Zillow founder Spencer Rascoff: "I will never invest in a consumer startup with paid marketing”

To your question of how did we get traffic? Very deliberately, and this is the advice I would give to any founder. Very deliberately, we did no advertising. The philosophy for the first probably three years of the company was any money that we might spend on SEM, Google, Facebook, whatever, let's invest that in product. Let's hire more engineers, designers, PMs, etc. Let's try to build something that's viral. Let's. Let's just focus on the product. And most of the great companies, the great services that we use today, from Uber to Snapchat to Instagram, Facebook, they follow the same philosophy, right? After three or four years, you do start seeing ads for these companies, just like you see hundreds of millions dollars of ads for us. But in the early days of those services, it's all about product, not about advertising. The reason you do that is to build innovation and product development. Bonafides. When I do angel investing, for example, I will never invest in anything that's B2C with any paid marketing for the first two, three years. Like when they're like, oh, yeah, we're going to try $100,000 a month Facebook budget, it's like, I'm out.