At last Thursday’s SIC conference, Tricia Duryee asked why online real estate companies have prospered in Seattle. One panelist cited low home prices, which let young entrepreneurs buy homes they could never afford in Silicon Valley, and from there begin to wonder how real estate could be better. Another suggestion was that HouseValues’ roaring 2004 IPO… Read More
Everybody knows the story: in the first Internet boom, new companies rode high on staggering losses only to face bankruptcy once the music stopped. At the height of the madness, a single Internet startup lost $720 million in one year, but was somehow valued at $25 billion. Now as companies invent arcane financial metrics to… Read More
We revere Amazon, and generally try not to give other companies advice. But does anyone know why Amazon doesn’t give up the state sales-tax fight and station its monstrous fulfillment space-ships over every major American city? Benefits: Deliver everything same-day including groceries the way it does here in Seattle Go after UPS, using its analytical… 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
Josh Kopelman observed Friday that e-commerce has changed very little since he founded Half.com: more than half the top-15 media companies did not exist in 1999 while all but one of the e-commerce companies did. Josh concludes that “I believe we’ve seen more innovation… in eCommerce in the last 10 months than we have in… Read More
A job applicant just told me Thursday that “Everybody knows you don’t like Microsoft or Amazon people.” Just last week, a board member heard the same thing. Which came as news to our chief technology officer, our Seattle-based engineering leaders, three star product managers and our hyper-productive lone marketing director, all of whom worked at… Read More