Prospering Amidst the Real Estate Meltdown: Trulia CEO Pete Flint (Part 2)

SM: What roles did you play when you took that journey with LastMinute.com?

PF: I did a bit of everything. Initially it was business development. In a small company you do everything. I did business development, which was partnerships to drive audience and content as well as other commercial relationships. I ran a bunch of product lines including mobile TV and voice services, and I ran the German office for six months. I did all sorts of marketing.

SM: You got good cross-functional experience.

PF: I gained tremendous cross-functional experience. I shadowed the CEO for many years, and he was a great mentor. I saw how to build the business from the inside. I learned the good and bad things to do. It was a phenomenal journey from March 2000, when we had our IPO, down to September 11th and all the terrible things that the attacks brought to the economy and travel, and then back up. I left in 2003, and in 2005 the company was sold to Travelocity for over $1 billion in cash.

I did OK even though it did not make me hugely wealthy. It did give me a bit of a cushion to think about what to do next, and that was very valuable. In 2003 I felt it was time to move on. I had been very focused on one technology, one vertical and one industry. I wanted to have a breadth of experience so I applied to business school at Stanford to get that learning and to go to the mecca of technology.

After spending a year at business school, during my summer break, I got intrigued by the real estate industry. Real estate in 2004 was not only a huge, booming industry, but it was also full of frustration. Even though the industry was making a lot of money, it was just covering the actual frustration.

SM: What caught your attention? How did you discover the dysfunction?

PF: I was trying to find somewhere to live. The first year I spent on campus. The second year you have to find somewhere to live, so I went to the Internet to figure out if I should rent or buy, and where I should live. It is an important financial decision. The web was really useless. There were one or two good sites, and that surprised me given how important these decisions are.

I also spent some time researching. I went to a conference in San Francisco which opened my mind to what was going on in the industry. The thing that was most appealing was that what I liked to do was solve big, meaningful problems. I looked at the real estate industry as something that was big. There are billions of dollars spent on advertising and tens of billions of dollars spent on commissions. Second, it is meaningful. It touches everyone’s lives and it passes the dinner party test wherein what you do is interesting to others and something they can have a perspective about.

Finally, it was definitely a problem that consumers experienced. Agents and brokers were frustrated. Those are big problems, which means good solutions are needed. I teamed with a classmate, Sami Inkinen, who was a fellow European entrepreneur. We were good friends and we spent a lot of the first year bouncing a lot of ideas off of each other. We teamed up, started researching and spent the entire year getting up to speed with the real estate industry. We launched in 2005.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Prospering Amidst the Real Estate Meltdown: Trulia CEO Pete Flint
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