How Rich Barton Built Expedia, Zillow, and Glassdoor: Lessons for Product Leaders

Expedia: Pioneering Online Travel Platform

In the early 1990s, as tourism surged in developed countries, travel information remained fragmented and largely offline. In 1994 Microsoft created an online travel information platform called Expedia , appointing Rich Barton as product lead. Expedia’s business model connected travelers with a wide range of travel products, earning commissions on sales and selling advertising to travel companies.

Today Expedia operates in multiple countries, offers hotels, flights, car rentals, and local experiences, and has grown into a group with 19 subsidiary brands. After the platform’s success, Barton left Microsoft to run Expedia full‑time, and the company went public on NASDAQ in 1999. However, rapid expansion created internal challenges: numerous subsidiaries led to fragmented technology and business models, data silos, and a growing technical debt that eventually impacted user experience.

Zillow: The U.S. Version of Anjuke

After leaving Expedia, Barton noticed a gap in the U.S. real‑estate market: property listings were siloed within a few agencies, making it difficult for buyers to obtain comprehensive information. In December 2004 he founded Zillow , an information‑integration platform that aggregated real‑estate data for both agents and consumers.

Zillow initially generated revenue through real‑estate advertising and agency fees, later expanding into home sales in 2018. By offering a richer data set than competitors like Redfin, Zillow quickly secured partnerships with nationwide agencies, filled its platform with listings, and grew its market share. Barton reinforced Zillow’s dominance by acquiring smaller competitors and building a robust data infrastructure that served both buyers and sellers.

Glassdoor: Transparent Job‑Market Platform

In 2007 Barton launched Glassdoor , addressing the lack of transparent employment information in the United States. The platform allows employees to anonymously share salaries, company reviews, and workplace conditions, creating a large, crowd‑sourced dataset.

Glassdoor monetizes this data by publishing industry reports, offering B2B services such as employer branding campaigns, and providing a recruiting marketplace where companies can post jobs and attract talent. To ensure data quality, Glassdoor requires corporate‑email verification, enforces a contribution‑for‑access model, and employs a manual review team to filter extreme or misleading content.

Conclusion

Rich Barton’s career spans one early corporate role and twelve entrepreneurial ventures, illustrating how recognizing information gaps, building data‑driven platforms, and maintaining simple, user‑centric solutions can drive sustained success. His story underscores two key lessons: (1) extract commercial value from everyday information, and (2) solve core business problems with the simplest, most effective approach.

Cross‑industry experience fuels innovative thinking and business expansion.

Even “experimental” projects like Expedia can become launchpads for long‑term achievement.

Strategic accumulation of data and services creates exponential growth, much like a wealth‑building curve.