Archive for the ‘Glenn Kelman’ Category
September 24, 2008
A job applicant just told me Thursday that “Everybody knows you don’t like Microsoft or Amazon people.” Just last week, a board member heard the same thing.
Which came as news to our chief technology officer, our Seattle-based engineering leaders, three star product managers and our hyper-productive lone marketing director, all of whom worked at Microsoft.
And it came as news to me, since I grew up in Redmond, adore Microsoft’s pass-the-bong video ads, and defend to the death the relevance of desktop applications (see comment 107). The first business book I ever read was Microsoft Secrets. My new favorite marketing campaign is Microsoft’s “I’m A PC” campaign.
So it’s probably fair to say that no CEO from Silicon Valley has a higher opinion of Microsoft than I do. I learn from Microsoft every day. And I’m intensely grateful that so many Microsoft and Amazon folks have thrown their hat into the Redfin ring.
“This Was Discussed at the Highest Levels Within Microsoft”
The trouble started because of one line in a Redfin job description: You don’t need big money to do something big. Don’t apply if you’ve worked too long at Microsoft, Amazon or an agency.
“This was discussed,” one applicant explained over a slice of pizza at a mall food court, “at the highest levels within Microsoft.”
What kind of “pompous ass,” one angry Microsoft veteran asked us, would write this job description? The people at Microsoft and Amazon, he continued, “know exactly what it takes to run in a start up environment, we were doing it when whoever wrote this ridiculous JD [job description] was probably in diapers.”
Of course, I’m the pompous ass. We agree that 30 years ago, Microsoft could still fairly be called a startup, though by that time I had graduated to underwear.
We probably disagree over whether someone who has not worked in a startup for 30 years is still a startup-type of person. And we disagree too, over whether any disrespect was intended to Microsoft, a company more successful than we’ll likely ever be.
Different Horses for Different Courses
My point wasn’t that any 15-year veteran at Microsoft has less talent or skill than the driven maniacs who tend to thrive at Redfin. Microsoft is a gladiator academy for brainiacs. But no one can honestly tell me that marketing Windows is remotely similar to persuading someone to ditch her Realtor-friend and buy a house through a website. We have no no budget, no agencies, three people.
We have to win by delighting consumers, juicing the Google index, having Octopus sex with the blogosphere, fighting like a trapped squirrel, moving super-fast. There’s just no way a company the size of Microsoft or Amazon — or Google (after complaining that we never saw Google candidates, we have seen a few) or Apple — could remain as desperate and impatient and unrealistic as we are.
Plenty of Microsoft folks thrive at Redfin and other startups, but their point of departure is how different a startup is from Microsoft.
“How Long is Too Long?”
Our best employees left Microsoft because they were squirrels and octopuses, juicers and speed-freaks. Some had been there two years. Some five. Some longer. But none had been there “too long” which was supposed to mean past the point of being passionate about what they do.
When we wrote this job description, we’d interviewed plenty of Microsofties who talk about staying “too long.” They’d say Redfin is a way to rekindle their passion for software or business. It makes us feel like a red sports car, or an extramarital affair.
Of Microsoft, But Unlike Microsoft
The truth is that many of the people at Redfin are of Microsoft, but they all say Redfin’s not like Microsoft. Marcelo Calbucci explained the difference.
The way I think about it is that our left brain (analysis, discipline, brilliance) comes from Microsoft, and our right brain (speed-lust, techno-promiscuity, the Internet’s goofiness and freedom as a cult) comes from Silicon Valley; nearly half of Redfin engineering is based in San Francisco.
It’s a good balance. What we’ve learned from Microsoft employees has made us better in engineering, product management & HR, where Microsoft folks excel. In marketing, Microsoft has taught us how to think in different dimensions than just public relations, social networks or search engine optimization.
What Do You Think?
We thought we’d ask other startups what your experience has been hiring from Microsoft and Amazon? And we’d like to know what to do about the job description. If it has offended others, we’ll change it. If there are any folks from Microsoft or Amazon reading this blog, please, tell us what you think (and if you haven’t worked there “too long,” apply for a job!)
