Michelle Broderick Comes to Redfin This Wednesday

Just a reminder that Redfin’s brown-bag program this week features Michelle Broderick, a savvy, new-generation marketeer who understands guerilla warfare, social marketing and viral programs better than your average bear.

I think she was the one who came up with the “People Love Us on Yelp” stickers that you see in restaurant windows all over town. And she has also the hard-nosed discipline of an old-school marketer from a company like The Gap. She’s funny and smart, so it should be a great talk.

She is speaking on Wednesday, April 28 at noon here in Redfin’s headquarters.  We’ll provide lunch for anyone who signs up, and happily host anyone who drops by. To add your name to the list, just leave a comment on the original brown-bag post…

Thanks to Michelle for pitching in, and hope to see you all soon!

The Self-Erasing CEO, Brian McAndrews, on Pushing Decision-Making Closer to the Customer & Making the Most Mistakes

As part of our brown-bag lunch program on management best practices, the legendary Brian McAndrews visited Redfin Friday. Brian took aQuantive through the highs and lows, leading the company out of the dot-com bust and building it into the juggernaut that sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6 billion. His talk on how to manage folks was another tour de force.

Brian has worked with and for all sorts of leaders in his career which, in addition to his time at aQuantive, has included stints at General Mills, Capital Cities/ABC, Disney and Microsoft. His advice is based on the great bosses he’s worked for and the bad bosses, and from his own experience as a CEO. As he laid out seven best practices, we did our best to keep up with what he said. Below is not a transcript – no one at Redfin is a stenographer, and I don’t take much time to clean these notes up later — but some of the useful bits and pieces of what he said, in as close to his own voice as we could get:

Set clear objectives, hold people accountable and get out of the way: if I had to sum up my management philosophy, this would be it. You want objectives to be aggressive but achievable. Push decision-making down and out in the organization, essentially closer to the customer. At aQuantive, we tried to empower people in sales and support. That means you have to have the right incentives, the right objectives and parameters. But within that framework, the more you can push P&L responsibility out, the better. This will help you attract and retain the best people. Do you want to be the only leader in your company? No…

One of the fundamental responsibilities that a manager has is building a team. Who is on their team is their call. That’s the most important decision a manager makes. I interviewed candidates for managers who reported to me, but this was only to give input and of course to help in recruiting the candidate. I once met a candidate who one of my direct reports wanted to hire who didn’t really do it for me. He hired the candidate anyway, and about six months later he fired that person. We hurt ourselves over that six months, but the manager who hired him also hired five or six good people too. That not’s a terrible batting average. I used to tell my own board, “If you don’t like the team I’m hiring, then fire me.” I held that manager to the same standard.

Micromanagement does not scale. Founders can be micromanagers. Sometimes micromanagement comes from a vision, sometimes it comes from a manager just being insecure. Micromanagement results in the loss of talented executives. Do you want people working for you who just take direction? Or do you want people who are going to lead, who are going to push back? We all know of some visionary founder or “celebrity CEO” who may have a reputation for micromanagent and so we ask: what about him? Doesn’t he prove you wrong? My answer is “no.” First of all, if the company is truly successful, my bet is their micromanagement is seriously overrated. Or if not, they are an extreme exception — and they’ll be in deep trouble when that person leaves since the people below him or her have not been trained to lead themselves. To support the “exception” point, look at lists of the top companies: best-run companies, best-managed companies, best places to work. The vast majority of these companies – if not all of them – are not led by these “celebrity CEOs” with micromanagement tendencies. In fact, the best companies to work for are led by CEOs you couldn’t name.

The way to get job security isn’t to own every decision, but to hire smart people. The board may say, wow, this person is better than you are. That’s a risk I’m willing to take. I often tell people who work for me: “The more you tell me, the less I will bother you.” Tell me what’s going on in our one-on-ones and I’ll stay out of your hair.

Micromanagement is a virus: the time and energy wasted by people down in the organization modeling that behavior is huge. When I have to present to a micromanager, I’m expected to know everything just as he would, which is a waste of time. As CEO at aQuantive, I was once asked at a board meeting what I thought of an executive’s presentation, and I said you already heard what I think. That executive knew more about the topic than I did, and he represented my point of view. Maybe the Board wanted me to have some special insight, but my insight was hiring him.

It is far more important to be respected than liked: act with integrity, be honest and transparent, treat people with respect and dignity. Being direct and honest often can mean delivering difficult news, news that people don’t want to hear. Some people don’t get that. A senior HR person I worked with viewed his job as what might be called a union leader, to lobby for whatever the employees wanted. Yes, your job is to represent employee needs to management, but it’s also to represent management to the employees.

Some decisions employees won’t like. My standard was: “Could I be ok with a decision that showed up in the New York Times, could I defend it?” For example, a compensation decision: could I defend to this manager why I was paying his or her peer more than her based on their performance. Of course in a public company, the New York Times rule comes true, as many executives’ compensation is public.

That can create some interesting dynamics. At aQuantive we said we had no politics, and certainly we had very little politics. We could be direct and transparent, where people said what they felt in the meeting. In my view, for someone on my executive team, the worst thing you can do is not say anything in a meeting, then come in my office afterwards and tell me what you really thought. When people tried to do that, I’d say, “I don’t want to be a middle-man. Say what you think in the meeting.”

