Archive for the ‘Events’ Category
September 30, 2006
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.
September 25, 2006
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!
September 20, 2006
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
August 25, 2006
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!
July 26, 2006
Inman’s big Connect conference kicked off today in San Francisco. It isn’t raining here, but the city was pretty all the same:
For starters, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington threw Molotov cocktails for an opening keynote at the new geek side of the conference, Inman’s Connect Tech, bringing in a dump-truck of ideas about everything that is happening on the Web to open things up for consumers.
We were glad to see such a good turnout, maybe 200 people, for an event that we’d cooked up with Inman only a few months ago. One day, maybe it’ll be as big as Connect, the event for agents. Mike (pictured above at left) stayed up the night before writing his speech, confirming the impression he made earlier of being an overgrown, talented kid, shy when he isn’t being startling.
What worried me was that instead of all the industry types barfing on Mike’s ideas, as I think they would have done last winter in New York, everybody was writing down what he said, or even worse, volunteering “we’re doing that now!” (Redfin is going to have a run for its money). The best part was when somebody said the Salt Lake MLS had allowed them to combine its data with for-sale-by-owner listings, only to have the Salt Lake MLS stand up and say “Not anymore.”
I kept looking over at the mild-mannered Inman CEO Mike Edelhart, to see if he would blanch at the controversy, but he was thrilled, engaged; good journalists never die, even when they become CEO’s.
The map guys didn’t say much new, but probably gave another 50 entrepreneurs enough encouragement to put listings on a map. Redfin was on a tame standards panel. Later on, Craigslist’s Craig Newmark stood on the other side from us of a large plant but nobody had the guts to say hi. We all felt pretty glum about being so chicken until Rob McGarty, who screwed up royally converting everyone to Treo’s, said “Hey, he’s using a Treo.”
The main event, Inman Connect, was a mob scene, with people jammng the doorways of a huge ballroom. I missed Brad Inman’s keynote speech about transparency because of a meeting that ran late, but Zillow’s blog hits the high points.
Zillow’s main men, Lloyd Frink and Rich Barton, gave an utterly charming presentation about what they learned over the past six months, consisting mostly of funny pictures. They introduced a neat feature for getting Zestimates by e-mail and opened up their API, which maybe we’ll use to put more data on our map.
They said they’d never be a brokerage, which is always nice for us to hear. They showed a slide of a house with a “Buy It Now” button next to it that kind of reminded me of our site. It was supposed to be an example of what not to do. The audience roared. The lady next to me craned around to see the look on my face. Note to self that we really need to change that Buy It button to something like Start Offer…
From the forum on journalism, I really liked Lockhart Steele’s comment on community features, that you should assume people are intelligent, so much more so than computers, and not worry that they might say something crazy, vengeful or stupid (though that’s fun too).
I ran into anti-realtor legal gadfly extraordinaire David Barry, wearing another scintallting shirt open at the chest, who said he felt “so energized coming to tradeshows.” I looked at him, not for the first time, with wonder.
We won an award for most innovative business model, which we’ll announce tomorrow. Winners in other categories included Trulia, Zillow, RE/MAX, Urban Digs, Cell Signs. I had set aside my laptop and patted my hair down when the envelope for our category was being opened, only to see Rob and Eric Heller jump up like Academy Award-winners on hearing our name, and take the stage to get their photos taken with Jessica Swesey. This was awesome.
We got invited to a swanky party at an expensive house up for sale but I didn’t go.
June 8, 2006
Is there a more bizarre and depressing circus than a tradeshow? The absolutely sexless hotel. The Tote Bag of Crapola. The inflatable enthusiasm.
My first trip to an Inman real estate conference was last summer in New York. I slept on a friend’s couch. I got drunk with a Dostoevsky scholar who admitted at the bottom of it that he had no idea how old his live-in girlfriend was.
The show itself was a bit different than a conference on, say, corporate software. New Jersey brokers with a fake-bake kept giving me their business card, “in case I wanted to buy or sell.” I found myself on a mobile devices panel in which I was forced to admit I didn’t have a mobile device. I gave a little speech about empowering consumers that was interrupted in its first five seconds by a jolly giant saying in a thick Brooklyn accent, “NOT IN MANHATTAN.”
