So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish! - Redfin Real Estate News

So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish!

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Updated on October 5th, 2020

October is the quietest month at Redfin. The interns leave in September, and the new recruits don’t visit the office until November. In the mountains, it begins to rain but hasn’t yet snowed.
Before our thoughts turn to the holidays, we wanted to take a moment to thank last summer’s interns. Redfin’s engineering, products and marketing teams are notorious for piling the responsibilities onto young recruits, but this year’s group delivered the goods:

  • Seth Goldenberg used machine-learning algorithms to predict which homes will sell, and also developed two new versions of the iPhone app once featured in Apple’s national TV ads. He’s re-joining us for a full-time job this winter.
  • Daniel Petkevich produced, directed and shot a video of our top-rated Android application, ran a direct-mail campaign and single-handedly placed over a dozen Redfin stories in the local press. Since there isn’t a single quiet spot in the whole Redfin office, he shot the video from underneath a fire blanket. Now Daniel has made it his personal mission to persuade every Yale student to apply for a job at Redfin, which we appreciate. We’ll have the world’s  best company orchestra!

  • Hardeep Uppal processed 100 gigabytes of data in Hadoop, then used Pig, Map/Reduce, and Hive to report on how revenue-producing customers use our site differently than everyone else. Hardeep is also a DJ. In the picture below, Hardeep is the one who is embarrassed at how much Daniel loves to show off his body.

  • Ji Mun helped to revamp our online agent profiles, letting users vote customer reviews up or down; she also dived into machine-learning algorithms for automated home recommendations. Ji became famous for her hats.
  • Coral Peterson built a dynamic tool for marketing listings that our home-selling customers love. As you can see from the photo, Redfin gave Coral an iPad at the end of her summer here, and a bong made out of tube socks.

  • Kevin Thai analyzed some of our six million+ listings on a Hadoop cluster to find ways to automatically improve data quality, one of our primary sources of competitive advantage. Probably the best football player we’ve ever recruited.
  • April Alexander: led a design team that increased the rates at which users signed up to become Redfin customers, with the potential to increase our 2012 performance by millions of dollars.  April is also re-joining us this winter.

Seth, Daniel, Hardeep, Ji Mun, Coral, Kevin, April and others, thanks to all of you for your dazzling work. You probably expected to sit around waiting for the next Costco order, but all of you went on a high-productivity rampage.
If you’re in Seattle for the holidays, come by the office and we’ll all go out to dinner. And if you decide to venture beyond Redfin for a permanent position, let me know where and I’ll tell your new boss to give you more money!
College students interested in working at Redfin for next summer or for a permanent position, just check out what we’re hiring for and throw your hat into the ring!

Glenn Kelman

Glenn Kelman

Glenn is the CEO of Redfin. Prior to joining Redfin, he was a co-founder of Plumtree Software, a Sequoia-backed, publicly traded company that created the enterprise portal software market. In his seven years at Plumtree, Glenn at different times led engineering, marketing, product management, and business development; he also was responsible for financing and general operations in Plumtree's early days. Prior to starting Plumtree, Glenn worked as one of the first employees at Stanford Technology Group, a Sequoia-backed start-up acquired by IBM. Glenn was raised in Seattle and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a regular contributor to the Redfin blog and Twitter.

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