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”)
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.”)
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.
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.
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.
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…
Breathe a sigh of relief, the first-ever Startupalooza career fair has come to a smashing conclusion (we hope it’s not the last). Led by our fearless recruiter, Aimee Cook, who ordered the entire Redfin workforce to dress in Socialist red, we came prepared to convert the legions of job-seekers to the sexy world of high-tech startups.
Of course the behind-the-scenes work at a startup is never that glamorous. Angela ripped me away from my computer 15 minutes till showtime saying that more signs needed to be hung in the lobby. I ran down with some open house sign and sold riders. The elevator doors opened to a mad house. Early guests waited patiently outside beyond the velvet ropes. And all I could think of was: how are 250 RSVPs, their friends, and last-minute-showups going to fit in our small lobby?
Somehow everyone fit. It was hot inside. Ryan Erickson and Cynthia Pang quickly became crowd favorites, manning the beer kegs. A guest named Carol, asked, “Is this what speed dating feels like?” Another blogger provides an extensive list of the who’s who in Seattle tech who came to see what all the commotion was about.
Bag, Borrow, or Steal had a nice A-board sign as part of their display but I had secretly hoped they would bring out a bunch of their fancy handbags and bling-bling jewelry for us to ogle over. A senior software engineer from Farecast gave me a fascinating 10-minute sermon on how tickets are sold in the airline industry. You don’t just code at a startup; you know the business in detail when you’re only working with a small platoon of diehards.
Glenn took a group outside to talk biz away from the heat and noise. Kelly Engel wouldn’t leave the registration table because, “it’s too much fun meeting all these people.” Bryan Selner and Matt Goyer pulled a product-management smackdown on interested parties. Andrew Donovan handled engineering questions with aplomb in his South African accent. Savan’s name and job title sprawled out over four nametags: Savan. Redfin. Design. Team.
Now we have a stack of business cards and resumes to go through. Interviews to follow. Thanks to everyone who attended.
Over the past few months, we’ve had the opportunity to hear from a lot of our customers both via email and focus groups. One of the most common requests that we get is from customers who want the opportunity to meet our agents in person. While you can talk to one of our incredibly dedicated agents any time just by calling 877-973-3346, we understand the importance of face-to-face communication for many people. Starting this week, we are hosting informal get-togethers in both Seattle and the Bay Area. There’s no formal agenda or presentation. Just a chance to meet a Redfin agent live and in person, connect with other Redfin users, and ask questions about Redfin and the homebuying process. We’ll even provide the snacks!
These events will always happen on the second and fourth Wednesday of the month from 6-7pm and there’s no need to to RSVP. Want to come? Just click here for more info or just come see us!
When we agreed to host last spring’s first Techcrunch here in Seattle, we had no idea that we were satisfying a previously unrecognized need for Puget Sound geeks to get together to talk shop and to show each other their new project, gadget, or site. Now that we’re a few more months into the game and have gotten seemingly unending requests to do an encore (and since it seems like Michael Arrington doesn’t have any immediate plans to return to Seattle), we’ve come up with an event that should give a lot of the same people another good reason to get together again: Startupalooza.
Come join us next Thursday, September 28th to learn about some of the most interesting companies in the web startup business here in Seattle. Even if you aren’t in the market for a job, there should some really interesting folks there and, for those of you that were at TechCrunch, you know we hold true on our promises of good pizza and beer being there as well.
Here’s a list of the 8 companies currently participating in the event:
* Bag, Borrow or Steal
* Blue Dot
* Exbiblio
* Farecast
* Gridnetworks
* Mercent
* Mpire
* Redfin
For more info or to RSVP, please check out our page about the event: www.redfin.com/startupalooza
Sitting in the passenger seat of a minivan we just rented at SFO cruising north on 101 at 65 mph (Eric drives too slow) heading to set up our booth at the Trump Expo I realized that we have a limited number of extra tickets for the show.
In the hopes of meeting some of the many San Francisco Bay Area Redfin users, I pulled out my laptop and much-maligned Treo and logged into the Redfin blog to get the word out.
If you are interested in going to the show ($280 street value), drop me a line at “rob at redfin dot com” and I will try to hook you up with a ticket. George Foreman, Al Gore and Donald Trump are speaking!
Redfin's corporate blog is the place to read what Redfin employees have to say about Redfin, the real estate industry and other topics such as life at a startup or usability and web design.
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