It’s funny how much we blog at Redfin without ever really saying what life at Redfin is really like. Enter Shahaf Abileah, the engineering lead who radically changed the speed, breadth and accuracy of our data imports from broker databases. He’s taking a long-planned one-year sabbatical with his fiancee to travel around the world, and… Read More
A job applicant just told me Thursday that “Everybody knows you don’t like Microsoft or Amazon people.” Just last week, a board member heard the same thing. Which came as news to our chief technology officer, our Seattle-based engineering leaders, three star product managers and our hyper-productive lone marketing director, all of whom worked at… Read More
I’ll be the last one — Redfin has been busy with its company meeting last Friday– to say I love Microsoft’s new “I’m a PC” ad. Doesn’t It Remind of You That Discovery Channel Ad? But maybe I’m the first who wonders if it was inspired by The Discovery Channel’s “The World is Just Awesome”… Read More
One small good thing about Wall Street’s terrifying meltdown: this year’s graduating class will send fewer of its best people into investment banking and more into fields where they’ll actually make something new and good. I remember walking around Pioneer Square last year with one of my favorite Redfin engineers, who was mulling career options… Read More
Republicans and Democrats alike are crucifying Carly Fiorina for saying her own candidate, John McCain, is unqualified to run a technology business.It’s odd to hear a spokesman for the Obama campaign, which only last week defended community organizing as good preparation for political office, suggest that a much different ability is now a prerequisite. It’s… Read More
There’s a home for sale in Foothill Ranch, California that looks custom-painted for Elle Woods, Barbie, Angelyne or Paris Hilton. Some witty Forums posters are having fun with this one (TrabucoDom – thanks for the tip!): “Now I can safely say I have a good idea of what it would be like to live inside… Read More
Maybe you can’t tell, but we work hard to make Redfin easy to use, going round and round on every design until we’ve forgotten where we started. In an effort to improve our forms, ace product manager Matt Goyer bought a book on usability for one of his young charges, Jim Lamb. But when Jim… Read More
Just before going home on Friday night, Redfin’s Jeff Yee just ran a query against all the active listings in our entire database, which includes listings from brokers, banks and owners selling their own home in Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, Chicago, Boston and Washington, D.C. areas (see links… Read More
Have you heard? Yammer is Twitter for corporations. On Monday it launched. On Wednesday, it won TechCrunch50′s top prize. By this morning, Yammer was reporting it had signed up 10,000 people from 2,000 companies. This afternoon, the great Dan Fabulich of Redfin asked if we could start using it. Of course, Dan was only being… Read More
Pawing through Redfin’s Facebook page for some employee pictures we could use to decorate a jobs flier, I came across this little beauty: It was taken at a Red Carpet home-buying class (which has become a huge hit, usually with over 100 attendees). Why do I love this photo? The main character is wearing a… Read More