Spencer Rascoff (born October 24, 1975) is an entrepreneur and businessman. He was the co-founder and former chief executive officer of Zillow Group, as well as one of the co-founders of Hotwire.com. Rascoff is on the board of directors of Palantir. Additionally, Rascoff he held the position of Visiting Executive Professor at Harvard Business School where he co-created and co-taught the “Managing Tech Ventures” course. [1]
Rascoff was born to Jane and Joseph Rascoff. His father was a business manager and tour producer for numerous well known musicians including The Rolling Stones, U2, and Paul Simon. [2] Rascoff grew up in New York and then Los Angeles, where he attended Harvard-Westlake. He received a degree in 1997 from Harvard University. [3]
After graduating from college, Rascoff worked as a private equity investor at TPG Capital and also as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. [4]
In 1999, at the age of 24, Rascoff co-founded Hotwire.com, a leading Internet travel company, which a few years later was sold to InterActiveCorp for $685 million. Rascoff then served as vice president of lodging for Expedia before leaving to co-found Zillow. [5]
Rascoff served various roles through the years including chief operating officer, chief financial officer, and VP of Marketing until his appointment to CEO in 2010. [6] As CEO, Rascoff led Zillow through its 2011 IPO and 15 acquisitions. In 2017, Rascoff was named "The Most Powerful Person in Residential Real Estate" by the Swanepoel Power 200. [7] Rascoff stepped down from his CEO position in February 2019. [8] In April 2020, Rascoff resigned from Zillow's board of directors. [9] [10]
In January 2020, Rascoff co-founded dot.la, a news site for the California tech startup industry. [11]
In October 2020, Rascoff co-founded Pacaso alongside Austin Allison. Pacaso is positioned as a real estate platform that makes second home ownership more accessible through shared ownership. [12] Pacaso has been described by some as an alternative take on the timeshare model of property ownership. [13] [14] [15]
In June 2021, Rascoff co-founded Recon Food with his daughter, Sophia Rascoff. The app uses technology to search a user's camera roll for all previous food-related photos and automatically upload them to the app. [16]
In 2015, he co-wrote and published his first book, “Zillow Talk: Rewriting the Rules of Real Estate.” [17]
Evan "Ev" Clark Williams is an American billionaire technology entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of Twitter, and was its CEO from 2008 to 2010, and a member of its board from 2007 to 2019. He founded Blogger and Medium, two of the largest blogging internet platforms. In 2014, he co-founded the venture capital firm Obvious Ventures. As of February 2022, his net worth is estimated at US$2.1 billion.
Zillow Group, Inc., or simply Zillow, is an American tech real-estate marketplace company that was founded in 2006 by Rich Barton, Zillow's current CEO, and Lloyd Frink, former Microsoft executives and founders of Microsoft spin-off Expedia; Spencer Rascoff, a co-founder of Hotwire.com; David Beitel, Zillow's current chief technology officer; and Kristin Acker, Zillow's current technology leadership advisor.
Redfin Corporation, based in Seattle, provides residential real estate brokerage and mortgage origination services. The company operates in more than 100 markets in the United States and Canada. The company has a 0.80% market share in the United States by number of units sold and has approximately 2,000 lead agents.
Move, Inc. is a real estate listing company based in Santa Clara, California. The company operates the Move Network of real estate websites, the largest of which is Realtor.com. Move has a longstanding partnership with the National Association of Realtors, the real estate industry's largest trade association, for operating Realtor.com.
Richard Barton is an American internet entrepreneur and the chief executive officer of Zillow Group. Barton founded online travel company Expedia, Inc., real-estate internet company Zillow, and job search engine and career community Glassdoor. He also founded the online travel photography sharing website and app Trover, which was acquired by Expedia in 2016. Barton was also a venture partner at Benchmark, and is on the board of directors for Netflix, Avvo, Nextdoor, and Artsy. He serves on the Stanford University Board of Trustees.
John William Gurley is an American businessman. He is a general partner at Benchmark, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm in San Francisco, California. He is listed consistently on the Forbes Midas List and is considered one of technology’s top dealmakers.
