Every month, Redfin publishes a newsletter about real estate prices out to a few hundred thousand people. A few hundred write back. The tone of the responses depends on the tone of the original newsletter. If we argue that the market will improve over the next year, as we did in Southern California at the… Read More
Every month, Redfin publishes two newsletters on real estate prices. One, usually published on the last Tuesday of every month, is a Redfin Roundup, which synthesizes data collected by economists, government agencies and others to provide a complete portrait of what happened in the market over the past month. The other is Redfin Insider, usually… Read More
A Boston-area Redfin field agent was arrested today by the FBI on charges of being a Russian spy. In her job application, she identified herself as Tracey Foley, but called herself Ann. Before we hired Ms. Foley in February of this year, at least two Redfin employees interviewed her, using a template that focuses on… Read More
My favorite anecdote in Michael Lewis’s The Big Short is about one of the first people to make big bets against mortgage bonds, a Deutsche Bank trader who liked to brag that he employed China’s second-smartest mathematician. According to Lewis, the trader talked about the mathematician as if he were “a pet tied to his… Read More
More than a few of you have written us to complain that the Redfin app for iPhone and iPod crashes on new versions of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 4. The new operating system comes standard with the new iPhone 4, but you can also download it through iTunes to an iPhone 3 or iPhone 3GS;… Read More
After a day spent at The New York Forum and in a CNBC studio — every desk in the newsroom had a TV, and every TV was tuned to the World Cup, even the one alongside the camera that was supposed to show me only myself — I caught a cab to Newark Airport. As… Read More
In the story of the rapidly vanishing high-technology IPO, the Sarbanes-Oxley law bringing independence and accountability to financial disclosures has become the chief villain. Bill Gurley and Fred Wilson were some of the first, in the summer 2008, to complain of Sarbanes-Oxley. But their timing was poor: due to barely understood and hardly disclosed financial risks,… Read More
The talk of the town today in Seattle has been TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington’s participation in last night’s TechFlash panel. One panelist said he wanted to spend the rest of his life building his startup, which is just the kind of hand-over-heart sentiment that Mike for some reason feels compelled to subvert, first by insulting… Read More
When you storm out of a spat with your girlfriend, the perfect riposte comes to you only on the second flight of stairs. I’ve been standing on that stairway all week, thinking about what I should have asked TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington when interviewing him at Atlassian’s Starter-Day conference. It was a big opportunity. In… Read More
Innovation and entrepreneurship are becoming my two least-favorite words, mostly because they are being appropriated in ways that are neither innovative nor entrepreneurial. Like in today’s New York Times essay by Tom Friedman. Friedman used to be one of my favorite writers. In Beirut to Jerusalem, when he talked about two sheiks on a flight… Read More