What took us so long? It’s hard to figure out how to deliver great service and still pay agents good money in a place like Philly, where the average home sells for $182,000. In our first expansion market, San Francisco, the average is now $894,000. We’ve learned how to stay busy from summer to winter, how to focus on a handful of neighborhoods rather than the whole town, and how long to wait to make any money.

Even people who don’t work with our agents will probably go nuts just for the online tools. Redfin is the first brokerage website in Philly to give consumers the whole enchilada: complete pricing history, eyewitness comments from agents who have toured the home, as well as pictures and prices of past sales.

This means that Philly real estate phanatics now have direct access to the same MLS data used by local agents, with details no other Philadelphia broker has ever displayed. It also means that the top-rated mobile applications for real estate are now available in Philly, so all that information is at your fingertips as you walk through a house.

With such a big data advantage, we expect our online traffic from Philly to take off like a shot. Even though our newer markets tend to be smaller, they mostly grow faster and faster as Redfin becomes known nationwide. It now takes us about four months to reach 100,000 website visits in a new market, whereas a few years ago it took eight.

This is especially true when we open a market like Philly, in close proximity to places where we’re already well known, like Washington DC and parts of New York.

Starting today, customers can work directly with Redfin agents in the Chestnut Hill, Mount Airy and Manayunk neighborhoods of Philadelphia, as well as the Main Line townships, the northern suburbs in Bucks and Montgomery Counties, and Chester and Delaware counties to the West.

For now, customers in Center City and the rest of Philadelphia can work with our partner agents, but as we grow our local business, we’ll expand our direct service into Center City and eventually Philly’s New Jersey suburbs.

We’re so excited to enter the City of Brotherly Love that we’ll be holding our first-ever community launch party in Philly on March 28^th. Everyone is invited! Whether you’re a customer or an agent, inspector or lender, or you just want to know what we’re all about, please join us to eat, drink and mingle with the Philly team and Redfin execs as we celebrate this huge milestone.

Want to get in touch with Linda and the Philadelphia team?  Send us an email at philadelphia@redfin.com or call 484-962-0034.  We look forward to working with you!

The post Philly, We Have Arrived! appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Redfin is a fairly young company, especially at HQ where most of our engineering and operations staff work. While there are several engineering and operations children, most are under 3 years old and not quite ready for a day in the office. This posed one challenge in the form of attendance, but the bigger issue was making our service-industry business translate into something that would have interest and meaning for a pre-teen crowd. We don’t make a widget that you can hold in your hand; translating great service, voluminous data and information technology into kidspeak felt like a daunting task.

Before I continue, I have to give kudos to my 9 year-old daughter Lola. It was her enthusiasm that first blindsided me, then inspired me to figure out how I could make my workplace interesting to her for a few hours. Second, I’d like to thank the other Redfin parents who played along. I think we were all surprised by the result, as each child talked afterward about “what a great time” they had.

At Redfin’s Seattle headquarters, we had six children in attendance, and we gave them each a role to play as we walked through putting a house on market, then “buying” the property. Thanks to Arthur Patterson for setting us up with a great subject property on a Redfin test server, a “1925 bouncy house” with 2 beds and 1 bath, located in Tacoma.

With the parents guiding the way, the kids submitted and scheduled a tour and actually viewed the “subject property” by taking a tour of the office lobby, conducted by Field Agent/Coordinator Maggie Cross’ daughter. Next was submitting an offer, negotiating the contract, and managing the deal through to closing. Negotiations got a bit tense when the offer of $118,999 (against a list price of $119,000) was countered by the seller, who was OK with the price but wanted more earnest money and a bag of candy, and “not the crummy kind, either.” Luckily, the agents helped the parties reach their goals, kept the deal on track and received reviews of “Really, Really Excellent” or “Super Awesome” from their clients.

After completing the transaction, we visited Steve Marcus in accounting to see how Redfin processes refunds to clients. We got to watch him process a real $28,080 commission check, which is a pretty big check to lay your eyes on when you’re 10 years old. We also got to see him put together the $14,040 refund for that buyer, which as it turns out is a pretty big check if you’re an adult.

Next stop was Jessen Myburgh’s office, where she offered up Redfin recruiting T-shirts. This was a great surprise for the kids, and we now have six more Redfin billboards walking around Seattle.

Finally, we went to visit Jason Brackins and Eva Reese to get a quick idea of how a web page gets built. We’d sent them a photo of the kids taken earlier in the day, and Eva talked about how photos get prepared for use on a website. Jason then showed how he could swap out a picture on our home page, and all the kids got a printout of the results.