(Photocredit: sexy octopus, jrixunderwater; speed dog, WisDoc )
September 23, 2008
I’ll be the last one — Redfin has been busy with its company meeting last Friday– to say I love Microsoft’s new “I’m a PC” ad.
Doesn’t It Remind of You That Discovery Channel Ad?
But maybe I’m the first who wonders if it was inspired by The Discovery Channel’s “The World is Just Awesome” ad, which came out just as Microsoft hired Crispin to take on Apple?
Both jump around the world, posing wild animals alongside innovative, nerdy free-spirits, who don’t seem to mind chanting a corporate mantra.
The Ad Is Un-One-Uppable
As soon as I heard that Microsoft was taking on Apple: I thought, 1. “Good! About time!” and 2. “They’ve started a fight they can’t win. Apple will one-up them.” But the ad it turns out is un-one-uppable. (It must have been designed to be that way).
Who wants to go after people saving polar bears, teaching African children, converting cow pies into car fuel? In fact, the ad sort of kills for me the whole Apple campaign, which now seems so precious, insufferable, narrow, white and male. As Crispin folks explained to Danielle Sacks when they first took the Microsoft account, “To try to be cool is not to be cool.” Apple really tries to be cool.
Why Did It Take Us So Long to See That Apple is Kind of Mean?
Why did it take us so long to see that? I remember being shocked on learning years ago that the Apple “I’m a PC” ad couldn’t run in Japan, because consumers there don’t like snarky comparisons; I hadn’t realized until then that the luminescent, post-modern ads were such a dirty shiv to the gut.
And it wasn’t just me: friends who still love unicorn stickers and long walks on the beach loved watching the PC nerd (whom Slate’s Seth Stevenson always maintained was more likable than Apple’s hipster) getting humiliated in ever-more elaborate ways.
Apple is the Marketing Juggernaut, Microsoft is the Software Engineering Company
And why did it take so long for Microsoft to respond? We think of Apple as a products company, and Microsoft as a business behemoth, but Apple is the company that floods the airwaves with ads while Microsoft is mostly a company of software engineers. Every time I’m about to buy an Airbook, I wonder how much of its cost is its carefully constructed image.
That’s why I love it that Bill Gates is cast as the anti-Steve Jobs, wearing dorky clothes and glasses, even though he’s the one who’s really trying to save the world.
So what do you think? Is “I’m a PC” a take off on the “World is Just Awesome?”Is Microsoft the real product company, while Apple is the marketing juggernaut? And what percentage of a Mac’s price is marketing vs. say, of a Windows Dell? I’ll go with 40% and 20%.
September 21, 2008
One small good thing about Wall Street’s terrifying meltdown: this year’s graduating class will send fewer of its best people into investment banking and more into fields where they’ll actually make something new and good.
I remember walking around Pioneer Square last year with one of my favorite Redfin engineers, who was mulling career options and thinking about his friends in dermatology and hedge funds.
He’d mentioned the “boatload of money” he could make in hedge funds, so I couldn’t help but ask just what he meant by that. He told me. It was a number so large that it would more than compensate for the weekly fruit basket we offer at Redfin headquarters, and that one time we took some employees water-skiing.
The engineer stayed, and ever since I’ve checked in on him with the fear and gratitude of someone waiting to be dumped. But look who has the upper hand now? Har! har! har!
(We’re very grateful for all the folks who work at Redfin, who are worth more than we — or — I hope! — anyone else — could ever pay.)
Update: Noam Lovinsky pointed out an interesting conversation about bankers becoming Internet entrepreneurs on Fred Wilson’s blog. The comments are as good as the post.
September 11, 2008
Have you heard? Yammer is Twitter for corporations. On Monday it launched. On Wednesday, it won TechCrunch50’s top prize. By this morning, Yammer was reporting it had signed up 10,000 people from 2,000 companies. This afternoon, the great Dan Fabulich of Redfin asked if we could start using it.
Of course, Dan was only being polite: the appeal of Yammer’s business model is that anyone can start using it (Redfin only has to pay to control it). And even if I’d said no, another Redfin employee would have started using it anyway.
