Online Message Boards & Communities: "Think of It Like a Nightclub"

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

All Happy Amazonians Are Alike…

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

Jeff Hammerbacher on Hadoop, Facebook and a Surprising Bit About Microsoft

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

Austin Ligon on Information Dominance, the Right Number of Competitors (Zero), The Lift Created by TV Ads (30%) & How Fast You Can Expand (20% per Year)

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