Name: The Mistake Spencer Rascoff Made When Creating Zillow
Uploaded: 2016-01-29
Duration: 3 min 25 s
Description: The CEO explains to Fortune’s Leigh Gallagher.

[ SOUND ] [ CROSSTALK ] [ MUSIC ] It's been an ugly year for the financial markets so far. Does that concern you? Only so much as it impacts employees kind of indirectly. At Zillow, we don't overly focus on the stock price. We take a very longterm view of trying Build a company for 10, 15, 20 years down the road, and we don't talk about the stock price internally, we don't overly focus on it. But it surely comes up from time to time. And Zillow went public at around 20 in 2011? We had a three- for- one stock split. Okay. So, split- adjusted, we had probably about $ 6 a share. I see. But when we went public, we had about a $ 500 million market cap. Today, we have about a $ 4 billion market cap. We've grown a lot as a company, but for me, the reason I get excited about coming to work is it's still so early. I mean, what's happening in online real estate, the way consumers are moving onto the Internet, the way mobile platforms are changing consumer behavior, and the way real estate agents are changing the way they interact with consumers. I mean, we're gonna look back and 2016 is gonna seem quaint. Pretty soon, so it's very early in the evolution of our industry. Tell me one mistake you've made along the way. Very early on when we were starting the company we didn't focus very much on SEO, on how search engines think about our website. We said, if we just build this beautiful website and people love it then search engines will take care of itself. I think that's the wrong perspective actually. It's not selling out to focus on SEO, if you want People to find your product you need to be visible on Google. It takes a lot of time and energy to really think about the impact of SEO on your website, or search engine optimization. So what keeps you up at night now? Everything. [ LAUGH ] I'm a warrior. And there's not shortage of things to worry about. I guess the single biggest thing that I spend my time on and I do focus on is employees' level of engagement. Keeping a high level of intensity among an employee base for an extended period of time is really hard. So how do you do that? It's exhausting. What do you do? I'm constantly articulating the strategy in the vision and creating big exciting goals kind of in the distance. The business is not static, one of things I'm most proud of it to the group is that when we find a business model that is working, when something is going well, we constantly looking at ways tear it down and rebuild it even bigger. The Mistake that most tech companies make is once they find a cash cow, when they find something that works, they do everything in their power to protect it, to build a moat around that. I fear that if we rest on our laurels then somebody will hit us from the side and we won't even see it coming. If you weren't running Zillow, what would you be doing? [ LAUGH ] I would like to be a stay at home dad, I Take, my wife's a doctor, and I'd love to support her career the way she's supported mine. So that would be good, failing that, I had always wanted to be a cowboy. I love riding horses, doing something outside. One of my biggest regrets about my career choice is I love my job, I love running a technology company, But you had to do it inside, and I hate that. I wish I could have a career outside, whether that's being a cowboy or a crossing guard, just something outdoors. You're a pretty transparent CEO. You give your cell number to employees etc. What's one thing your employees don't know about you? What do employees not know about me? How much you worry? [ LAUGH ] Yeah, maybe. As a CEO I try to project an air of confidence, to employees, to investors, to the media when in truth there's plenty to worry about and I worry a lot about a lot of things. I can also wiggle my ears. I don't know if that would count. That'd definitely count. Okay right. [ MUSIC ]

The CEO explains to Fortune’s Leigh Gallagher.