Barton, Richard N.

Richard Barton, (born June 2, 1967, New Canaan, Connecticut, U.S.), American entrepreneur who created the do-it-yourself websites Expedia.com and Zillow.com.

Barton graduated from Stanford University in 1989 with a degree in industrial design. In 1991 he joined Microsoft, Inc., where he served as a product manager for MS-DOS and, later, the Windows operating system. While working on a Microsoft travel-guide project, Barton was inspired to provide consumers with direct access to flight information rather than leave them dependent on airlines and travel agencies, which effectively monopolized the travel-booking business. Microsoft launched Barton’s idea as Expedia.com in 1994. It was spun off as a public company in 1999, and under Barton’s guidance Expedia became one of the most popular—and financially successful—travel-booking websites. He remained the firm’s president and CEO until 2003.

In 2006 Barton and Lloyd Frink, a former Expedia executive, created Zillow.com, a self-service real estate website that looked to duplicate the success of Expedia. Zillow was instantly popular, in large part because of a feature called Zestimate, which provided users with an estimated value for any of the tens of millions of homes in the site’s database. Barton served as CEO until 2010. Among his other popular ventures was Glassdoor, a website he cofounded in 2007. It allowed past and present employees to post anonymous reviews of their companies. In 2018 Glassdoor was sold to a Japanese corporation for more than $1 billion.

In addition to his various ventures, Barton served on the board of several companies, including Netflix.