After being stalked by a felon with a gun, and then being spat on by an angry reader, Michael Arrington announced this morning that he was taking a break from TechCrunch, only to have John Cook post a reaction just before lunch concluding that this kind of abuse “comes with the territory.” Journalists, he observes,… Read More
Today, even though Redfin.com looks exactly the same, it’s actually a little bit more precise in nearly 14 million different ways. As Arthur Patterson explains on our devblog, the new version of Redfin.com that we began rolling out last week is another milestone in our Freakish Depth strategy – to provide more and better data… Read More
In a post today on the Bloodhound real estate blog, Redfin published an essay on how we measure customer satisfaction — we may be the only real estate company to use the same systematic approach embraced by Apple, Dell, Vanguard, American Express and many others — and what we plan to do with the data… Read More
Wow, what a week last week in New York. From the Real Estate Bar Camp on Tuesday to two and half full days of Inman Connect + parties it was an exhausting trip. Now that I’ve recovered and survived three full days of meetings here at Redfin here’s my quick take on things: Transparency is… Read More
“Life,” William James once said, “is in the transitions.” He wasn’t talking about weddings and graduations, but the lonely moments before, when a decision still hangs in the balance, and irrelevant details are so vivid that they’ll stick in your mind for years to come: the melted-plastic smell of a U-Haul cab; the iron sound… Read More
We learned this weekend that Seattle may be on the verge of closing its second newsaper, the Seattle PI. A few days earlier, Clay Shirky had compared journalists to old Russian hard-liners who had never lived under — or imagined — any other regime. First Henry Blodget and then The Atlantic Monthly began wondering aloud… Read More
Yesterday we talked about what Redfin achieved over the past year. Without thinking much about it, I promised a second post on our priorities for 2009. Without revealing our top-secret R&D projects, here is what we’re focused on so far… Fanatical customer service, and the industry’s happiest customers, by far: stay proud, Redfin. And run… Read More
Have you ever met Andy Liu? He’s the CEO of BuddyTV. Most entrepreneurs I know are miserable with how the world is now — it’s why they’re entrepreneurs — but Andy seems perpectually delighted by it. He smiles more than anyone I’ve ever met, in an entirely goofy, genuine way. Which is odd, because he… Read More
At today’s all-hands meeting, Redfin surveyed our 2008 accomplishments alongside what we wanted to do better in 2009. It was a good exercise, both so we could put to rest our mistakes, but also see how far we’ve come. Here is what we accomplished in the past 12 months: Decreased the cost of bringing a… Read More
Wow, busy day! Today I was at Real Estate BarCamp New York — a precursor to Inman Connect. What’s BarCamp? BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants. What’d we talk about?… Read More