Spencer Rascoff caught a whiff of worry as an entrepreneur in 1999 after launching his first startup, Hotwire, a travel website where consumers can book flights, hotel rooms and packages.

He faced insurmountable challenges two years later after the United States was victim to a terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001. Rascoff managed to save Hotwire through the travel recession that followed and later sold the company for approximately $700 million.

Rascoff will share his experience managing adversity during the 9th Annual Power Forward Speaker Series, co-presented by First Commerce Credit Union and the Florida State University Office of Research, on Feb. 16 at the Ruby Diamond Concert Hall at FSU.

By 2006, Rascoff co-founded Zillow, a popular real estate database for consumers that unlocked information that was not readily available to buyers and sellers. Once again, two years later, Rascoff found his company on the ropes amid the global financial crisis tied to the Great Recession.

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He managed to help Zillow turn around, flourish and become a $10 billion company. Now the 47-year-old is on to another wildly successful startup called Pacaso, which helps people buy second homes by offering real estate properties as shares to eight owners per property.

In an interview with the Tallahassee Democrat, Rascoff said it's the fastest company "ever to become a unicorn or worth over a billion dollars," adding it's in 40 markets in four countries.

"We've raised a couple $100 million dollars in venture capital. And that company also has plenty of headwinds, despite its enormous growth," Rascoff said. "So through these three startups, whose stories are basically complete and one which is still being written, I've figured out how to manage startups through adversity and keep employees motivated and stay on strategy for at least in two cases and managed to pull rabbits out of the hat."

The Democrat, which is a Power Forward Sponsor, asked Rascoff some questions leading up to his speech. Here's what he said:

Q: What's been your biggest lesson that you've learned as an entrepreneur?

A: The biggest lesson as an entrepreneur is to find a large industry where consumers are incredibly dissatisfied with something about it. So a large addressable market, but significant consumer dissatisfaction can create an opportunity for a huge business...You think about other giant industries like logistics, which Amazon has disrupted or healthcare, which many startups are trying to disrupt. So these huge industries where there's lots of consumer consternation, for one reason or another.

Q: Talk about those early days of launching Zillow and what really was the spark for that? And then why was it so necessary at the time and why is it still so necessary?

We started Zillow in 2006. At the time, there was no consumer-oriented real estate platform. There were plenty of real estate websites, but they all prioritize the real estate professional and none of them prioritize the consumer. So the inspiration for Zillow and the opportunity that was before us at Zillow was to create a consumer-first real estate portal.

We started with the "Zestimate" which was our attempt at valuing every home in the country. And we added publicly available property data like number of bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, tax history, and prior sale price.

We illuminated incredible troves of data that were locked up in county courthouses or inaccessible to consumers, because they were secretly hidden in industry-only databases. By unleashing the power of that information to the consumer, we help them make smarter decisions about their most important asset, their most important asset their home.

The reason that it is still relevant all these years later, is because real estate continues to keep consumers most important financial asset and also emotional asset.

Q: Have you ever been to Tallahassee?

No, I'm super excited. I've never been there. I've been to Florida obviously many times, but I've never been there and I could not be more excited.

Q: When looking at housing market data for Tallahassee on Zillow, what are some takeaways?

A: What I see when I look at this data is a really complicated housing market. I see very low listing inventory; listing inventory is down (nearly) 44% year over year. So there are very few homes for sale. But, because mortgage rates are so much higher, with the few homes there are for sale they are quite unaffordable.

When people say, 'How's the market?', it's actually very complicated to answer. In some ways, it's quite terrible because mortgage rates are so high and affordability is low. It's very difficult for homebuyers to buy homes. On the other hand, it's actually quite good for a seller because there's very little inventory they have to compete with.

My advice is generally to seek all the data that you can find on places like Zillow and Redfin and other real estate resources. But you should complement or supplement that self-directed data with the services of a real estate agent or some other local professional who can interpret all the information that you find online.

Q: The Power Forward event draws a diverse mix of college students, entrepreneurs, business professionals and community leaders. What's going to be your message?

A: I'm speaking about managing through adversity ... I've figured out how to manage startups through adversity and keep employees motivated and stay on strategy and at least in two cases, managed to pull rabbits out of the hat, despite huge macro economic challenges, and hopefully the third as well we'll see.

Contact Reporter TaMaryn Waters at tlwaters@tallahassee.com and follow @TaMarynWaters on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Zillow Co-founder Spencer Rascoff to speak at Power Forward