I recently interviewed Zillow co-founder David Beitel on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:
Adam: Our guest today co-founded a multi-billion-dollar company that changed the way people buy, sell, rent, and finance homes. David Beitel is the co-founder and CTO of Zillow. David was previously the CTO and one of the earliest team members of Expedia. David, thank you for joining us.
David: So good to be with you, Adam.
Adam: You grew up in Conroe, Texas, 40 miles outside of Houston, and you were interested in technology from an early age. You studied computer science at Cornell and have been working in software ever since. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?
David: Oh, gosh, yeah, let’s go back. Small-town Texas. If you hit Conroe, you’re either on your way to Dallas or you’ve missed your stop going to The Woodlands. But no, a great place to grow up, good people. And yeah, my early computer days started in high school there. It was called computer math at the time, but that’s where I learned to program. And the immediate gratification of it, this idea that you have this thing you want to do, and you can write some code and build something that you can use, or others can use. I remember one of the first things I did was write a Christmas card database for my mom that I could print out every year so she could remember who to add to her Christmas card list. But no, it was this spark. The engineers out there and the developers out there know that once you get the bug, it’s hard to shake. And now more and more people through AI are getting to experience that too. You don’t have to go get a computer science degree to write code and build applications for people. But yeah, I know that early day, that spark, I knew that technology was something that was important to me. I had the good fortune to have a computer at home that I could really understand and study. And then, yeah, the decision to go to Cornell and study computer science. There’s a little funny anecdote there. I started in electrical engineering. I was a tinkerer; I liked to build things. And there was an engineering lab where we kind of built our own little early boards and programmed the chips, et cetera, and I shocked myself pretty badly in the lab twice, blew the circuit breaker in the lab, and did a quick pivot to computer science, where I felt like maybe working with the software might be a little simpler and safer and leave the electrical engineering to somebody else. But again, it was that instant gratification of building something that was going to help solve a problem. And of course, we’ve seen that in technology all over the place, and to be able to be a part of that and help change industries, like I did at Expedia with travel and now at Zillow with real estate, it’s been an incredible journey.
Adam: I love that. Problem-solving is an essential skill for success. What were the most important skills that you developed that allowed you to rise in your career? And what are the most important skills that you utilize today as a leader?
David: Clearly, there’s some basic skills that we need to kind of show up to the game. And I do feel like I learned a lot of really important things early in my career about kind of foundational aspects of computer science and technology that I lean on, that these are kind of part of my DNA of sorts, and that help influence things where I need to rely on my instincts to make the right call. But honestly, so much is about the people that you surround yourself with, and the empathy that you have for both our customers and what we’re trying to do and for those that we’re bringing together. There’s a lot of curiosity. We’re really traveling some untraveled paths here. And I often pull our teams together and say, this is the jungle we’re navigating, and we don’t know exactly. We know kind of generally where we’re going, what we’re trying to do. We have a mission for the company or for our product. We have a great understanding of the customer, and we talk about the customer being our North Star, but the path we’re going to travel to get there is going to be a little rocky. It’s going to be a little bumpy. We’re going to make some mistakes along the way. So let’s have some curiosity. Let’s be self-critical. Let’s not be afraid to challenge the status quo and realize that the next step is the most important one, and we’re going to learn from it and kind of continue to be evaluating. So again, I love surrounding myself with people that are curious. That’s where that innovation comes from, that innovation mindset, that growth mindset that you talk about, but also a level of accountability, both for ourselves and our teams.
Adam: And just about all those skills that you described are soft skills. When we think about technology and technical leaders and what is important and what it takes, we default to technical skills. But everything that you’re describing isn’t technical, it’s a soft skill.
