From The Vault: VC Legend Bill Gurley On Startups, Venture Capital and Scaling
Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. During Spencer's time as CEO, Zillow won dozens of "best places to work" awards as it grew to over 4,500 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and $10 billion in market capitalization. Prior to Zillow, Spencer co-founded and was VP Corporate Development of Hotwire, which was sold to Expedia for $685 million in 2003. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 100 companies and is incubating several more.
This interview was originally published on December of 2020, and was recorded at the inaugural dot.LA Summit held October 27th & 28th.
One of my longtime favorite episodes of Office Hours was a few years ago when famed venture capitalist Bill Gurley and I talked about marketplace-based companies, how work-from-home will continue to accelerate business opportunities and his thoughts on big tech and antitrust.
Benchmark General Partner Gurley is based out of Silicon Valley and known famously for investing early in trailblazing companies including Uber, GrubHub, Zillow and so many others.
Gurley has looked over thousands of pitches from companies over the years and he shared the two things he looks for in each startup: unfair competitive advantages and the go-to market.
“I think Facebook’s approach of going slow through Harvard in the Ivy League, then college, built something much more durable than MySpace did, who just kind of launched everywhere,” he said.
dot.LA Reporter Decerry Donato contributed to this post.
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Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. During Spencer's time as CEO, Zillow won dozens of "best places to work" awards as it grew to over 4,500 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and $10 billion in market capitalization. Prior to Zillow, Spencer co-founded and was VP Corporate Development of Hotwire, which was sold to Expedia for $685 million in 2003. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 100 companies and is incubating several more.