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, 13^th 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.

The post Law & Order, Special Victims Unit: How To Get “The Man” On Your Side When Starting a Company appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

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.

I tend to think that’s the easy stuff. You can pick up some of it as you go, and hire other people to help you with the rest.

To convince you this is so, Redfin has put together a Startup Skillz program in San Francisco for our own folks to learn the tricks of the trade when starting a company, with lunchtime speakers talking candidly about what has and hasn’t worked for them.

And now we’re inviting folks from outside Redfin to attend these talks, too. The speakers we’ve scheduled so far include:

• This Tuesday, November 15, 2011: James Slavet, Greylock Partners, “How to Pitch a Partners’ Meeting, The Best and the Worst of What I’ve Seen“
• Wednesday, December 14, 2011: Paul Willard, Chief Marketing Officer at Practice Fusion, “Moneyball Marketing: Customer Acquisition At Scale“
• Tuesday, January 10, 2012: Roy Gilbert, CEO of Grockit, “The Great Exhilirator: Going From Engineer to Executive“
• Thursday, January 26, 2012: Ilan Lovinsky, Law Partner at Gunderson Dettmer, “Law & Order, Special Victims Unit: How Not to Get F***ed When Starting a Company“

Each talk runs from noon – 1. To sign up, just click the link. We’ll also rig up a dial-in for our Seattle team.

Earlier this year, we offered a more extensive curriculum on the same theme in Seattle, and we’ll schedule more San Francisco talks next year based on what worked before.

The reason we’re doing this is because it’s important for us to be the best place in the world for an engineer to work, so we can have the best engineering team.

We especially want to make Redfin a good place for entrepreneurial engineers to work: these are the folks with  the creativity and confidence to pursue their own idea, with the poetry to make it beautiful, and with the passion to rally a whole team to get it out there fast.

The talks could of course backfire. If making Redfin a better place for entrepreneurial engineers to work also means making Redfin a good place for those folks to one day leave, too, so be it.

As Augustine once said in his prayer for chastity, give us Redfin spinouts, but not yet! To sign up for the talks, just click the links.

The post Startup Skillz Lunch Program Starts Tuesday in San Francisco appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

We aren’t sure whether to pursue every one of Bridget ideas, but we’ll probably go with a few of them straight away! The brown-bag program is usually open to the public. Past speakers have included former Delta CEO Jerry Grinstein, former aQuantive CEO Brian McAndrews, iLike co-founder Hadi Partovi, Picnik co-founder Jonathan Sposato and many others. Here’s what Bridget had to say…

People participate in communities for many reasons but the fundamental question is what’s in it for me. Think of it like a nightclub.

It shouldn’t be a silo; it can’t be separate from the brand, from the website. Our forums at Redfin are sort of a silo; people in the communities aren’t featured elsewhere on the site.

Sephora is a good example of a website that draws on data from Lithium’s forums, with a branded forum called “beauty advice.”

This discussion is featured on a main page of the Sephora site. Sephora also features the top contributors, changing the selection criteria for top contributors all the time so that contributors stay motivated. Top contributors on Sephora get a profile page that lets them choose their ten-favorite products. You’re not just a log-in, you’re a real person & you get to express your personality.

To host its discussions, Sephora started with a Facebook page, but this had a few problems:

• it’s hard to have a discussion on Facebook,
• it’s not easily integrated with Sephora.com,
• different users at Sephora all have to use one Sephora log-in,
• the search-engine ranking benefit accrues to Facebook not Sephora.com.

To solve these problems, Sephora integrated Lithium discussions so that a Facebook post shows up in the discussion forum or vice-versa.

What Do You Do on Forums?

You can do a lot of different things with online discussions.

You can host an idea exchange about, for example, features to add to a website, in which the Kudos or like or +1 button is a vote for the feature proposed. In its own forum, Litihum has 350 features for its products suggested by customers. Even if an idea isn’t acted on, and contributors get frustrated, it is good overall for Lithium.

Lithium discussions also allow you to upload photos and videos, a Lithium feature that we haven’t turned on but probably just should; real estate is very visual.

