What a fucking baller?

I was gonna save guy for next week, but we're gonna do a double billionaire of the week. So we're doing a double billy special. Get get your get your billies right now, Richard Burton. Okay. So have you heard of this guy, Richard Burton? Is it Burton's billboards?

No. So this guy started a couple of different companies. So just if you just Google Richard Burton. I did earlier, and nothing came up.

Oh, did I am I saying his name wrong? I think you got it wrong because I did No. No. No. Okay. He Barton. Sorry.

Barton not Bert Okay. So Richard Barton, so this guy started Zillow. He also started one of your favorite sites, glass door.

He also started he has three. So he has Zillow,

He has glassdoor,

and which what's his other one?

I was gonna research this for next week. So we're just gonna do this live here. And he did Expedia.

He did Expedia.

Board of Directors on Netflix.

He did Expedia

Zillow and Glassdoor.

What a fucking baller.

I'm like, okay. The media?

Yeah. So okay. So how how did this happen? So I've listened to this interview with this guy, like, five years ago.

Before this podcast even started. Before this podcast was even a little, you know, sperm in my balls.

And when I when I looked at this guy. The one thing that stood out to me was he had a very simple thesis that he used to start all these companies, which was information

wants to be free. So, okay, what his information wants to be freemium? So he was basically, like, I'm gonna bring transparency

to industries that are that are not transparent.

And so he's, you know, let's take Zillow, for example. Before Zillow and the sort of online house pro you know, how search companies existed like Truulia and all this redfin and stuff like that.

The MLS listings were something that only the agents and brokers had access to. And so this is they were gatekeepers. They were like, oh, you wanna know what's on the market? Let me literally print out the MLS papers

and, I'll show you show you these and I'll I'll tour you through these companies. That's a great line, dude. Information that one information once you gotta The information wants to be free. And so, so they needed the same thing in travel. Right? We had travel agents who were the brokers who you had to call and be like, hey, I'd like to get flight, I don't wanna pay too much and that you just trust that, hopefully, this agent is gonna do gonna do their job. They're gonna know all the different options, different times, different airports, and they're gonna find me something that fits my needs. And Expedia was just a search bar that would just tell you, here's all the flights. You decide. Here's the information. You don't need to go to a travel agent anymore. And, glassdoor is the same thing. You wanted to know what's it really like to work there. And employers have no desire to put that out there. They don't want anybody to know any of the bad things that happen, you know, the working environment of their company.

And employees were often scared to do it because they would sign things. So it would be, like, you know, non disclosure,

whatever non slander. I forgot what the term for it is, non disparagement.

And, so Glassdoor was unleashing the information about what's it like to work at X company. And so I love how this guy, literally on one thesis,

has started three multi billion dollar companies,

off that one premise. And so that was when I when I did what you were talking about, I reverse engineered how did this guy do it. It wasn't, oh, how did he build Expedia? How did he build Zillow? It was, how did he even get this idea? Oh, okay. What other industries today lack transparency where I can open them up. What are they?

Oh, dude. Well, if now, that's a billion dollar idea I need to

to have. Well, I have to spot cut. Let's think of some. One of them is,

pricing for enterprise software.

Right. What they do is they find out how much money your company makes, and then they go, okay, we're gonna charge you this. Right.

I like that. I like that a lot. Like, I hate that call for pricing,

model. I mean, I I hate it, but it works. We do it.

So AngelList did this in in a way as well when,

you were able to figure out

who's invested in what? That used to be, like, sort of not easy to find information. It wasn't sort of, like, totally guarded.

But I Crunch base as well. I'm literally just looking at the tabs that I have open. Right? Like, yelp. Yelp is something like that too. You know, how is it what is it like to eat there? The review system.

It it,

organized

and made public information that people wanted that was not super transparent before this.

Yeah. I mean, housing, he did that. There's a lot of, like, there's there's so many good ones.

Salaries. He did that with glassdoor.

Does this master do salaries?

Yeah. So there's there's one that I use that's in the tech world called levels. I think we talked about it once before, but They do it where with just the, like, kind of tech companies. It's like, what what do people at tech companies make? And a lot of people have been doing this on,

Inside company. So inside Microsoft, for example, they created an anonymous Google doc where you could just put your level, your job category, like engineer or designer, product person, whatever, and, your salary and your pay. And then you

could figure out am I underpaid, but the but this was even in, like, more specific. It was, like, in a company these are people now, like, and it's not just glassdoor. It's like just a few who,

kind of go and post this stuff, but,

they're getting, like, these these companies are having all these, like, really rich documents with thousands of people contributing. And and right now, those are just Excel docs. I wonder if you could take the just a salary component of maybe what's in glassdoor

and do it in a better way inside company. So people make sure they're not getting the short end to stick within their own company right now.

That's interesting.

Another one is freelancers.

So, like, freelancers, what? Freelancers and agencies.

