Fellow Seattle-based entrepreneur/venture capitalist, Nick Hanauer, has been been poking the hornets nest of 1%ers recently with a Bloomberg Op-Ed he authored which argues that we capitalists are not job creators, our customers are.  If Nick had singled out high-finance types, well, okay, those guys are everyone’s somewhat-deserved favorite target.  But Nick couldn’t be talking about me, a founder a several companies including Expedia and Zillow, that now employ thousands …

Mark Britton, the incredibly capable co-founder and CEO of Seattle Startup, Avvo, has recently opened a job for VP of Marketing and overseer of the business units.  Avvo has built up the largest legal directory on or off-line in only a few years, and has now set the company’s sights on Doctors and other professionals.  Ratings, Reviews, and Q&A with real professionals is a powerful consumer concept that …

At Zillow we just released a completely re-conceived Zillow on iPad.  It was fantastic fun to develop and even more fun to use. Here is my launch post about it on Zillow’s blog and below is a video for those of you who don’t yet have an iPad.  Zilllow has only had “mobile” apps (iPhone, Android, and now iPad) for less than a year, yet well …

A quick post to say how pleased I am at the formation of what, for now, we are calling NewTravelco.com.  I’ve helped form this company with Expedia veterans Greg Slyngstad, Simon Breakwell, and Sunil Shah.  I remain CEO of Zillow.com, but will serve as non-executive Chairman of New Travelco, which means I am on the board, but don’t work there.  I want to thank Joel Cutler at General …

In email I just asked a good friend who lives in San Francisco:

“Where should a group of 12 price insensitive, wine-loving conference go-ers go for a dinner where we can get great wine, and maybe bring a few of our own bottles?”

Erik came back with the following that I thought I would share for fun:

1. RN74 is new French place with great Burgundy list –http://www.yelp.com/biz/rn74-san-francisco
2. Zuni Café

…

Marcelo Calbucci of the Seattle 2.0 blog hosted a terrific conference in Bellevue a few weeks ago called Startup 2.0. It was attended by ~300 engaged and switched on folks who are in the process of or thinking about starting up companies. Marcelo asked me to keynote and has recently posted a video of my speech as well as those from several other accomplished Seattle entreprenuers, including Kelly Smith, Alex …

The Completely Ownable, “Made-Up” Consumer Brand Wins Long Term

I wrote this as a private email in 2006 and just refreshed for the blog

“Should we call our site something literal or should we make up a new word?” This is a question I often get asked by consumer product/service entrepreneurs.  In light of Microsoft’s re-launch of Microsoft MSN Live Search as “Bing”, I thought it timely to re-fresh some …