So, all in all, it was a very successful outing. Thanks to everyone at Redfin who helped and/or allowed us to spend some time showing these kids the ropes. We hope many of our clients, friends and family had the chance to share their work experience with their children today.

Happy Earth Day and have a great weekend,

Sincerely,

Dave Billings
Seattle Market Manager

The post Take Your Child to Work Day – Redfin Style appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

I was moved and terrified by this strange comparison. “But I don’t even have a car,” I said.

“My G**,” Kirill murmured. “That’s even worse.”

I had no idea that Kirill was citing the iconic play of the real estate industry, Glengarry Glen Ross, or that I would spend the next ten years of my life hearing software salesmen repeating the lines that its playwright, David Mamet, added as an afterthought for Alec Baldwin in the movie version:  ”coffee is for closers,” “always be closing,” and, my favorite, “third place: you’re fired.”

Like Paradise Lost’s Satan or “Wall Street’s” Gordon Gekko, Alec Baldwin’s charismatic monster seemed unfettered by the claustrophobia of the tragedy in which he had been set, enjoying a long after-life in the imagination of the salesmen that the play was trying to doom.

The speech has had an afterlife with many of us here at Redfin, too. As you have probably already surmised, Glengarry Glen Ross has been the inspiration for everything Redfin is against. To this day, we are still arguing with Alec Baldwin, and it’s unclear who will win the argument.

Now you can hear it for yourself. The Seattle Rep is staging Glengarry Glen Ross. Some of the insights about the business are uncanny; David Mamet is the son of a real estate attorney. And the dialog has its own strange rhythm, of American profanity set to the meter of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Redfin is buying a block of seats for the 7:30 p.m. showing on Thursday, February 25. Thirty employees are coming, and we’re also inviting Redfin’s Seattle fans to join us. We got primo tickets on the main floor at a 20% discount, for $32 each. We’ll try to meet the cast members before or after the play, and we’re also hosting a happy hour — free drinks and snacks! — in Belltown for everyone who comes.

If you’d like to come and you can spring for the seats, sign up in the comments and we’ll add you to the list. We have room for 10 folks, first come, first served — and we’re ordering the tickets at noon on Thursday, February 18, so don’t dilly-dally.

And for those of you who can’t make it, here is the essential Mamet dialog, snatched from a note-card a journalist once found taped to Mamet’s desk. I think about it all the time:

A: Life, maaan…

B: Life.

A: It is so crazy — let me tell you: If you saw it in a movie, you would not believe it. Do you know why? BECAUSE IT HAS NO PLOT.

(Photo credit courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The post Party with Redfin at Glengarry Glen Ross Next Thursday appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

I’d reached the point in my life when I no longer knew what this question meant. I held up a splayed-out hand to show them my wedding ring. Behind me, a friend said, “They’re professionals.” Another said, “They want to harvest our kidneys.” And a third: “They think we’re movie producers.” We stood there, petrified, staring at them. They stared at us. Then they tore off into the night.

But it has always stayed with me that I never answered their question. Because the answer is “Yes, I do want to party.” Which is why Redfin, Madrona, Fenwick & West and Square 1 Bank have organized another big Naked Truth event for Seattle’s tech community:

What: The Naked Truth: Show Me the Money
When: July 9, 6:00 p.m.
Where: The Olympic Sculpture Park on Seattle’s waterfront
How Many: 400 people; the park limits attendance, so you have to sign up.
Why: Understand how different revenue models for online consumer companies work
Format: panel + party
Panelists:
Damon Darlin, Technology Editor, New York Times
Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures, author A VC
Michael Arrington, Founder & Editor, TechCrunch
Jonathan Sposato, CEO, Picnik
Brad Jefferson, CEO, Animoto
Ethan Lowry, Co-Founder, Urbanspoon
Glenn Kelman, CEO, Redfin
Livestream: by Seattle 2.0; check back here the day of the event for the webcast
How Much: $0
Hashtag: #nakedtruth

This Year’s Theme: Revenue Models for Consumer Internet Companies
The topic for this year’s event is revenue models for online consumer businesses. We’ve asked entrepreneurs from a few of Seattle’s funnest consumer services** to talk about how they make money from ads, transactions, subscriptions, downloads. Using real numbers  – on the cost of traffic, on the ratio at which that traffic converts into customers, on the revenues yielded per 100,000 visitor — we’ll dig into what makes different revenue models really work.