Give employees the right to be wrong: if we’re not making mistakes, we’re not taking enough risks. Just don’t make the same mistake twice. Make a mistake for the right reasons, for a client, for the business. Learn from your mistakes, and teach everyone. There are exceptions: mistakes of integrity are one-strike-and-you’re-out. Otherwise, mistakes can be good. One of my colleagues used to say: “The reason we’re better than other companies is because we’ve made more mistakes than they have.” Encourage a culture of admitting mistakes. No excuses, but explanations are fine. It’s great when a senior leader says in front of her boss that she made a mistake, it’s critical for others to see that, to see that it’s accepted, and not punished. It’s great to ask what might be considered “dumb” questions, and it’s great for other folks to see you ask dumb questions; you should model that behavior as an executive.

No jerks: no matter how smart someone is, if someone can’t get along with others, if somebody treats others badly, they’re out. Sometimes you worry that somebody is too smart to fire, too valuable to fire. That’s never true. The collateral damage that is being done to the morale and effectiveness of the people that “jerk” is interacting with is enormous, even if it is often hidden from his or her direct boss. When you do make the decision to fire someone who is a “jerk”, you often hear that the whole team will quit. That never happens either. Hire slowly, fire quickly. It’s right for the team, it’s right for the company, it’s right for the person leaving.

Have a bias for action: gather the data you reasonably can and make a decision. What people don’t realize is that sometimes doing nothing is a decision. You can get bogged down with consultants, meetings, PowerPoints. You want an organization where it’s always clear who is supposed to make a decision. This lets some people give input and others make the decision rather than having two people both posturing, because they’re vying to make a decision. And always align authority and responsibilty. You don’t want to be in a situation where you have no authority but you’re still accountable, where you can get blamed for something you didn’t do; or conversely, where someone who does make the decisions is not held accountable for them.

As CEO, I always felt the fewer decisions I was making, the better we were doing.

Live or die by your values: most companies have values but they often have too many. Who can remember 13 values? aQuantive only had four values, and everyone knew them. It was hard to pick just four; someone, for example, would say excellence has to be a value, I mean, don’t we want to be excellent? My job as CEO was to pick just four. What other decisions did I have to own? Well certainly picking the team was the most important. Acquisitions were a big part of our strategy. I had to make the final decision on compensation and budgets.

And that was it. What was interesting about Brian is that on the one hand he’s such an indelible figure – tall, with a deep voice uninflected by many doubts – and yet he stood in front of us for an hour trying to do the impossible, erasing himself bit by bit so you could see all the other great leaders at aQuantive more clearly. Many thanks to Brian for coming by, and to Madrona for hooking us up with him. We had a lot of people at Redfin buzzing about it, and already one meeting on Friday night giving someone authority over a problem he’d previously had to helplessly take the blame for — so it was definitely a big hit.

Any comments or questions for Brian, just post ‘em below and we’ll make sure he takes a peek.

(Photo credit: Jeff Louella on Flickr)

We’re Rescheduling Tomorrow’s Brown Bag With Roy Gilbert

Sorry for the last minute notice but we need to cancel tomorrow’s (April 14th) brown bag with Roy Gilbert (former nuclear submarine lieutenant, currently a director at Google).

We don’t have a new date confirmed just yet but we’ll let you know here when we do.

And we are still on for Friday’s brown bag with Brian McAndrews, former CEO Of aQuantive, who will be talking about management best practices.

The GMail Business and the Coffeeshop Culture Explained at Redfin Brown-Bags

Redfin’s brown-bag lunch program, designed to inject a big dose of alien super-power DNA into our little startup, has been a smash success, both here at Redfin and all over Seattle. Redfin folks and all the startup junkies who dropped by our office last Friday are still talking about Neil Roseman’s goofy, persuasive, insightful and just totally useful talk about how to scale an engineering organization.

Now, bolstered by bigger and more boisterous crowds at every lunch, we’re adding a few more speakers…

• Next Wednesday, April 14, from noon – 1 p.m., Roy Gilbert from Google will talk about what he learned as a nuclear submarine lieutenant, and later running the GMail business and launching Google India from scratch to more than 1,000 folks. Roy also rowed two-man crew in college; supposedly the highest levels of lactic acid ever measured in a human being came from the thighs of a two-man crew competitor. Roy is a bad-ass.
• Friday, May 7, Christine McHugh, who runs Starbucks Global Learning, will talk about training, employee development and culture, based on her experiences creating one of the most consistent, well-recognized brands in the world one Starbucks new hire at a time. This is a big topic for Redfin, because we’re hiring like crazy, but we still want Redfin to mean something precious and intensely felt. Kudos to the great Sophia Gray for coming into my office after the Starbucks annual meeting to talk about what  we could do to steal some of the Starbucks magic.

And that doesn’t even count the folks who are already scheduled to come in, including former aQuantive CEO Brian McAndrews on management best practices next Friday and Yelp’s Michelle Broderick at the end of the month on community marketing. To sign up to attend the series — we’d love to have you! — or just to get on the email list, leave a comment here. Thanks to Roy and Christine — and all our other brown-bag speakers — for visiting Redfin. We’re very excited and honored to have you both.

Update: Unfortunately we’re cancelling April 14th’s brown bag lunch with Roy Gilbert. We’ll let you know when we have a new date!

Neil Speaks on Seducing Engineers, Polishing the Turd, Hiring Lucky People, Measuring Inputs, Perl Scripts as Managers

As part of Redfin’s brown-bag lunch series, the great Neil Roseman visited us today, wearing a goofy t-shirt he bought on Woot and a sports jacket. He led Amazon’s earliest engineering efforts — he bought the company’s third web server, ever — and rose to its greatest heights. Dozens of folks from Seattle’s startup community also came by, and lots of folks listened in to the online presentation. And now all of them are emailing and calling and coming by to say how wonderful Neil was.

