Your Tech Story

Richard Barton- Founder of Expedia

A true businessman is someone who observes a problem that exists in the society, thinks for a possible solution and comes up with something to resolve that problem. Thus, making a difference in the society by providing the services which makes our life easy. Richard Barton is founder of multiple ventures all focused to make people’s life easy. Barton uses a slogan “power to the people”, the staunch philosophy behind his each start-up. Barton has created a space for the people where they can access information, data, and even share their views, thus making internet a place for people.

Image Credit: Twitter

Born on 2nd June, 1967 in New Canaan, Connecticut, United States, Richard Barton is a son of a teacher and mechanical engineer. His father, Jim Barton, once gifted a Commodore 64 to Richard when they lived in New Canaan. Barton has a strong family background with his forefather John Barton and his grandfather Horace Barton known as celebrated in the 1999 South Dakota Tennis Hall of Fame.

Richard Barton completed his degree in engineering in 1989 from Stanford University. Before joining Microsoft in 1991, he took a job at Alliance Consulting Group. After joining Microsoft, one day in a conversation with Bill Gates, Barton pitched the idea of his first business venture – Expedia, and asked Gates to back him. The idea behind Expedia was it would directly allow the consumers to view the prices and book online airline travel tickets, thus, removing the travel agents from the picture. He founded Expedia in 1994 and the idea took off a great leap becoming a massive success for Barton. Later, he left Microsoft as Expedia was declared as a separate company and went public in 1999. He remained as CEO of Expedia till 2003 after which the company was acquired by IAC Corp.

The acquisition of Expedia and considerable amount of free time gave Barton much needed space to think and work on his next ventures. He wanted to create something which had the same motto as Expedia had – to make common people’s life better. In one of the interview he said, “If we’re doing things for regular folks that make their lives better and save them money and give them transparency, we’re on the side of the angels”. His next project was to start a website called Glassdoor.

The idea behind Glassdoor was to provide job seekers transparent information about the company, employees, their salary and even rate the working based on the information. This would encourage the job seekers to find the right job for themselves and for the company to raise their bar so that their ratings are not affected. The site has a whopping 22 million members and has successfully raised $93 million. According to Mr.Hohman, Chief Executive Glassdoor, the company is willing to go public.

Barton’s another idea was to create a space to share transparent information about the local real estate markets. And thus was launched Zillow – a website to find any information needed about real estate. The aim of this website was to provide all that information which was previously hidden from the customer. Barton, as of today, owns shares worth $400 million in Zillow.

Although a genius business mind Barton avoids the hubbub of Silicon Valley and doesn’t wish to get himself mixed up in the flashy corporate world. He prefers to stay away and work from a place where he finds peace and can relax whenever he wishes. Currently, he is a board member at Netflix, a venture partner with Benchmark, and also an active investor in start-ups. Barton has managed to keep a low profile and lives in Seattle.