We’ve also got a few folks to report on what’s happening in the world beyond Seattle: Damon, Michael and Fred have probably seen more revenue models for Internet-consumer businesses than anyone.

Together, we hope we can give some useful advice to entrepreneurs trying to figure out the best revenue mix for their own companies. It’s something Redfin is still working through, too, so it’ll be good to get some help. Even though Internet companies everywhere are in a put-up-or-shut-up situation, you could go to a hundred Internet conferences and never hear a word — let alone a number — about revenues.

What You Need to Bring
So we hope everybody can come. The panel will run ’til 7 or 7:30, then we’ll start the party. We’ll try to commandeer a taco truck to set up at the park entrance, and the Olympic Sculpture Park folks will run the bar. If the grass is wet or your pants are white, you need to bring a blanket to sit on in the park’s amphitheater.

But you should try to make it. At the last Naked Truth, people fell in love, scores were settled, grudges were forgiven, the fur flew over all sorts of dingbat startup ideas, everyone was smiling, and folks dressed up like it was the prom. I need a haircut now but I’m waiting two more weeks so it will look perfect for the big night.

If you’ve got ideas for spicing up the event with jugglers, sword swallowers or tambourine troupes — or if you have questions you want to ask the panelists — leave a comment and let us know what you can bring to the party. Many thanks to Madrona & Fenwick for putting this event together, to all the speakers for agreeing to participate, and to Seattle 2.0 for streaming it.

(Photo credits: Chateau Marmont by John and Keturah, Olympic Sculpture Park by Jacobc on Flickr)
*Myself included! We were all nerds, especially compared to the rest of the Marmont’s clientele.
**We’re claiming Animoto as Seattle-based since the team went to high school here, and one of them still has an aunt in Tukwila!

The post The Naked Truth Returns! appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Over the years, this friend has explained to me many things: what different drugs are like (“if you must choose just one, mushrooms”), how to bake a chicken (salt, pepper, nothing else), the only way to actually finish writing a book (feverishly, in a remote cabin), and how good family life could be (his toddler-age children fetch beers from the fridge).

But never how to have a good time. Whenever I’ve been supposed to have a good time, like at an amusement park or a party, I’ve failed, and then felt worse because of my failure. “Corporate fun” has been especially miserable. But then I came to Redfin. And if there’s one thing Redfin knows how to do, it’s how to have a good time.

In that spirit, we threw a Red Carpet party last week for our Seattle customers, so they would tell us how to improve our service or our site. And we had a really, really good time. Naturally, I was opposed from the start. “Nobody will come,” I said. “And we won’t have anything to say.”

But I wasn’t in charge. Our ringleader, Chelsea Mitchell, got $200 worth of beer on a high-heeled sprint through Costco. Mykie Gunderson cleared out his “Rock Band” junk just outside my office. Matt Goyer set up a computer to show drunk people the next release of Redfin.com.

And the customers came in droves. A Russian couple, on hearing that I was Lithuanian, told me that the “hard-working Lithuanian is a myth.” Bahn Lee took one of our prettiest guests and her boyfriend on an extensive Redfin tour. Angela Cough’s husband explained to an awe-struck crowd of scrawnies how to do 100 pushups (“just be naturally strong, I guess”).

And a dozen different customers came up to me just to gush about how great their experience was. The cumulative effect was overwhelming. Running an online business is a constant effort to think in inhuman dimensions, about changes to your site that can bring millions of new visitors. But at the end of the Red Carpet party, each happy customer seemed like a triumph.

If you’d like to meet the Redfin people in your area, let us know, and we’ll set up a Red Carpet party there, too. Thanks to Chelsea, Pam, Janelle and everyone else for setting up the party, and thanks to all the customers who made the event such a blast.

The post How to Have a Good Time appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

If you’ve ever wanted to interview one of our agents in person, or grill an engineer about why you can’t search by
$ per square feet, now’s your chance. The next Red Carpet happens Wednesday, March 12^th in Seattle and you’re all invited, whether you’ve bought or sold with us or decided to kick the tires while the market cools off. True story: one of our guests at the last Red Carpet came looking for a job and now she works here.

Product man and Redbull-drinker, Matt Goyer, will be demo-ing all the cool new features on Redfin. Don’t worry about the oxymoronic blog heading. Coronas, Chipotle and Redfin… it will all make sense when you get here.

The Details
Date and Time: Wednesday, March 12th, from 6:00PM to 8:00PM.
Location: Dexter Horton Building at 710 2nd Ave, Suite 600 in Downtown Seattle (between Cherry and Columbia).
Parking: There are many garages nearby. Street parking is also available, free after 6PM.

