Archive for July, 2007
July 27, 2007
John Cook has always reminded me of Edna Buchanan*, the scoop-crazy crime reporter for the Miami Herald who once overheard a colleague grumble about his garbage cans being stolen, only to appear suddenly at his cube with the breathless question: “Empty or full?”
John had a similar reaction when he heard Avvo’s founders complain to us of being accidentally erased from the invitation list for the recent Naked Truth party. The rib John was gnawing fell to his plate; a drop of barbecue sauce hung from his chin so that he suddenly looked like a blood-starved predator.
As we noted in our post-party digest, John suggested going through the wiki history to find the culprits. We all laughed. But today he unveiled a major plot twist: the folks who had deleted Avvo from the list were in fact “the PR firm that represents Steve Berman, the Seattle lawyer who has filed a class action law suit against Avvo.”
John has been coming up with this stuff as long as I’ve known him, which has been almost exactly the extent of my professional career in Seattle.
When I first moved here with everything I owned crammed into a 10-foot U-Haul, I felt a little blue on walking into an empty house. But the first hopeful act in any move is to plug your telephone into the wall. Soon after I did, and well before it seemed anyone could have had my number, the phone rang.
On the other end of the line was John Cook, wanting to know what I was doing in Seattle. I didn’t know him from Adam, but I felt like I knew him already.
* ~*~*~*
*The title of our blog post was taken from the lede for an Edna Buchanan story about a man who was shot by a security guard at a fried-chicken stand for trying to push to the front of the line after the restaurant ran out of chicken: “Gary Robinson died hungry.”
**Several Redfin stories in the LA Times have been written by a colleague of Edna Buchanan.
*** Photo cropped via Picnik… what an amazing service!
July 26, 2007
The Naked Truth video is up, on Mixpo instead of YouTube, so we could stream the entire 56:53. This is your chance to hear five great journalists and bloggers talking about how entrepreneurs talk to them. Greg Gottesman from Madrona moderated.
In case you don’t have an hour to watch the whole thing, we’ve summarized the juicy bits.
FV is Fred Vogelstein from Wired, JC is John Cook from the Seattle PI, MA is Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, RB is Rebecca Buckman from the WSJ, TD is Tricia Duryee from the Seattle Times.
*~*~*~*~*
5:15, MA: If you have a really cool product it doesn’t matter how much of a buffoon you are, it’s going to get written about.
5:45, MA: Get rid of all the marketing crap that you’ve learned… Start with MySpace and say it’s different in this way or that way.
6:30, RB: What we do and what Michael does is now very, very different. The considerations are very different for a blog, a newspaper, a monthly magazine.
8:05, FV: Essentially what all of us do is we traffic in smart people.
9:36, JC: I would encourage everyone to give me the scoop first… I don’t get bent out of shape if it gets pitched to both [PI and Seattle Times] organizations.
11:06, TD: If you’re trying to pitch something for the largest newspaper, things trickle down hill.11:55, RB: What we like to do is bigger-picture trend stories… if it has been mentioned in other publications or other blogs, that’s ok, we can use that as a news-peg… but the Journal is very picky, as far as if the trend story has been written somewhere else, we’re not going to do it.
13:30, TD: Even if you send us a press release and you don’t hear back from us, it’s not like we just hit delete and are not even reading it… If I get five e-mails on a similar topic, I can see that the trend is happening…
14:30, MA [on PR firms]: Some PR firms are ok and some flat out lie manipulate and steal to get what they want. They think that we care a lot about exclusives… I don’t really care about exclusives, because I feel like if I write a better story, because I’m a blogger I have a natural advantage because others blogs links to each other… I don’t care that much about exclusives… what I don’t want to be is second… I don’t mind being the same time as everybody else.
16:25, RB: I would think for me a scoop is more what we call a concept scoop… it’s more like, hey, you’re the first publication that connected these dots and put the concept scoop together.