So the problem

with a lot of this stuff is

when we're trying to hire some agencies

to WordPress development,

I have to back channel and go find out from people who worked with them what they were like,

once I sign up to and agree with them, I can't I won't find out unless I'm on a weekend if they suck or not. Right.

And it's like, oh my god. I can't believe that. I can't believe I mean, and that's the same thing with like payroll software too. Like Gusto looks good, but when you sign up to it, you don't realize like what you like and what you don't like about it. So we have a couple of friends who are doing things that are trying to,

put out, you know, they're trying to make information come free of what software do companies use say, like, a lot of people would wanna know what does the hustle use? What do you guys use to send email? What do you guys use for analytics? What do you guys use for your pay paywall? What do you use for trends?

And, like I know Ryan at product hunt, they're doing this with something called stacks or your stacks.

And, they wanna know what's your software stack that your company runs on. And it's an interesting idea. Like, he's designing it kinda like a social network, but the value in the end, if you did, if you get there, is, oh, cool. I can now go see, okay, if I'm building an Airbnb type of company, what do they use to run their company? What do they use for my legs? Do you think that the is that working?

Well, it's really tough to build. Right? There's one of those things where really valuable if you get there, really tough to get the information in because you have to get the incentives right.

Later on, you have the incentive to come to the site because you wanna see what other people use. But what's the incentive to post? And so he's trying to make it fun and interesting and cool to post

by making it, like, very visual, like, sort of a, like, get it doing that. A profile for your company. Right? Like,

like, yeah, we use this stuff. And, so I don't know the numbers on how it's doing, but I do think it's an interesting experiment.

And I think if they did it, it would be the most valuable thing that product hunt has built because it's a It's just inherently surely

there's a great business model on top of that if you can show what software people use. That's cool. I agree.

That's interesting.

I love this idea of information needs or information wants to be free. Yeah. And I let's think more about that. So I think we'll come back with an example of information today that is either

behind a walled garden or it's incomplete. And, if you set it free, it would make people

make better choices or or save the money or whatever it is. Like, maybe it's something of insurance space. Maybe it's I don't I don't know exactly what, but I'm gonna think about this because I think this is a formula for building really big companies. Yeah. For me, it's how much

things cost, like, like, freelancers

and and lawyers and things like that. That's that's always bothered me. I I don't, like, I, like, my lawyer could be like, yeah, we charge seven hundred dollars an hour. And when I was first go. And I was like, I have no idea. Is that normal? Right. And on the other side, it's also how much companies make. Right? Like, you love it when you hear that a company's public or it's a nonprofit because you're like, yes. I'm gonna get to their financials because they have to report. You know who definitely is pitchbook.

Full private companies? Yeah. Well, and they do it in a really way. And they're owned by a publicly traded company. They do about one hundred and twenty million dollars a year in revenue. What they do is, like, twenty five grand for a pitch book subscription. Right? Really expensive, and they do about a hundred and twenty. They're owned by, is it called morning star?

Or it's a company bright star? I think it is morning star or morning starts like the mutual fund thing. It's, yeah, it's owned by one of those things. And I I just read their their earnings thing. Morning star. It is morning star. They are the mutual fund thing too. And they,

what they do is they do a bunch of different things. The first thing that they do is they crawl the web and they find SC see documents and they find, like, all type they just crawl and find data,

and they have a team of, like, three hundred people who just hit the phones all day and call people and get the information.

Right.

And then the other one that's, like that is, you know, even for podcasts, when we look at the top charts, and we're like, alright, how do we become the number one business podcast don't know how much we don't know how many downloads they get. Right? There's this idea of how much something how much is being earned, how much is something making, and how much does something cost I think that just generally would apply to a whole bunch of different spaces that you can you can use for this. Yeah. That's why I use a similar web because they show me how much, like, traffic, I guess, traffic. One of the dope ones of this. Do you use second measure?

Yeah. They're great. They're great. I think they're a little bit extension.

Yeah, if you don't know what they are, so second measure takes credit card spending data

and,

can tell you essentially, like, how much money something is making just by analyzing how many people are charging Spotify per month. And then they're like, okay. Cool. Right? Imagine Spotify was not public company. You'd be able to see here's how much revenue that they're making or do this with, like, the delivery companies, which delivery company is winning? Well, they can just check this huge data set of credit card spending and say, okay, it looks like Grubhub's in the lead. And then second is DoorDash or whatever. And so second measure is super powerful using the source of truth, which is credit card data. I don't know how they get at it. I don't really talk about this stuff. All I wanna do is just, like, end the podcast and make my days fifty hours long and just start searching everything. So

this whole this whole data or make information or find information wants to be free. That

whole That's amazing. That's the test. I want people to listen to this podcast and be

so

excited. And then I want you to feel anxious I want you to feel stressed that you don't have fifty hours in your day to go do this. And, that's that's how this should feel. I've heard a bunch of people say, like, yeah, I have to keep pausing the podcast.

To, like, a, write shit down, b, take a breath, c, think of think about what's going on, and then I resume it. And, yeah, that's what we want. It's that that high value.