Jack Horton is senior vice president for Personive, a company that allows individuals to register at the site to protect their privacy and manage their online personas. The online service is based on technology that verifies the attributes of an audience, captures their interests and makes their profiles portable for use by other Web sites.
Horton will speak at Real Estate Connect in San Francisco on Thursday as a member of the "7 New Ideas That Will Change Real Estate" panel.
He answered a set of questions posed by Inman News:
What do you see happening in the real estate market in 2008?
The industry is vital to our economy and now everyone knows it. The "fixers" will try to improve the "system." Unintended consequences lie ahead.
What advice do you have to help real estate agents and brokers get through this market?
Offer clients insight and trust — everything else is noise.
What was your first job?
Installing office equipment.
What made you join your current company?
Reducing the trust barriers that are preventing Web 2.0 from being all it can be.
What’s been your biggest challenge in running the business?
Staying on a fast bus to market reality.
If you had one thing to do over again in your life, what would it be?
I should have taken more finance classes at Wisconsin.
What style of home do you live in and when did you buy it?
A colonial on a cul-de-sac with a black dog on the porch in beautiful Reston, Va., mortgaged in 1983.
What worries keep you awake at night?
When will the Washington Nationals find a left fielder who can hit his weight?
What lesson did you learn in the last year?
The great Satchel Paige said it best: "It’s not what you don’t know that kills you. It’s what you think you know, but … it just ain’t so."
What would your second career choice be?
Quarterbacks coach for the Green Bay Packers.
What kind of music do you listen to?
Polka — especially the "Happy Schnapps Combo."
Who is your hero?
Thomas Watson Jr., the son of the founder of IBM, who built the most complex and adaptive business institution in history.
Hear Horton speak at Real Estate Connect in San Francisco, an event that began Wednesday and ends Friday. The conference program and registration are available online via the Connect Web site .
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