17:30, FV: A handful [of pr firms] can pick up the phone and call me and say they’re having a dinner with such and such company I’ve never heard of and because I know they’ve taken the time to be serious about choosing their clients, I’ll probably go. If you wind up getting a PR for the sake of lightening your work load I think that’s probably a mistake, you guys are the best sales men for your ideas and your companies.
19:00, FV: Every once and a while just to be evil if I know the CEO, I’ll call the CEO up and say you know you should fire your PR firm.
20:00, JC: I’m always looking for a news hook. For me a lot of the times that news hook is a financing event… just because a financing event is a transformative event in a company’s history.
20:45, MA: A lot of times, I’m not super-interested in hearing a PR rep’s idea of a trend and how their video site fits into it. I feel like it’s my job to come up with that.
22:30, FV [on how to approach a journalist]: Become a source of mine, tell me what is going on in the industry that you’re starting your company in. Tell me about the VC’s that are smart and the VC’s that are dumb.
23:00, MA: [Michael calls out Fred on giving more coverage to his sources, since Michael has been criticized for making the same comment before.]
24:15, RB: Not only can it suck your wallet dry, I feel like PR firms can suck the life out of you… If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re doing it for a reason, and if that kind of interest and passion is relayed to us, that makes us more interested in what you’re doing.
25:00,TD: Don’t worry about being completely polished.
25:20, TD [responding to a question about how to spin a journalist]: Why do you want to spin us? Are you doing something illegal?
27:15, JC [on ducking a question]: If there’s information that you don’t want to share, just tell me I can’t comment on that and leave it at that… just be straight up.
28:45, MA [on how to prepare for an interview]: Get the CEO on phone, you [as a PR rep] are not going to be able to know the product to the detail I want to hear about. If you’re the CEO, it doesn’t really matter, you know the product, I’m going to dig it out of you… I like to disrupt the story immediately by asking random questions… and try not to waste time… Some times a five minute conversation leads to a much better story than an hour conversation would.
30:50, RB: The worst thing is when you’re talking, they say something really interesting and then AFTER they say it, they say you can’t print that, that’s off the record.
32:05, FV [on if you screw up on the record]: You beg.
33:15, JC [on takign something off the record]: If it’s really important to the story, I will fight to get that in there. If it’s a guy that just misspeaks, and says something silly, I’m going to cut him some slack.
34:30, MA: I have two sets of negotations when I talk to an entrepeneur, one is tell me everything, and two is now ok tell me what you’re ok with me printing.
36:45, TD: if the facts are wong, you should let us know immediately… [But if it’s just an opinion from another source you don’t like,] that’s the breaks when you’re talking to a reporter.
37:33 JC: I really like follow-up after an interview… you have it in e-mail which is easy to access.
40:00 FV [on the company that is the best at PR]: I’d say Microsoft [laughter].
40:15 JC: I APPRECIATE SCOOPS.
43:40, RB: We have some very, very high ethical standards at the Journal and that’s something that everybody who works there is very proud of.
46:00, MA: A lot of the young entrepreneurs are a little bit nuts in Silicon Valley, I actually forget the name of the disease they have, they’re so smart they cannot communicate with other human beings… literally people have this. They’re always a lot of trouble.
46:40, FV [on the most surreal interview]: I got to interview Jeff Bezos jumping on a trampoline… yes we were naked.
48:00, FV on getting into TechCrunch or Wired: It’s just personal, we hate you [laughter].
48:25, MA: It’s not their fault, it’s your fault. You can’t force this stuff… spending more money on PR is not going get into these publications… I mean it’ll get you into mine, I’ll write about you [laughter].
49:30, FV [on focusing first on the trade press]: Success breeds success… that’s exposure we’re all going to see. Whenever I try to get up to speed… I’ll pull tons of stories.
52:40, MA [on the importance of entrepreneur’s blogs]: I think it’s really important. When you have a blog you become 100 times more important to me as a reader than you were before. Because you have your own voice and you can link back… I think every entrepreneur should have a blog.