You can also create a knowledge-base, in which the posts are organized by topic and the content is edited and updated rather than simply discussed. It’s like a wiki, but it has workflow with security, so you can decide who gets to author and edit articles. The content can be worked on by a small group of people, then commented on by others. Forums posts can be nominated to be incorporated as a knowledge-base article.

You can also encourage folks to post discussions to Twitter and Facebook. People are more likely to share discussions they’ve actually contributed to rather than, say, real estate listings. You can also allow for private messages to a contributor.

Who’s in Charge? Moderation Tactics

You have to tame the trolls.

Lithium-powered forums have  an analytics suite that shows how much traffic the forums are driving and who is contributing… we can thank the biggest contributors, or address problems they’re complaining about. You can monitor who leaves, and who is up and coming.

You can see the average response time for a question, so you can try to be more responsive.

Lithium also helps us monitor our social media buzz. Mentions spiked from zero to one yesterday!

Moderation is also important. You can search for key terms like a competitor’s terms. You can require some users to go through a moderation workflow before posting.

After the presentation everyone started talking and asking questions. We were all excited about what we could be doing better with discussions! Maybe you are too. What would you like to see Redfin do with its Forums?

The post Online Message Boards & Communities: "Think of It Like a Nightclub" appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

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 different eras in Amazon’s growth. Over and over again, the speakers sounded one theme: relentlessly improving the customer experience.

This theme is so obvious that you’d expect everyone to trumpet it, but most don’t.

The kinds of people who are asked to give talks are generally very successful people, whose stories assume the shape of battles lost and (mostly) won. But for Amazonians, it seems like the battle never ends: Amazon’s Neil Roseman gave engineers a log-in so every Amazonian could see on each page the performance statistics for that page. When an Amazonian tells a story, it doesn’t conclude with a triumphant result in the style of almost every business anecdote. It just sort of trails off toward the next improvement. It’s a very humble, restless way to look at the world.

What’s more noticeable is every Amazonian’s emphasis on putting the customer first. You expect technical folks to focus on technical challenges but it’s startling how easily the engineers at Amazon connect a technical problem to a customer problem. Neil, and his former engineering colleague, Rick Dalzell, both talk about customers they’d never met like next-door neighbors.

I find it even more impressive that the business folks whom you expect to take a cynical attitude toward profits are the ones who are most idealistic about improving the customer experience. When we asked Scott Jacobson how Amazon decided when to recommend a partner’s product over its own, we expected to hear about a fancy profit-maximizing formula that was far more complicated than the one Amazon actually uses: what’s best for the customer?

I could have cried when Scott said that. If it’s so simple to be good, why is it so hard? I think Jeff Bezos’s greatest achievement at Amazon is that he has made customer-first thinking easy, not hard. And he has proven that it is the only way to generate sustainable profits. I hope that one day when all the Redfin old-timers are sent out to the speaking circuit, we all sound the same in that one respect.

The post All Happy Amazonians Are Alike… appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Software Developers as Business Analysts: Jeff emphasized the importance of letting developers access usage data, so they can figure out on their own what optimizations need to be made to the site. While the query language of traditional relational databases doesn’t do much beyond pull the data out, Hadoop allows developers to build their own analytical tools, or extend those of others, using a more powerful all-around programming language like Java.

The Rise of the Machines: Jeff observed that the amount of data being stored by computers is exploding, just because most of it is now automatically captured by machines. You can change one setting on a web server and increase the amount of data you capture about what people do on your website by a factor of 100 or even 1,000. When Jeff worked at Facebook, the company was generating a terabyte of data — a trillion bits of information — every day. And this was in 2007.

Microsoft Has Started to Do a Lot Right: While Jeff was hardly impressed by the packaged software bought by businesses less enterprising than Facebook — Gordon was too polite to include Jeff’s unexpurgated opinions — Jeff reserved special praise for all the analytical tools Microsoft offers with its database, SQL Server. As Jeff said, “It’s kind of scary that Microsoft has started to do a lot right within the last 5 years.” If you do end up working with a relational database rather than Hadoop, Microsoft’s a good choice.