This event happens to be at our Seattle office again but we plan on holding Red Carpet events soon in our other markets. If you’d like to sign up for a future event email our event coordinator: Chelsea at chelsea (dot) mitchell (at) redfin (dot) com.

RSVP for next week’s shindig on our invitation page: Click here!

The post The Red Carpet: Burritos y Beer y Real Estate Website appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

And yet we all went into it with the unfounded optimism peculiar to California: as if we might find a new best friend, or start a religion, or get swept up in an apocalypse (fires, earthquakes, Internet bubbles) that no one could previously have been convinced to take seriously.

I went curious to see what CEOs as a group would be like, as if to see what I might become: I imagined a convocation of X-Men, each with her own freakish flaws and special powers, or of business-casual, bloodlessly suave Agent Smiths.

And there were plenty of both, more than can be described here in any organized way. An Israeli entrepreneur working on a top-secret project with Eastern European X-Box hackers complained that investors in his first business wouldn’t let him use the service he built to run porn. “But this time,” he promised, “lots of porn.”

In his keynote speech, Tim Draper made a plausible case for colonizing Mars, showed a photo that may have been of himself standing astride a slaughtered elephant, and asked the crowd to sing along to a song that he composed and performed. (When I later asked a DFJ partner about the song, he said, “Oh, I’m the drummer in Tim’s band.”) It made me wonder if every titan of venture capital is really just a camp counselor on steroids, nudging his little charges along on their projects.

I felt bad for the follow-up acts. A Chinese entrepreneur took the stage to boast that his countrymen were “the Jews of Asia.” A banker dusted off “Internet growth” charts from 1999. But then a CEO in a pastel tie and matching pocket square explained how he evaluated job seekers in terms of the way they made people feel, a leap of empathy and insight that it had never occurred to me to consider.

The folks running ad-driven sites clucked that big advertisers still don’t get it. And we all agreed that the real problem was that nobody can beat Google in direct response ads, while for the zillion-dollar branding campaigns, TV and radio still pack a bigger emotional wallop.

We competed to say how little money we spent and how few people we employed, which climaxed when a San Francisco entrepreneur said he rented industrial space in Potrero Hill for $2 a square foot — ten times less than Redfin pays for its truly vile south-of-Market office. On the phone later that night, Redfin’s HR swami talked me out of cutting everyone’s pay.

Things went downhill from there. Over drinks, a games entrepreneur boasted of receiving letters from men who lost their wives because they couldn’t stop playing his game, MechWarrior. “You have to believe they might be happier alone,” he said. I misheard a young lady complain about the person who “did her nails” and told her “I’d love to have that nose.”

A guy from Los Angeles in a Thriller-style leather coat told me his creative partner was Ashton Kutcher. An Internet media mogul said he moved to LA so he could feel like part of the entertainment industry but discovered that “down there, the bassist in a third-rate bar-band has more street cred than we do.”

Everyone nodded. We knew all about being nobodies. But then we all went to bed that night in a real hotel — not on some friend’s twingey mattress – kings of ridiculously small, ragtag empires that seemed for the moment as unprecarious and boundless as the sea.

(Thanks to DFJ for hosting the conference).

The post The Most Optimistic Place on Earth: CEO Camp appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

On Tuesday, November 13^th, all of that changes. Redfin is opening our Seattle headquarters to current clients, past clients, and those on the fence. You will be treated to the finest pizza and beer that $300 can buy and demo unreleased website features on a floor to ceiling screen. You can even chat with Redfin’s engineers about your likes and dislikes. We call this event The Red Carpet.

While no metaphor suffices, an image of Gene Wilder comes to mind. If Glenn is Gene, I guess that makes me an Oompa-Loompa and makes you Charlie.

Come one, come all. The standard issue Redfin uniform is jeans and a cotton sweater. I think I’ll wear a collared shirt on Tuesday. You can wear whatever you like.

The Details
Date and Time: Tuesday, November 13th, from 5:30pm to 7:30pm.
Location: Dexter Horton Building at 710 2nd Ave Suite 600 in Downtown Seattle.
Parking: There are many nearby garages. Street parking is also available.

Our humble headquarters does have limited space. Please RSVP to donald -dot- desantis -at- redfin -dot- com. We will confirm you on our list and make sure that there is enough food for everyone.

