Spencer Rascoff explains how he came up with the idea for Zillow

I was buying a house and it sucked. I mean, we were just like, really like, here we are in 2005. The Internet's 10 years old. There was nothing that prioritized the consumer. This is an industry, actually, which had a lot of great data, but it was inaccessible to you and me. And it felt a lot like online travel 10 years earlier. So do you remember in 1995, you know, when I first started booking travel, I would call the travel agent and I would hear him or her on the phone, and you'd say, I want to fly from LA to New York on Tuesday, back Friday. And you'd hear them, you know, click, click, clack, right on a keyboard. And you'd be on the phone, you'd be like, what screen are you looking at? You just want to jump through the phone and look at that screen. And that's what Expedia did, is it turned the screen around so that the traveler had access to the same information that the travel agent did. And so in 2005, it felt really similar in real estate that there was all this great data in the MLs, which are private, proprietary databases that only the industry gets access to in county courthouses, which is where all the sale data, tax data, other property attributes live. And we wanted to set all that free, just like we had set all this data free in travel. So that was the consumer pain point that we're trying to solve. It was born out of personal frustration. And so when we first came up with this idea, we started calling these companies that have all this public record data and said we wanted to buy it all and make it free and publicly available. And it was a total mind bender for them. They're like, well, that's never been done before. Why would you want to do that? What would your revenue model be? And then we had this sort of epiphany. Looking out the conference room window, we were looking at all these houses in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle, and we said to ourselves, wouldn't it be cool if you could have a price on every rooftop? All these other real estate sites, and there were plenty of real estate sites at the time, they focus on what's for sale. And the more interesting question to us was actually, what's every house worth? Everybody is always interested in what every house is worth. And so when we launched the site in 2006, we launched with a price on every rooftop and no listings. People don't really remember this, but we had no listings on the site for two years. We became the third most visited real estate site with no listings, no homes for sale. When you first launched, how much money did you raise? We raised $6 million round from us from the early founders and then I think before we launched, we then raised a 20 ish million dollar a round from Benchmark and TCV.