It was fun. And it was pretty good, too. As at most social gatherings, we were pariahs. A few months later, when we visited Inman in Emeryville for our launch, we proposed starting a new kind of show, for real estate technologists like us. And Inman said, “OK.” It’s called Inman Connect Tech & we think one day it might be bigger than all the conferences for agents. Google, Microsoft and MapQuest have signed on. And, if you’re interested in real estate technology, you might want to, too. The agenda looks pretty good, with stuff on AJAX, analytics, data mining, community, maps. July 26, in San Francisco. There’s a discount for early sign up.
Don’t worry if you want to come but don’t like Redfin. We’ll be there, but you don’t have to talk to us.
June 1, 2006
TechCrunch Seattle is in the books, and we still haven’t recovered.
For a moment there, we thought we were going to screw it up. When we got to ConWorks at five, TripHub and Farecast had their brochures stacked in neat piles and their demo looping on big monitors. It was a tragic reminder of a way we’ll never be.
Savan’s truck went up in smoke trying to haul eight elephant kegs. Rob had to snatch monitors off everyone’s desk (“I don’t care if people are still using them!”) so we could blow out the demo stations. Two Canadian bloggers grabbed a stone-age boulder to help us pile-drive real estate yard signs onto every corner, completely oblivious to their charming accent. Angela got back on on the scene at six with bags of lemons and ice and whipped everyone into shape.
And then the party got ROLLING. Some customers ganged up on us and gave us some great ideas on how to make our service even better. Brian Marsh, freshly shaved for the first time in a week, talked up some demure developers that we’ve been trying to recruit for months. Women swooned over NPR’s John Moe, because he plays in a band, and contributes to McSweeney’s, and has a nice voice too. The temperature shot up to 1,000 degrees.
I complained to Zillow’s Amy Bohutinsky that my daily Zillow alert breaks my heart, every day, and then, oddly but kindly, some Zillow developers gave me some encouragement for my speech, which no one heard. Bryan Selner told me to say we’re hiring, Sean Richter said something even better, which I forgot. David Eraker was proudly wearing his realtor pin. Ryan Erickson demonstrated a facility with tapping kegs that was disturbing for someone so young. Bahn demo’d Redfin ’til he was hoarse, and Eric told everybody about the Redfin techcrunch discount.
TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington, taller and shyer than I’d thought he’d be, but just as smart (like a big, quiet kid whom the coach couldn’t recruit for the football team), was mobbed. Somebody with headphones and a big mike was interviewing everybody. Madrona’s Greg Gottesman was working the room in a dazzling white blazer, and Peter Cochran was gathering an entrepreneur with a good idea into Vulcan’s clutches.
And then at the end, when the scavengers were picking through the pizza and soft drinks that nobody drank, and we had to take down the signs and roll out the empty kegs, our launch was over, and we had time to remember Emily Dickinson’s line that “nothing is half so sad as a battle lost except a battle won.”
If you took pictures, post them to Flickr, and tag them techcrunchseattle.
May 27, 2006
Seattle TechCrunch is turning into a deranged mob scene, with over 250 people signed up after only a day.
When was the last time a party like this came together? You’d have to go back to P. Diddy’s 2004 birthday, as covered by no less than three reporters from The Gray Lady, back when Harold Raines was promising “to flood the zone” on major events… (legally licensed from the NYT)
Some Dreadful Man Misled Her Again, No Doubt
The New York Times, November 9, 2004
By JOYCE WADLER; WITH MELENA Z. RYZIK AND JULIA CHAPLIN
You know the aggravation you have when, say, the ARDMAN bat mitzvah is scheduled the same day as the JONES bat mitzvah?
It was kind of like that Thursday night when the premiere of JAY-Z’s concert film, ”Fade to Black,” was held the very night of P. DIDDY’s birthday coronation, or as the invitation termed it, the Royal Birthday Ball. The buzz on the red carpet involved what everybody was wearing to the Diddy party. Mr. Diddy tends to be rather tyrannical at his events. His invitation — which specified that guests had ”a duty to fulfill” and must dress ”like style icons” — even provided a list of approved designers.
Mr. Z., on the carpet at his own event, was taking it so seriously that when a reporter complimented him on the black great coat with a plush collar, striped shirt and fluffed polka-dotted tie, he got a little upset.
”Oh, no, no, no, no, no, hold on, don’t get it messed up,” he said. ”I got another suit for Puffy’s.”
Mr. Diddy, for his part, showed up at Mr. Z.’s event in track suit and sunglasses. He was in a particularly good mood. When the Hot 97 D.J. SUNNY started to ask him a question, he grabbed her mike. Then, in a voice that reminded us of MARILYN MONROE crooning to J.F.K., he starting singing. ”Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday to me!” he sang. ”Happy birthday, dear Diddy, happy birthday to meeeeeeee!”