So I said yes. And then thought: what does this mean? And what have we done?
What Does Yammer Mean?
What Yammer means to me is first that there’s a new model for selling enterprise software, and it resembles nothing more than George Soros’s efforts to undermine the Soviets by air-dropping fax machines behind the Iron Curtain: tools are downloaded and used, with executives & IT only later having to accommodate the facts on the ground. The whole question of whether Yammer is actually productive is beside the point, because it’s so easy and fun.
Yammer also means something more, that email is broken: overwhelmed with spam, cumbersome to open, with responses feeling like an obligation rather than an option. If you want to deliver a message to someone, almost any other medium is more likely to 
get noticed: IM, Facebook, Twitter, RSS.
What Have We Done?
But the bigger question about Redfin’s use of Yammer is what have we done?
While I am glad to try a new technology — Dan is such a fearless pioneer — I worry that Yammer might be worse than work, and worse even than no-work. At least when you’re browsing ESPN.com, you feel bad about it. Yammer happens at work, and it sounds like work — you can always tell when someone is writing an email, IM or Twitter, because their typing is so much faster and noisier — so people think it is work, with one crucial exception: it may not get work done.
I’m not sure I buy the talk about collaboration. I’ve seen passive-aggressive arguments happen over email and (less over) IM — Skype’s workrooms are the exception; they’re awesome — that could have been avoided or settled in a few minutes face to face; will Yammer be much different?
As it is, I have elaborate fantasies about outlawing the whole Internet for hours at a time, or even for an entire workday. When I marvel at how
a historical colossus like Theodore Roosevelt (definitive naval history of 1812, four-volume history of American frontier, a staggering number of slaughtered animals, U.S. President) or Honore de Balzac (dozens of coffee-fueled novels, written from midnight – 3 in the afternoon, while standing up) had time to accomplish so much, I usually attribute it to talent, servants — and no Internet.
Staving Off a Coup
But whether a shot at greatness is in anyone’s cards, I don’t have the guts to pull the plug on email, IM or Yammer for even a minute: there would be a coup, and Cynthia Pang would mount my head on a stake outside the Dexter-Horton building by the end of the day. I think a lot of executives who are asked about IM or Yammer agree to it for the same reason: they don’t want to seem like Scrooges or Luddites, and they’re not sure they could stop anyone anyway. And truth be told, we want our Yammer too.
Gentle reader and Dan Fabulich (who is, by the way, mutantly productive and far less curmudgeonly than I am) what do you think? Is Yammer good or bad for actually getting work done? Once we actually start using Yammer, we’ll report back on the results. Right now I’m not sure — but I’m excited to use it anyway.
(Flickr credit: soldiersmediacenter on Flickr)
September 7, 2008
Barack Obama and John McCain are going to spend the next two months arguing over the economy, mostly about how to foster innovation. The politicians blame politics. In last Sunday’s New York Times, Cisco & Google engineering executives talked about the same problem. They blame the lack of engineers.
Both are right. But the real problem isn’t that we have to be wiser or smarter. We just have to keep taking big risks. Taking big risks is where Americans have always stood head and shoulders above everyone else: get-rich-quick schemes have been our specialty. But now the new fashion among the professional risk-takers has been to risk very little.
$100,000 is the New $10 Million
Venture capitalists are racing to miniaturize themselves toward the vanishing point. One of my favorite bloggers, Fred Wilson, recently asked why not “back 10 teams at $25,000 each instead of one team at $250,000”? Just last week a Seattle venture capitalist boasted that “we are seeing impressive companies being built for under $100,000.”
To which one can only say: Really? Which companies?
Just do the math. Two engineers can last 12 months on $100,000, which is great for building a prototype, but often nowhere near enough to build an ambitious product, much less a business. Yes, hardware and software have become nearly free, but people have always been a startup’s main cost.
Spending Less, Doing Less
What’s usually happening is we’re spending less by doing less. Behind the steady drumbeat of startups, any TechCrunch reader can’t help but notice how whimsical many have become.
