Archive for August, 2007
August 31, 2007
I sit in Redfin’s West Wing, with the folks who answer our telephones in easy earshot, and most of our software engineers everywhere else. It’s a pleasant place, which every day seems to turn up strong opinions, small revelations, useful squibs, useless facts.
It seems a shame that we go to such great lengths to figure out vexing problems and never tell anyone else about it. So we’re publishing a new Redfin blog for developers, by developers, and are stuffing it full of everything we learn as we put together the Redfin site, including code samples, beauty contests, log files. Our only theme will be what seems useful to share with others.
To figure out whether it’s your cup of tea, check out the inaugural posts:
1. Code to recognize automatically a Web user’s time zone, by Michael Smedberg
2. Why we switched from Six Apart’s Movable Type to WordPress, by Alex Loddengaard
3. Why we chose Microsoft Virtual Earth vs. Google Maps (originally published here in early 2007), by Bryan Selner and others?
Or just grab the RSS link for your feedreader.
August 22, 2007
The Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Buckman published an article yesterday depicting Redfin as the oddball on an ad-crazed Sand Hill Road. Which is unfortunately true.
When we were meeting investors about our last round of financing, three huge deals for ad networks had just set venture capital abuzz: Microsoft bought aQuantive for $6 billion, Google bought Doubleclick for $3.1 billion, and Yahoo! bought RightMedia for $680 million.
Eager to capitalize on the trend, many potential Redfin investors seemed genuinely shocked that Redfin doesn’t run any ads whatsoever. Serving customers directly via flesh-and-blood agents, rather than simply sending them from our website to a traditional brokerage — this is a much messier business than running ads.
Yet having come to grips with this fact, investors couldn’t stop asking about “page views,” as if there were no other measure of a website’s success than how many ads it could have served. This page-view fetish is the reductio ad absurdum of the ad-driven mentality: a “page” after all is just a component of a web application, and a “view” is the most passive way to interact with that application. By measuring web applications in terms of page-views, we lose sight of what the application is supposed to accomplish, which in our case is the sale of a home. (We try to accomplish that goal with as few page views as possible.)
The circularity of the quest to generate page views perhaps explains the anomie behind many ad-driven Web 2.0 businesses. My friends at these businesses sometimes seem not merely daunted, which happens to all of us, but occasionally uninspired. Silicon Valley has gone from taking out the middleman to being a middleman, hoping to waylay users at a website before passing them on to a business that hasn’t changed at all how it serves customers. Travel sites like Kayak have become portals to other portals like Orbitz. The Web is becoming a gigantic lead-generation contraption for business-as-usual. It’s hard to get excited about that.
What’s funny is that Silicon Valley still thinks of itself as the swashbuckling foe of traditional industries, but every day it’s becoming more like Madison Avenue, minutely sensitive to traditional advertisers’ needs, and unwilling to rock the boat. The two used to be miles apart: Madison Avenue wants only to entertain you long enough to implant the urge to buy a Pepsi; Silicon Valley used to want to change the world. Now no one at an ad-driven real estate website can breathe a word about whether the real estate industry needs change.
And maybe they shouldn’t. It can seem naive or self-important to think that a business should have any purpose beyond making money. Yet many of the businesses most successful over the long haul — Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, for example — have been built around a sense of purpose that motivates employees, appeals to customers and simplifies decisions. Nothing endures as well as a purpose.
And without some purpose, Silicon Valley will lose the fervor that once propelled us to build great companies. Of course Redfin is hardly great now, but we aim to be great. Our purpose is to use technology to put consumers in charge of buying or selling their home. This is the most valuable change we can offer the consumer. We hope that it can lead to our becoming the most valuable company in our industry.
If this makes companies like Redfin neither fish nor fowl, with real estate agents working alongside software engineers, then perhaps we will be the first awkward creature to stagger ashore on our own two feet, hopefully into a slightly better world.
August 20, 2007
I’ve been asked by many of my friends and family why I decided to leave my position at Microsoft, where I was appreciated and rewarded, for more work, more responsibility, and more stress. Well, the decision was mainly a result of three factors. First, someday I may start my own company, and transitioning from a startup makes that much easier. Second, I didn’t agree with many of Microsoft’s decisions and direction. Third, I wanted to build a product that would really cater to consumers and could stand on its own.
