The first Houzz professionals were not found through a business plan. They were found close to home. Adi Tatarko and Alon Cohen asked a few Bay Area architects to upload portfolios to a site Cohen had coded himself, and the first customers, one account says, were other families at their children's school.
Tatarko was born in Tel Aviv. A Carnegie Corporation profile says she grew up admiring the women in her family. Her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, was an internationally exhibited fashion designer, and her mother ran a real estate business. Design and property were the family trade before they were hers.
A Carnegie Corporation profile says she grew up admiring the women in her family.
She met her husband while on vacation in Thailand. Cohen was Israeli too. They started a small tech services company in Israel, married in 1998, and moved to Silicon Valley. After leaving the tech sector, Tatarko worked as a financial adviser while raising their sons.
Then came the house. A difficult remodel in 2006 left them struggling to explain what they wanted and to find the right people to build it. Nobody had a good place where a homeowner could see an architect's work and say: like this.
Houzz went up in February 2009. What nobody planned was that strangers outside the Bay Area would ask for more categories and more cities. It became a company in fall 2010, with an iPad app that November. By 2014 there were offices in the UK, Germany and Australia, and by 2022 about 65 million users.
The cost was not small. A privacy lawsuit over call-recording notifications, filed in 2015, was settled. The $4 billion valuation the company reached in 2017 has not been refreshed in any source found, so it is now stale. In 2020 the company launched Houzz Pro, software for the professionals who had been its guests, a harder business than inspiration.
Tatarko has been blunt about what she thinks founders get wrong. Her advice, in the Carnegie profile, is 'Don't enter to exit.' It reads differently from a woman whose grandmother made clothes and whose mother sold houses. Those women built things that stayed. A company that begins as a fix for your own house may last longer than one that begins as a plan to sell.