Palantir Technologies is a public American company that specializes in big data analytics. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, it was founded by Peter Thiel, Nathan Gettings, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Alex Karp in 2003. The company's name is derived from The Lord of the Rings where the magical palantíri were "seeing-stones," described as indestructible balls of crystal used for communication and to see events in other parts of the world.
Sivaramakrishnan Somasegar is an Indian-American technology business executive in the Greater Seattle Area. He is a Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group, a venture capital firm based in Seattle. Somasegar joined Madrona in November 2015 after a 27-year career at Microsoft, where he most recently was corporate vice president of the developer division and overseeing the global distributed R&D centers at Microsoft.
Trulia is an American online real estate marketplace which is a subsidiary of Zillow. It facilitates buyers and renters to find homes and neighborhoods across the United States through recommendations, local insights, and map overlays that offer details on commute, schools, churches and nearby businesses.
PicMonkey is an online photo editing and design service that can be accessed from a web browser, or through a mobile app. The company behind the service is headquartered in downtown Seattle, Washington.
Vacasa is an international vacation rental management company based in Portland, Oregon. It provides property management services for over 35,000 vacation rentals in North America, Belize, and Costa Rica. Vacasa manages properties in 34 U.S. states.
Alexander Caedmon Karp is an American billionaire businessman, and the co-founder and CEO of the software firm Palantir Technologies. As of April 2022, his estimated net worth is US$1.1 billion.
Oregon Venture Fund makes venture investments in the Portland, Oregon area and throughout Oregon and SW Washington. The fund consists of 180 institutional and angel investors, of whom 85% have run or founded a business. The fund evaluates up to 300 business plans per year, selecting five to seven to invest in annually. In 2018, the fund changed its name from Oregon Angel Fund to Oregon Venture Fund and launched a new $30M fund. Since its inception, Oregon Venture Fund has generated an average annual rate of return of 34% and a return on investment exceeding $3.50 for each dollar invested.
Vacatia, founded in 2013 and based in San Francisco, California, spun out of Vacation Listing Service Inc., launching originally as an online marketplace for buying and selling timeshare interests.
Property technology is used to refer to the application of information technology and platform economics to the real estate industry. Property technology overlaps with financial technology, including uses like online payment and booking systems.
Cadre is a New York–based financial technology company that provides individuals and institutions direct access to large commercial properties. The business and financial press describe it as a service that "makes the real estate market more like the stock market" by allowing investors to select the individual transactions in which they participate, while investing a smaller amount than would be required to fully fund a transaction. For example, 12 institutional investors participated in a $60 million office building purchase. The firm was named to Forbes' "FinTech50" for 4 years in a row starting in 2016. In 2019, Cadre was the cover story of the Forbes "FinTech 50" issue. In 2018, a partnership with Goldman Sachs was announced through which Goldman Sachs' private wealth clients committed at least $250 million (USD) real estate investments through Cadre. In 2020, Cadre announced its "Direct Access" fund intended to include smaller investors with a $400 million target raise. The company also offers a managed portfolio service and a real estate secondary market, as well as a cash holdings account called "Cadre Cash". The company has announced plans to address racial injustice in the United States by investing at least 10% of its Direct Access fund investments with minority-owned operators and increasing its cash held in black-owned banks.
Crowd Cow is an American online meat delivery marketplace. It connects fisheries and ranchers who raise livestock with consumers who want to buy meat.
RRE Ventures is an American Venture Capital firm based in New York City. The firm primarily invests in seed, series A and series B rounds and focuses on companies operating in the software, internet, communications, aerospace, robotics, 3D printing and financial services sectors.
ButterflyMX is an American property technology company that specializes in smartphone-based access control. ButterflyMX’s hardware offerings include video intercom systems and keypads that users can manage through a mobile application.
Pacaso is a property broker that buys single-family homes and sells them to consortiums of buyers. The San Francisco–based company claims it reached unicorn status faster than any other USA-based company.