Neil’s talk was about how an engineering organization can stay agile while the company grows fast. It was funny, humble, insightful, goofy, incredibly compelling. Here’s what he had to say:

The fish rots from the head down: there’s a Turkish website that tries to prove every Greek proverb was originally Turkish and so we should say that there’s a Turkish saying that the fish rots from the head down. For an engineering organization to be great, you need a leader who is great. “Jeff Bezos is present, Neil said, even when he is not present.”

Seduction is better than coercion: let people choose programming languages. People become zealots about programming languages but it’s a real mistake to force people to think your way. Seduce people instead. At Evri, Neil bought a five-person software team with an enterprise background. They weren’t interested in scrum, XP, or agile programming. They came from a different world.

Neil liked putting post-it notes on a board everyone can see, moving notes along to track progress. The team wanted to build its own system. Neil said fine, so long as it’s transparent: “I don’t want to bug people to know what’s going on.” The system the team built was so complex that they switched to his system of sticky notes. They came around without feeling it was jammed down their throat.

It’s ok to be different: a single solution is rarely what is required. You’re better off letting people do what they want. If they want to deploy via Maven, let them do that. As Neil said, “a good engineering team won’t use tools that suck.” To keep the culture you had when you first started out with four engineers, let tools, processes, designs vary. If you build software correctly, your interfaces have to be in agreement, not implementations. Amazon iterated many times on how it built and deployed software; it deployed via human beings and Perl scripts, via third-party software, via different teams using their own approaches, and finally built tools that were so good that everybody wanted to use them. If you want to use your own system, you’re stuck with managing and maintaining it top to bottom.

Hiring gets harder and harder. The temptation when you get bigger is to let professionals — HR and recruiters — handle hiring. It has to be a significant part of everyone’s job. We started to worry at Amazon that our hiring bar wasn’t as high as it was in the past. Good people like to work with good people. Most managers don’t know how to make poor performers better. Managers aren’t often good engineers, and engineers aren’t good managers. Amazon got worried about the quality of the engineering team as it grew and got the VPs together to make sure that someone who understood the culture and its standards was always on every interview loop. Neil himself did campus visits; it’s never too early in a company’s life-cycle to start campus recruiting. Amazon made the time to recruit, from the highest level on down. “I’ve had SD 1’s talk to Jeff,” Neil said, “And Jeff would always make the time.”

Every one of Jeff Bezos’s shareholder letters includes this phrase: “Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com’s success.” It is probably why Amazon has prospered when so many other technology companies started in the 1990′s have declined. Neil also cited a recruiting letter that Jeff Bezos distributed to folks he knew; my favorite line was: “Expect talented, motivated, intense and interesting co-workers.”

Loose-coupling is really important to make sure you have the right culture; it’s a good architectural model as well. You can’t have a very large, uniform group, as you end up developing your own micro-climates anyway. Metrics gives you the latitude to let groups run however they like. UPS delivers on time more frequently than FedEx but FedEx has the better reputation because it was the pioneer in tracking information. FedEx made promises that people could validate for themselves.

Focus on small, frequent successes: it’s important to have lots of things that you can promise and then deliver on; small teams like doing that. Let a small team build a plan with frequent successes. The most demoralizing thing is to go a long time without a success. Small bits — frequent repeatable success — this is really important.

Hierarchical communication kills engineering organizations: try to avoid ever having a hierarchical org chart. The left hand doesn’t talk to the right. Hierarchical communication decreases satisfaction of employees, and requires more coordinators. There’s a lot of weirdness in humans so you have to have managers. But if you could write a Perl script to eliminate managers you would. At Redfin, if you have more software engineers and more agents, you’d make more money; that’s not the case for somebody who coordinates stuff, they’re only there because they have to be. Flat organizations have managers who aren’t’ very involved, and the team figures things out on their own. “These managers are like the scrum-masters of scrum-masters.”

Create a culture that self-selects: a strong culture lets people know whether they fit in. Let people who don’t like it opt out. “If there isn’t a clear signal for people to opt out, you don’t have a culture.” You don’t have to be nice, but you don’t have to super-aggressive either; Neil doesn’t like being adversarial, asking how many man-hole covers there are in Seattle isn’t his style. The culture works people in and out of the organization in a way more subtle than that.

Continuous is better than batch — and launch dates are batchey. Some people need a launch date. If they do, maybe they’re not right for the culture. “My attitude was,” Neil said. “it’s web software, it’s running all the time. Our software wasn’t mission-critical. When Amazon launched in Germany, we couldn’t take money for three weeks. Since this was our early days, that wasn’t such a big deal. But if the 787 fails — Boeing has 10,000 100-page specs — people die. At Amazon, if we make a mistake, nobody dies.”

Let people go: as companies change, folks get upset when people leave their team. “When somebody leaves the team you get ticked off at them,” Neil said. “I have worked very hard not to get ticked off. I say, ‘I love you, I’ll keep a seat here, come back when you’re ready to come back.’” Neil noticed that someone in one group was a star, but as soon as he left that group, the manager concludes he wasn’t so good after all. There’s an old Yiddish saying: ‘someone else’s backside is easier to smack.’ (Neil quoted the original Yiddish!) There are lots of yo-yos at Amazon, people who left and came back, because managers took a more mature approach.

