I sat down with Cynthia Taylor, a senior vice-president at Zillow at SXSW in 2025 to talk about why remote work is better for many businesses.
As more companies refine their in-office strategies, Zillow is embracing a different path—one that prioritizes impact and empowers employees to work where they are most productive.
The Seattle-founded real estate technology company has fully adopted a distributed workforce model, recognizing that great work doesn’t have to happen under one roof. Since shifting to remote work during the pandemic, many of Zillow’s employees scattered across the country, with others enjoying working from home and the company has also expanded its hiring nationwide. “I moved from the San Francisco Bay area to be closer to family in Upstate New York, and it’s been just absolutely phenomenal,” said Cynthia Taylor, a senior vice-president at Zillow who spoke at the Inc. Founders House at SXSW 2025 in Austin.
The company has long recognized that the key to business success is talent, but if they stayed remote. Over time, Zillow developed Cloud HQ, a workforce model designed to turn remote work into a “true strategic advantage . . . and really enable the type of collaboration that makes invention possible,” Taylor explained.
Why Cloud HQ works
There are three core components to Cloud HQ. The first is fostering collaboration at any level—whoever has an idea has a say. “Everyone who is doing great work has a seat at the proverbial table,” she explained. “We’re all the same size on a video conference screen. You’re really leveling the playing field.”
The second piece is technology investment—“nothing happens by accident,” she noted. Zillow has invested in several tools to foster collaboration, such as Glean, a platform that helps employees find information quickly and build artificial intelligence (AI) agents, including a tool that lets its product development team tap into years of consumer and professional research or tool that helps employees answer common IT questions.
The last component is intentionality gathering in person. Employees do get together, but at strategic moments, usually around planning cycles. “When teams need to come together to brainstorm or ideate, we bring them in to fuel that in-person connectivity and collaboration,” she said. These “zRetreats” are intentional, cross-functional gatherings designed for collaboration, problem-solving, and sparking big ideas. Because teams don’t see each other every day, those in-person touchpoints feel bigger and more energizing, strengthening collaboration long after.
One important in-person gathering is Hack Week, which gathers—in Seattle and virtually—product engineering, design, and marketing professionals across the entire company. It’s an intense week, but people can pitch ideas, solve problems, and work with staff they haven’t worked with before. “The ideas and innovations that came out of Hack Week, we rolled straight into our product roadmaps for the next few quarters of next year,” Taylor said.
Boosting revenues—and pride
Taylor added that Cloud HQ has worked better than she expected. Not only can she be closer to family and still have a job at a company she loves, but the business is thriving and has consistently outperformed expectations in residential revenue. They’ve created numerous new roles and innovations, and, most importantly, employees feel supported and seem happy. According to Zillow’s own surveys, 94 percent of staff are proud to work at the company, while 83 percent say they have the resources they need to do great work, Taylor noted.
Prior to Cloud HQ, the vast majority of Zillow’s employees lived close to an office. Now, the company receives four times as many applicants per role and has employees in all 50 states. It’s made Zillow think deeper about unlocking creativity and how to best use the talent they can now bring into their operations.
“We’re able to leverage talent everywhere and that’s especially important in real estate,” Taylor said. “Real estate is so local and having employees across all states, having that phenomenal talent, allows us to better understand the communities and the [buyers, sellers, and renters] that we are building technology products for. It’s so powerful.”
