At today’s all-hands meeting, Redfin surveyed our 2008 accomplishments alongside what we wanted to do better in 2009. It was a good exercise, both so we could put to rest our mistakes, but also see how far we’ve come. Here is what we accomplished in the past 12 months: Decreased the cost of bringing a… Read More
This is an essay arguing that some of the same forces driving Wall Street have affected Sand Hill Road, so that entrepreneurs try to make money without worrying about losing it. From the backseat’s darkness, the hedge fund manager wasn’t talking to anyone in particular, and didn’t seem to notice no one could understand much… Read More
Redfin published a guest post on TechFlash this morning about how the balance of power has shifted between the idealists in business who advance a company’s sense of mission and the mercenaries who insist on being 100% focused on profits. In many ways it picks up where an old Redfin essay about get-rich-quick-schemes left off…. Read More
Many thanks to Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld for publishing an essay this morning on what I’ve learned as a CEO during the downturn. Did anyone notice that the picture of Arnold in “Predator” is strikingly similar to the picture of me? The premise of the post isn’t that Redfin has found our way out… Read More
After Redfin’s layoff last week, the CEO of a startup down the street emailed to say “at least we’re not public!” Which made me wonder how private we really are. You can hide from the Wall Street Journal but not from the hundreds of tech and real estate blogs that covered Redfin last week. One… