…that took place a long, long, long time ago (Nov ’05 to be exact… a few months before Zillow launched). In writing about the patent applicants, I started thinking about the time that I interviewed for a position on the product team at Zillow under Kristin Acker.
At the time I was an transportation engineer and if I was going to make the switch to the “online” world, then I really wanted to be on a product team where things got built. I clearly came to Zillow’s attention because of my blogging at Rain City Guide, but first-and-foremost, I saw myself as an engineer. I didn’t want to go into Zillow and be known as “the blogger. ” I wanted to be the idea guy who helped build cool stuff!
Interestingly, someone on the Zillow team (I think it was David Beitel but I’m honestly not positive), was strongly pushing me to look into the idea of being on the marketing team… but I just wasn’t interested in marketing. To the engineer in me, marketing seemed like fluff.
A few months later I accepted a position on the product team as the director of consumer innovations at Move and it only took a few months before I came to the realization that I didn’t belong in product. Irony of ironies, I realized that I BELONG in marketing and in less than 6 month at Move, I moved myself over to the marketing team where, for better or worse, I became known as “the blogger.”
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