferriss]

Amazing beard. Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

I actually kind of froze up when I met him. It doesn't happen to me very often, but he's kind of a hero. And he's in Seattle. He's in.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, he's right there.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah, he's right there. So I see him occasionally at our sushi place. I'm like, I get scared. But his latest, Polo Stom, I highly recommend.

[Tim Ferriss]

Okay, I haven't read it yet.

[Rich Barton]

Some people are giving me grief for it. Authors, when they get successful later.

[Tim Ferriss]

7,000 pages.

[Rich Barton]

Well, it's long a Lot of his stuff is long, but it's not that long. It's not like Cryptonomicon or something, which I loved.

[Tim Ferriss]

Side note.

[Rich Barton]

Me too. But authors, as they get successful, sometimes they have too much power over their editors and so they get a little self indulgent. Which for me, with a beautiful prose writer, I'm like, take me along. Fine, I will indulge your self indulgence. And I don't mind it, but this one takes 100 to 150 pages to break into. But then it just goes.

[Tim Ferriss]

Then it rips. Then it rips.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah. So anyway, I highly recommend. And it's going to be a trilogy. And so it's only the first one. So I'm like, I can't wait. Anyway, I love you can tell I love to read fiction.

[Tim Ferriss]

And do you lean these days? If you're gifting, have you gifted those books that you mentioned?

[Rich Barton]

I have gifted Oceans and Stars, but I'm such a Kindle person and so many of us are digital readers now. It's kind of hard to gift.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah, it is.

[Rich Barton]

It's more group chat. Book group group chat. That's how most of the book discovery happens for me now.

[Tim Ferriss]

Have you read any of Ted Chang's stuff? Oh, man.

[Rich Barton]

Who is it?

[Tim Ferriss]

Okay, so Ted C H I A N G. Okay, last I checked, he has two collections of short stories. There's one which I always script the title of. It's like stories of your life and other stories. Something like that. And one of those short stories was the basis for the movie Arrival with.

[Rich Barton]

Oh God, that's great.

[Tim Ferriss]

Jeremy Renner, amazing movie. So one of his short stories was the basis for that. And then I read that collection and pretty much everyone who read it was just like, I don't understand how this guy does this. And if they happen to be writers or also just like sad clown tier. Just like, how does someone even begin to create something like this? His second collection came out Exhalation, and I didn't want to buy it because I didn't want to be disappointed. I was like, there's just no way. That first one was Appetite for Destruction. You can't do that twice. And then the second was just unbelievably good. And not all of them will hit necessarily, but the ones that hit are just incredible.

[Rich Barton]

And they're like One night read short stories. A collection of one night reads.

[Tim Ferriss]

I would say a lot of them are one night reads. Some of them end up being a little bit longer. But he along with other writers too. Kenneth Liu, I think, is Liu. He has the paper Menagerie, which was actually gifted to me by Matt Mullenweich, blends or alternates in a sense, between sci fi and fantasy in this really compelling way.

[Rich Barton]

Cool.

[Tim Ferriss]

So you get these little ginger snacks in between your pieces of sushi.

[Rich Barton]

That sounds right up my alley.

[Tim Ferriss]

Resets so highly, highly recommend. And I think for the longest time he wasn't. Maybe he still isn't a full time writer. That's the part that really got me where I was like, okay, he writes technical manuals for A, B or C. And then in his spare time, he wins Hugo and Nebula awards. It's just like, oh, come on.

[Rich Barton]

Amazing.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

There's hope. There's hope for. I always kind of wished I became a writer. I like to write, but I'm not that good and I've never dedicated time to it. But in that vein, this guy, Amor Toles, do you know him?

[Tim Ferriss]

Oh, so I've only read he was a banker. I know finance. Well, that's another one.

[Rich Barton]

Until he was like 40.

[Tim Ferriss]

No, I know. The only thing I've read of his is Lincoln highway, which, I mean, it is such a page turner. It's so beautifully architected. And I read that and I threw. Someone named Hugh Howey shook hands with Amor very briefly at a restaurant. We happened to bump into each other and I found out about the finance background. I was like, you gotta be kidding me.

