Law & Order, Special Victims Unit: How To Get “The Man” On Your Side When Starting a Company - Redfin Real Estate News

Law & Order, Special Victims Unit: How To Get “The Man” On Your Side When Starting a Company

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Updated on October 2nd, 2020

Just before I joined Redfin, I’d wanted to start a company but my brother got sick and I fell in love and soon I was in Seattle. What I never forgot was the lawyer who was going to help us incorporate that business, Ilan Lovinsky, a partner at Gunderson Dettmer, and brother of the great Noam Lovinsky.
Ilan may be the savviest mofo I’ve ever met, and yet he’s got soul too, which is just another way of saying he’s not a lawyer so much as the consigliere every CEO hopes her lawyer will be. He’s also a Redfin hound-dog, casing the site daily for listings.
And now today at noon Ilan’s giving a talk at Redfin in San Francisco, as part of a series we’re hosting for Redfin employees on how to run your own startup. Our goal is to attract the kind of people who will one day found a business, to keep them as long as we can, then to launch them into careers of rap-star wealth and profligacy.
You’re invited, to come in person or to dial in.
So far, the series has been one hit after another.
We’ve had Roy Gilbert — former nuclear submarine officer and head of Gmail, Google India and Grockit  — come by to talk about management best practices; he explained how a Twinkie once out-rowed an NCAA Division-I oarsman.
And James Slavet from Greylock gave a five-step tutorial for dazzling a venture partners’ meeting. I went over everything you’d ever need to know about financial statements, in 45 minutes flat. And TellApart’s Mark Ayzenshtat took us deep into the science of customer profiling and re-targeting.
Now Ilan is going to hit the legal ins and outs. This may sound dry to you. But I’ve heard this talk before. In a Sand Hill-road parking lot Ilan once gave me his 15-minute guide on “how not to get f—-ed” and it was like the Businessman’s Book of Revelations.
You can come by in person, to 88 Kearny, 13th floor, in downtown San Francisco. Or you can just dial-in to a web conference:
Web: https://redfin.webex.com/redfin/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=662069306
Password: redfin
Call: 1.866.625.9936
Code: 6223346
If you’re coming by in person, please sign up here by 10:30 a.m. today so we can order lunch for you. I’ll be there with a Music-Man baton and a top-hat to introduce Ilan and slurp from his boob of wisdom. If you have a great idea for Redfin, we can chat before or after.

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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