Trading college-girl gossip or graphing rock-band popularity is cool but we also need entrepreneurs willing to spend the time and money to f*** with the order of things. Rather than building game-changing technologies that can make an entire segment of the economy better, most startups are using what’s already out there to create a new media site. Silicon Valley, meet Hollywood.
What’s Really Scary: Nobody’s Scared
Everyone knows that last quarter was the first since 1978 that a venture-financed company didn’t go public. Mid-stage capital dropped 15%. Late-stage investing is now cashing out entrepreneurs before their companies have made money. And what’s really scary is that nobody’s scared.
Bill Gurley says an IPO isn’t worth the Sarbanes-Oxley headaches. Others are just waiting for the market to tick up. But if those were the real problems, we’d see more accretive acquisitions. Instead, even YouTube is struggling to make money for Google.
Most entrepreneurs don’t even aspire to build a self-sustaining business. Among the 25-year-old entrepreneurs I know, that goal seems as dated as the Brezhnev-era Red Army.
You Want to Get Funded? Think Small
It’s an attitude investors have encouraged. When I came of age in the 1990’s, VCs were always challenging entrepreneurs to think big. It helped shake us out of our navel-gazing reverie and into a broader world. Now, chastened by over-funded companies from the dot.com boom, many investors look for ways to cut an idea down to size.
Of course, some businesses don’t need a lot of money to get big. Others are happy to remain small. But there are big ideas that take time and money, and though there is still plenty of funding available, no one could deny the mood among Internet startups has changed.
Could Amazon’s Jeff Bezos show up on Sand Hill Road today to pitch a company that would lose money on software, on warehouses and distribution centers – for years? He might get his idea funded; he’d more likely get talked out of it. It’s so easy to nudge enterpreneurs — and people in general — toward smaller things.
What I’m Looking for in TechCrunch50
We can’t all be Amazon. But we do have to make sure that the volatile mix of money and energy – which occurs in only a few places, at a few moments in history — can still easily form around the big ideas, not just the small ones. This is why everyone is eager — why am I so insanely eager? — to see what TechCrunch 50 delivers: will startups debuting at tomorrow’s big conference make Silicon Valley’s place in the economy smaller or bigger?
The judges may argue over which contestant is the most clever or polished, but for those of you scoring at home, there’s room on the card for another column. Which startup is most likely to f*** with the order of things? We need a few of those too.
August 13, 2008
Around 1 a.m. last night, after spending a few hours cruising blogs and watching YouTube cycling videos, I found myself up against it and hastily wrote a post about Redfin’s stunning new release that referred to developer Robert Gay as a “man-child.”
What I meant by this was a compliment: that, at the tender age of 22 21, Robert must still be somewhat like a child physically (he is larger than I am but how much of that is baby-fat, and baby-muscle, and big baby bones?), but that he codes like a MAN.
Some concerned friends of Robert approached me with what Urban Dictionary said I meant:
A man child is a male who is over the age of 25, who still lives as though he is a juvenile. Many man-children are not gainfully employed, and survive off of the financial support of their enabling parents. Heavy video-game addiction to fantasy games such as World of Warcraft are key to the man-child.
This, to me, also seems like a compliment.
A secondary definition is a common moniker for the “Black Jesus,” Amare Stoudemire, starting center for the Phoenix Suns. This is definitely a compliment. What does man-child mean to you? Would it have been more precise to call Robert a child-man? He is, in any event, a total star, precocious yet powerful like Amare, if Amare played D…
[Post-script: Google really is incredible... only 24 minutes after we published this post, a Google search on "young gay man-child" turns up Robert on page one. "Kinky masochist" turns up Redfin statistician Mose Andre.]
August 1, 2008
Redfin was on Good Morning America today, as promised. The interview was, as always, a blast, and being in a studio was as strange as ever. For some reason, I kept thinking of the children’s book author I had met in a green room on a previous trip. He had written a beautiful little book, and had nothing to worry about. Real estate by comparison seemed so complicated and mercenary.