53:30, FV: It takes a huge amount of work. It absolutely builds credibility and it probably builds more credibility than any PR firm you could hire but it has to be reasonably transparent.
54:50, RB [on what entrepreneurs’ blogs are good]: [Redfin’s] blog is excellent [screams of joy].
55:25, JC: I do like the Redfin blog… I think Zillow does a really good job, they’ve made it a really important part of their PR strategy and it shows.
55:30, MA: Yeah, but don’t break your own news on your own blog, give it to us [laughter among the panelists].
That’s it! To read more, check out what John Cook, Dipika Kohli and Tricia Duryee have to say…
Our bonus link today comes via the Second Friend of Redfin from the Washington Post: Attorneys for two United Arab Emirates leaders urged a federal judge Monday to dismiss a lawsuit filed on behalf of thousands of children forced to ride racing camels…
July 25, 2007
The Naked Truth party wasn’t the three-ring circus I had hoped it would be. No one arrived by camel. The police didn’t shut the party down. There were big bouncers working security, but no velvet rope.
And yet everybody — hundreds of people — seemed to have a blast. Our goal in hosting the event was to foster direct conversations between journalists, bloggers and Seattle’s entrepreneurs and that was how it seemed to work out. It felt like things could happen between people that don’t normally happen, probably because I drank more than I should.
There was a panel then a party. I was so nervous handling the introductions that Dave Hanley asked from the back of the crowd if I was doing alright.
Just before the panel started, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington told Wired’s Fred Vogelstein to get to the freaking point, then rolling his eyes, explained to everyone that he was quoting the Fred Vogelstein dossier that a PR agency accidentally mailed to Fred Vogelstein. Later he pulled in everyone’s else’s microphones so that they all sat in front of him and then leaned back, smiling.
Fred said that you should hire an agency, but only if they’re unlikely to work with you (the elite, selective firms). The WSJ’s Becky Buckman admitted to having a soft spot for goofy, impassioned pitches from entrepreneurs (by e-mail, so you don’t freak her out too much). The PI’s John Cook, looking healthy and quick in a Ho Chi Minh outfit, explained that he doesn’t mind talking to crazy people — our eyes met — but that follow-up clarifications (BY E-MAIL) are always appreciated.
One brave entrepreneur stood up to say how he and his agency had tried to get into Wired and TechCrunch; Michael Arrington told him you never will (”We just hate you,” Fred chimed in, jokingly. “It’s not them, it’s you,” Michael said). MC Greg Gottesman asked the Seattle Times’s Tricia Duryee how best to spin a story, and Tricia asked, “why not just tell the truth?” Then she teased John Cook about whose circulation was bigger.
On the subject of scoops, Becky Buckman explained that she likes to have a “concept exclusive,” in which she can tell a meaningful story behind events that others may have already covered. Michael Arrington said he didn’t need an exclusive scoop on a story, so long as a news embargo was taken seriously by everybody else (I think I saw him check his iPhone in the middle of the panel). John Cook was asked what his favorite kind of story was and immediately replied “AN EXCLUSIVE.”
Becky was unexpectedly moving in a comment about ethics in journalism. Michael begged people to eliminate “revolutionary” and anything else that sounds like marketing babble from their vocabularies, suggesting instead that companies pitch themselves like movies (”‘Tootsie” meets ‘The Longest Yard’” –>”MySpace for senior citizens”). He also said he couldn’t fathom the reason an entrepreneur wouldn’t blog, explaining that the network of links between blogs is the currency for exchanging information and traffic between his site and theirs — then added, but “don’t break your own news on your blog.”
As the panel wound down, a gigantic barbecue trailer backed into the parking lot. Its ghastly perfume wafted over the audience, but their attention never wavered. The panel was great — really lively — and it was good too.
