Jeremy Wacksman: The Tech to Power the Industry

Hey, happy to be here.

My workday typically starts when I'm in Seattle actually with walking the dog with my wife. So, I have two teenage boys and so they're out of the house early on the way to school and I often will get time before the day starts kind of in all weather to get a quick walk in and we chat and we get the dogs some exercise and we get ourselves some steps to wake ourselves up for the day. So, that and a cup of coffee.

I mean I'm a Seattleite, so Starbucks is the easiest closest thing to get and that's usually what's in our house.

What inspires me? Well, I mean, I guess we'll come around to Zillow, but I find what I get most passionate about is solving customer problems. And if I look at my career, it's been led by chasing and working at companies that are trying to innovate sort of on behalf of the customer and usually the consumer. That's really what motivates me. I was actually an engineer by training. I got my computer engineering degree to start. I thought I wanted to be a coder. I wasn't great at it. And what I fell in love with when I got my first job was really trying to figure out what to build. And trying to figure out what to build is like, well, what problem are you trying to solve? Like what exists out there that needs to be made better and that the engineering part of my brain was the problem solving part of my brain, but it was, you know, applying to like the what and I think that's kind of what motivates me in what I read in companies we study in business and how we talk internally and lead teams. Like I think that's sort of the common framework for me.

I mean outside of work I do like to unplug.

Finding activities that kind of force you to unplug. I'm a big skier and when you're going down a mountain, you kind of have to be present on going down the mountain and that's very, you know, freeing and clarifying and clearing of the head. So, I find that I like to find things that just force you to focus.

Whoa.

I can't imagine what the learning curve is like on glass blowing. That's got to be pretty steep.

Oh, wow.

Okay. More becoming beautiful over time, I'm sure.

The best way I can describe a CEO's job is to try and support others to make decisions. My job is to help my leadership team and their teams work through what their objectives are, work through what their teams are working on, which inevitably with humans involves conflict resolution, coordination, collaboration, understanding, communication. And so that's, you know, humans are messy as they interact. So, we end up spending a lot of our time helping decisions get made, helping teams that are working together resolve a conflict or accelerate an effort or unlock an insight, but it's really helping the leaders do that versus doing it yourself.

No, actually, I think your job goes where it takes you. I mean, I think like water flowing, you know, you kind of flow to the area of impact and what part of the business you're spending more time on or what team you're spending more time with will vary based on the need at the time. So, and maybe that's part of what makes it really interesting for me. Back to the like, you know, what motivates me is solving problems is there's always a new or different problem to solve. There's always something to work on and a team that needs help and I get to spend my time helping and I get to spend my time helping across the company.

Yeah, the best help is support. The best help is listening, understanding what the problem is and then whether it's going and removing a roadblock, whether it's providing clarity if two teams had a different point of view. The best help is like resolving conflict and inevitably enabling people to get their job done. Like that's the best help. But help sometimes can just be like clearing up a miscommunication or making sure team A knows what team B is doing or, you know, so help can take a variety of forms.

It's hard because humans are wired to be scared of failing and they're wired to be fearful of change. Like we are creatures of habit. So we do as well as we can to celebrate failure through learning. You talk, you know, root cause analyses, AB tests, any AB test could be a failure. B failed if A succeeded, but you talk about them as what did we learn from that? How are we smarter today versus before because we did it. I think having that culture and understanding what you learned from something and then just being very focused on the future forward. It like sort of doesn't matter how we got here from here, we learned something. How do we improve from here? I think setting that culture and tone and then trying to celebrate learning. Those are the things I think we at Zillow try and do. It is hard though because I think it's again you're kind of pushing against human nature to do it.

Yeah. I mean the cloud helps but having a framework for how you evaluate things I think helps. When we run product experiments, you know, we have an ever maturing way our product and engineering teams and design teams work through trying something out or experimenting and that system building a system around it is as important as building the culture around it.

As often as we can. And we talk to our customers in a ton of ways, right? So there is surveys and research where you literally have buyers and sellers in a room or on the phone or on a Zoom or in a survey but we also talk to our customers by reading data and that happens at large scale and all the time. So the biggest way we at Zillow try and summarize all that up is we really codify and personify our customers and we actually name our personas alliteratively so that they are in the room all the time. And so one of the best ways is yes, you collect the data, you collect the insights, but you also sort of have the buyer and the seller and the renter present in the room and you name them when you're talking as a way to make sure that you are thinking about them, when you are building, when you're solving a problem, when you're evaluating data.