But then again nothing can make you feel how infinitely varied and desultory life can be like morning television. The star of today’s show was a 44-pound cat, which had entered the building on a red carpet, with ABC interns posing as paparazzi. Competition between the morning programs for the cat interview had, I was told, been fierce. In the green room, the cat tucked into the small feast that been laid out for him.
Diane Sawyer’s producer came in, and looking down at the grazing animal with a mixture of disgust and what may have been wistful envy, asked if the cat had “like, an endocrine problem.” The cat’s handlers, a group of funny Jersey ladies, said, “let’s not go there.”
Barbara Walters came through the studio in a magnificent King-of-the-Mountains-style dress, walking gingerly, with delicate eyelashes and a well-muscled man in a very tight shirt and bleach-blonde hair carrying her purse, to air an interview with Carla Bruni. I’ve been watching her since childhood, and wish I had said hello. It was strange to hear her talking so matter-of-factly about Carla’s orgies. I was interviewed by Diane Sawyer, whose youthful relationship with Henry Kissinger I had also just read about, awestruck.
We ploughed through some questions around some real estate science we’re publishing next week, remembering the advice “not to get into it” with any of the nuances and qualifications we would have dearly loved to make. As soon as the segment was over, the producers swooped in to escort Ms. Sawyer to Bryant Park, filled with teenage girls and already a little sticky with heat, for a production of Rent and a Jonas Brothers concert.
Earlier in the day, I’d asked, “Who’re the Jonas Brothers?” The entire green room fell into shocked silence.
“Dude,” the producer said, apparently having never struggled with the sense of scale that any visitor to New York’s big stage immediately gropes for. “They’re huge.”
July 3, 2008
Lots of prominent venture capitalists, including Fred Wilson and now Bill Gurley, are writing this week about the dearth of IPOs first reported by Matt Richtel in the New York Times. This quarter was the first since 1978 that a venture-financed company didn’t go public.
But the real headline isn’t the dearth itself, but the fact that some of the smartest people in VC are fine with it. It’s like the PGA moved the Masters to a pitch-and-putt, and Tiger Woods applauded the decision.
The argument goes that a public company just isn’t a worthwhile aspiration anymore for Internet or software companies, in large part because of a lions-tigers-and-bears litany of regulations that the National Association of Venture Capitalists is asking everyone to complain about. Bill cites 15 (holy cow!) companies in Benchmark’s portfolio with more than $50 million in revenues, all still private.
“I don’t think we have a demand problem, we have a supply problem,” Bill writes. “No one wants to manage a public company.”
This is a pleasant conceit, that all of us could manage a public company if only we wanted to. But the real supply problem is how many companies can — not how many want to — grow into large, profitable, stand-alone businesses.
In this respect, Bill chose the wrong threshold for companies that could go public. At $50 million in revenues, you would be spending 2 – 4% of revenues (roughly $1 – 2 million per year) on the costs of being public. That doesn’t sound good.
But how many Web 2.0 companies today have a chance of reaching $100 million in revenues, then $500 million? Maybe we have the next Google, eBay, or Amazon among our ranks now. If so, I doubt the new regulations are enough to deter them from growing into public companies.
Characterizing folks who cash out as just smarter or more realistic than those who want to build a stand-alone business seems just as misguided as the 90’s macho insistence on an IPO for its own sake. There are some businesses where M&A makes more sense, and others that can prosper on their own (forget the companies so disruptive or weird that few companies will want to buy them).
M&A today is just a different game of the musical chairs we played in 1999. Who is going to be left to buy technology companies if technology companies stop going public? It can’t just be Google and Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and IAC forever.
That means we have to keep building business to be businesses, not just to get bought. There are plenty of entrepreneurs who, if they could grow a business to $100 million and beyond, would prefer to keep building it rather than get acquired. The hard part for us isn’t the regulations, it’s getting past $100 million, which takes patience, big thinking, and a huge appetite for risk.
When brilliant folks like Bill Gurley and Fred Wilson start giving up on that project, it’s time for high-tech to get its mojo back.