And wasn’t Greg Gottesman a magnificent host? He never looked at any notes, he never sounded like the teacher in Charlie Brown, he spread the action around to all the panelists.
Then the party got underway. One partygoer asked another how his social networking site was different than others (answer: “you’re an asshole.”) iLike’s Hadi Partovi, modeling his own company t-shirt underneath a blazer, looked every inch the hip Web 2.0 entrepreneur. Amit Mital, Redfin’s first fanatical investor, demanded extra drink tickets for his years of support. An intern, Alex Loddengaard, asked my wife out to dinner (she said yes).
A kindly young woman challenged Fred Vogelstein, who flew up for the event in the middle of a deadline, to explain why Wired put a half-naked woman on its cover (answer: “I didn’t think they’d go for it either.”) Michael Arrington trampled me on the way to the bar.
Tricia Duryee wore big sunglasses. Peter Cochran looked like a model for a surfing magazine. Paul Goodrich talked up his Croatian triathlon training regimen. Our progenitor, David Eraker, suddenly stood before me, a large, happy presence.
Michael Dougherty battled back a horde of Redfin engineers from recruiting a colleague at his new startup. With his deep, knee-buckling voice, Matt Goyer asked a woman about interviewing at Redfin (”my boss is right over there,” she squeaked).
After months of harassing us about Safari support, Mike Davidson suddenly appeared in the flesh to take my chest-heaving, tearful confession. (I tried to blame Microsoft. He introduced me to his friend from Microsoft).
A man told me his name had been erased from the invitation wiki by a saboteur. John Cook overhead him, and smelling a juicy story, suggested we go back through the edit history to find the culprits.
Someone complained to me about a beer shortage. I told him Zillow drank it.
Angela Cough promised there would be a vegetarian option (the corn bread was terrible). Cynthia Pang pointed someone out and said “That girl is NOT nice!” Angela nodded violently, arms folded across her chest, menacing even when pregnant.
I wobbled out of the party while the sun was just setting behind the mountains, on one of the longest days of a very short and wonderful summer.
Many, many thanks to the journalists who took the time to come to the event, to the team at Havana Social Club for hosting a great party, to Angela Cough and Elise Hebb for putting it together, to Cynthia Pang for coming up with the name and helping out, to Madrona for helping us pay for so much of it, to iLike, Wetpaint, Jobster, Farecast and WildTangent for their support, to everyone who came. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
We all had a really good time. Please tag your Flickr photos with nakedtruth. We’ll post the video in a jiffy. Any details we forgot about, or that John Cook didn’t address in his excellent post, just add a comment.
July 24, 2007
If you’re on the wait list for The Naked Truth, come on by. Lots of people are here but the parking lot seems able to handle it. I am in an altered state so I might be biased, but everybody seems to be having a pretty good time!
July 20, 2007
The Naked Truth, the meet-up we’re putting together next Tuesday for entrepreneurs to talk to the media, is all full. We’ve rented out tents, chairs and a stage for the adjoining parking lot, which is now hosting the panel. Even though I have recently learned there will be no healthy vegetarian options whatsoever, we doubled the barbecue budget.
Party mastermind Angela Cough kayboshed renting a windowless beer van to slowly circle the block (”nobody wants to sit in a van with you”), but she did add another hulking security guard (”we just don’t want things to get out of hand”).
Fortunately for those behind the velvet rope, plenty of people on the list aren’t going to show. At 5:40 for the panel, and 7:15 for the party, we’re going to open up the waitlist. We’ll probably be able to accommodate everybody. The evening of the event, we’ll post a notice on this blog and the invitation wiki about how things look for the party, so you can avoid making the trip if it looks like you won’t get in.
Now, on to more important business. We have a bonus link, courtesy of a Second Friend of Redfin, who admires the “sheer unbridled animality” of a computer chip magnate’s plans for an elaborate pleasure grotto. On a kinder note, the New York Times reports on the story behind the iconic image of this week’s steam blast.