Focus on the inputs, not just the outputs. Neil talked to a hotel company that measured itself by looking at its bookings. But he asked, “Why not look at how long it takes to make a booking, how easy it is, how good the experience is?” It’s like focusing on the stock price of a company. Let people have ownership over the stuff they can change on a daily basis. Teams will focus on the outputs if left alone. (This made me want to give every Redfin team its own metric.)

Measure everything. In the developer’s view of Amazon’s site, the bottom of every page has every service call listed out and how long it took to run, to focus everyone on performance. Every measurement gets better, because that’s how people keep score of whether they’re doing well. Pick the measurement carefully; and what the heck, measure everything too.

Work backwards, starting with the customer, the press release, the user manual, the mockup. This works great for consumer software but you can do it for anything. The subscription API for Amazon Prime began with a press release that Neil wrote, even though no press release was issued when it was finished, even though it had no user interface at all.

Be innovative, from the top and the bottom. Give awards. Amazon had a just-do-it award, which is given only to people who didn’t ask for permission (I love this). You need a culture where there is a willingness to fail, and to fail fast. Encourage people from the bottom up to make decisions in real time. You want a continuous flow process, not a big planning cycle. I hadn’t realized that different teams at Amazon own different elements of a single page, but Neil emphasized this; everything was chopped up so a two-pizza team — a team small enough to be fed by two pizzas — could build it.

At Amazon, people enter ideas through the ideatool, for submitting an idea directly to executives. “A single engineer put an idea in an internal tool for a shipping club and then we launched Amazon Prime in three or four weeks using a subscription API we’d already built. We launched Prime very quickly.”

Be prepared to throw stuff away. Refactoring projects should always scare the crap out of you. Refactoring rarely accelerates development. Make somebody prove that the next three releases will be 20% to 30% faster. “Most of these projects,” Neil says, “are polishing the turd.” It also isn’t so bad when you have applications that do the same thing, though engineers often complain about this; the user experience should be consistent but otherwise you need to stay loose. Infrastructure should be shared.

Don’t be afraid to let necessity be the mother of invention: let people design systems when they need them. In 2001, mobile was supposed to be huge but it didn’t work out so well. Amazon built a huge mobile team then took it down to four engineers. The engineers were about to be dispersed throughout the company; they wanted to stay together and Neil asked what can you do? They wanted to wrap Amazon in a thin layer of code to deliver a set of services as XML over HTTP and they had three ideas for how this could help Amazon:

1. Voice-based customer self-service through TellMe; this cut 90,000 phone contacts per quarter.

2. “A music thing that didn’t work at all.”

3. i-mode in Japan, which turned out to be a huge success

They stayed, and became the web services team that got Amazon into the web services business.

It should be fun. Before he began to worry that it created some potential religious conflicts, Neil used to ask people if they considered themselves lucky. “People identify themselves as lucky or unlucky; the lucky ones don’t complain, they find the good stuff to do and get it done. The other people say they would have shipped but marketing screwed them…” That said, there are a few Eeyores who are amazing performers. “My favorite Eeyore answered a question by slapping his palms on the desk, farting and leaving the room.”

Build for the biggest scale from the beginning, Neil said, and with that he was done with his presentation.

Neil then answered a few questions:

iPad vs. Kindle, what’s your take?
We created a market. Here you have a guy, Steve Jobs, who hates books deciding he has to make something that competes with Kindle.

How do you give engineers latitude and still create a consistent user experience?
To make user interfaces consistent, make as few rules as possible so people actually care about them.

How do you get engineers to work with business folks?
I’ve always wanted to have people come in to work, have a sign on the door that tells them to go to a new office, and whatever office they go to, that’s their new job for a few weeks.

How do you get software engineers to wear pagers and help out with operations?
I think it’s dangerous to have people write software be separate from how it’s used in real environments. You don’t want to create a team of lesser technical beings to maintain it. But you can write software that can be managed by people who aren’t software developers. By the time we were done, IT could manage 70% of the tickets.

How do you allocate time to experiments that can be sketchy?
Experimentation was built into the very core of Amazon. Jeff always encouraged us not to worry about things that performed less well than what was there because performance could improve and decay over time; you have to compare the performance of one thing at the starting point to another thing at its starting point.

Afterwards, Neil was mobbed, and he said one more interesting thing that I can’t help but repeat: that he doesn’t like the term software architect because it pre-supposes a rigidity in software when what is so wonderful about it is that it is very plastic, something people write for ourselves and can change how we like…

Many, many thanks to Neil for a great talk, and to all the folks in the startup community who came by to hear him speak. If you have any questions, leave a comment below and we’ll make sure it finds its way to Neil!

You’re Invited! Neil Roseman Speaks This Friday at Redfin

The Amazon has always been a place shrouded in legends of gold, lost cities, fountains of youth, cannibals and miracle cures. At Redfin our Amazon is Amazon.com. We’ve marveled at how the company focuses ruthlessly on the customer, tests everything, executes flawlessly, innovates endlessly, and constantly re-asserts its identity as a Kindle-creating, cloud-supporting technology company even as its grocery trucks rumble up and down the streets of Seattle.

Most of all, we’ve been impressed that Amazon seems to update the code of its behemoth website almost every week. It’s like watching an elephant perform a pommel-horse routine.

So we’ve invited Neil Roseman, a ten-year Amazon veteran who led software engineering for the Kindle, MP3, video on demand and a slew of other ground-breaking products — to speak at Redfin this Friday at noon. Neil is a gifted speaker, a grizzled warrior, a beautiful mind. I think he wears an earring; his tattoo history is, for now, unknown. We are honored and excited to have him speak.