David: It’s so true. I remember a little fun story. When I was growing up, my grandfather lived in Florida. I would go visit them every summer and spend a week or so with them. Great guy, and my grandmother was great, really loving, and just to spend time with him. He had retired, but he was an executive back in the day at Sears, Roebuck, maybe a name you don’t hear very much. But he told me something early on that just sticks with me, that technology is important. He was always fascinated by technology, but that it was really the people. Don’t forget about the people. The technology maybe is what gets you excited, but it’s the people that really make the impact and apply the technology to solve the problems. And they’re just people, right? I mean, we talk about our employees, we talk about resources, and we talk about things in spreadsheets, but really it’s people that are coming together to solve these problems, to build these products. And look, sometimes we have to make decisions as leaders that aren’t popular, that are tough, that impact these people. But when we think about them as people, and we create these relationships, one, it’s fun and it’s interesting, and we learn more. But also, I think we bring out the best in each other, and we get more out of each other when we think about our team that way. Pretty fascinating, especially in this world now post-pandemic, and Zillow moved to a mostly remote work environment. We have offices. People can go into the office, but most people work from home. I’m at home right now, and I go in as needed. We have retreats that we get together. You might think it’s hard to build relationships online and mostly through the screen, but if you’re intentional about it and you take the time, you can build incredible relationships, and you can create incredible bonds that are very powerful. Yes, it’s great to get people together, and it’s good to break bread and see each other eye to eye, but there’s incredible things that you can do in between, when we’re online and remote.
Adam: In your experience, what are the keys to leading in a remote setting and leading in a hybrid setting?
David: I mean, I think, one thing, we can use our technology and our tools to help break down some of those barriers. I couldn’t imagine doing this 20 years ago, given the state of the internet, the tools that were available. We have people all over the world. We have people in other countries. We have people in Mexico, we have people in India and Germany and Serbia and Ukraine. We couldn’t do that like we can today. And when I bring a team together, in some ways, remember the time when you’d have your whole team together, and that one person would be remote, and they’d be up on the screen, and you’d almost sometimes forget that they were there, and you’d almost be like, oh yeah, Bob chimes in. And when everybody’s online, it kind of really creates this even playing field where everybody’s going to have a voice, because we’re all in this together, and everyone’s in their square on the screen. But we’re having real honest conversations, and that can be very powerful. The other thing I’ve noticed is you tend to write a few more things down in a bit more of an async model of communicating, because you have time zone differences and everyone can’t be in every meeting, or you can’t be in the same place at the same time. We document things a little bit more. And some of the tools around working on these documents together can be a really powerful way to make sure everyone’s on the same page. And it also has given people that maybe have a different style of communicating a voice as a leader. I always want the best ideas to come forward. And sometimes the people that talk the most in a meeting, or have that red energy that often finds itself in the tech space, are the ones that grab the mic and speak the most. But sometimes it’s that person in the corner that’s a little bit quieter and maybe doesn’t think as quickly on their feet or on the fly, or can’t debate something with you in real time as effectively as they can. Taking a step back, developing their ideas, and presenting them in maybe a slightly different way. I want those great ideas to come forward too, and I think the model that we’re starting to iterate on and start to develop in this model that we’re working in remotely is starting to pull out the best in that and create some things that maybe weren’t always available when we were just in the office together, doing it a certain way.
Adam: David, you bring up a really, really important point, which is that the loudest voice in the room is the voice that gets the most airtime, the voice that gets the most attention, but is very rarely the most valuable voice. Very rarely, the person with the best ideas, oftentimes, the person with the best ideas doesn’t volunteer their ideas because they’re too shy, or they don’t feel compelled to share their ideas. Maybe they don’t have the opportunity to share their ideas. It might not be the right platform. You, as a leader, have to figure out how to surface those ideas, and you shared one way of doing it, doing it in a remote setting, doing it in a hybrid setting. But regardless of the setting you’re leading in, it’s imperative for you as a leader to ensure that every person on your team has the opportunity to share their best ideas, and is incentivized to share their best ideas, because, to your point, the person in the corner who isn’t speaking up is the person who you want speaking up. That’s the exact person who you, as a leader, want to ensure that you are empowering.