To read the entire summary of Jeff’s talk, visit our devblog. Or check out other engineer-to-engineer talks, such as Twitter talking about its use of Scala. The next big talk is our own Sasha Aickin, dishing it out next Thursday on the merits of HTML5 vs. proprietary mobile applications. Everyone’s invited! And many, many thanks to Jeff for a fantastic talk.

The post Jeff Hammerbacher on Hadoop, Facebook and a Surprising Bit About Microsoft appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Who here has heard of CarMax? Only a few of you? Well we’re not in Seattle. We sell $100 million worth of used cars per store. We have the same ethics as Costco. It’s guaranteed. You can return a car you buy from us in five days and get all your money back; elsewhere the guarantee is “fifty feet or fifty seconds.” The financing – there is no financing person wheeling and dealing, there’s just a computer screen telling you what the rates are — is totally straight.

The challenge is getting the cars on the lot. It takes us 23 minutes to buy a car from a consumer. The price we give you should reflect what it could be sold for at an auction in the next seven days, minus the frictional cost of our having to deal with it. We buy about a third of the cars we look at.

The best cars out there are hard to buy. Who has a Honda Odyssey? GREAT cars. A Honda Odyssey isn’t available in lease fleets and rental fleets. We have to buy it from customers. That’s the key challenge. Any customer can come in and we’ll buy their car, so long as they have the title to the car. That’s a real commitment. It means we buy cars we don’t want. We have an auction every 14 days for mom & pop dealers, selling whatever our own customers don’t buy from us.

Our service is a fixed price, a la carte offering – we don’t play games by offering you a lot for the trade-in then over-charging you on the sale of a new car — we’re totally transparent. Our website lets a Sacramento customer buy a pink Caddy in Miami. You pay to move the car, but if it’s not as described, we pay you back those moving costs.

And the whole purpose of our advertising is to drive you to our website. People who come in to our store after having looked at our site are twice as likely to buy. Our sales managers used to prefer walk-ins off the street and groan about the Internet leads. Now, it’s the other way around.

How fast can we grow? Well used cars alone are a $300 billion industry. We’re about a fourth or fifth as big as we can be. We have zero competitors. And that’s because it’s really, really hard. You have to build systems, processes, culture. We’ve been at it nearly 20 years.

Costco has a rule that you can’t grow more quickly than 10% store-on-store because you just can’t get the right people. In the big-box world, it takes 25 – 30 years to cover the United States.

The time you put in lets you build overwhelming competitive advantage. I’m not viciously competitive, but the right number of competitors to have is ZERO.

Every month that you do what you’re doing, and you do it really well — satisfying customers, perfecting processes, developing people — that’s a month that no other competitor can short-circuit. Once you get a big lead on somebody, the only way to get caught is for you to screw up.

How do you know what to pay for a car? How do you know when to discount a car that isn’t selling? We know more than anybody about how to price a car. We strive for information dominance on the market for used cars. We have 21 math geniuses who have figured this out, and we make sure they never meet anyone.

The only bigger retailer than CarMax in terms of sales per store is Costco. But unlike Costco, we can’t call up Coca-Cola to get more Coke. We have to source our own inventory. We worked with Toyota to figure out how to recondition a car efficiently. At heart, we’re a bunch of process engineers.

We have technicians, we have car salesmen, we have office people – you need office people because there are 14 documents you need to have signed to buy a car – and the office people are anal-compulsive. And then we have buyers.

Like Enterprise, we focus on the talented folks who may not have been in top half of their class…. natural leaders, maybe high-school athletes, but they perhaps didn’t focus completely on their studies while they were in college… know anybody like that? But they are smart, hard working, and looking for a great opportunity.

We have to train everybody from scratch. The only way to be a Marine general is to be a Marine. To be a CarMax buyer, you have to have a good memory, you have to be bright, you have to be willing to take the shot. That means, you have to be willing to make a bid. They tend to be like sales-people, but they’re also a bit full off themselves and they’re often young.

The point is that we systematize everything except – our associates and our customers. The key with our associates is that you have to get these four groups of people – technicians, salesmen, office people and buyers — to work together to sell as many cars as we possibly can, in an honest way, with the lowest possible price that still allows us to make money. That’s really hard.

