Sublime

Rich Barton is hardly a household name. Perhaps this is because he’s not based here, and makes relatively few investments. However, while there are more visible founders (like Bezos and Zuckerberg) who’ve built bigger businesses, market cap and notoriety aren’t the only measures of a founder. And Barton is a strong contender for the title of best c... See more

Barton career can be summed up by his mantra “Power to the People”. His companies take power from the incumbents and give it to consumers. Instead of trying to hoard information, they are on the side of consumers and giving them more data transparency.

Our tagline is Founders are artists, not assets. If I had to summarize my core belief, it’s that the best founders, especially in the early days, look more like artists creating a fundamentally new, creative project. They don’t resemble business executives chasing an arbitrage opportunity.

One of my fundamental insights along with Lloyd Frank, who's my co-founder at Zillow, and was at Microsoft, and Expedia, and Zillow with me as well, was that a regular person armed with a connected PC that's plugged into the internet was going to in effect, storm the best deal. Was going to be armed with a weapon to tear down every wall that separa... See more