David: So true. And I think a lot of those conversations can happen in smaller settings, maybe at the team level, where a manager with their smaller team can create an opportunity for those voices to be a little louder and to have a safe space for that person to step forward with their ideas. I mean, this comes back to a lot about the culture, too, of the organizations that you’re building, right? I feel like we have a very transparent culture at Zillow and the companies that I have been a part of starting and helping grow. Certainly, we talk about these core values and these leadership principles that really get at the core of that. How do you create this place where everyone can thrive? How do you create this place where we expect a lot from ourselves and others? How do we communicate the vision and pull out the greatest ideas and encourage people to challenge us? It’s so easy to think, oh, gosh, well, if he’s the CTO, he must know the right answer. And my idea, even though it might be different than that, my gosh, maybe I shouldn’t talk. Boy, I don’t want that. The key part of that, too, is not always being the first to grab the mic, right? I mean, some of the best leaders are the ones that listen first, create the space. Yes, it can be awkward, the silence can sometimes be awkward, but sometimes you have to allow that to be there, or just call people out. I mean, I think often, if you call on somebody, they often rise to the occasion, or create other opportunities for these ideas to flow. We do a really fun thing at Zillow where once a year, for a full week, we do something called Hack Week. And this is an opportunity to kind of work on something that’s off your roadmap, off the beaten path. It’s not something that we’ve told you you have to do. Maybe it’s a new technology. You’re looking to explore an idea that you and a few of your colleagues have that you want to develop and build into a prototype or something else that you’re interested in pursuing. And it’s incredible what people will come to you with, new ways of working, new technologies that we should be deploying, new business ideas. Some of the cores of our Zillow lending business come from some early ideas that came out of one of those Hack Weeks. This is an incredible opportunity. Other companies do that with their 20% and such, and we certainly create opportunities throughout the year for people to be innovating and coming up with new ideas. But this like, let’s just go off and take everything off, let’s stop the meetings and get together, over 1,000 people that come together in Seattle, and then a bunch of people online that can’t travel. And it is amazing, the energy and the ideas that flow from Hack Week. Again, that’s just an example of something that we can do to try to create the opportunity for the best ideas to come to the top.
Adam: I love that. It is so important for you as a leader to create opportunities for the people who you lead to take chances, to take risks, to be creative. It is so important for you as a leader to create an environment where the people who you lead aren’t afraid of being wrong, aren’t afraid of saying something that might not actually be the right answer, and creating an environment where the people who you lead aren’t afraid of you. And a lot of that starts with you as a leader being authentic, being yourself, and being vulnerable, not you as a leader not being afraid of showing your weaknesses, not being afraid of showing that, hey, I might be the CEO, I might be the CTO, I might be all the way up here on the totem pole. But in reality, we’re all on the same level, because we’re all human beings. All men are created equal, and we all are in this together, and we all bring something unique to the table, and my job as a leader is to figure out, what do you bring to the table that will help elevate all of us, that will help elevate this team to where we want to be.
David: Yeah. Love that. It brings up the best in people when you create that environment, and people feel like they can step forward and contribute like that. I feel like I’m pretty capable and have some strong skills that have allowed me to grow my career and get to the position I am. But I’m certainly not the smartest person in the room, and I can’t have the depth and breadth in everything that I’m responsible for to be the expert in everything. It doesn’t take that long to realize that in most cases, and then certainly hiring great people that you can bring together, and then you can have, oh my gosh, I’m so lucky to work with some of the strongest leaders and strongest contributors that I have so much confidence in. Sure I’m involved, sure I’m down in the trenches with them and rolling up my sleeves and showing humility. And I’m not afraid to go get the pizzas when I need to get the pizzas and whatever, and I want to hear their ideas. I’m creating that opportunity. And then, of course, create the space, create the opportunities, and recognize and reward the failures. Boy, we don’t want to keep making the same mistakes twice, certainly, but we’re going to make mistakes. When you’re out innovating, like we were talking about, that path through the jungle, you’re going to make some wrong turns. But we want to try to identify those mistakes quickly, pivot, learn from them, be stronger from it. Realize what was the point of that experiment, and what are we going to learn from that, and take that forward. And when people start to see that, see the risks being rewarded, they start taking them. As leaders, we need to inspect and confirm, and so it’s not a passive leadership, it’s active leadership. And at times, we’re asked to make calls that are uncomfortable, or that if there’s disagreements within the team, that’s our role, is to listen to all the ideas and ultimately make the call, and as a team, move forward in that. And if we make the wrong call, acknowledge that and admit our mistakes. And I think people see the humanity and the humility in that, and they respect us as leaders more, especially when we’re transparent, and we own that, and just like we expect them when they show up.
