September 28, 2007
Visiting New York always makes me feel like an impostor. Unlike everyone else here, I’m neither gritty nor suave. Yesterday, the subway broke down deep in the Bronx, and I looked so hapless on the street outside the station that a woman drove me over the Henry Hudson bridge to the A train, where a young stocking clerk felt obliged to tell me how to treat subway “predators” who “roam the A” (”like children, like people who are under you… because they ARE under you”).
Today started at a trendy Soho restaurant where all the media and publishing giants, in pink ties and striped shirts, spend an hour with the New York Times over a pastry. I had been waiting 20 minutes for a meeting. Two impeccably dressed men were shown to the adjoining table, and I perked up for some high-powered gossip. They surveyed the situation and murmured in French that they wanted to be moved. Of course, the waiter understood them too.
Somehow I didn’t feel put down until, responding to a welcoming gesture from me, one said in native American English, “We just want to move.”
September 20, 2007
Zillow announced today that the real estate media company raised $30 million in a round led by private-equity firm Legg Mason. What’s interesting to us is how the world is reacting to one of the biggest venture investments since the 1990’s. Becky Buckman at the Wall Street Journal speculates that the valuation was $350 million, but without mentioning whether this includes the $30 million in cash.
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch is the only one to notice that Legg Mason was the same investor that led the other mammoth Web 2.0 investment this year, the $44 million round in Marc Andressen’s Ning from July 2007. VentureBeat reports the news on the heels of a depressing announcement that a 6th-grader raised $6.5 million.
Seattle’s John Cook goes deep with a Rich Barton interview in which the Zillow CEO describes a money-raising effort that wasn’t an effort at all. What struck me most about this interview though was Rich’s reaction to Web 2.0 startups, which John described as trying to “build something very cheap with two or three engineers, you test it, you try to build it through a grass roots marketing campaign and then if it is successful, then you sell out, like Flickr.” Rich responds, “That is completely anathema to me.”
And we agree with Rich’s objections to startups that stay small so they can sell out early, having argued before how important it is for entrepreneurs to shoot the moon. But what if John had asked the question slightly differently, about startups that want to do something big, but don’t raise a lot of capital? This is Web 2.0’s $24,000 question. Can community — people selling dressers, taking pictures, arguing over Scientology — take the place that capital — sock puppets, fancy offices, huge financing rounds — once had in the ’90’s?
For all the baloney oozing out of warmed-over Web 2.0 startups, this was the one premise that seems really worthwhile and even precious: that we could combine existing web software to build sites where the people who use them create a lot of the value, all without spending too much money.
This has been on my mind ever since I heard Rich’s comments to a group of entrepreneurs in which he predicted that Wikipedia and Craigslist (first audio clip) would have to make a lot of money or lose to better-funded competitors. It was a fiendishly provocative statement, because those sites have special meaning to any Internet aficionado, which in turn probably explains why they have thus far flourished.
It still seems possible that a small number of committed engineers, supported by an enthused community of people, can change the world (you see this stuff on the back of cars – albeit never very nice cars – all the time). In so doing, the engineers can usually make money.
Zillow may of course have both a community that extends beyond the real estate industry as well as an unusually large amount of capital, but it’s the community — people talking about real estate on Zillow — that will drive their success, not the capital.
September 14, 2007
Ira Glass recently complained that though everyone aspires at some level to be a detective, it is rare in life that there are any actual mysteries to solve. We all know why the dog won’t leave the house alone anymore, what someone was looking for in our garbage, which family member has been drinking out of the jug.
But here today we present to you an honest-to-goodness mystery. In the remote Northern California wilderness of La Honda, someone has begun posting Redfin bumper stickers on guardrails, mile-markers, and even put some in trees. The bumper stickers are high-quality, requiring significant work and expense to produce, re-appearing whenever they are taken down.
This would be good news, except that we have never printed bumper stickers, and the citizens of La Honda have called us to complain. Perhaps this is a dirty trick, like McGovern campaign workers who once plastered cars with Nixon bumper stickers, or called in the middle of the night to ask for a Nixon vote (and they thought they were the ones being naughty).
But taking the obvious cheap shot and blaming this bumper sticker on deranged traditional agents — who, it is almost certainly true, have destroyed or stolen yard signs and open house signs in Boston and Seattle — doesn’t even make sense: why in La Honda, where we’ve never bought or sold a house? And why would a traditional agent spend his own money to have the bumper stickers produced?
Could it be a disgrunted ex-employee? A bored teenager? An online competitor? If you have a theory, leave a comment.
The thing is, that someone out there actually knows. And like all criminals, he is carefully monitoring his victim for blog posts like this, and other signs of distress. A $100 reward to the person who can tell us, paid in cash, of course at a busy train station. Or an abandoned factory. Come alone.
September 10, 2007
BusinessWeek is surveying its readers about the best new online real estate service of 2007. Somehow Redfin didn’t even make the list of contenders, probably because we’re not available in many U.S. markets. But we’re the only ones challenging the traditional real estate industry, by actually brokering the purchase and sale of homes. The world may still need what one eye-rolling friend of mines now likes to call a YAREM (”Yet Another Real Estate Mashup”) but it absolutely cries out for someone using the Internet to change the game in real estate. Maybe next year, we’ll make the grade.
September 8, 2007
The front page of yesterday’s New York Times business section discusses traditional real estate agents who are leaving the industry, those who have stayed, and — woo-hoo! — Redfin’s growth.
The article has been the #1 most-emailed business story, but in the general polls still trails an expose of microwave popcorn’s role in lung disease and a review of the great publisher Knopf’s equally great rejection letters to prominent authors (”This time there’s no point in trying to be kind…”), often written by Alfred A. Knopf or his wife, Blanche.