There was a shout from somewhere on the line.
”Diddy, I didn’t know you sing!”
”Yeah, I sing. I do it all, baby! ” Mr. Diddy said.
Then he turned his attention back to Sunny’s mike.
”Hot 97, here’s your boy Diddy. I’m here supporting my man HOV” (that would be Jay-Z).
But to the Diddy event, at Cipriani Wall Street.
”In the faraway land of P. Diddy’s royal kingdom where there are grand soirees all the time, there is one grander than all, the Royal Birthday Ball,” the invitation read in part. ”Your code of dress shall begin with silk, velvet and other luxurious fabrics and end beautifully in hand-tailored suits and gorgeous dresses flown in from the fashion houses of Paris.”
The invitation did not stipulate that on the red carpet PARIS HILTON should pull her gown so high that everyone could see she wasn’t wearing any underwear. But that after all is what makes her a fashion icon.
Another elegant moment on the red carpet: TARA REID’s black gown slipping and exposing a breast.
Anyway, it was a grand event.
Violinists serenaded guests at the entrance of the cavernous old bank building. Inside, canopy beds and claw-footed bathtubs had been set up to suggest Mr. Diddy’s notion of royalty — or a back issue of Penthouse. Guests were subjected to a barrage of giant pictures on the wall of the life of P. Diddy: Mr. Diddy with his daddy, Mr. Diddy with NOTORIOUS B.I.G. Mr. Diddy, microphone in hand, stood on a raised platform and babbled on about — who else? — Mr. Diddy.
Among the celebrants: VICTORIA GOTTI in a black strapless gown that looked as if it had been ripped from one of her bodice rippers, MARIAH CAREY in what appeared to be a wedding gown, BRUCE WILLIS, GEORGE HAMILTON, VIKRAM CHATWELL, SANTE D’ORAZIO, ZAC POSEN, DONNA KARAN and BETSEY JOHNSON.
Ms. Hilton, in the early, relatively sedate hours of the party, could be seen chatting and smiling sweetly at P. Diddy’s mom, JANICE COMBS.
(”Oh, what a nice, sweet little girl,” we could see a mom saying later, though not a mom like Ms. Combs, who was wearing a 30′s style white satin gown and white fur stole — and is nobody’s fool.)
Soon after midnight, the room became a sea of cocktails spilling and champagne flutes flying.
NAOMI CAMPBELL danced in a hooded pink evening gown while USHER skulked a few paces behind.
TOMMY HILFIGER, in a gray top hat and three-piece suit, looked a bit dazed.
Eventually, a giant tiered birthday cake was wheeled out and several barely dressed women jumped out and sang — what else — ”Hey, P. Diddy!” Then several modelesque women plucked petals from the rose sculpture and hurled them at him.
”More alcohol!” Mr. Diddy yelled.
May 25, 2006
A few weeks ago, we heard that TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington was coming to town, and decided to throw a party for all the Web 2.0 companies in Seattle to meet one another and talk about what they’re doing. The PI’s John Cook and NPR’s John Moe immediately signed up for the project, a few mystery guests are rumored to be flying in, and hopefully you’ll come too. To get things going, we agreed to pay for the first 20 pizzas and a few kegs of beer.
Why come? Seattle already has plenty of functions for business people to eat tasty breakfasts (Seattle’s Rotary Club is the most powerful in the nation), but that doesn’t quite bring together the berserk energy of a whole bunch of start-ups getting to know one another and sharing ideas. There’s a reason that, even in a largely virtual world, start-ups tend to cluster around a few spots, like Silicon Valley and Seattle. And the reason is that every once in a while, the entrepreneurs need to emerge from their offices to meet, perchance to talk, and to drink too much.
Check back here tomorrow, and we’ll confirm that we’ve been able to rig up wireless for you to show off whatever you’re building. The event is next Wednesday, May 31, from 6:30 – 11 at ConWorks, a funky artistic space south of Lake Union.
Redfin’s Eric Heller rode his bike from our office earlier this afternoon to get some pictures:
Isn’t that pretty? See you next week!
May 15, 2006
Tune into KUOW’s The Power of Voice tonight for a lively discussion about the Seattle real estate market.
The show airs tonight at 8:00PM and the audio is supposed to be available on the web about an hour later.
If you have time, please call in and discuss your War Story.