The post Redfin Rolls Out The Red Carpet appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

But this one also felt set in a year of magical thinking, 1999, when San Francisco was at the height of the dot.com boom: Trulia dressed up some of their employees in big green foam-suits, like their logo. Terabitz drove people around in Mini Coopers and hired models and acrobatic sign-twirlers to work the sidewalk. A Redfin knock-off bought a booth and sent five people to the show. Behind closed doors, everyone talked about the meltdown in real estate and mortgage.

On the same night we were running a focus group, a real estate website threw a big party and somehow printed the address of our San Francisco office on its invitations. Before we could decide whether to invite everybody in, everybody left.

On a walk through the sunshine of Yerba Buena’s fountains, the great Adam Koval kept asking why each of us cared so much about a site that was such hard work. Later that day, Zillow’s Rich Barton waved from an escalator as he drifted away.

I sat down in a meeting with executives and consultants from a social networking service for real estate consumers and went unexpectedly berserk on hearing that agents would be able to challenge and sometimes remove reviews. (I later apologized, and the entrepreneur graciously forgave me.)

One of the conference’s real estate super-bloggers approached a big brokerage’s CEO to introduce herself in the flesh, stomping off when he seemed to have no idea who she was. “He knew,” she later said. “Oh, he knew!”

Before my blogging keynote, Joel Burslem assured me I had time to go the bathroom. I came back a few minutes later to discover the entire crowd twiddling their thumbs. I began my speech convinced Joel had just told everybody where I had been.

After the keynote, developers in Redfin’s San Francisco office announced “Hell has officially froze over,” because someone on Bloodhound Blog had made a kind comment about Redfin. I visited the blog and read that “I was full of sh__.”

(courtesy of whiteafrican on Flickr)

Everyone talked about switching from Google Maps to Microsoft Virtual Earth or back again.

Many people came up to us to say “That this whole conference hates you except me.” This was usually followed by their saying they had only one (friendly!) question, which was usually “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?”

And everyone kept asking us why we came to the conference since we obviously didn’t belong there. For the first time, actually, we had thought we did…

(Thanks to Marc Andreessen, Netscape co-founder, for calling out our post on entrepreneurship. Everyone has probably already seen our bonus link, a video of people dancing on treadmills, but we had to be sure…)

The post Inman Conference: Online Real Estate Starts to Feel Frothy appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

In case you don’t have an hour to watch the whole thing, we’ve summarized the juicy bits.

FV is Fred Vogelstein from Wired, JC is John Cook from the Seattle PI, MA is Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, RB is Rebecca Buckman from the WSJ, TD is Tricia Duryee from the Seattle Times.

*~*~*~*~*

5:15, MA: If you have a really cool product it doesn’t matter how much of a buffoon you are, it’s going to get written about.

5:45, MA: Get rid of all the marketing crap that you’ve learned… Start with MySpace and say it’s different in this way or that way.

6:30, RB: What we do and what Michael does is now very, very different. The considerations are very different for a blog, a newspaper, a monthly magazine.

8:05, FV: Essentially what all of us do is we traffic in smart people.

9:36, JC: I would encourage everyone to give me the scoop first… I don’t get bent out of shape if it gets pitched to both [PI and Seattle Times] organizations.

11:06, TD: If you’re trying to pitch something for the largest newspaper, things trickle down hill.11:55, RB: What we like to do is bigger-picture trend stories… if it has been mentioned in other publications or other blogs, that’s ok, we can use that as a news-peg… but the Journal is very picky, as far as if the trend story has been written somewhere else, we’re not going to do it.

13:30, TD: Even if you send us a press release and you don’t hear back from us, it’s not like we just hit delete and are not even reading it… If I get five e-mails on a similar topic, I can see that the trend is happening…

14:30, MA [on PR firms]: Some PR firms are ok and some flat out lie manipulate and steal to get what they want. They think that we care a lot about exclusives… I don’t really care about exclusives, because I feel like if I write a better story, because I’m a blogger I have a natural advantage because others blogs links to each other… I don’t care that much about exclusives… what I don’t want to be is second… I don’t mind being the same time as everybody else.

16:25, RB: I would think for me a scoop is more what we call a concept scoop… it’s more like, hey, you’re the first publication that connected these dots and put the concept scoop together.

17:30, FV: A handful [of pr firms] can pick up the phone and call me and say they’re having a dinner with such and such company I’ve never heard of and because I know they’ve taken the time to be serious about choosing their clients, I’ll probably go. If you wind up getting a PR for the sake of lightening your work load I think that’s probably a mistake, you guys are the best sales men for your ideas and your companies.