July 18, 2007
Redfin has been futzing around with some new designs for the home page of our website and could use your help picking one out. Our goals are to get people searching and to explain how Redfin works.
We only get one shot at the explanation because returning visitors see a view of our map as they left it on their last visit. Many are so thunderstruck by Redfin’s search superpowers that they never realize we have to make a living buying and selling homes.
When we surveyed our customers about what they wanted to see on the home page 58% asked for an explanation of our commission refund, 47% for an overview of our company, and 45% for a step-by-step guide to the process. But you should just say what you want: even though this blog is by and for people at an absurd remove from reality, please don’t feel like you have to channel anyone normal. It never works.
Here are the choices, which you can click to enlarge:
1. Illustrated explanation of the buying process:
2. Photo illustration of the buying process:
3. Who we are, in paragraph form:
4. Who we are, in bullet form:
Tell us which one you like first, second, third and last; suggest modifications or an entirely new treatment. Thanks to Savan Kong, Jason Wu, Michael Young, Matt Goyer, Jeff Yee, Marc Singer, Dana Irming, Bryan Selner, Leo Shklovskii and many others for their input so far. And thanks to everybody else for your feedback now…
We’ll also post a link to Redfin Forums, too.
July 18, 2007
Redfin today announced its expansion to the Washington, D.C. area and a $12-million series-C financing led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the folks behind Skype, Overture and Hotmail.
The whole process of raising money from DFJ seemed to encapsulate the essential Redfin traits (persistence, serendipity, adventure, speed): Redfin wooed DFJ somewhat unsuccessfully over the course of a year; but it was a zealous customer who arranged the initial meeting; which we traveled to by plane, train and bicycle; demonstrating a website that had only been launched the day before; resulting in a closing that took just a few weeks.
In the DFJ bathroom, I remember seeing a photo of one of the partners being strapped (was it head-first?) into a go-kart for a big race and also a piece of artwork painted by another partner, and feeling sure we had come to the right place. And we had. Of all the investors we talked to, DFJ was the most committed to building a long-haul, consumer-centered business, which sounds like motherhood and apple pie but is increasingly unusual in an ad-addled world.
DFJ’s Emily Melton will join Redfin’s board; she shares the Redfin spirit of candor, dog-craziness and derring-do but also brings with her Silicon Valley’s smarts and values. In a pinch, she drives the wrong way down one-way streets.
The fund-raising itself was fun. We roared around San Francisco in a convertible Mustang; felt glamorous in big, drugstore-bought sunglasses; listened to dance music on the radio; sat around a Starbucks getting nervous in between meetings. For no reason at all, we wore cufflinks, ran demos that didn’t work, slept on a friend’s couch to save money.
Many thanks to the folks at Redfin now and before who got the company to this point, to our partners at Madrona, Vulcan, BEV and Orrick for their constant support, to DFJ of course for leading the round, and last but not least, to all our friends in Silicon Valley and San Francisco who gave us a little help along the way.
And now of course we have to celebrate, with the opening of the Washington, D.C. market, which includes Baltimore and suburban Virginia. We used to launch these markets with one guy in his basement, e-mailing a dozen of his neighborhood friends for our “viral campaign,” but now we’ve got a huge list of people to notify that we’ve arrived in the area, and a team of folks led by Catherine Jardine, and many promises to keep too.
July 16, 2007
Between Friday afternoon and Monday morning 320 people signed up for The Naked Truth, an event we’re putting together with Madrona to connect entrepreneurs with journalists. We were going to limit the pre-party panel session to 200 people so we could keep it indoors but now we paid for a tent and a little stage so more of you have to have come: 50 more to be precise, all from the waiting list. This kind of feels like planning a wedding. The party itself still has plenty of space left, and all the same people will be there. To RSVP for the party, click here.
