Barton's Transparency Empire

A story about how Richard Barton built three billion-dollar companies using one simple thesis: "Information wants to be free."

"I listened to this interview with Richard Barton about 5 years ago, and the one thing that stood out was he had a very simple thesis that he used to start all these companies: information wants to be free. He was basically going to bring transparency to industries that were not transparent.

Take Zillow for example - before Zillow and online house search companies existed, the MLS listings were something that only agents and brokers had access to. They were gatekeepers who would say 'You want to know what's on the market? Let me print out the MLS papers and show you these.'

Then they did the same thing in travel with Expedia. We had travel agents who were the brokers who you had to call and say 'I'd like to get a flight and I don't want to pay too much.' You just had to trust them to know all the different options, times, and airports. Expedia was just a search bar that would tell you 'here's all the flights, you decide.'

Glassdoor was the same thing - you wanted to know what it's really like to work somewhere, but employers had no desire to put that out there. They didn't want anybody to know any of the bad things, and employees were often scared to speak up because of non-disparagement agreements. Glassdoor unleashed the information about what it's like to work at companies.

I love how this guy literally started three multibillion-dollar companies off that one premise of making information free."