Adam: Right out of college, you started working for Microsoft. You excelled at Microsoft and ultimately joined Expedia as an early team member, helped create the Expedia that we know today. Then joined the founding team of Zillow, created this multi-billion-dollar technology platform. What did you do that allowed you to differentiate yourself from all of the other Cornell computer science graduates, all of the other graduates with computer science undergraduate degrees, computer science master degrees? How did you stand out? What did you learn? And what can anyone else do?
David: That’s kind of fun to think about, and there are some lessons there. I was a pretty heads-down kind of guy. I think growing up, learning a lot from my parents just about hard work, I wasn’t afraid to work hard and be a little patient in the process and realizing that there’s things that you can control and the things you can’t control. And I could certainly put myself in a position, work at a great company that enables certain opportunities, but at the end of the day, there can only be so many CTOs and so many VPs and so many directors. But that if I worked hard, if I was a good team member, if I tried to make an impact, tried to be someone that was pleasant and enjoyable to work with, that good things would come to me. In some ways, it was that simple. I had some really good mentors along the way, some people that were champions for me. So I guess I would encourage people to seek those people out. What I got from that, and certainly empowers me when people ask me to talk to them or be maybe a mentor for them, I feel like that’s our responsibility as people that are a little bit further along in their career to give back. But I had some incredible mentors who taught me a lot, took me under their wing. This guy was the 80th employee at Microsoft. You know how big Microsoft is? He was the 80th employee. The people he knew there, and here I was some green early talent out of college who was trying to learn and figure out what it meant to work in a corporate environment, and the way he took me under his wing and introduced me to people and helped point out opportunities to me that maybe I should be as bold to put my hat in the ring for. And then the humility that he had to flip the script and realize that he was at a point in his career where it was the right opportunity for me to become his manager and manage him and a bunch of other teams as my career was growing, wow, right? The humility and the confidence that you have to have to do that, pretty amazing. So to be surrounded by people like that, and to have those people championing for you, wow, what a gift. Of course, there’s opportunities that I had to go after and to struggle through and persevere through. And one of the things we’ve been talking about, take bets, not be afraid to be a voice of dissent. Do that tactfully. If I have good ideas, make sure I find ways to present them. Be a good teammate and remind ourselves that we only succeed as a team, not me as an individual, even though there are people that we run into along our way, and we don’t always have the same style of working. Maybe we butt heads at times and approach things just a little differently, that we have to put those things to the side and find ways of working together, because that doesn’t just affect our relationship, that affects the way our teams work together. These are things we learn, and things we learn how to overcome, and the power of obviously working together and succeeding and finding those big wins that our customers love, and that’s the fun. That’s, you know, talk about Expedia and Zillow, changing industries, using technology to change the way that people shop for homes or travel. Like, wow, that’s such an honor to have been a part of these companies and making a difference that we are. I’ve just been so privileged.
Adam: Having played such a vital role in building the technology behind changing the way people travel, changing the way people buy homes, what are the keys to building great products? What are the keys to building great software?
