The pilot who picked real estate.
There is a Cobra attack helicopter in the back of Lane Hornung's resume and most people miss it. They see Stanford. They see the MBA from CU Boulder. They see the broker's license and the proptech founder and the Forbes Real Estate Council badge, and they assume a steady professional climb. They are wrong about the climb. He spent the early 1990s in a helmet over the Persian Gulf. The orderliness came after.
Hornung is the CEO and co-founder of zavvie, a Boulder company that builds the software a brokerage uses when a homeowner wants to look at every option at once. Cash offer. Bridge loan. Listing on the open market. Power buyer. iBuyer trade-in. The point of zavvie is that the agent does not lose the conversation just because the consumer suddenly has fifteen new acronyms to weigh. The agent stays in the middle. The technology bends toward the human. That is the whole pitch, and Hornung has been delivering it, in some form, since the late 1990s.
Before zavvie, he founded 8z Real Estate in 2010 and ran it into the top tier of Colorado brokerages. Before 8z, he launched COhomefinder.com, which started as a side project in 2002 and quickly became one of the busiest real estate sites in the state. Before that, he was an executive at ZipRealty in the Bay Area, helping a scrappy online brokerage grow from a handful of agents into a public company. The throughline is not glamour. The throughline is that whenever the internet has changed how Americans buy houses, Hornung has been there with a small team and a clear opinion.
Boulder, by way of the Marine Corps.
Hornung studied industrial engineering at Stanford and graduated with honors. He then joined the Marines and trained as a Cobra attack helicopter pilot, serving more than six years and flying in the Gulf War. He has never made that the headline of any company. He talks about it the way operators talk about anything they have already done: as practice for what they do next. He calls his nonprofit Salute Colorado, and he runs it for veterans transitioning into civilian life. He treats the nonprofit with the same energy he gives his for-profits, which is to say he treats it like work.
After the Marines came CU Boulder for the MBA. Then ZipRealty in the Bay Area. He came back to Colorado in 2002, got his license, joined RE/MAX Alliance, and started building. He has been building in Boulder ever since.
What zavvie actually is.
A brokerage is mostly a network of agents and a pile of disclosures. What is missing, in 2026, is a calm way to compare the new ways to sell a home against the old ones. Hornung's bet was that consumers do not want to choose between an iBuyer, a cash offer, a bridge program, or a traditional listing in isolation. They want to see them next to each other and ask a person what they think. zavvie is the layer that lets a brokerage do that without giving up the relationship to a national platform.
It is a quiet bet. It does not photograph well. It does not generate headlines about valuation rounds. It just keeps showing up in the brokerages and lender groups that want the marketplace without the existential dread.
The Lane Hornung Career, in five chapters
The 'I know that house' theory.
Hornung likes to say that the four most powerful words a Realtor can offer a consumer are: I know that house. It is a small line and he uses it everywhere. It is also a thesis statement. The argument is that algorithms have made comparison easier, but they have not made standing on a porch easier. The agent who has walked through the kitchen with the cabinets that swell in monsoon season has a piece of information no listing portal can have. Hornung's products are designed around that asymmetry, not around eliminating it.
It is also why he is comfortable saying, in the same breath, that today is the best time in history to be a Realtor. He is not contrarian for sport. He is contrarian because he has lived through three internet transitions in real estate and watched the people who adapted win.