Archive for the ‘Events’ Category
July 20, 2007
The Naked Truth, the meet-up we’re putting together next Tuesday for entrepreneurs to talk to the media, is all full. We’ve rented out tents, chairs and a stage for the adjoining parking lot, which is now hosting the panel. Even though I have recently learned there will be no healthy vegetarian options whatsoever, we doubled the barbecue budget.
Party mastermind Angela Cough kayboshed renting a windowless beer van to slowly circle the block (“nobody wants to sit in a van with you”), but she did add another hulking security guard (“we just don’t want things to get out of hand”).
Fortunately for those behind the velvet rope, plenty of people on the list aren’t going to show. At 5:40 for the panel, and 7:15 for the party, we’re going to open up the waitlist. We’ll probably be able to accommodate everybody. The evening of the event, we’ll post a notice on this blog and the invitation wiki about how things look for the party, so you can avoid making the trip if it looks like you won’t get in.
Now, on to more important business. We have a bonus link, courtesy of a Second Friend of Redfin, who admires the “sheer unbridled animality” of a computer chip magnate’s plans for an elaborate pleasure grotto. On a kinder note, the New York Times reports on the story behind the iconic image of this week’s steam blast.
July 16, 2007
Between Friday afternoon and Monday morning 320 people signed up for The Naked Truth, an event we’re putting together with Madrona to connect entrepreneurs with journalists. We were going to limit the pre-party panel session to 200 people so we could keep it indoors but now we paid for a tent and a little stage so more of you have to have come: 50 more to be precise, all from the waiting list. This kind of feels like planning a wedding. The party itself still has plenty of space left, and all the same people will be there. To RSVP for the party, click here.
July 13, 2007
A year ago, the Diddy spirit pervaded Seattle, resulting in a NerdPartySupernova led by an Ephod-clad Michael Arrington as the Grand Poobah. Beer-hauling trucks conked out, young men fell fatally in love, entrepreneurs with Hare-Krishna looks in their eyes rampaged through the ranks of venture capitalists.
This year, we’re doing something bigger. First of all, we’re bringing in the barbecue pit. More importantly, we’re on a mission to introduce journalists to entrepreneurs, so that little companies with big ideas can put themselves on the map, and figure out how they want to talk to the press. With a tip of the hat to Robert Scoble, we’re calling the event The Naked Truth.
Rebecca Buckman from the Wall Street Journal, Fred Vogelstein from Wired, Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, John Cook from the Seattle PI and Tricia Duryee from the Seattle Times will be on a pre-party panel to answer questions. And startup bigshots like Hugh Crean, Hadi Partovi, Jason Goldberg and Ben Elowitz will be in the crowd to ask.
Here are the details:
When: Tuesday, July 24, 2007. The panel starts at 5:30, the party starts at 6:30.
Where: The Havana Social Club, 1010 East Pike Street, Seattle
Who: every entrepreneur, dreamer, procastinator, narcissist, coder, starter, joiner, flim-flam man, gonzo PR guy, bigshot, littleshot and networking twizzler in town… please come!
Madrona Venture Group and Redfin are paying for the kegs and the ‘cue, and iLike, WetPaint, Farecast, Jobster and WildTangent are helping us put it together. If you want to come, you have to sign up in advance, or overpower our HGH-juiced Cambodian bouncer at the door. Panel attendance is limited to 200 people. We’ve tented a nearby parking lot so the party can handle 500.
Madrona’s Greg Gottesman, master of ceremonies for the panel, has already laid down the law for his approach: “I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass—and I’m all out of bubble gum.”
Edit the wiki to put your name on the list…
February 2, 2007
After seeing readership grow by leaps and bounds in Seattle, Redfin launched Bay Area Sweet Digs today, a blogsite that provides eyewitness views of listings in neighborhoods all over the Bay. Check out what’s shaking in Fremont, Palo Alto & Mountain View, Berkeley, San Mateo & Redwood City, in San Francisco itself, or up north in Santa Rosa & Sonoma.
We hope you like it.
Already the site is getting plenty of attention, with reviews and notices at SocketSite, Inman, 3 Oceans, Transparent Real Estate (which says our reviews in Seattle have gone soft).
My favorite house reviewed so far has of course been the one in Berkeley. I also liked hearing about the Roman Catholic priest who fell in love with an artist.
If there’s neighborhoods you’d like to see or ideas for how we could make things better, let us know. Otherwise, sign up for a subscription!
Bonus material, from a friend of Redfin: a court ruling against an unscrupulous mover. There’s a misanthropic pleasure in reading about what this sadistic mover did to people and their possessions.
January 30, 2007
The February 7 SocketSite meet-up on what’s going on in San Francisco real estate this year filled up its 100 spots in 24 hours, so now we’ve opened up registration to a few more people. If you’re in, add yourself to the list (soon)! Oliver Muoto, Silicon Valley’s most-eligible bachelor in 1999, will be there.
(Image found searching Flickr for “partyanimal”)
January 29, 2007
SocketSite, the obsessive-compulsive San Francisco real estate econometrics blog, is hosting a February 7 meet-up so legendary Editor-in-Chief Adam Koval can take head-on the fundamental question about San Francisco real estate: what’s going on out there? With prices? With new developments? With renovations?
Redfin is on the hook for the drinks; registration is already filling up (we won’t try to contact you or sell you anything).
Real estate junkies only, please (my favorite attendee name so far is “Prospero Garcia.”)