June 24, 2008
Being on TV is a junkie kind of rush. Even if you’re as stuck up as I am about it, you fall into hoping TV’s magic will transform you during the broadcast into something larger than life. But then you get airbrushed with make-up (new for HD, it feels soft and good), the mic-man publicly undresses you to the navel a minute before the segment starts, and you’re rushed off the set in another two minutes feeling more, not less, inconsequential. 
Redfin was on Fox & Friends’ segment this Sunday to talk about our business model (save $10,000!) and to answer the usual questions (we’re not putting anyone out of business). At the end of it I felt a little blue. I walked through the saddest place on earth, a darkened “Geraldo!” set. The streets in midtown Manhattan were empty at 7:30 a.m. I answered an email from a lone Connecticut fan wondering about our expansion plans. I called my mom, and told her my day felt already over. I remembered that a 60 Minutes producer — he was such a prince — once said “everyone is always depressed after the interview.”
Then I got on the 1 subway uptown… and saw people in tank-tops and bibs. A race!
I got back to my room, changed, and ran to Central Park, in what I only then realized was an event for disabled & able-bodied people alike (registration fee paid later).
As usual for Manhattan, folks lined up for the seven-minute-a-mile pace who would almost immediately begin walking, leading to altercations with punier, faster runners. There was a small-voiced, encouraging speech by New York Road Runner’s president Mary Wittenberg and, from the beginning — and all the way through — there was cheering. I LOVE people cheering! Why don’t we do that more often?
And there were so many runners -– I had not thought there could be so many — competing on prosthetic legs, of an age that many must have been injured in Iraq. A large, magnificently muscled man running outside the lane and against the current was yelling, Marine-style: “UP AND OVER, UP AND OVER, COME ON.” It was good to see some of the vets running together. We can never re-pay them. It’s hard not to be almost-scared of the intensity of their experience. But everyone on the course was glad to be doing something with them.
A few racers ran arm-in-arm with their parents, very close to one another, some encouraging me though I should have been the one encouraging them. Melted make-up streamed down my face. And perhaps because I was deranged from trying to run faster than I really could, or because of the cheering, I was overcome with love.
March 23, 2008
Michael Arrington complains again today that people are overwhelmed with email. Michael cites a venture capitalist who encourages people awaiting his email reply to befriend him on Facebook, but then admits he is even less responsive there.
“Someone,” Michael says, “needs to create a new technology that allows us to enjoy our life but not miss important messages.”
But if Michael wanted fewer messages, he could just switch to a private address without telling me what it is. Every time we write an email rather than call, or add another distant “friend” to Facebook, we choose a network over true friendship, communication without commitment. And usually, we’re choosing what we want.
This is a process that starts early: the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik recently wrote about the imaginary friend his toddler talks to on her toy-cellphone, usually only to say that she’s too busy to talk to him.
And it began a long time ago. The critic Hugh Kenner speculated that the disembodied voices of modern poetry grew out of the invention of the telephone. What I grew up seeing as a way to reach out and touch someone, a previous generation saw as a paltry substitute.
And now that’s how I now see Facebook, as a paltry — but not quite dispensable — substitute. Facebook comforts us with the thought that we have lots of friends. And yet the prestige that this network offers is the opposite of security, that 8th-grade sense we got from knowing exactly who our friends were.
The “social utility” of friends on Facebook is different than other forms of friendship. Most of my friends’ Facebook updates have the quality of overheard cell phone calls: mundane, impossible not to listen for, really only half of a conversation, but also comforting. Someone stuck in Singapore for a year once told me that what he missed most was the English chatter of overheard conversations.
This is why I’ve stopped checking Facebook throughout the day, but then suddenly find myself, alone in the wee hours of the night, glad to see everyone there. The feeling it gives me was best described in Augie March: “Wherever it was dark there was this sound, continental and hemispheric, again and again, like surf, and continuous and dense as stars.”
Saul Bellow was writing about falling asleep to the chirping of insects, but now that sound is the buzz of our friends. Maybe the one-line updates of Facebook have just reduced communication to what we really need to hear, over and over again: “Are you there?” “Yes, I am (everything’s fine).”
(photo credit: Moriza on Flickr)