David: Focus on the customer is just so critical and so intense. Other companies talk about this too. Now, certainly, the ones that are successful, I think, are really anchored there. The challenge is you have to be careful, right? I mean, the old joke that you ask people that ride horses what they want, they want a faster horse. As part of innovation, you have to listen to your customers, you have to observe the way they work. You have to understand their needs and their desires and their wants. But you also have to sometimes look further down the road and dream up new ways of working that maybe they don’t even know exist because they just don’t have that perspective. And the technology advances that have made the products that we’re building now possible, and certainly AI has been a part of that story, have opened up a whole new realm of the kinds of products that we can build. Certainly, the development of the mobile phone and how that unlocked. These are the shifts that happen, and then, as builders of software and products, we look for great opportunities to leverage them and to create new ways of working and new products that we can develop for our customers. Real estate’s a very mobile thing. You’re driving down the road, you see that house that’s for sale, you’re navigating a neighborhood, you’re out for dinner, and you’re negotiating a deal. So the power that the mobile device unlocked really was a game-changer. And Zillow was one of the first iPhone apps, the first iPad app. And so much of our customers experience us through those applications. The same thing now with AI, just the things that we can do, the products we can build, the immersive experience, the content that we can create through our rich media, through 3D content. You can navigate the inside of a home now without ever even going and visiting it. We’ve gone way beyond just high-definition photos. How exciting, the kinds of things that we can do for our customers and for our agents and for sellers. Right now, I don’t have to have all these people necessarily trampling through my house just to kind of see if it’s something they want to come visit. Certainly, you’re going to go look at a home before you buy it, but people that show up now are much more active and engaged shoppers than they ever were. These are the kinds of technology changes that we’re excited about leveraging and putting in front of our customers in ways that they never could have imagined. So a little bit of curiosity or creativity, understanding the customer, taking risks and experimenting, building systems that are going to scale, that are flexible, being adaptive, being resilient, and being willing to say yes to things that are maybe a little bit of a long shot. It’s been great having partners, whether it’s with Apple or OpenAI. We were the first real estate app at OpenAI for ChatGPT, and they told us we had to be done in six weeks. And I was like, oh my gosh, we’re like, working on 5,000 other things, and they were still defining how it was even going to work to have other applications to operate within the ChatGPT product. And we’re like, we’re on board, let’s go. And we didn’t know what was going to happen or how it was going to end up, but we were going to show up with our team, and we were going to figure it out together. And it’s exciting. Clearly, there’s a lot of people using ChatGPT, and we want to be where our customers are, and the product’s going to evolve a lot over the coming weeks and months and years. But wow, we showed up, and what a great thing to be able to be a part of.
Adam: What should leaders understand about AI? And how can leaders best leverage AI?
David: Oh, gosh, what a great question. There’s so many aspects of that that I’d love two hours to talk to you about.
Adam: Take your time.
David: Yeah, yeah, and the reason why is because it’s such a game-changer. Like, look, AI is not a new thing. Zillow started on AI, our Zestimate, which is evaluation, was something we built almost 20 years ago, is AI. But the AI that you are kind of anchoring on are some of the new capabilities of large language models and the models that are creating the products that are built using these technologies. And a lot of the products that we’re using, I’m talking to you today through a product that has leveraged AI and can use AI to make our meetings more effective. There’s so many aspects of how companies can run and operate, and really, I would challenge leaders, because what we’re doing internally at Zillow, we’re challenging every department head to build an AI strategy. So whether you’re in finance or legal, or you’re running our people team, or you’re in engineering, or you’re in our product team, or you’re on our sales team or our operations, how can AI automate tasks, simplify workflows, elevate our workers to have higher-level thinking, so that we take the mundane tasks that can be automated or simplified and level up our employees to do higher-level work faster and more effective, and help us iterate on our products and our mission faster. That is so exciting and certainly creates cost-saving opportunities. It allows us to leverage our people more effectively, allows them to work on more interesting things and makes their job satisfaction better and creates new ways of working that we were talking about earlier. And then, of course, we can talk about the impact that it can have on our products and how we interact and talk to our customers, how we personalize our products. How do we make them more relevant to them? Your experience on Zillow and my experience on Zillow should be very different. Yes, we’re navigating the same product. Maybe you’re looking for a rental, I’m looking for a rental, but maybe we’re looking for different things, and the kinds of neighborhoods that you’re looking to live in, or maybe you’re looking for an apartment in a big multi-family building. All of these things are things that are unique. Or I’ve got kids, you’ve got a dog, and you need more stuff, like all of these things are different, and our financial situation might be different. All that should be woven into this product that we run. We all know that experience when you’re working with somebody that really just seems to get you, when you go into a store to buy something, and that great person that comes up to you and really gets to know you and what your needs are, doesn’t show you a bunch of stuff that you don’t need. The AI is creating the opportunity to build systems that allow for that to happen. And the fun thing about real estate is it’s such a long transaction. From the early days of starting to dream and shop for a home, and you start to become more serious as the shopper, and you start touring homes and looking at a lot of great content, maybe you’re making some offers, maybe you’re getting some declined. And then, of course, this long process of getting a mortgage and closing that can sometimes take six months. That’s a long time, and a lot of things happen, and a lot of people come together to make that happen. And AI is really making that a more enjoyable experience, a more efficient experience, a more personalized experience, and making every person in that transaction, both the buyer and seller and the agent and the loan officer and the closing and service and title, more efficient and effective. Wow. Talk about changing an industry that’s through the power of AI and through technology.