December 18, 2006
The Redfin Holiday Party was in many ways different from last year’s party:
1. No one said he had to leave to meet his parole officer.
2. The “potluck” did not entail employees buying a Safeway fried chicken & expensing it.
3. Both women and men willingly attended.
4. The world’s most eligible Korean bachelor came stag.
5. The world’s greatest Korean break-dancer explained how to spin on your head.
In other ways, the party was the same:
1. We held it at my house, after a long, painful silence at a company meeting in which no one else volunteered. Nobody used coasters.
2. Savan made everyone give speeches.
December 15, 2006
The start-up I joined out of college was co-founded by Jon Kraft, nicknamed Beef, whose neck was so big and his arms so short that he had to walk around with his sleeves rolled up. He managed to convey to us lesser mortals a sense of both derision and kindness, for which we were always grateful.
The first question Jon ever asked me changed my life. Sticking his head over my cube wall as if he’d just made a happy but probably useless discovery he said, “Hey Kelman… do you RALLY?”
We spent the rest of the night stapling brochures. And even though I’ve always been more a lollygagger, I began to think of myself as a rallyer. Jon has gone on to make a massive multi-player pornographic game, the amazing Pandora, Mozart-chiming stuffed animals, and now a technology that will allow you to insert your own face into Grand Theft Auto.
Jon is the reason I found myself on Thursday night at a Redmond Azteca as a gigantic windstorm shut down the city. We originally scheduled a meet-up there to talk to customers, partners and job-seekers. Then John Cook saw our blog announcement and sent the memo to Nerd-Land that there was a Seahawks game that night. Then the storm hit.
Matt Goyer, the product manager leading the charge, was unphased. “Maybe we should leave fifteen minutes early,” he said. “Maybe we should wimp out,” I said. He assumed I wasn’t serious. But the truth is, if I could have stayed home and still thought of myself as someone who rallied, I would have.
From our Pioneer Square office, we waded through hordes of Seahawks fans in blue firemen’s helmets and garbage bags, who seemed even happier because of the rain. It felt like one of those zoos where you walk among the animals.
Matt’s beat-up Neon from Winnipeg began burning oil after fifteen minutes on the road. We saw a waterfall pouring over the freeway wall from Capitol Hill. The lights of the city looked so beautiful in the storm that it suddenly seemed like we were seeing them through tears. Matt took advantage of the time to tell me all the ways Redfin has to be better.
When we got to the Azteca, our CTO (Michael Young) had already ordered a half-dozen beers with little lime wedges and some rancid mexi-meat, in anticipation of the crowds to come. Sitting calmly in front of a little Redfin placard he had made himself, he looked as if he had never experienced a moment of self-doubt in his life. I wondered if I could drink all six beers myself.
But we discovered that the kind of people who use Redfin to buck the real estate industry are OK bucking some bad weather too. There was JD, the big guy who used Redfin to find a place in Kirkland when he moved here from Vallejo. The two entrepreneurs who started a hosted service for printing Christmas cards. The customer who just closed on a condo through Redfin and came to tell us we had to add home-owners’ fees to the site (check back in a month). The guys from Level 3 who came by to say our site was too slow.
Even though it was half the reason we were there, I didn’t get the guts to ask anybody if he wanted a job. When we got back to the Neon and tallied up what we got out of the night, the one thing that didn’t add up but meant the whole world was this realization about Redfin’s customers: you guys, rally too. Thanks for coming out. Jon Kraft would have been proud.
December 11, 2006
Every day, Redfin gets a dozen or so e-mails about how our site could be better, from people who seem to know a lot about computers, often using browsers that haven’t even been released yet. We have had to conclude that many of them are from the Planet Microsoft.
It’s high time we met a few of you for some “mini-chimis” at the local Azteca. So Michael Young (Redfin’s new CTO) and I (Redfin’s CEO) are headed over to Redmond this Thursday night from 5 – 7 (and beyond!) for drinks. Legendary hipster Matt Goyer will also be there. Anyone from the Eastside who would like to meet us is invited!
Our priorities:
1. Taking people’s ideas and calling them our own: what could we do to make Redfin better?
2. Meeting some of the folks who coded Virtual Earth, so we can figure out how to draw on it.
3. Desultory recruiting, but only if you are a Freak of Nature.
4. And in the end, and only if things go really well, drunken fiasco on a Dostoyevskian scale.
I don’t think too many people will come. So it should be nice & perfect & small.
Your priorities:
1. Free Mexican food & drinks, and good times too, like the Blazing Saddles chili-eating scene…
2. Lots of nice people to talk to about startups, real estate, technology.
We will be signing autographs, but only on bare skin. So you know who to look for, we’ve posted a photo. Mike is the one in the back.
November 24, 2006
Blaine Harden of the The Washington Post today put Seattle on notice that a gigantic earthquake could liquify the southern half of the city, destroying homes built before 1975 and killing as many as 1,600 people. No one even noticed the fault that could cause such a quake until 1992.
Monster quakes happen every 1,000 years in Seattle, but there hasn’t been a big one in 1,100 years, so we’re due. Old houses need to be bolted to the foundation, which costs as much as $20,000 if you hire a contractor, or $1,500 if you do it yourself. This involves “goggles, gloves, overalls, kneepads, a respirator.. . a compressor-driven nail gun, a roto hammer drill and a torque wrench.” Blaine isn’t exactly encouraging: he warns of a man who got squashed by his own house halfway into the job. It takes 100 hours to do the job, so maybe you should just hire a contractor.
We tried to buy (vs. just ripping off) a Washington Post picture (also by Blaine Harden, apparently the lone Postian in the Northwest) of the seismic retrofit guy with the compressor-driven nail gun, but you have to talk to somebody at the Post to do it…
