Just a brief note of thanks to the folks who took up the challenge we posted on this blog at the beginning of the month, and used Vittana to loan a few bucks to the education fund of folks halfway around the world: Patrick Tsao Davin Hanlon David Drake Julian Land Julian, David, Davin, Patrick:… Read More
Our monthly newsletter went out to 177,311 folks, an 8% increase from last month. Read it here or sign up to get it via email. Update: we originally stated that buyers must close on a home by April 30 to take advantage of the Federal Home Buyer Tax Credit. Buyers must be under contract by… Read More
Redfin can be a fun place to work. Not because we have catered lunches or dazzling offices or happy hours or ski trips or push-up contests or cycling races or cook-outs or high-speed, demolition-derby scavenger hunts, but mostly because we try very hard to be a good place to work: my bonus depends on employee happiness…. Read More
My favorite essay published this weekend was Michael Arrington’s post on our increasingly public reputations, and his hopes for increasingly forgiving attitudes about the youthful bong hit or the disgruntled ex-colleague that now inevitably show up on Facebook or Twitter. As I read Mike’s post, I thought about how shame and community are magnified for… Read More
One more thing about yesterday’s website upgrade… did you notice how much faster the site loads each listing? The turbo-charging is largely due to the work of our principal engineer, Michael Smedberg, who figured out new ways to cache data about a listing so we don’t have to query our database for basic property history… Read More
People do strange, wonderful things. Maveron’s Dan Levitan, for example, sent me a note two weeks ago asking if I’d like to go to Starbucks’s annual meeting, despite his having no stake in Redfin’s success. Wednesday morning, I rode over to Seattle Center, and filed into a huge theater, taking a seat next to Dan…. Read More
Big news Redfinnians! Today we launched a big upgrade to our service for home-sellers, began touring short sales, and opened Phoenix. It’s a lot to cover, so let’s dive right in! The Listing Service Now Includes an In-Home Consultation, More Online Tools Lets talk about the listing service first since that affects every market. The… Read More
Josh Kopelman observed Friday that e-commerce has changed very little since he founded Half.com: more than half the top-15 media companies did not exist in 1999 while all but one of the e-commerce companies did. Josh concludes that “I believe we’ve seen more innovation… in eCommerce in the last 10 months than we have in… Read More
Kushal Chakrabarti, the founder of Seattle-based Vittana, is my kind of freak. He trains seeing eye dogs. He competes in triathlons. He talks way too fast, and writes dazzling emails in the middle of the night. And even though he was a superstar at Amazon who could have had every venture capitalist in town drooling… Read More
The Great James Slavet kicked off Redfin’s brown-bag lunch program today, talking about the management best practices he’d rounded up from his salad days of founding a startup and running a business unit at Yahoo with hundreds of millions in revenue. He talked about salsa dancing, veganism and love. He was humble, goofy and funny…. Read More