Ross Buhrdorf, founder of HomeAway, discusses selling his company for $3.9 billion. He also shares his current venture, ZenBusiness, which aims.
Ross Buhrdorf, founder of HomeAway, discusses selling his company for $3.9 billion. He also shares his current venture, ZenBusiness, which aims to democratize entrepreneurship.
one of the things that that i do as an entrepreneur is create jobs create value and you know i want to change my trajectory i want to change my life and that's why i came to zen business to start a business i want to be my own boss might want to edit this out for all you entrepreneurs you know raising money is really tough alrighty hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show so today's guest is super super exciting i mean he's been in the world of startups for many many many years but in today's session really we're going to be covering a lot we're going to be covering building scaling creating new categories you know what does it look like when you start to see traction massive exits uh you name it so i guess without further ado that's what let's welcome our guest today ross bertoff welcome to the show hey great thanks for having me alejandro i'm super excited about today and and
super excited about your show i listened to it oh so glad to hear so originally you were born in lincoln nebraska so how was life there well i'll tell you what you know with this year i'm down in austin texas right now and it feels like i'm back in lincoln nebraska with all the the snow and ice we got so i froze my butt off in lincoln that's what happened but i got down to austin texas and went to the university as quick as i could right and obviously you know your parents were definitely a great source of drive for you i mean they were like very much pushing you to to even get you know your your your paydays you know removing snow and cutting wood so yeah i'm sure that made a difference for you yeah absolutely i mean my both of my parents were you know they had and it's funny you know we talk about my business zen business both of my parents had side gigs i mean they had regular jobs
but they had side gigs and that seems to be even more popular right now with the pandemic is side gig so when i was going to school you know i'd shovel snow as a kid when i was in you know in middle school and then later on when i was in university i chopped wood so i was always an entrepreneur my father was always a entrepreneur doing side gigs whether it be you know he had a dump truck and had a salvage business in addition to his his uh his regular business and my mother hung wallpaper they also did home renovations so you know from early age it was always you know to have a side hustle and be an entrepreneur and i jumped in early in my career that's amazing and also you jumped into computers very early on so what got into computers you know i i mean i i was just they were just coming out and you know it just it was just something i was enticed by excited by and you know i went to
university of texas got my cs degree i just think it was you may be the novelty of it and um you know it's certainly been i think i picked the right field it wasn't obvious when i when i started it out it certainly you know computers were were coming on and it was important but you know who would have thought that it impacted the world the way it has yeah 100 you know right away after after actually you're you're getting your degree you went at it you went at it but not as an entrepreneur yet you went at it in the world of uh corporate so uh so so how was that for you i mean doing a little bit of corporate america yeah it was it was good you know i'll tell you what it really was a pivotal pivotal uh point for me uh i went to work i actually interned at data general while i was going to the university of texas and data general was a you know a micro computer company like digital equipment
corporations and i remember they had this huge huge year you know they hit a you know a billion dollars in revenue and you know six months later there was an economic downturn and everyone got laid or a lot of people got laid off in the facility that we were working on except for me you know i was one of the people that didn't get laid off and it was because i was a low-paid intern that was adding a lot of value to the company and it really impressed upon me at that time that you know there's really not any difference in risk with respect to working for a big company or working for somebody else and being an entrepreneur or taking you know your risk into your own hands and so i really had this at a very i think pivotal age that you know man this big company thing is there's no guarantees and i i guess i'd rather go out on my own and take more risk uh with my career and that's literally
what i did from that point on i went on to a company called tanda or went to tandem computers that was my first job out of school i needed a job and you know had a family then worked at tandem got a great bunch of experience it was it was really an internal startup at tandem we built the first fault tolerant unix machine now played a part in that and then after that i went to hal computer systems which was a my first real startup and we built that was the last computer company from the ground up how computer systems we built the first fault tolerant uh spark chip the spark chip was what was in all the sun microsystems boxes uh that box or that computer and that company got bought by fujitsu and you know i was off to the races as an entrepreneur after hal i went to excite.com that was a startup i was in the you know that was the whole internet boom it was in the first a few people at
excite.com after excite.com i went to uh series during the bust after the the inter internet 1.0 bus your experience oh yeah your experience is amazing heroes because you know the um i'm sure that going through the dot-com bust uh you know there's so many people that are probably listening to us now and they don't even know what that is and you know we're coming out of this market that we've been for 14 years like celebrating you know returns after returns i mean what were some of the lessons that you got from from seeing that catastrophic environment of companies going you know down the toilet like one after the other yeah yeah i'll tell you what it made uh you know a heck of a you know if it wasn't radio i'd say another word but it made a heck of a impression upon me the bust because um i had had made a fortune at excite.com you know four dollar options that were you know over three
hundred dollars at the peak of the market and i thought it was a great idea because we were riding so high you know well i'll invest that in sun microsystems in cisco and at the time you know cisco was the largest cap company in the world and boom it all kind of tumbling down so i lost a lot of money uh and as a result that really made made makes a heck of an impression on you made me uh more conservative in my approach moving forward and what it taught me is that you know there has to be real value you have to be building real value for your customer you have to have real retention uh you know you have to build a product that your customer wants now certainly at excite.com we did we did do that but a lot of the other companies that were surrounding it you know the market viewed it as a land grab it didn't matter if you made money just mattered that you were capturing eyeballs and you
know ultimately eyeballs don't necessarily pay the bills you have to have a real business model underneath it and so i think what i walked out of from that point of from from that part of my career is you know and and it's made me i would say i'm certainly not risk averse i mean that as a startup and an entrepreneur risk is one of the things that you have to spend is how you out compete the incumbents but i'm also very focused on unity economics a sustainable business building real value for customers or or like i always say you can't you can't lie to your customers you know ultimately 100 you know after this after this experience for you too ross i mean you did a couple of um failed the enterprise startups that i'm sure that really gave you a lot of a lot of lessons and experiences on and also on your view on how you wanted to execute and do things well and and avoid you know not doing
perhaps the mistakes that you had seen in the past but that was the segway that really got you into into being the founding cto of at this small company at the time called home away yeah yeah so i was the founding cto at homeaway and you know we had created um you know we created the category leader the unicorn for the vacation rental uh segment you know did 28 plus acquisitions raised to 450 plus million dollars did an ipo and then ultimately sold it to expedia for 3.9 billion dollars i mean it's uh you know it's really something to go through create a unicorn like that and go through that experience um you know and i think my career up to that point had built upon that i mean at excite.com we did lots of acquisitions so i knew how to do those but nothing you know prepares you for the fantastic growth we had at homeaway and here again it you know it comes back to one of my tenants great
business…