[Rich Barton]

I know.

[Tim Ferriss]

You gotta be kidding me.

[Rich Barton]

I learned that he was on somebody's pod. He gave a great pod When Lincoln highway came out to somebody who cracks open artists, it might have been like Brian might have been Koppelman.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

Very well put in Kalpelman, who gets to artists, right? Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

Who, by the way, for people who don't know, a quick bit of trivia. So Brian Koppelman, co creator, Billions and co creators, writer of Rounders and all these movies and TV shows and so on, also discovered Tracy Chapman as a musician back in his A and R days.

[Rich Barton]

Really?

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah. Isn't that wild?

[Rich Barton]

He's a talented guy. Yeah.

[Tim Ferriss]

So it wouldn't surprise me if Amor was on.

[Rich Barton]

Yeah, he was on there and got him to crack open. And he was kind of surprised by Brian's questions, I think, and didn't know Brian. And all this stuff came out amazing.

[Tim Ferriss]

All right, this is the Billboard question. If you could put anything on a billboard, message, quote, reminder, anything at all, obviously, metaphorically, just to get something in front of a lot of people.

[Rich Barton]

You asked this. So I did think about it a little bit. And my initial response that I latched onto came from that movie, Bowfinger. I don't know if you ever saw Bowfinger. It's a cult classic and a lot of you people out there haven't seen it, but I highly recommend it. It's Eddie Murphy, tour de force, and Steve Martin and Heather Graham. It's super quirky. Eddie Murphy plays two roles in it, which he did for a while in lots of movies, and he plays one of his roles. He plays a paranoid Hollywood celebrity who thinks and in fact is being followed by people who are making a movie about him with him starring it unbeknownst to. To him, that's the setup. Steve Martin's directing and he gets super. He's already a paranoid guy, but he gets super paranoid. He's like, people are following me. And he goes to a thing that. I don't know what kind of culty LA religion it's representing, but it's called Mindhead. And he goes in and he has his first counseling with the high priest of Mindhead. And the religion is based on three happy premises. I'm not going to remember them all, but happy premise number one was something like. Like, there is no giant foot in the sky about to step on me. Okay? This is like a mantra you have to repeat. The third one is my favorite, and that was what I was going to put on the billboard. And that is, even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won't. Okay. That goes on my billboard. That or my favorite Burning man bar ever had that giant neon sign on top of this kind of cozy geodesic dome playing groovy music, decorated as an aquarium. Anybody out there? Like, it was at Burning Man a while ago and it hasn't come back. It was our favorite spot. And the sign said, don't panic.

[Tim Ferriss]

I will say more.

[Rich Barton]

That's it. Don't panic. So that's on the billboard. Don't panic. I think a lot of my job as a leader, explicitly or naturally or otherwise, is to naturally bring people off of their high beta, high swings, high mood swings. People have a tendency towards fear and panic. Panic. And almost always it's going to be just fine. And when it's not, it doesn't matter anyway.

[Tim Ferriss]

Right?

[Rich Barton]

Okay.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

All right. And it can cause a lot of a happier life and a calmer community and a better, healthier community and family if everybody just takes a little breath before getting scared, you know, or going crazy or sending a text or whatever.

[Tim Ferriss]

Even though I feel like I might ignite, I Probably won't. Is that basically related to the don't panic?

[Rich Barton]

Yes, I think so. I think that led me to the don't panic. I think so. And I'm not saying I actually, I don't move through the world feeling as if I might ignite. I really don't. But I think a lot of people, especially in the modern newsfeed, iPhone, TikTok, Twitter world, do feel that way. And so it's even more important. It's why meditation is on the rise. It's why we're looking for escapes. We're looking to give our brains embodies just a break from the constant barrage. And it's causing mental health problems we all are familiar with. And I think that's part of. It's just too easy to get mad or scared or outraged or whatever. Go take a rafting trip for a week. That's disconnected. That's going to be on the rise. Those are growth businesses, right? People sheltering from the digital storm of doom. Exactly. It's so unhealthy.

[Tim Ferriss]

Have you taken any sabbatical since Italy?

[Rich Barton]

Oh, yeah. I mean, I've had multiple retirements.

