Wild, Wild Horses
Silicon Valley has always showered so much money on the deserving and undeserving that it would be hard for any one of us to say which group we ourselves belonged to. But one crucial difference between this boom and the last is that the folks in the last boom had to ship or starve. Today, not shipping pays pretty well. Read More
The Best Ideas of 2012
Quartz, the Atlantic Monthly’s new business magazine, recently asked me to compile a list of the best ideas to emerge this year from the technology industry, in an essay published just after Christmas. Here are some of the highlights: The last-second economy: in the I’ll-call-you-when-I’m-close era, consumers expect everything to be available on a moment’s notice,… Read More
All You Have to Do Is Ask: How to Hire Smart People Everywhere
Many years ago, one of Redfin’s investors asked Sean Moriarty, former TicketMaster CEO, to take me to lunch. Sean asked only two questions: “Are you some kind of star-f****er?” (I’d breathlessly inquired, as if it wasn’t self-evident, what David Lee Roth was really like) and “Do you have an eye for talent?” “Well,” I said,… Read More
First You’re Lucky, Then You’re Good
In book publishing, an author who has written two manuscripts, the first mediocre and the next magnificent, will often see the two published in reverse order, with the magnificent novel promoted as a debut, and the mediocrity coming out years later. What publishers know is that if your first effort is even slightly disappointing, no… Read More
Alone, Just the Two of Us
I’d just sat down last month for a chat with the CEO of a very successful startup when his co-founder, the company’s chairman, walked into our coffee-shop. The two had been apart for a few minutes, but the chairman made such a beeline for us that I worried he wanted my pastry. He was in… Read More
Facebook Could Be Worth $100 Billion, But Not For Display Advertising
Everyone in finance is talking about Facebook: the amount of stock that it sold and the price of that stock. Everyone in technology is talking about Facebook too: the number of users it has, the time each user spends on its site, the power of Facebook’s development platform. The first group tends to think Facebook… Read More
Since When Did We Become a Lobby?
When one of my best friends was just getting started in his career, he wrote a paper arguing that Nevada has the most business-friendly laws in the U.S. He’d just moved there to take a position as head of marketing for SuperPawn, the world’s second-largest chain of pawnshops. Now he runs business development for one… Read More
Life on a Short Street
On the empty sidewalk opposite my house, I was toodling along on my bike recently — and yes, I was also talking on a cell phone with my brother — when I heard a driver yell, “HEY BUDDY, WHY DON’T YOU WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOING?” Before even looking up, I responded: “WHY DON’T YOU GO… Read More
Never Tell Me the Odds
In a board call last month, I finally told everyone that the commission savings that Redfin offers home sellers and buyers dramatically lowers our profits margins and there is no evidence that it drives more revenue. We have, I told our investors, given away $100 million because of my irrational belief that Redfin was put… Read More
Roske Speaks: Redfin Should Be More Like Costco
Chris Roske, Redfin’s director of finance, recently sent me a letter explaining how Redfin should be more like Costco. I think the letter’s pretty good even though I disagree with a few points (Costco does send a ton of direct mail and I think its overhead costs for website development should actually be higher because… Read More