Neil’s talk is part of a brown-bag series open to the public, where we invite big-time operators who have built little companies into big companies to share their secrets. We need to know how many are coming so we can order enough pizza. To sign up for the whole series, just add your name to the comments here; if you want to sign up just to see Neil, leave a comment below.

The logistics:

2025 1st Avenue, 6th Floor
Seattle, Washington
Friday, April 2, noon

It should be fun: Neil said his presentation would have lots of pictures and stories in it. A pregnant lady heard about my sorry performance in a plank yoga contest that James Slavet incorporated into the last brown-bag and said she would come to the next one for a head-to-head competition. (Cynthia, I have been training. I am ready.)

(Photo credit: Bill Sheridan on Flickr)

Brown-Bag Lunches at Redfin

A startup can be its own strange little place, which is good if you’re a little lonely or intense or if you need a sense of purpose and belonging. But working at Redfin can also be like trying to watch a swim meet while splashing around in your own end of the pool; many of us often find ourselves wondering how the rest of the world works.

So a few years ago Redfin launched a brown-bag lunch program in which we invite bad-a** operators to talk about how they built a small company into something big. Big blog publishers have talked about pitching the press; game designers about how to delight consumers; Amazon executives about how to design an e-commerce site; deal kingpins about negotiating tactics. We’ve also asked traditional brokers to speak to us about what it’s like to work with us. The lunches have been a galvanizing force, a shot in the arm, a recombinating splice of freakishly strong alien DNA.

This week, we’re launching our 2010 brown-bag program, beginning on Wednesday at noon with Greylock’s James Slavet.  Like a few other speakers, James is discussing management best practices, a topic especially important to us now as more folks within Redfin dive into management for the first time.

I asked James to speak after noticing how good he was at managing me, which usually involves the kind of riot gear worn by extraction teams in supermax prisons. Before joining Greylock, James founded his own startup, and later ran Yahoo’s search & marketplace business, honchoing  hundreds of millions in revenue.

James is the first of several folks scheduled to pitch in over the next couple of weeks:

• March 10, management best practices:  James Slavet, Greylock partner
• April 2, agile engineering at scale: Neil Roseman, Amazon VP of Engineering, 1998 – 2007
• April 16, management best practices: Brian McAndrews, former CEO of aQuantive, acquired in 2007 by Microsoft for $6 billion
• April 28, community-based marketing: Michelle Broderick, former Yelp marketing director
• May 7, training and growth: Christine McHugh, Starbucks’ interim VP of Global Learning

We’re still working on a few folks to discuss consumer branding and customer service, which we’ll have to announce later. For now, many thanks to the amazing folks who’ve already agreed to help us out.

As before, we’re inviting folks from outside of Redfin to participate. Just leave a comment below and we’ll save a spot for you.

Gamers Make Better Lovers

What always surprises me about folks in software is…

1. How few people ask for help:  meeting your peer at another company helps you steal ideas and makes you seem open-minded and — here’s the thing — you’ll believe them, and listen to them and act on what they say — and when you explain your rationale to others you’ll be able to cite a credible reference.
2. How readily people offer help: it’s flattering and fun to help and often involves a free lunch.

Redfin’s brown bag program is a case in point. Andy Liu showed us the light on SEO. Ben Elowitz explained conversion in terms of education and trial, which is why we published a real estate glossary.  Scott Jacobson talked about  running Amazon Marketplaces, which is why we simpified our agent recommendations and launched our partner network. The whole Urbanspoon crew helped us build a shiny new thing, which we’re just about to launch. And Paul Goodrich pulled our head out of the sand — just in time! — about how to scale a business.

Almost every time someone comes by to give us a brown-bag lunch, it has become a catalyst for change.

Last Wednesday it was Jonathan Sposato and Peter Roman who gave a talk on  how to design a beautiful website like Picnik. They talked about the dandelions that pop up as you complete each field in Picnik’s registration system, and the progress bar that impulsively accelerates through the last 10% .

They talked about spending time in the beginning on their brand, not arguing about the abstract names of a category — not about, say, whether Redfin stands for transparency or honesty or openness —  but getting to very precise feelings by multiple examples, examples of words and pictures and things they liked and wanted to be like. They showed pictures of chairs designed in 1941 and the latest architecture in Gramercy Park and images of kids with their parents and color swatches.

It was something I really agreed with because I have always felt that the most magnificent accomplishment of any work of art — and any brand is a work of art — is a sustained and precisely expressed emotion. It has always seemed to me that the people with the most emotions, the best emotions, struggle to  sustain them.

But the real insight came at the end of the talk when Jonathan explained that they worked so hard to delight people — Picnik tries to give everyone a  little surprise —  because the Picnik folks come  from a gaming background. As executive producer of Halo, Jonathan had to make the shell casings fly from the gun and bounce off the wart-hog in just the right away. It was a totally alien perspective for most of us, since we come from a business software background where people are users — someone forced to use our product — not players.

There’s probably a good case for the stripped-down-to-the-metal speed and functionality of Craigslist or Google Chrome. But it is hard to deny the emotional appeal of being more painterly in our design.

Anyhow, the two things that I got out of the talk were that Redfin should stop trying to win a logical argument with consumers about why our home-buying service is clearly the rational choice, and start pumping on the glands and the heart — our site sometimes seems masculine and cold. And the other thing is to think sometimes like a gamer: what if our users were players who didn’t have to do anything unless it was for pleasure?

