Adi Tatarko and Alon Cohen bought a fixer-upper in Palo Alto in 2006. It was meant to become a family home. Then came the plans: expensive, unsuitable, and sufficiently far from what they wanted that the couple had to begin again. Renovation had supplied them with an education, although it was rather more costly than the prospectus suggested.
They knew the experience they wanted to have. Finding pictures that helped explain it, and people who could make it happen within their budget, proved harder. Referrals from friends and relatives brought professionals into the conversation without necessarily bringing a shared understanding of taste, cost or requirements. A recommendation is a useful thing. It cannot tell an architect what is inside your head.
Tatarko had already worked in technology and moved into finance. Cohen was an engineer at eBay. Neither needed a new evening occupation. They had two young children, day jobs and a house requiring attention. Nevertheless, in 2009, they began building a website to help with the renovation. Cohen wrote code. Tatarko helped bring the community together. The house was still waiting; the website had visitors.
The plans nobody wanted
The origin of Houzz is unusually easy to picture because its founders were customers before they had customers. They needed to see work they liked, save it, discuss it and locate the people responsible. A beautiful room in a magazine could offer encouragement. A photograph connected to a professional could offer a next step.
Houzz made those connections part of the experience. Professionals could display their portfolios. Homeowners could discover ideas and identify people whose work matched what they hoped to do. The founders asked local architects to contribute images. Families at their children’s school joined the early community. The first audience was close enough to have a conversation with.
Consider the social difficulty inside the original problem. A homeowner has an image, a budget and a vocabulary that may be imprecise. A professional has skills, experience and work that a prospective client may never have seen. Bringing those people together requires more than putting names in a directory. They need something concrete to discuss. On Houzz, photographs helped supply it.
A detour through New York
Tatarko was born in Tel Aviv and grew up with working women as examples. Her mother ran a real estate business. Her grandmother was a fashion designer whose work was exhibited internationally. Enterprise belonged to the family’s experience, even if Tatarko did not initially regard it as the destination of her own life.
She met Cohen while travelling in Thailand. Before Houzz, they had already built a small technology services business together in Israel. They married in 1998 and moved to the United States, living in New York before settling in Silicon Valley. The partnership preceded the Californian house, and the Californian house preceded the company that made them publicly known.
New York suited Tatarko. She enjoyed its energy and was reluctant to trade it for Silicon Valley in 2001. In California she pursued finance while Cohen advanced at eBay. Later, Houzz occupied evenings and weekends. It makes her reluctance to turn the website into a business easier to understand: she would be leaving a career she had deliberately chosen.
The neighbours were the first audience
In the early days, Tatarko’s work included writing homeowner interviews. In December 2009 she introduced Jennifer Grey’s Old Painted Cottage, asking about the home and its renovation. In April 2010 she featured Maria’s Dreamy Whites, a family home on a horse ranch in California. These pieces remain a useful glimpse of the founder doing the ordinary work of welcoming people.
Her introduction to Maria began with curiosity about decorating in white while raising children. It is a wonderfully domestic subject for someone who would later spend years explaining a technology business. The questions concerned rooms, choices and the practical experience of making a home. Readers were offered a person behind the pictures, along with an invitation to look more closely.
The website spread beyond its local beginnings. Homeowners and professionals elsewhere asked for more places and categories. Word of mouth carried the idea into other markets. A project built around one couple’s difficulties was gathering people with related difficulties, and people whose livelihoods depended on solving them. The founders eventually had to decide how much of their lives to give it.
In the fall of 2010, both left their jobs to work on Houzz full time. The transition deserves a moment before the familiar tale of growth resumes. A side project can borrow spare hours indefinitely. A company asks for a different commitment. Tatarko had children, a profession and reasons to preserve the arrangement she knew. She chose to change it.
The investor on the sofa
Tatarko initially resisted outside investment. She enjoyed building Houzz with Cohen and worried about what the wrong investors might do to that experience. The concern was understandable. Once another party supplies the money, decisions acquire another audience. The founders wanted help growing the platform without spending their working lives performing the rituals of a company they had never intended to start.
Sequoia Capital partnered with Houzz in 2011. Its account of the first meeting describes a frugal setting with careful attention to design. Tatarko later recalled Alfred Lin visiting the founders’ house and discussing the product on the sofa. Formal board meetings had yet to impose their furniture preferences.
The conversations included a question that mattered to her: when should Houzz start making money? She wanted the community and product to have a sound footing first. The relationship with Lin gave the founders room to think through revenue rather than rushing every possible commercial feature into the experience. The sequence was a choice about where to spend limited attention.
There is also a distinction between being reluctant and being immovable. Tatarko accepted investment when the founders needed help scaling. She did so while trying to preserve the priorities that made the site useful. Independence, in this account, involved choosing partners carefully as well as doing things alone.
“Don’t enter to exit.”
Adi Tatarko, on advice that stayed with her
Dinner, with the cooking optional
The household and the business never occupy entirely separate parts of Tatarko’s story. She and Cohen had worked together before becoming parents. At Houzz they divided responsibilities according to their strengths, with Tatarko leading as CEO and Cohen serving as president and driving product development. They also had a family life that continued to demand decisions after the office decisions were finished.
Her account of those priorities is refreshingly practical. Being home for dinner with her children mattered. Personally doing the cooking mattered less. When travel to meet country managers clashed with leaving her baby, she took the baby along. These were arrangements for particular situations, described without turning the household into a management seminar.
Cohen, she has said, finds working with her easier than renovating a home with her. Tatarko concedes the point. The joke fits the evidence: building Houzz gave the couple complementary jobs; renovating their house required agreeing about the same rooms. Marriage offers many opportunities for collaboration, and evidently some demand more negotiation than others.
The business behind the beautiful room
By 2022, Houzz was described as serving more than 65 million users. That figure belongs to that period. Its significance for Tatarko’s story is the distance travelled from the families and professionals who first participated locally. The platform had become a place for an international audience to find inspiration and connect around home projects.
There was another expansion within the business. On April 7, 2020, Houzz launched Houzz Pro, bringing professional business management into the offering. Estimates, proposals, invoicing, payments and client communication joined the picture. Each belongs to the less photogenic part of renovating a house, where an attractive idea has to survive an actual project.
A portfolio can help a professional win attention. A proposal helps define the job. An invoice helps the business get paid. Houzz Pro carried the company further into those everyday tasks. For a founder whose original frustration involved the gap between what she imagined and what she could arrange, the progression has a recognisable logic.
On January 1, 2024, Cohen became CEO and Tatarko became executive chair. The appointment followed years in which they had jointly shaped the company. Her new role included continuing to work with Cohen, the board and senior management. The titles changed within a partnership that had already crossed countries, careers and a considerable number of renovation decisions.
In December 2025, she discussed bootstrapping, remaining private and community feedback in a Boardroom Club interview. Those subjects return to decisions from Houzz’s beginnings. They also show a founder still explaining how the company develops, now from the chair’s seat.
The house at the end of the story
When Guy Raz asked in 2022 whether the family had ever completed the renovation, Tatarko said they still lived in the same house, and that it had been renovated. The answer gives the origin story an ending more satisfying than a valuation. The building that caused the trouble had remained their home.
She spoke about the memories made there with the people she loved. After all the discussion of growth and investment, the conversation had returned to a family’s rooms. Houzz might give other homeowners a place to begin their projects. Tatarko’s own project had become the setting for years of family life, with a company growing around it.