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… Read More
Some of the best entrepreneurs are engineers. If you can design and build new products, all you really need is an idea. But many engineers believe that you need much more: the business skills to read a P&L, file articles of incorporation, raise money, get press, meet customers, manage employees, and all that other jazz…. Read More
Bridget Frey, Redfin’s newest engineering director, recently joined us from Lithium, the software provider for our for-consumers-and-by-consumers online discussion site, Redfin Forums. Bridget hosted a brown-bag talk at Redfin yesterday about how to build online communities like Redfin Forums, and especially about how to get the most out of a software-provider like Lithium. We aren’t… 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
As part of our engineer-to-engineer series of technical talks, Cloudera co-founder Jeff “The Hammer” Hammerbacher visited Redfin’s San Francisco office last week to explain why Facebook began using Hadoop — which stores data as a lot of big files on many computers rather than squeezing it into the rows and columns of a database —… Read More
CarMax founder and former CEO Austin Ligon visited Redfin yesterday. CarMax is a $10 billion superstore that is taking all the sales slime & financing shenanigans out of the used-car business. Customers love it. As part of our brown-bag lunch program, Austin came by to talk to us about how to build a customer-driven consumer… Read More
Big news! The founder and long-time CEO of CarMax, Austin Ligon, is visiting Redfin in Seattle next Tuesday, May 18, and he’s leading a brown-bag discussion at noon here in our Seattle office on all the topics dear to our hearts: How to build a trusted brand in an industry where trust is broken How… Read More
As part of our 2010 brown-bag series of workshops, Redfin on Friday hosted Christine McHugh to talk about what she learned about training folks in her 20 years at Starbucks. We expected someone with that much experience to be deep into middle age but in fact she started at Starbucks as a barista while she… Read More
Redfin has been hiring plenty of folks lately, mostly because we have the best recruiter I’ve ever seen in Sophia Gray. Even for Sophia, it has been hard to find the best people, and get them through our behavioral interviews (the discipline here is to ask people about a specific accomplishment and its result, rather… Read More
As part of Redfin’s brown-bag series, social marketing guru Michelle Broderick came by to talk about how to turn your brand into a party that everybody wants to join. Michelle knows a thing or two about marketing, having worked for Yelp, Yahoo, Continental and Real. And she knows how to be funny and charming. I… Read More