Adam: With all that in mind, what advice do you have for anyone in a leadership role, or anyone who might find themselves in a leadership role, or anyone who aspires to be in a leadership role, on how to best leverage AI?
David: You have to be willing to experiment quickly and don’t try something once and then kind of write it off. It’s amazing how quickly these models and these tools are evolving. Really, even just over a couple of months, there’s a lot of great information out there. Other people that are operating in these different spaces, trying these tools. There’s lots of good content that’s available, podcasts to listen to and online newsletters to subscribe to that bring out daily content. I’m constantly reading these things and sending things to my team. Have we tried this tool? In many cases, they’ve already tried them. Or when did we do that? Let’s try it again. Let’s not give up on these things. It’s easy to get in a little bit of analysis paralysis, where you’re always searching for the best thing that’s going to be perfect. I think the challenge is to try to find ways to leverage the technology, even while it’s still evolving and maybe not quite where it needs to be. And so some of that comes back to your design team, to find ways to develop the product so that there are off-ramps, so that if the technology isn’t always working perfectly, that there’s ways for our customers to still have their needs met and still have a very successful experience, or to build the product in a way that the part of the product that you’re building is a little bit more contained, and you can get a lot of value from that in a bit more of a contained scenario. We have a CRM that real estate agents use called Follow Up Boss, and it’s very powerful. You have a lot of customers, and you want to use the software to help manage your business. And you can imagine over this long cycle, there’s a lot of customers you’re talking to, and a lot of things that are happening. We can use AI to make that agent really quickly understand what’s the status of my interaction with this customer? What’s the next thing that I should be doing to help that customer move through the journey and help them have a successful experience? And AI can make their job really easy at doing that. That’s just a simple example of something that you don’t have to build the most monstrous, complete thing to get a lot of value out of this technology. Look for those small wins, and then certainly look for the bigger bets. If you’re just doing small iterations, you’ll find the little, as we say, local minimums and maximums, but you won’t find that step-function change. So you need to have part of your team both focusing on the short-term things, but also the long-term bets that might take years to pay off, but they’re going to be the things that are going to change the way your company grows and the way that the technology and the industry experience your products. That’s what we’ve seen. I mean, I’ve had this 20 years at Zillow, 15 years at Expedia. We’ve made some incredibly long bets on things, and you have to be patient as leaders. Everything doesn’t happen overnight. Some things can, that’s great, but some things take a lot of patience and a lot of perseverance, and that’s great, right? We’re in this for the long run, not just for a quick win.
Adam: David, when we started the conversation, a big takeaway was how important soft skills have been to you as you distinguished yourself in rising in your career, and in how you lead people and lead teams. And so many people who work in technical roles don’t necessarily have the greatest soft skills. So many people who work in technical roles don’t necessarily have the greatest leadership skills. Some do, and those who do tend to stand out. What advice do you have for anyone in a technical role on how to develop soft skills and how to develop leadership skills?