It’s an active debate at Redfin — we took years off Sasha Aickin’s life by introducing rounded corners into our user interface, to make our delightful site more delightful — so it’s hard to know where to draw the line. But Jonathan and Peter made a good case, and you can tell already from sitting in Redfin meetings that it changed how we think. Thanks guys!

Brown-Bag on Public Speaking: 25 Tips

Redfin launched its 2009 brown-bag lunch program last Friday, where employees and guests speak on how we can broaden our horizons beyond our little startup and develop our careers.

I addressed the first topic, public speaking, mostly because in 2002 I had attended part of a road-show boot camp that Sequoia Capital put its executives through before an IPO. The CEO and the CFO were the stars of the road-show, so I wasn’t the main attraction and didn’t participate in all the exercises, but the one session in which I did participate was one of the most useful of my professional career.

The man who ran the boot-camp seemed fantastically old yet emphatic, like a wizard. I wondered if at one time he coached other Sequoia alum, like Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, and was surprised that he didn’t seem to mind working with us. I have no idea what we paid him. Here’s what I learned, with a few extra suggestions of my own…

1. Go with what makes you comfy: a slide deck isn’t an end in itself, but a means to an end: to help you comfortably speak to strangers. Your slides should be like an old lady’s shoes: it doesn’t matter how they look so long as they feel comfortable. For this reason, editing someone else’s slides sometimes makes the slides better but almost always makes the presentation worse.

2. Give yourself cues, not a script: the audience has read every slide before you open your mouth, yet most presenters still say each bullet aloud. Why? Because the slide has so much text that there’s little left to say. Compare that to each slide in a Steve Jobs presentation. It’s a haiku, sometimes less, just a title and an image, sometimes nothing at all. Steve, not the slides, tells the story. If you have less text on the slide, you’ll find yourself looking at the slides less, and the audience more.

3. Don’t present at your presentation: a good presentation isn’t a presentation at all. It’s a dialog. PowerPoint is an evil matrix of command and control, squashing interruption. The only question that many presenters ask, “does that make sense?” — is really just a brute request to continue. A good presentation is a dialog between you and your audience. The last two words I think of before starting into any presentation came from Muhammad Ali, who from the depths of his Parkinsonian catatonia gave a speech to Emory students consisting entirely of: “ME… WE.” These are the barest elements of a great speech.

4. Mingle beforehand: during your presentation, use the questions, stories, names of people you talked to in the audience before the presentation started. If you’re presenting on the sense of smell for example, you could mention that  ”one of your colleagues just mentioned that the smell of pizza now reminds her of all your late-night bug parties.” You don’t have to call someone out by name to establish a connection.

5. Ask questions:  it’s the best way to engage an audience.

to find common cause: (“how many of you wish there was a scent-based art form?”);

to set up a surprise: (“anyone want to guess how many different smells the human nose can register?”)

to gather information: (“What smells would be in your olfactory memoir?”)

People will initially be hesitant to answer your questions, so your first question should come early and be easy to answer. It helps to have a friendly face you can call on. And it’s not a big deal if you answer it yourself; you still got people thinking rather than just listening.

6. Establish eye contact with anyone who will give you the time of day.

7. Overdress, then roll up your sleeves: always take the preso  more seriously than the audience

and dress for the event. I learned this from Jim Flatley, a colleague who ran field operations at my last job. Deeply disturbed that I’d moseyed into a staff meeting in socks with no shoes, Jim immediately pulled his pants down and asked “Glenn, do you mind? I’m just more comfortable this way.” Now I dress up to present. But I think it’s effective too to build intimacy with an audience by taking off your coat halfway through, like Diddy at one of his parties.

8. Eat light, eat protein: it supposedly keeps you sharp. John Kennedy asked for a papal dispensation to eat bacon on the day of his great inaugural speech, a Friday. Don’t worry about milk; the idea that it coats your vocal cords is untrue.

9. Arrive early so you can relax: I’m usually cross at the beginning of a presentation because I barely have time to get the slides on screen. My brother, the one who left corporate life to save the environment, used to tell me that Hitler let crowd excitement build by arriving late and rushing on-stage. I took this advice for years, but it never worked for me. It’s petrifying to look out into an audience and have no idea what people are thinking. If you arrive early enough to mingle, you can adjust to what the audience wants.

10. Never turn down a mic: big, bearish men love to say they’ll be fine without a microphone. They probably refuse to ask for directions, too. Without a mic, you’ll sound pretty haggard at the end, and you’ll lose straight-away most of the vocal range you could have had for dramatic effect. Even in a room of 30, ask for a mic.

11. Tell stories: a story has at least one character, and a plot. Rather than explaining the three reasons why your startup will win, tell the story of how you came to believe in it: “I was buying a place and I realized I could find out more online about a hair-dryer than a house.” Be personable, not argumentative.

12. Show some passion: a former 60 Minutes producer was once trying to pump me up for a “Today” show interview. He said many people would be drifting by the TV without even listening, and their first cue that I was saying something interesting would be whether I looked interested in it myself. “Now,” he said, approaching the high point of his shtick. “Aren’t you interested in what you’re going to be talking about tomorrow morning?” “No,” I said. “You’re screwed,” he said. And I was!

13. Belittle only yourself (a little): your project is to please. It should be illegal to give a presentation without a few jokes. And the butt of all those jokes should be you. Obama would have been insufferable if he hadn’t started almost every campaign event with a few self-effacing wisecracks about how his wife keeps him in check.

