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Today marks a special day, it is Trulia’s Birthday and we are officially 2 years old! Hooray! People often ask how Trulia came about and why we started it, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to share the story of how Trulia came to be…

Sami Inkinen and I met as graduate students at Stanford University in 2003, and as newcomers (I came to Stanford from England and Sami from Finland), we were both terrifically excited to be in California and the Silicon Valley, but we both had a hard time finding a place to live. Like most people of our generation, the first thing we did was to go to the Net and search for information.

In the summer of 2004, there were a few good local sites that offered bits of information, but for people doing their early research, there was no one place to find great real estate content. Real Estate is a huge industry and such an important part of everyone’s life; it was crazy that no one had done a better job of translating listings and information for the Internet age. We knew that we had stumbled onto something big.

In the fall of 2004, as classmates who loved technology and solving big problems we got to work researching the industry, speaking to home buyers, sellers, agents, brokers, franchisors, technologists, anyone we could find to learn more about the real estate industry.

There was a lot of initial suspicion about a new technology company looking to shake up an established industry. Thanks to other technology companies that pulled a bait and switch or didn’t deliver on promises made, they were skeptical to say the least. We kept this in mind as we built out the business model, and have made it a focus to partner with the industry and listen to their concerns along the way.

The more we peeled back the surface and voraciously consumed everything we could, the more we became fascinated with the real estate industry and excited about how we might be able to make a difference.

In the spring of 2005, we started to build prototypes and think about the sort of place that we’d like to work. Once we officially turned down job offers, it all became very real—we were going 100% down the entrepreneurial path. It was exciting, and a little daunting. Even with all the research under our belts, we couldn’t really know what we were in for.

We graduated from school in June 2005 and spent that summer in a small shared office in San Mateo building the website. We were so excited about what we were building, spending endless hours designing interfaces, sourcing content and writing code.

So two years ago today on September 25, 2005, we took this photo in a small office when we launched the website. We held a modest celebration as we flipped the switch and it’s been an incredibly exciting ride ever since.

We have grown a lot since then, from 6 to 50 fantastic employees (and hiring lots more, so please apply!). We continue grow our website traffic at double digit monthly growth rates and are sending millions of visitors to our partners.

Thinking about how the vision has changed today from what we planned back in 2005, I can honestly say, it has remained much the same. We still focused on our mission as we were back in 2004 of fixing the consumer online real estate experience and helping consumers make smarter real estate decisions

So with that, Happy Birthday to us! And here’s to all the great stuff we have in store for many birthdays to come.

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