It’s hard to make the business succeed. It’s easy to make it fail. Anybody in the chain can make it fail. I’m always asked when I meet with Wall Street if there’s another opportunity like CarMax out there. And I always thought, well what about selling used houses? That seems like a good business.

Did you ever consider getting into related businesses?
When we had one store, we tried renting cars out of it too. An Enterprise VP showed up right away and talked us out of that business. That says a lot about Enterprise – if it wasn’t a private company, I’d buy their stock, because that is really paranoid, and I really like paranoid people — and he convinced us that what he did with rental cars was hard, that used cars was enough. So we decided to focus, focus, focus.

And what we really focused on was the quality of the service first and foremost. When I worked for Marriott hotels, Bill Marriott used to tell me: “My brand is the night you just spent. If the bathroom was dirty, you don’t care about the television ads.”

That means you have to pay people to do the right thing. If you want to know what you’re paying people to do, go watch what they’re doing. People are pretty smart. At CarMax, we pay associates to help our customers find the right car for them. We pay $150 per used car, whether it’s a six-year-old Kia or a $75,000 Mercedes.

The branding challenge is to convince people that we’re honest; but if they haven’t experienced it, it’s well-nigh impossible. Our goal is, make you happy and we’ll sell more cars than anyone else, more efficiently.

How do you use technology? Is transparency the key to your success, or just having better technology?
We spent $10 million on information systems before we opened the doors on our first store. We used RFID to track every car, we used the first-touch screens in retail to show people every car on the lot.

Transparency is our friend. It helps contrast us with every other car salesman because they all hide information to control the customer. Being transparent prepares our customers to buy a car, prepares our customers to trust us.

We hired a Ph.D. in statistics three months after we opened our first store. She worked for two years, no results. Then we found a guy from Duke, who found a correlation between cars on our lot and our discounting strategy. I can’t tell you what the correlation was, but man it was a big one. It took two and a half years to get any value out of it, but we are still getting value. Now we’re running super computers to try and track every car on the road in America, when it has sold and what it sold for and all the rest. Our goal is information dominance.

Our buyers quickly build up a huge amount of field experience and a great sense of what cars are worth. But we work really hard to get them to recognize the insights that the data analytics folks can provide them that are not intuitive, but make them even better… it gives them a real knowledge edge in the marketplace. The two groups have very different personality types, but have learned to respect each others’ talents, and to work together to make the buying, valuation, and inventory processes fast, accurate, and customer-friendly. As a result, we know more about what any car is worth than anyone in the country, and we know it faster.

And that helps us wear down the traditional dealers. We take market share from them year in and year out. It’s like a sales tax on their business. The first time they really reacted against us was when we tried to get in the nation’s largest new-car mall in Sacramento. They refused to let us operate there. So we opened a store just outside its wall that everybody had to drive by to get to their mall. It killed them. You know you’re on to something when you like being right next to your competition.

Who’s your target customer?
Product marketers are going to hate me for saying this, but if you have a job, and you don’t have a butler, you’re my target customer. That’s 80% of America.

We have expanded slowly. But once you cover 70% of the U.S., your national TV rates are cheaper than if you bought it market by market. For a while in LA we were trying to save money and we did no TV advertising. Then when we turned on TV, it drove a 30% sales increase. When the Internet came along, TV became more valuable. And search marketing works great. We tested from 2003 – 2005 because we couldn’t believe that Google was good as it was. There’s a revolution – a REVOLUTION – going on in analytical marketing. It was amazing what we could do.

People buy a car every three to five years, so it’s really important that when they do come, they have a good time. We may never see them again. From the beginning, we’ve done intensive surveying to find out why people who didn’t buy, why not? Half didn’t buy anything. We asked anyway, would you recommend us to a friend? A lot of them said they would. That’s the most important question you can ask.

The single biggest reason people come to us is word of mouth. I wish I could buy word of mouth – just go to a network and ask to buy $10 million in word of mouth — because if I could, we’d buy that and nothing else. The challenge with a lot of our advertising was to be relevant, because most of the time, people aren’t in the market for a car. We don’t want to bombard people with stuff at a time when they’re not interested in a car right now.