14. Use simple words: imagine if, instead of saying “tear down this wall,” Ronald Reagan said “eradicate this fortification”? Simple words are more powerful; Martin Luther started a revolution with eight simple words: “Here I stand. I can do no other.” A professor once told me to use Anglo-Saxon-based words instead of so many fancy Latinate terms. “Which is which?” I asked. “Hit your thumb with a hammer,” the professor said. “The next 50 words out of your mouth will be all Anglo Saxon-based.” During my brown-bag, Chris Glew called out his favorite example: instead of ocean, say whale road. Now you’re talking Chris! Our goal isn’t to sound smart; it’s to be persuasive.

15. Be spontaneous: Martin Luther King was about to flounder in his most-famous 1963 speech for the Civil Rights March on Washington when Mahalia Jackson called out “Tell ‘em about the dream Martin.” Listened to in its entirety, what’s remarkable about King’s speech is how unremarkably it starts. Fortunately, King soon veered from the prepared text to give a variant on a speech he had tried out before, in what became the 20th century’s greatest prophecy. If during your speech you discover in yourself a vein of genuine emotion, follow it. Your audience will be alive to the risks, and reward you for it.

16. Move as fast as possible, but not fast: If you ever ask yourself, “is it time to move on?” move on. I have never, ever listened to a presentation without wondering “when’s lunch.” If you’re running late, don’t rush, just be concise. If you don’t have time to be concise, skip slides. And even if you’re not running late, you should not speak to every bullet on every slide. You’re not Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. If I ever get to make my case at the Pearly Gates, my opening argument will be I skipped slides and let the crowd eat early.

17. Move, then be still: a salesman from Buffalo once told me he liked to find a few people scattered across each audience, and then move around the stage at key points in his presentation to establish eye contact with each one. For most people, the moving part is easy. What’s hard – especially for a spaz like me — is standing still after you’ve moved. Just look at Gordon Gecko in his overwhelming “Greed is Good” speech: he moves easily around the stage and into the audience, but stands stock-still to make each of his major points. For the final 20 seconds of his speech, he doesn’t even blink.

18. Hold the basketball: if you hold your hands in front of you as if you’re gripping a basketball, it will encourage you to gesture in measured ways. I was told this by the great Dan Fabulich, organizer of Harry Potter and open-source conferences, someone who travels with a large bag of dice for serendipitous gaming opportunities. However unlikely a source for sports metaphor, Dan is a fantastic speaker.

19. Know your wiifys: a wiify is what’s in it for you, a one-line summary of each slide that explains why your audience should care about it. The you isn’t your bottom-line as a speaker, it’s the bottom-line of your audience. The goal is to connect to their reptilian brain, promising money, sex, power. For each slide, you have to imagine someone yelling “I don’t care.” If you actually write out a wiify for each slide, your presentation will be much more crisp, and you’ll be able to adjust if the prior speaker goes long or a key audience member announces he’s leaving early. You should be able to whisk through the highlights of an entire deck in five minutes, without hurrying.

20. Never leave without the ball: make sure you understand the question before attempting an answer. Nothing is more deflating than an audience-member saying, “Actually, that wasn’t my question.” If you don’t understand the question, apologize, and ask the person to repeat the question, but never imply the question was poorly phrased. You can also repeat the question yourself, to affirm that you’ve understood it before answering, to prune away any negative distractions, and to give yourself time to think. A perfect example of answering a question before you understand it came during George H.W. Bush’s 1992 debate with Bill Clinton. It is hard to remember now that, basically until Bush answered a question he didn’t understand, #41 was the overwhelming, post-Desert Storm favorite.

21. Never say “good question”: unless you want to say it for every question. The person who asked the “good” question will like it, but the next questioner may feel slighted. If you want to affirm each question, do it in different ways: “wow, I’d never thought of that,” or “hey, thanks for asking.”

22. If you have to cut off questions, give notice: Norman Schwarzkopf, the Desert Storm general, ran press conferences like military drills. Nearing the end, he would say, “two more questions.” Then, “one more question.” Even though most journalists didn’t get to ask their questions, he never seemed rude or abrupt.

23. Start every answer with yes, no or a number: it drives me crazy when presenters don’t answer the question directly, instead using their “answer” to repeat their spiel. In any presentation, as early as possible, you want the audience to have some measure of control. So get right to the point and answer the dang question, then (if you really must) do your spiel. And if you don’t know the answer to a question, say “I don’t know.”

24. Come up with a fun title: especially at a conference, where you’ll be competing in the program guide with other talks in other rooms.

25. Always say thank you: even if you flub horribly you can still be humble. Provide your contact details on the final slide so people can find you and your slides via email, in the blogosphere or Twitter.

There’s plenty more good advice, but that was the list we came up with during the brown bag. If you have other suggestions, please leave a comment! And if you’d like to come to the next brown bag, on what venture capitalists are funding these days, sign up here.

Neurotic post-script…
Make the slides look sharp: yes, the slides are just a prop but I still fuss over their formatting anyway. The hallmarks of a good slide, about, say, controlling feral cat-population are:

• 5 lines, 5 words per line, max: though I break this rule all the time
• 2+ bullets: if you only have 1 bullet, you don’t need bullets
  • Parallel structure: the bullets are consistently either
    • imperatives (find cats | capture cats | transport cats)
    • nouns (large dogs | dead mice | snakes)
    • sentences (Rob finds the cats | Sarah captures the cats)
  • Consistent capitalization, punctuation: if you start using periods, use ‘em on every bullet.
• 1 font: this is arguable;
• 0 animations
• Meaningful titles: avoid generic titles for each slide like “Cats (continued)”
• Native charts, created by the presentation software: which look better than pasted-in spreadsheet charts

For more public speaking tips, visit alltop.

