At breakfast earlier this month, my friend Roy Gilbert made an offhand reference to two types of people, knowers and learners. It was a distinction I’d never heard before. But I liked the idea of identifying someone as a learner, just because it’s so hard to make any change to our identity, unless part of… Read More
What’s interesting about this weekend’s debate over Fred Wilson’s contention that “marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks” is that it re-enacts an old battle: engineers’ wariness toward marketing, and marketing folks’ distrust of engineers’ build-it-and-they-will-come naivete. But the truth is that the battle-lines between the two sides just don’t exist… Read More
Last night, we flipped the switch on a different data source that gives us a more complete picture of the number of foreclosed homes that are not yet listed for sale. This is a part of what a lot of people refer to as the shadow inventory — homes that have been foreclosed upon by… 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
Redfin, Madrona Venture Group and eight other startups today launched a new program to recruit computer-science students to work in the Seattle area as interns this summer. The selection process is rigorous but it’s a sweet deal for the finalists: not only do you get to interview at a who’s who of Seattle startups all… Read More
It has almost been 18 months since Intuit acquired Mint for $170 million, so long ago that we can hardly remember how vigorously venture investors defended the deal, even as Redfin and Jason Fried suggested that Mint would have been fine going it alone, too. The Valley’s digerati were unanimous in praising Mint for taking… Read More
Earlier this week we published another round of Insider Reports on our local blogs in Seattle, the Bay Area, Washington/Baltimore, Chicago, and new this month: Boston. Our local experts around the country combined a look into Redfin’s vast database of market data with the read from our agents in the field to bring you the… Read More
We’ve been a little quiet lately, mostly because Redfin has been busy: with our annual kick-off party, a big upgrade to the website in the works for March, and a new initiative to give each local real estate team the latitude to run as a small business, judged by customer satisfaction and profits. In the… Read More
If Leo Tolstoy is right when he says all happy families are alike, then Amazon must be a very happy family. Redfin has had three speakers from Amazon visit us, one as recently as last week; what’s striking about all three is how similar each sounded to one another, despite coming from different departments, and even… Read More
Have you seen the articles on TechCrunch about the workers in the Chinese iPhone plant maimed in the line of duty without receiving medical care? The overwhelming response in the comments has been a kind of fatalism you rarely see in Silicon Valley: observers all agree that we as consumers are powerless, that Apple itself is powerless,… Read More