It has become commonplace to claim that the cost of starting a company has declined by an order of magnitude; just this morning Dave McClure took this claim as the starting point for his dazzling essay, Moneyball for Startups. I think the claim is partially true, but overstated. And I wish we had data, not… Read More
As part of our Engineer-to-Engineer series of talks on topics such as Hadoop, Scala, HTML5, Cassandra and Clusto, Redfin invited Ryan Dahl to speak last Wednesday on Node.JS, a web server he created using JavaScript. It was a stupendous talk. Now, I know what you’re thinking. For a core back-end technology like a web server, why use JavaScript, a technology… 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
Having recruited key architects from Facebook and Twitter for engineer-to-engineer talks on Hadoop and Scala, Redfin now turns to Ryan Dahl to talk about Node.js, the toolkit he built for creating web servers in JavaScript. By separating the web server from operating-system threading, Node.js’s claim to fame is scaling with less engineering effort and lower… Read More
Watching Steve Jobs’s primary reaction — annoyance – to the iPhone 4 antenna debacle, it has been hard not to think about it in terms of the decisions Redfin needs to make every day: between going for something innovative or making incremental improvements to satisfy customer requests. Steve Jobs is at such a far end… Read More
Every month or so, as part of a series of talks called Engineer-2-Engineer (E2E), one of the gods of software engineering descends into the San Francisco offices of Redfin or Digg to give a technical talk on a practical subject. We’ve had architects from Twitter, Facebook and Pandora talk about Scala, mobile and Hadoop. Now… Read More
My twin brother is an old-school letter writer with a Symbian phone. Here’s a note he just sent me about the World Cup, which has nothing to do with Redfin, startups or real estate, but still captured some of the mania that has gripped our office in the past few weeks… Best look, individual: Carles… Read More
Fred Wilson posted a thoughtful essay on Friday, about putting the band from one startup back together for the next. While acknowledging that it was an inevitable tendency, Fred stopped short of deciding whether it was a good or a bad thing, which suggests to me his feelings are mixed on the topic. I think… Read More
Apple just released Redfin’s update to our iPhone app, which corrects some problems we’d been been having when folks using the new iPhone operating system tried to pan away from an area they’d been searching. To download the updated app, just click on the App Store icon, then on the Updates icon… Many thanks to… Read More
Here at Redfin, we don’t have much patience with bubble bloggers. We do not have a fixed position that all markets are over-inflated all the time. For example: since last year, we have stated repeatedly that foreclosures are likely to peak this summer, a position now corroborated by statistical data and our own experience: in… Read More