“When the Bell Rang, We Were At 50-50″

As part of our brown bag lunch program, Farecast CEO Hugh Crean visited Redfin Friday for a talk on the Art of the Deal. Hugh was a corporate development bigshot at Priceline, and an equity analyst at the fierce DLJ investment bank before that. He talked about something I’ve never been good at, which is how to negotiate deals.

Here are a few of Hugh’s tips:
Know both sides of a deal: understand before being understood. Always enter a deal asking “what do you need?” You can learn everything you need to know simply by asking, which gives you the same advantage as a poker player who is last to bet. I once read an obituary of a legendary sports agent whose signature opening move was to never be first to open his mouth; squaring off with general managers who knew his game and wanted to beat him at it, the two sides would start off by staring at each other in silence for five minutes. Looking for this anecdote, I came across this beauty of a quote from Leigh Steinberg: “it’s fine not to be a totally finished person.” George Burns took Steinberg to his first baseball game.

Establish the boundaries of what is negotiable, and then don’t cross those boundaries; it just irritates people.

Both sides have to win. Hugh said, “always be direct and straight with people. You can’t trick people into taking a bad deal.” There is a particular kind of wheeler-dealer who sees business as a matter of being savvy rather than creating value, of finding new ways to screw people, but most deals depend on both sides getting what they need. Richard Parsons, the CEO of Time-Warner, is famous for this philosophy.

Keep it simple: hard deals, complicated deals never get done. If you get too fancy, people find ways not to do a deal. Time kills deals.

But for the most part, time is out of your control. Accept that you can’t make a deal happen on your own.

If things don’t work out, keep smiling and move on. Life is short, and no deal is easy.

Always know the decisionmaker. Be direct: “Are you the person who ultimately makes the decision? What is your process? What is the best way to work with you?” But also treat everyone as important, from the janitor to the CEO (Hugh worked the room so thoroughly before his presentation started that I started to worry he would recruit all of our employees away); if someone is in the room while a deal is being negotiated, she is there for a reason.

I can’t help but add one bit of advice I got from my old boss, John Kunze:
Be prepared: most people believe that their quick wits and dazzling personality will carry the day in a negotiation; this in part stems from the idea that a negotiation is the fun part of business, the part you see enacted in the movies. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been negotiating a now-or-never deal and wanted to hit the pause button, so I could look up an old contract (“what did we pay last time?”) or ask a stupid question (“how many shares were there outstanding again?”). What this means is that when the chips were down, I wasn’t prepared. Like anything else, a lot of deal-making is knowing the value of what you’re getting or giving, and thinking through what you’re prepared to exchange for it. Without preparation, executives can waltz into a deal two months in the making and give away the farm.

Aside from the advice, there were some good moments during Hugh’s talk:
My third-favorite moment was when Hugh began talking about how to tell when the opposing side is uncomfortable: legs are moving, hands are moving, neck veins become engorged, hair gets brushed away, people blink faster (in a panic, I tried to remember if I did any of these things while Hugh was opening things up with his Farecast pitch, which was so good that I found it THREATENING). Hugh’s catalog of human frailty reminded me of a blog posting on how to spot liars (for example: when you change the subject, a liar is relieved to move on). Hugh said that you can talk more slowly to calm a room, or more loudly to pick it up.

My second-favorite moment was when Hugh answered a question from Bridgette about how to handle a situation in which a negotiator was trying to bypass her to get a deal done. The plucky Bostonian stuck out his jaw and said “If anyone comes at you in this life, FIGHT.”

And my all-time favorite moment was when Hugh told a story about his younger brother, a boxer who fought against heavyweights half-again his size, in places like Maine, while the audience (older? fat? sometimes not even paying attention?) was served dinner (steak? probably not even with a vegetable). Hugh’s brother got mauled but, he told Hugh, “when the bell rang we were at 50 – 50.” I love that story.

It came to mind this morning while I was chewing over one last story, written by the great Michael Lewis for today’s New York Times on football coach Bill Parcells, who, after his divorce, keeps everything precious to him in a manila folder, including an anecdote written on yellowed paper about a fight fought three decades ago:

He didn’t see the Hart-Antuofermo fight in person but was told about it, years ago, by a friend and boxing trainer, Teddy Atlas. It stuck in his mind and now strikes him as relevant. Seated, at first, he begins to read aloud from the pages: how in this fight 29 years ago Hart was a well-known big puncher heavily favored against the unknown Vito Antuofermo, how Hart knocked Antuofermo all over the ring, how Antuofermo had no apparent physical gifts except “he bled well.” “But,” Parcells reads, “he had other attributes you couldn’t see.” Antuofermo absorbed the punishment dealt out by his natural superior, and he did it so well that Hart became discouraged. In the fifth round, Hart began to tire, not physically but mentally. Seizing on the moment, Antuofermo attacked and delivered a series of quick blows that knocked Hart down, ending the fight.

“At that moment, Hart began to weep. It was really soft at first. Then harder. He was crying because for the first time he understood that Antuofermo had felt the same way he had and worse. The only thing that separated the guy talking from the guy crying was what they had done. The coward and the hero feel the same emotions. They’re both human.”