Early Life and Education
Richard Barton was born on June 2, 1967, in New Canaan, Connecticut. Raised in a family with a teacher and a mechanical engineer, Barton developed an early interest in entrepreneurship. He graduated from Stanford University in 1989 with a degree in engineering.
Rise to Success
Barton's career began with a consulting stint and then moved to Microsoft in 1991, where he worked on products like MS-DOS and Windows. In 1994, while at Microsoft, he founded Expedia, an online travel booking service. Expedia was spun off as a public company in 1999, with Barton as CEO until 2003. After a break, he co-founded Zillow in 2006 with Lloyd Frink, also from Expedia, and served as its CEO until 2010 and from 2019 to August 2024.
Key Business Strategies
Barton's key strategies include identifying opportunities to leverage technology for consumer empowerment. At Expedia, he gave consumers direct access to flight information. At Zillow, he aimed to make the real estate market more transparent with tools like Zestimate. He also founded Glassdoor, to increase transparency in the job market.
Philanthropy
Barton and his wife Sarah established the Barton Family Foundation in 2004, initially focused on supporting education and mentoring programs for at-risk youth in Seattle. The foundation now focuses on reforming the U.S. criminal legal system and addressing societal inequities.