Yes. Not as often as I'd like. I mean, that's the most fun thing, both talking to the end consumer, but ultimately talking to our agents is some of the most fulfilling work because you get to hear what's working well for them and then you also get to hear what's not working well. And they're great at giving feedback. Right now, it's actually in a really great spot because fall is our conference season. So, I'm actually on back-to-back weeks of talking to our partners across our agent teams, our broker teams, our rental folks. Like, I've been to four or five in a row. So, I've gotten to really marinate in learning what's going well, what's not going well. The rest of the year doesn't always get this surge. So, I really like this time of year because I get to spend a ton of time with our partners and our customers.

The big theme for this year, and this is where the constructive feedback comes in, is around helping them navigate all these changes.

Helping agents navigate. Yeah. So, we'll talk about agents specifically. We can talk about buyers and sellers too, but as you know, we're probably undergoing a larger amount of change in this industry now than I've ever seen in my 15 years here. Obviously, the macro environment is challenging, but the regulatory changes that came from the settlement and the business practice changes is big for the industry. And then generative AI is showing up and it's going to like rewire how the software works. So like we have all three of these kind of forces of change happening at the same time.

And that change is scary to people because they're not sure what's on the other side. And it's easy to wake up and read a headline that says AI is taking your job or people are going to stop hiring buyers agents or everything's going to change. Like it's easy to wake up and get freaked out. And so the feedback we've gotten is basically help us, right? You're our software partner. We are, you know, we say we do tech so you can do real estate. And that's been our mantra for a long time with our agent partners. But we're finding ourselves increasingly not just doing tech, but also doing advocacy, also doing pioneering on forms, which we never thought we'd do to help educate the customer. So, we're finding our way into new spaces because the feedback we're getting is, you know, we need help. This is a big scary new world and we're trying to figure out how to navigate it.

The big opportunity that's coming with all this is better education for the buyer and seller. And if you think about what the industry changes are, you can really sum them up as evolutionary, not revolutionary, and more education and transparency for the buyer and seller. Right? Just think about the two big changes that have happened. The requiring buyers to sign an agreement with an agent. That's a great thing because as we learned from talking to our buyers, most buyers didn't understand how this works. They don't understand how people get paid. Maybe they were told, many were not told, right? And then sellers having choice in how they offer compensation, not requiring them. Like that's a good change, too. Sellers should be able to choose that. Both of those things end up with a more educated consumer. And when you ask a buyer or seller, almost everyone is going through this transaction for the first time. So they don't know how it works. And so they usually are learning on the job. They're learning as they're going. And so more education is great for them.

So a good example of that is we pioneered a touring agreement as part of these changes. We never had put an agreement that's our form in front of anybody. But no one was stepping up to put a form to meet this need that said, 'Hey, all buyers have to sign something before they go to our house.' We said, 'Okay, well, we believe buyers should have choice. So, let's try and help codify a lightweight form.' We call it a dating form before you get married, right? You can go see a home with an agent, 7 days, non-exclusive for free, so that you can choose a great agent. We think that's better for the buyer. We also think that's better for the agent because that helps great agents win that business. They can show how great they are at what they do. That's a good example of us stepping in to help the buyer in a way that they wouldn't have known to ask for that a year ago because they didn't know it was a thing. But now we're here and fast forward a couple years and buyers are going to be used to signing an agreement to go see a house and date an agent before they marry an agent.

You know, I wish I knew. When this first started happening, we didn't expect this to be such a big issue because to us it's so obvious that private listing networks are bad. They're bad for buyers, they're bad for sellers, and they're ultimately bad for agents, right? And so we looked at that and said, 'Okay, the rules of clear cooperation largely ensure buyers, sellers, and agents can see all the inventory.' And that's a good thing. And that's a wonderful thing that exists in this country that doesn't exist in any other market. If that goes away and private listing networks become more of the norm, well, buyers don't get to see all the inventory. That's not what buyers want. It's not good for consumers or buyers. Sellers also end up leaving money on the table, many of whom don't know that. And there's a bunch of studies that have come out that show that off-MLS listings sell for less. People don't understand they're trading visibility for price. And then that's bad for agents because agents ultimately then their value props diminish. They can't be like, 'I can take you to see all the homes.' I can take you to see the homes I have. And consumers end up paying more, right? You have to like pay for access to listings. None of that sounds really good. So we said, well, it's unequivocally bad. This probably won't be a big thing. And then somehow it became this big next cycle. Maybe it's because everything's up in the air because of the settlement and what else could get litigated and just fear of uncertainty. But to us, you never do wrong by doing right by the consumer.

And to us, transparency and access to all listings is right by the consumer. So we are hopeful that we come out of this with actually even stronger transparency and even stronger access for buyers and sellers and agents. But it definitely is a topic of the day.