[Tim Ferriss]

Now, are those failed retirements or did those have an endpoint where you're like, I'm going to take a year and then I'm going to dust off my.

[Rich Barton]

The Italy one was a failed one, although I suspected I was really young. Right. The others know it's just been sabbaticals.

[Tim Ferriss]

How long are they typically?

[Rich Barton]

The Italy one was the longest one, but I've kind of built shelter into our family's routine now. So it's just a part of the normal cycle of the seasons and a really key component of that. It's not always achievable, especially now Starlink and traveling Starlink and Starlink at my surf camp and Starlink on my Airstream. It's harder and harder to disconnect, but disconnection is really a key part of it, I think. I think disconnection, the behavior you observe when people are disconnected, like with my family, when we do. We rafted the Grand Canyon this year with a big group of friends and family. And when you watch the younger people, it's very unsettling. For the first, it's only like three or four hours. And then when they realize it's over, it's total mean reversion to human behavior. Playing games, doing crafts, taking a hike, you know, painting a picture. It's totally beautiful what happens. And everybody is happy. Happy. Well, you can't not be happy making A friendship bracelet or playing Taco Cat. What do we. I don't want to give that away. I don't want to give your game away.

[Tim Ferriss]

No, you didn't.

[Rich Barton]

But you can't not be happy when you're doing that and not looking at your phone.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah.

[Rich Barton]

Highly encouraged.

[Tim Ferriss]

Rich.

[Rich Barton]

Tim, so nice to see you, man. It's great to see you.

[Tim Ferriss]

We've covered a lot of ground.

[Rich Barton]

That was fun. Wow.

[Tim Ferriss]

Where. If people want to learn more things about Rich, should they be visitor 22 to your blog?

[Rich Barton]

No, I don't think so. The blog is totally vestigial. It's an appendix that needs to be removed. Hopper and Dropper. Yeah. No. Yeah. No, man, I don't. You know, the writing thing, I've had a lot of offers to do that with. I've just never felt like I enjoyed reading any of those, you know, business guy ego books, you know, I just don't find them very interesting. And I don't want to be one of those kind of jerk offs, you know.

[Tim Ferriss]

Now maybe do a writer's retreat or an mfa, compressed mfa and take a stab at fiction. Just saying. Even if you never publish anything, it's a good muscle to train for a bit just to play with it.

[Rich Barton]

I'm doing more creative things deliberately now and it feels good. I took a Procreate painting on my iPad during COVID and it's so fun. I feel so good and I catch myself going back and looking at my works. Be at a party and I'll show people what I painted. And it's not good, but it makes me feel good.

[Tim Ferriss]

I did exactly the same thing during COVID Procreate. And you go through these tutorials. There's something very soothing about it.

[Rich Barton]

Oh, that Australian gal who I think works at Procreate who gives the tutorials.

[Tim Ferriss]

So awesome. Yeah, so many good ones. Is there anything you would like to say? Any closing comments, formal public complaints you'd like to lodge?

[Rich Barton]

No. No. I guess I should just. I should thank you. You perform a good service. You provide a good service for a lot of people with this pod and with your books. And certain people need it more than others. And I really don't think people are looking for shortcuts. That may have been where you started a little bit. I really just think people are just looking to lead better, happier, slightly more efficient lives, improving lives. They want to improve themselves. And you really help people do that. And the divers of the guests that you bring on this pod is really inspiring. So, yeah, it's great. Thank you. Thanks man, it's great to be here.

[Tim Ferriss]

Yeah. Awesome to have you everybody listening. We're going to include everything we talked about in the show notes. Tim Blog podcast. If you search Barton, that's going to be the only Barton. So you'll find this episode and until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. And as always, thanks. Thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between 1 and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books, I'm reading albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field. And then I test them and then I share them them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short. A little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. Something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim Blog Friday, type that into your browser. Tim Blog Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. Listeners have heard me talk about making before. You manage for years. All that means to me is that when I wake up, I'm block out three to four hours to do the most important things that are generative, creative, podcasting, writing, etc. Before I get to the email and the admin stuff and the reactive stuff and everyone else's agenda for my time? 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