S 01 Ep 35 | Navigating Market Disruptions and Making Strategic Decisions Pete Flint built Trulia from a Stanford dorm room to a $ 3 . 5 billion exit , raising only $ 33 million before going public , and now runs NFX , a fund whose entire thesis is organized around network effects . The conversation covers the full arc honestly , from early fundraising mistakes where Pete learned that investors cared more about consumer interface than data infrastructure , through the 2008 financial crisis that accidentally revealed a better business model when inbound complaints from real estate agents turned into a high - converting sales channel nobody had planned for , to a clear - eyed account of why he chose to sell a company he loved once the competition shifted from product differentiation to marketing spend . In this episode Pete reframes network effects not as a Silicon Valley concept but as something closer to a law of nature , visible in medieval trade routes and B2B software alike , and argues that the vast majority of durable value creation on the internet traces back to them . For founders the practical message is about sequencing : solve a real problem first , establish honest unit economics , then build the layer on top that makes you genuinely hard to displace .