Whew! That’s it! Thanks to everyone at Redfin and beyond who came, and thanks to Austin for a fireball of a talk. Any more questions for Austin, please leave a comment below and we’ll try to get him back online to respond…

The post 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) appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

• How to build a trusted brand in an industry where trust is broken
• How to become one of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” six years running
• The return-on-capital of different business models for expanding: direct service, franchised operations and joint ventures
• The growth pains Austin went through growing a $5-billion Fortune 500 company from nothing

Austin and Redfin have plenty in common. Like us, Austin has testified before Congress about anti-competitive industry laws and rules: in our case, laws banning real estate commission refunds and rules limiting what data we can publish; in his case, laws banning national new-car retailers or the Sunday sales of any cars whatsoever, even via the Internet.

Like us, Austin took on a vast, well-funded incumbent: I had always thought the largest class of self-made millionaires consisted of real estate brokers, but Austin insists it’s car dealers. And both of us raised cash that gave us the time to build an operationally complex, capital-intensive operation capable of generating increasing profits at increasing scale.

When we first met, Austin said he thought of Redfin as the CarMax of real estate and I told him we thought of CarMax as the Redfin of cars. A while back when Redfin was raising money, we shamelessly compared ourselves to CarMax; the graphic to the right was the last slide of our deck. We still have a lot to learn about how CarMax really works.

Austin’s brown-bag talk will start at noon here in  Redfin’s Seattle office, 2025 1st Avenue. Then at 3:30 we’re going to the UW to talk about how to develop Seattle as a humongous entrepreneurial hub, and finally at 6:30, we’ll head over to the Seattle 2.0 awards. All three events are open to the public, so if you see us around town, please be sure to say hi.

To hear Austin’s brown-bag talk, just add your name to the list here so we know how many pizzas to order; the UW colloqium requires no advance registration, and Seattle 2.0 will cost you $69. Thanks to Austin for coming out, and hope to see you all here for his talk!

The post Austin Ligon Speaks Next Tuesday at Redfin Brown-Bag appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

What we liked about Christine was her emphasis on domain expertise, most of which comes from the folks making the business go day to day. The story of Starbucks learning initiatives is of training moving from the classroom to the stores, from trainer-led courses to manager-led courses, from lecture to workshop. Here’s what Christine had to say, first in a brief presentation, then in response to our questions:

From the start, our training involved tasting 30 coffees. That commitment to quality training has stayed true but we’ve had to change. Yes, we’re still focused on our product and on our culture. But we’ve had to change how we deliver our training, moving more to leader-to-employee training, and now over the last few years experimenting with technology.

We’re hiring tens of thousands of people every year. That is a big engine. We’ve had to find different ways to do our training. In the last few years, that shift has become more dramatic. Our basic challenge is ensuring that a partner comes out of the system prepared to deliver a quality beverage, with a smile, quickly.

As we’ve tried to accommodate partners who can’t wait for a lecture-based class to come around on the schedule, we now depend on in-store one-to-one delivery of our training materials. Three principles guide our strategy:

1. Experiential learning: how do you encourage learning through experience? How do you optimize informal learning? Part of that is demographically driven. The millennial generation that we hire wants hands-on learning, where 70% is on the job, 20% is learning through others, and only 10% comes from instructors.

2. Technology-based learning: we used to have a lot of books; we now use online learning, video. This increases speed-to-market. We just implemented a learning management system; we use Plateau. And let me tell you it has been paaaainful. This isn’t because of Plateau. It’s just because any switch of that size is a lot of work.

3. Leader as coach: we want to be very clear about the leader’s coaching role. We used to have a lot of trainers. But we don’t have a big base of trainers now and we don’t think we ever will again. We want the leaders in the business to be coaches. When we rolled out a new Frappucino program, we wanted senior vice-presidents to be certified – they had to take a test – and then we wanted them to propagate what they learned through the whole company. When everybody goes through it, we get better engagement and buy-in, and we learn what’s wrong with process we’re training people on…

How can we avoid Death by PowerPoint? We want to roll up our sleeves, we design activities; it could be the simple act of reflection followed by asking folks to write something. We try dyads, with two people, where you work with a partner. We try to find different ways to make it creative. In online meetings, we use polls and chats; we ask participants to do some pre-work where they had done something in advance. The emphasis is on lots of pictures and less words. Storytelling can be really powerful.