Almost all the top engineers I know talk ad nauseum about starting their own company, with the caveat of, “I’ll stay at big company XYZ for 2-3 years, then I’ll go out on my own.” Well, it never made sense to me how they thought that they could make the transition from being so removed from the business and the end to end process of creating and shipping a product. Working at a startup, you’re about as close as you can be to running your own business, and you don’t have to spend nearly all of your time and effort trying to raise money. For instance, the only financial statements I ever saw at Microsoft were quarterly reports (as a shareholder), and even those were a mystery. At Redfin, we get to see all of our financials, like pro forma cash flow statements that we might show to investors, and are encouraged to understand it and ask questions. Even raw talent can’t make up for this kind of experience.
While I was at Microsoft, many things didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t understand the massive “re-orgs”, which, if you hadn’t heard about ahead of time, it meant nothing material changed for you. I didn’t understand why we’d try to enter dominated markets with an uncompetitive offering. I didn’t understand those little table tents on the cafeteria tables or the giant banners and posters promoting intranet websites. I didn’t understand why site searches on MSDN were abysmal. I wasn’t the only one who was confused. Minimsft would try to speculate about a re-org or an acquisition. And on popular internal aliases like “litebulb”, for instance, there’d be email threads where people would ask why Vista had 6 (ok, 
SKUs, why Zune wouldn’t work with PlaysForSure, why their product had to be renamed from something cool to something like Windows Communication Framework, or why there were 2 confusing boxes on local.live.com (or so adverse to just calling it “maps.live.com” in the first place). Legitimate questions often got defensive responses. To paraphrase one developer, “Why are these responses always along the lines of, ‘We know what we’re doing’? Personally, I’d welcome the feedback, because that’s how I’ll improve. Why can’t you provide the reasons that led to your decision?” I couldn’t have agreed more.
Once I had decided I was leaving the company, I spent a lot of time trying to find the startup I’d be most passionate about. It sounds arrogant, but good software engineers can pretty much choose where they want to go. And it’s nearly frictionless to change jobs these days. You can post your resume up on Monster and get daily calls and emails. So, you do your homework and find a startup that really appeals to you. I was definitely not looking for some me-too social networking site or some company that was funded purely based on its management team’s connections. When I found Redfin, I knew it was just what I was looking for. During my home buying process a few years ago, I was convinced the real estate industry needed some serious changes. For instance, searching online required clicking in a multiple highlight box with 50 neighborhoods I’d never heard of, but I checked them anyways just in case they were somewhere near where I wanted to live. After much research, I learned that my agent would probably be getting a 3% commission when I bought a house. It wasn’t a “free” service as many led me to believe. Ten grand to drive me around and guilt me into buying a house I didn’t feel was right for me? Redfin’s scrappiness and audaciousness to battle it out with the traditional agents, brokerages, and MLSs on behalf of consumers like me was very appealing.
Startups aren’t for everyone. But for any of you on the fence and considering the startup world, here’s my advice:
- Plan for the future. Thinking about what I could accomplish in 5 years at a well established company versus a nascent one intrigued me. You’ll have much more influence over the development of an infant than you will a 30 year old, and the rewards should be commensurate.
- If you refer to your company in the third-person, or have to ‘beat’ the system to be productive, it’s a bad sign. (One rumor at Microsoft was that your group should spend exactly 100% of its budget/headcount, otherwise ‘they’ would cut next years.)
- Make sure your whole company feels like one team. Ballmer once joked at a company meeting, “Why do the different groups only clap for themselves?”
- Be as important to the company as it is to you. In a technology startup, the people ARE the startup. Our CEO reminds us, “The company’s only assets walk out the door every night.”
- Consider working where there are no sacred cows. Don’t like something? Be able change it!
- And finally, to quote Paul Glen, “Never underestimate the power of free food.”
August 12, 2007
Much to our surprise, Redfin’s conversation with Guy Kawasaki about why a start-up can seem hard instead of easy cropped up in The New York Times over the weekend, rising to one of the top spots for most emailed business articles. Rumor has it that Redfin founder David Eraker will even be making a cameo in a version of the article coming out online later in the week.
You can read comments on the blog posting in Digg or del.icio.us or just subscribe to all the Redfin news here… Many thanks to Guy for letting us publish the original essay on his stupendous site, and to all the entrepreneurs who have responded to it with encouraging email. Our goal was supposedly to encourage you, but we’re glad to get your support nonetheless.
And thanks to our mysterious but trusty Friend of Redfin for being the first to spot the news…
August 8, 2007
Kevin Kelly, who is our hero mostly for having edited the Whole Earth Catalog but also for having been a member of the founding team behind Wired Magazine, just blogged about a house he bought through Redfin!
