One Big Idea

Barton has founded three billion-dollar companies: Expedia, Zillow, and Glassdoor. 

On the surface, these three companies look different. But they are mirror images of each other. All of them attacked a big opaque market, such as travel, real estate, and corporate recruiting. They used the Internet to remove the information asymmetry between establishment gatekeepers and ordinary consumers.

His companies take power from the incumbents and give it to consumers. 

Data network effects kicked in and they gathered a critical mass of information to become encyclopedias of critical information.

In Incoming exhibit Richard captured the experience of refugees from North Africa and the Middle East using military-grade thermal detection cameras. Instead of capturing visible light, it detects body heat, which the human eye cannot see. 

Mosse represented his subjects in unfamiliar ways by turning them into inverted silhouettes without identity. Each person glows with body heat. Instead of being divided by race, viewers are united by the shared temperature of humanity. 

When you look at the world through your One Big Idea lens, you see opportunities others are blind to. In that way, it is just like the Electromagnetic Light Spectrum. There are light waves flying all around us — radio, microwave, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, X-Ray, and Gamma-Ray. But humans can only see visible light.

Study a panoramic idea for long enough and you’ll start to see its effects everywhere. People with intimate knowledge of One Big Idea monopolize a narrow band of the light spectrum, which gives them access to ideas and opportunities regular people miss.