Our instructional design team is really nerdy – they have to be very detail-oriented about what they’re training on – but also really creative. Our best trainers are a combo of functional experts in teaching and subject-matter experts. About half my trainers have done the job of being a store manager, a district manager. When it comes to delivering the materials the team prepares, we pair on-the-job trainers with experienced facilitators. For example, we paired site selectors – people who picked where the stores were – and then certified them in facilitation.

How do we prepare the coaches? Anyone in our stores who wants to be a trainer applies; we select the trainers based on very specific criteria — Are they performing well in their current job? Can they give feedback? Are they good planners and organizers? Can they execute in a standardized way? — then give them some basic training on how to teach.

Why are we moving from the classroom to the store? We had to shift because people could wait months until we had enough folks to fill the class. But the most important reason is that we wanted the store manager to be accountable – not somebody else –for their folks to be well-trained. We expect better-trained partners, and that people will get the learning when they need it. We tested instructor-led vs. in-store-led training, and the data so far are heavily weighted toward in-store training performing better.

How do we train our licensees and JVs differently? Everybody is the same. A barista is a barista is a barista. Some licensees – Safeway for example — may add content. Some countries bolt-on new training; Britain offers a flat-white coffee that other countries don’t.

How do you make sure you get consistency?
We send out a kit, with a coaches guide, with posters. People have to learn about a beverage in three ways — I saw it, I made it, I tasted it. We ask them to go back and make the drink; we survey customers, asking them on our receipts to fill out a survey for a free drink.

How has the training organization evolved over the last 15 – 20 years?
When we started out, training did a little bit of everything. Then training became a very big organization. Then we took it back to something very focused. We started with 1 person, then went to 150, then went to 90. We train trainers now, rather than training people directly.

How do you train people on customer service?
We do talk a lot about our values; we talk about how we greet customers, how we talk to customers. Training on skills rather than just product knowledge is an area we’re taking a much closer look at…

We have advanced training, a coffee master’s program. We also have, mostly for store managers, a coaching certification. We have an elective curriculum. We used to have more touchey-feeley electives, now it’s very business-oriented. For video and on line learning, we use shorter courses. The short courses are what people use and go back to. Ten minutes is the max.

How do you develop people?
Well it’s some training, some plain old good managers, some corporate values. The discipline we bring to it is that we give performance reviews, do development plans, figure out what resources we need to execute on the plan.

That was it! Many thanks to Christine for an awesome brown-bag talk. When she was done, the crowd went wild, and Christine was mobbed by admirers. We really learned a ton.

The post What Starbucks Learned About Learning appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

But it has been just as hard to train all the new folks on our values, our history and our strategy, on what to look for in a house or a contract, and how to handle a negotiation, so that every Redfin person you meet is an exemplar of the company we want to be. We’ve started developing tests, workbook exercises, role-playing cues. We still have a long ways to go.

So we’ve been looking for someone to run our training program. But in the meantime, we asked Christine McHugh, director of global learning at Starbucks, to host a brown-bag talk on how Starbucks has been able to open a thousand stores year, all around the world while still maintaining a consistently soothing, warm experience for consumers. She’s speaking today at noon, here at 2025 1st Avenue, 6th floor, in a talk that is open to the public.

To get ready for the talk, she asked us to send over some of the questions we’ve been wrestling with; here’s what we came up with:

1. How do we know that people have actually absorbed what we’re teaching?
2. How do we avoid death by PowerPoint? How large can a class be and still be interactive?
3. Do you try to teach just facts (like what Starbucks stands for) or also skills (like how to manage the people in your store)?
4. Does a trainer in the Starbucks organization actually teach the class, or just work with line managers to put together the right kind of materials?
5. What kind of training do you provide to people on an ongoing basis? Is training available just when folks are newly hired or promoted?
6. How do you scale training in a distributed organization?
7. How has online training worked for Starbucks? Do people actually watch web videos?
8. How much training does a barista get? A store manager?