July 13, 2007
A year ago, the Diddy spirit pervaded Seattle, resulting in a NerdPartySupernova led by an Ephod-clad Michael Arrington as the Grand Poobah. Beer-hauling trucks conked out, young men fell fatally in love, entrepreneurs with Hare-Krishna looks in their eyes rampaged through the ranks of venture capitalists.
This year, we’re doing something bigger. First of all, we’re bringing in the barbecue pit. More importantly, we’re on a mission to introduce journalists to entrepreneurs, so that little companies with big ideas can put themselves on the map, and figure out how they want to talk to the press. With a tip of the hat to Robert Scoble, we’re calling the event The Naked Truth.
Rebecca Buckman from the Wall Street Journal, Fred Vogelstein from Wired, Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, John Cook from the Seattle PI and Tricia Duryee from the Seattle Times will be on a pre-party panel to answer questions. And startup bigshots like Hugh Crean, Hadi Partovi, Jason Goldberg and Ben Elowitz will be in the crowd to ask.
Here are the details:
When: Tuesday, July 24, 2007. The panel starts at 5:30, the party starts at 6:30.
Where: The Havana Social Club, 1010 East Pike Street, Seattle
Who: every entrepreneur, dreamer, procastinator, narcissist, coder, starter, joiner, flim-flam man, gonzo PR guy, bigshot, littleshot and networking twizzler in town… please come!
Madrona Venture Group and Redfin are paying for the kegs and the ‘cue, and iLike, WetPaint, Farecast, Jobster and WildTangent are helping us put it together. If you want to come, you have to sign up in advance, or overpower our HGH-juiced Cambodian bouncer at the door. Panel attendance is limited to 200 people. We’ve tented a nearby parking lot so the party can handle 500.
Madrona’s Greg Gottesman, master of ceremonies for the panel, has already laid down the law for his approach: “I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass—and I’m all out of bubble gum.”
Edit the wiki to put your name on the list…
July 12, 2007
Redfin is one of Time Magazine’s “50 Best Websites of 2007.” We woke up yesterday morning feeling historic, as if we had suddenly become a statesman, a perky Olympic athlete, a consumer craze, a major health trend. We looked for a Time Magazine logo to embed in the page and found this delightful graphic instead:
Jim Lamb, ace Stanford marketing intern, math super-puzzler, ex-football star, prodigious sushi eater, home-sick Seattleite, crunched the numbers on how being in Time affected our traffic:
Thought I’d share a little bit of [Google] Analytics data regarding the Time.com story that came out yesterday. The data is pretty rough but it gives us a better idea of the impact of appearing in an article like that. As of a few hours ago, about 750 people had linked directly from the article to our homepage. Traffic numbers from yesterday suggest that perhaps a few hundred more typed “redfin.com” into their browsers after seeing us in the article. A few other stats on these visitors:
–> about a third were from WA/CA/MA
—> majority checked out the homepage and then left, especially those in other regions (non WA/CA/MA)
—> over 90% had never been to our site before
–> 1 in 10 viewed a property details page
–> 1 in 20 visited the Buy silo
Doesn’t seem like it will be driving us any immediate business, but the article was pretty nice for general exposure/branding purposes which we can’t really measure. It made it to digg.com front page twice (1,750 total diggs) which typically means a ton of pageviews.
We also have a few bonus links for you, the first an obituary for the great-great-grandson of Prince Otto von Bismarck:
Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.
Meanwhile, the New York Times describes a 1985 fight between Yankees’ manager Billy Martin and hillbilly pitcher Eddie Lee Whitson; the fight started in a bar, spilled out onto the street and ended, humiliatingly, in a hotel corridor: Whitson, who was tall and sturdy, kicked Martin squarely in the groin, a blow that made everyone watching wince. Martin crumpled for a second, but then stood up and in a calm, but firm, voice said, “Now, I’m going to kill you.”
Whitson then broke Martin’s arm, an injury that Martin told reporters was the result of a bowling accident.
Both links are from a Friend of Redfin.