Kevin describes the site as “one of the easier ones to use, with nice virtual walk thrus of each home, and good comparison data for the neighborhood.” He also says Redfin is “a joy to navigate.” He saved $15,000 buying a home through Redfin.
We couldn’t be more proud to have Kevin as a customer. And grateful: his blog posting, combined with the appearance of Redfin’s “60 Minutes” segment on the front page of Yahoo! today, gave us a nice boost…
Today’s bonus link comes from A Friend of Redfin; it is an obituary of Father Sir Hugh Barrett-Lennard, “a greatly admired if highly eccentric priest of the London Oratory” who, when asked for confession outside church, held up a tennis racket to serve as a grille, so that the separation of confessor and penitent was maintained.”
Many thanks to Guy Kawasaki for posting up The Naked Truth video on how entrepreneurs talk to the press.
August 5, 2007
A few Redfin folks went to last week’s Inman Conference in San Francisco; Inman is a big real estate and technology conference. Like all conferences, it felt like an alternate universe: smaller, friendlier, more competitive, shorter-lived.
But this one also felt set in a year of magical thinking, 1999, when San Francisco was at the height of the dot.com boom: Trulia dressed up some of their employees in big green foam-suits, like their logo. Terabitz drove people around in Mini Coopers and hired models and acrobatic sign-twirlers to work the sidewalk. A Redfin knock-off bought a booth and sent five people to the show. Behind closed doors, everyone talked about the meltdown in real estate and mortgage.
On the same night we were running a focus group, a real estate website threw a big party and somehow printed the address of our San Francisco office on its invitations. Before we could decide whether to invite everybody in, everybody left.
On a walk through the sunshine of Yerba Buena’s fountains, the great Adam Koval kept asking why each of us cared so much about a site that was such hard work. Later that day, Zillow’s Rich Barton waved from an escalator as he drifted away.
I sat down in a meeting with executives and consultants from a social networking service for real estate consumers and went unexpectedly berserk on hearing that agents would be able to challenge and sometimes remove reviews. (I later apologized, and the entrepreneur graciously forgave me.)
One of the conference’s real estate super-bloggers approached a big brokerage’s CEO to introduce herself in the flesh, stomping off when he seemed to have no idea who she was. “He knew,” she later said. “Oh, he knew!”
Before my blogging keynote, Joel Burslem assured me I had time to go the bathroom. I came back a few minutes later to discover the entire crowd twiddling their thumbs. I began my speech convinced Joel had just told everybody where I had been.
After the keynote, developers in Redfin’s San Francisco office announced “Hell has officially froze over,” because someone on Bloodhound Blog had made a kind comment about Redfin. I visited the blog and read that “I was full of sh__.”
(courtesy of whiteafrican on Flickr)
Everyone talked about switching from Google Maps to Microsoft Virtual Earth or back again.
Many people came up to us to say “That this whole conference hates you except me.” This was usually followed by their saying they had only one (friendly!) question, which was usually “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?”
And everyone kept asking us why we came to the conference since we obviously didn’t belong there. For the first time, actually, we had thought we did…
(Thanks to Marc Andreessen, Netscape co-founder, for calling out our post on entrepreneurship. Everyone has probably already seen our bonus link, a video of people dancing on treadmills, but we had to be sure…)
August 1, 2007
We took your advice about Redfin’s home page, which we published to our website this evening.
We especially liked Angela and Chuck’s suggestions about numbering each step.
We’ve noticed that women especially seem to prefer an alternative treatment, with a photo of happy customers and a simple explanation of how our business is different. At some point, we’ll give that one a try, too, running two versions of the home page to see what works best.
Thanks for all your help!
(If you have browsed Redfin’s map before, you may not initially see the home page. When you visit Redfin.com, we still start you wherever you left off on our map. But you can always access the home page by clicking on the Redfin logo at top left.)
August 1, 2007
Following a guest appearance on Guy Kawasaki’s blog arguing for Do-It-Yourself PR, Redfin is back in action with a post on all the ways a startup can be hard. Many thanks to Redfin star engineer Michael Smedberg for working through the ideas in the essay, and to Guy for posting it up. The idea grew out of comments made by Steve Ballmer at a Technology Alliance lunch. We know it’s not cool to admit that Redfin has sometimes been hard, but hopefully it comes through that we really care about what we’re doing, too.