As always, we’ll post a write-up of the talk, probably later today. If there are questions you’d like to add to the list, just suggest them below. And if you’d like to see Christine in person, leave a comment here to let us know you’re coming, and then swing by! We’ll order lunch for you…

The post Starbucks's Christine McHugh Speaks About Training appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Michelle’s talk was a big hit, with visitors from outside our office lining the back walls and the office halls to hear what she had to say. It was one of the few talks on marketing that wasn’t so calculatingly fake that it made me want to throw myself out a window.

And it was a lively good crowd! There was a contingent of Yelp fanatics in the front, and former Redfinners Savan Kong, Pam Hayes, Lily Supardan and Leo Shklovskii in the back, and all sorts of other folks too.

Here’s Michelle’s advice…

Be platform-independent. Arguing over whether to use Yelp, Twitter or Facebook is like Billy Madison arguing over whether conditioner or shampoo is better. You need both.

And don’t forget old media either. When Michelle’s mom first bought a microwave she thought she would bake cakes and turkeys in it but really you need a conventional oven and a microwave, just as you need traditional media and new media.

Authenticity is how people decide whom to listen to. A brand’s most important trait is authenticity. Ruffles has “Authentic BBQ Potato Chips” but the label actually says in small type, “Flavored Potato Chip.” Michelle’s reaction: OMGWTFBBQ?

Be the power user. Whatever your market is, make sure you’re the power user out there. If you’re leading the charge, people will follow. On the flip side, you sure can’t understand your community if you’re not using it. Yelp, has people on the ground in every city. Local authenticity matters. And if you’re already in the mix, it helps you control problems before they get out of hand.

Most of all, you can take people who are big supporters and use them as the ambassadors for your brand. Redfin, for example, could ask all its fans to talk to customers who are just going through the process for the first time. (What do all you Redfin fans out there think of that?)

Add to the conversation. Be an authentic participant and dive in. Participating isn’t just a matter of re-tweeting. You have to add wit and insight to the conversation, particularly when most folks on Twitter are just re-tweeting up the wazoo. Don’t contact people just when you need them, don’t just be a self-promotional megaphone. You can’t market anything if you don’t have something interesting to say.

Face-to-face matters. You also have to create a brand offline. Office hours are great; just tweet out whenever you’re going to be working in a coffee shop (I’m going to try this). Yelp parties work well because we use a lot of booze. Boxee did a promotional stunt at SXSW using an RV that lost its hook-up; rather than calling it quits, Boxee made the RV a cause, begging people around Austin to host the RV in their driveways for a night. Wherever the RV went, a party followed.

Everything can be fun. We’re web 2.0, we’re not your dad’s Internet. Even a 404 page can be funny: Twitter has the fail whale; Yelp’s CEO has a picture of his dog chewing on Internet cables. A lot of people use Redfin for fun… that has to be part of the brand essence. (We sometimes try to sit up straight for the cameras and wipe the smile off our faces so people trust us to handle their real estate transaction, but maybe that’s the wrong move?)

Embrace your identity. You can make anything work if you own it and can laugh at yourself. Jack in the Box created a secret society for people who like club sandwiches, and filled a promotional email for it with caps and exclamation points. The self-awareness is what made that campaign work.

Balance is important. 80% of what you do is goofing off. 20% is promotional. But the 80% is what makes people listen to the 20%.

Let a thousand flowers bloom. As the folks at Edelman have famously observed, “social media should be 1% of 100 people’s jobs, not 100% of one person’s job.” Redfin has agents all over the country. If each one pitched in on their wisdom or insights from what they learned in a day, it would really lift up the whole company. Michelle compared this to all the little kids at camp hoisting up a parachute. If you’re in sales and marketing, you better not be a shrinking violet: get on Twitter and express yourself!

That was it. Michelle spent another half hour answering questions and getting mobbed by her adoring fans. Many thanks to Michelle for leading the conversation, and thanks too to all the visitors from the startup community who joined us. Next time – on May 7 we’re hosting Starbucks’s head of worldwide training — we’ll order more Indian food (I nearly passed out half an hour after the talk because I ate too much of it).

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