Rich Barton’s Big Idea: Power to the People

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.