19:00, FV: Every once and a while just to be evil if I know the CEO, I’ll call the CEO up and say you know you should fire your PR firm.

20:00, JC: I’m always looking for a news hook. For me a lot of the times that news hook is a financing event… just because a financing event is a transformative event in a company’s history.

20:45, MA: A lot of times, I’m not super-interested in hearing a PR rep’s idea of a trend and how their video site fits into it. I feel like it’s my job to come up with that.

22:30, FV [on how to approach a journalist]: Become a source of mine, tell me what is going on in the industry that you’re starting your company in. Tell me about the VC’s that are smart and the VC’s that are dumb.

23:00, MA: [Michael calls out Fred on giving more coverage to his sources, since Michael has been criticized for making the same comment before.]

24:15, RB: Not only can it suck your wallet dry, I feel like PR firms can suck the life out of you… If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re doing it for a reason, and if that kind of interest and passion is relayed to us, that makes us more interested in what you’re doing.

25:00,TD: Don’t worry about being completely polished.

25:20, TD [responding to a question about how to spin a journalist]: Why do you want to spin us? Are you doing something illegal?

27:15, JC [on ducking a question]: If there’s information that you don’t want to share, just tell me I can’t comment on that and leave it at that… just be straight up.

28:45, MA [on how to prepare for an interview]: Get the CEO on phone, you [as a PR rep] are not going to be able to know the product to the detail I want to hear about. If you’re the CEO, it doesn’t really matter, you know the product, I’m going to dig it out of you… I like to disrupt the story immediately by asking random questions… and try not to waste time… Some times a five minute conversation leads to a much better story than an hour conversation would.

30:50, RB: The worst thing is when you’re talking, they say something really interesting and then AFTER they say it, they say you can’t print that, that’s off the record.

32:05, FV [on if you screw up on the record]: You beg.

33:15, JC [on takign something off the record]: If it’s really important to the story, I will fight to get that in there. If it’s a guy that just misspeaks, and says something silly, I’m going to cut him some slack.

34:30, MA: I have two sets of negotations when I talk to an entrepeneur, one is tell me everything, and two is now ok tell me what you’re ok with me printing.

36:45, TD: if the facts are wong, you should let us know immediately… [But if it’s just an opinion from another source you don’t like,] that’s the breaks when you’re talking to a reporter.

37:33 JC: I really like follow-up after an interview… you have it in e-mail which is easy to access.

40:00 FV [on the company that is the best at PR]: I’d say Microsoft [laughter].

40:15 JC: I APPRECIATE SCOOPS.

43:40, RB: We have some very, very high ethical standards at the Journal and that’s something that everybody who works there is very proud of.

46:00, MA: A lot of the young entrepreneurs are a little bit nuts in Silicon Valley, I actually forget the name of the disease they have, they’re so smart they cannot communicate with other human beings… literally people have this. They’re always a lot of trouble.

46:40, FV [on the most surreal interview]: I got to interview Jeff Bezos jumping on a trampoline… yes we were naked.

48:00, FV on getting into TechCrunch or Wired: It’s just personal, we hate you [laughter].

48:25, MA: It’s not their fault, it’s your fault. You can’t force this stuff… spending more money on PR is not going get into these publications… I mean it’ll get you into mine, I’ll write about you [laughter].

49:30, FV [on focusing first on the trade press]: Success breeds success… that’s exposure we’re all going to see. Whenever I try to get up to speed… I’ll pull tons of stories.

52:40, MA [on the importance of entrepreneur’s blogs]: I think it’s really important. When you have a blog you become 100 times more important to me as a reader than you were before. Because you have your own voice and you can link back… I think every entrepreneur should have a blog.

53:30, FV: It takes a huge amount of work. It absolutely builds credibility and it probably builds more credibility than any PR firm you could hire but it has to be reasonably transparent.

54:50, RB [on what entrepreneurs’ blogs are good]: [Redfin’s] blog is excellent [screams of joy].

55:25, JC: I do like the Redfin blog… I think Zillow does a really good job, they’ve made it a really important part of their PR strategy and it shows.

55:30, MA: Yeah, but don’t break your own news on your own blog, give it to us [laughter among the panelists].

That’s it! To read more, check out what John Cook, Dipika Kohli and Tricia Duryee have to say…

Our bonus link today comes via the Second Friend of Redfin from the Washington Post: Attorneys for two United Arab Emirates leaders urged a federal judge Monday to dismiss a lawsuit filed on behalf of thousands of children forced to ride racing camels…

The post The Naked Truth Goes Straight to Video… appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.