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I was very pleased to have been invited to give a keynote speech at the Web 2.0 Expo conference this week in San Francisco. Here is my speech (10 minutes) where I discuss Zillow’s mobile services, and some lessons learned from our experience in mobile.
March 22 (Bloomberg) — Bill Gurley, general partner at Benchmark Capital, talks about investment opportunities in cloud computing. Gurley also discusses app stores, AT&T Inc.’s planned purchase of Deutsche Telekom’s AG’s T-Mobile and secondary-market valuations. He speaks with Cory Johnson and Emily Chang on Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg West.” (Source: Bloomberg)
I’m a big Fred Wilson fan. I’ve seen him speak publicly many times and have always been impressed. I was specifically impressed a few years ago when he took on his own industry by arguing that the government’s treatment of carried interest as a capital gain rather as ordinary income constituted an improper tax break for private equity and hedge fund managers. While I agree with his position, I was mostly just impressed by the fact that he spoke his mind, even in the face of likely negative pressure from his colleagues in his industry.
I’m a frequent reader of his blog and follow him on twitter. His blogging is so good, and so important and helpful to entrepreneurs, and at the same time it’s just good business sense for him because it raises his profile in the entrepreneurial community which improves his deal flow and lowers his cost of capital (since entrepreneurs would rather have as their investor someone with his intellect, experience and bully pulpit).
So as you can tell, I admire him. And then today he topped himself by letting an early-stage VC, Paul Graham (of Y Combinator) publish emails between the two of them about the company airbnb. I highly recommend you read their email thread from 2009.
Friends,
I’ve been remiss in introducing the latest startup that I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with: Room 77. I’m on the Board of Directors.
Room 77 helps travelers make smarter decisions about which specific hotel room they want. There are lots of websites out there that have information about hotels, but Room 77 is the first ever to provide room-specific information including views from hundreds of thousands of hotel rooms. The team has been working their butts off in stealth for the last few months, and they just launched two weeks ago. Lots of accolades so far including winning the Launch conference. [Please check it out on the web at www.room77.com or download the free app in itunes.
Bill Gurley (@bgurley) is one of Zillow’s Directors, and is one of the best venture capitalists I’ve had the good fortune of getting to know. He was on CNBC today talking about the current excitement about investing in private companies.
I'm Spencer Rascoff, the CEO of Zillow.com, one of the largest real estate websites. I grew up in New York and then Los Angeles. Went to college in Boston and then back to New York, before moving to San Francisco and then Seattle.
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