David: It’s a great question. I also would add that we talk a lot at Zillow about leadership, and leadership doesn’t mean management. Certainly, our managers are leaders, but some of our best leaders are people that are individual contributors, that are finding ways to pull people together to drive our work and get that team to work and do great work, and that’s important to remember. Part of that patience I was talking about is people are looking to grow their career, and I do think it’s important for people to kind of have ownership over their career and not be always waiting for others to help them grow. And there’s a joint responsibility there between your leadership and yourself to have some ownership there. But look for ways to do that. I think some of those soft skills are also maybe looking a little inward to being a little introspective about what are my strengths. I think you’ve heard of the insight mining, where you understand your strengths and your kind of style of working, and what drives you and where do you struggle, and just awareness of how you lead or how you operate helps you, helps your teammates. We actually publish all that. We encourage all of our employees to go through that, publish that on an internal site we have that’s like our org chart, that people can understand, oh well, my manager leads with this kind of energy, or wants the details, or wants to be trusted, and so forth. So a little bit of awareness about who we are and how we operate and who the people we work with goes a long way to understanding how we can work together, or how I can think about changing the way I work to make sure that we’re working well together. One of the best training I ever learned early on was situational leadership, where you don’t just have one style of working. You have to understand the circumstance of the context of the team, of the individual. What do they need from me as a leader to show up and help them be an effective part of a team and operate well together? And I think that awareness is also super critical as a leader. If I don’t have some skill, I think the other thing is looking for good mentors or coaches. There are good ways of doing that with formal training, or just looking at the people around you that seem to kind of get it and are doing well. And I will often point out someone and create opportunities for them to shine, and then as an idea that that recognition drives awareness to the other people in the team to be like that person. Why does that person get the recognition and I don’t, or why do they get the interesting opportunities and I don’t always? And I think as leaders, we can be transparent and be direct with that feedback, but I think there’s a great opportunity for us to learn from each other. And like you said, there are some skills that we have inherently and some of that can be trained, but I think there’s also times where we realize what our strengths are and where our weaknesses are, and look for those opportunities that really amplify our strengths. I love the fact that at Zillow and other companies I’ve been a part of, your opportunity to get promoted in advance isn’t tied to becoming a manager. I don’t want to force people into management just because they think that’s the way they have to get ahead. There’s plenty of opportunity to lead and take on more responsibilities as an individual contributor, and in some ways just as impactful, and if not, sometimes more impactful. And then be looking for ways for people to show some of those leadership skills. Maybe you’re managing an intern that is over the summer, or you’re helping with a cross-team initiative where you’re getting to share and advance some of those leadership skills that we see in them. There’s definitely things that we can do, no matter what, to challenge them and help them grow in ways that they are, you know, maybe you’re lacking a few of those skills. So again, I think it’s a great question, and something that as leaders, we have to be really aware of with our team.
Adam: David, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful, personally and professionally?
David: I think be curious, because that curiosity will challenge us. There has to be a motivation there and a patience there. It’s easier to kind of fall into a rut, be comfortable because it’s convenient. But real success, real impact comes from taking risks and being bold and being curious and trying things that have never been tried before, and finding people to work with that help you take that journey. We could point to a number of examples of people that have built, including Zillow, including Expedia, including Microsoft and Tesla. And, you know, go down the line, people that have taken big bets and risky things, and maybe failed along the way. But no, I think that curiosity and motivation, not being afraid to fail, but learn from that. Many of these things we’ve talked about, surround yourself with people that you enjoy working with, that are going to challenge you. You’re going to bring out the best in each other, people you trust, and have a learning mindset where you’re finding ways to use the journey to learn new things. Gosh, I feel like right now, there’s so many opportunities to expand your knowledge and understanding and try some of these tools. Oh, I’m afraid, I don’t know, I don’t know where to start. Just try, just start. Ask somebody, and once that fear factor goes away, oh my gosh, the opportunities that unlock. Just a fun story. My mom was here visiting for Christmas last year, and we were talking about AI, and she was a little nervous about this technology. You know, older people are maybe concerned about technology, and she was concerned about what it was going to do to our society and how we were going to live, et cetera. And I was like, well, let’s just try it. I got my iPad out, we’re sitting on the couch, and I just started showing her how it worked. We started asking, like, what do you want to know? What are you curious about? And by the time she left, she had her own account, and she uses it every single day. She uses it to build an exercise program, to understand a medical condition, to learn about something she doesn’t know, and ask it more complicated things. I was like, just such a great example of here’s somebody that probably would have found it easier to just ignore technology late in my life, to just take the fear away, have someone show that it is actually pretty powerful, and then to run with it. As leaders, and just anybody navigating their career, wow, what a great mindset to have to not be quite so afraid and just kind of dive in head-first, and then have great people around you to help you.
Adam: David, thank you for all the great advice, and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.
David: So fun to meet you. So excited to be a part of it. Thank you so much.
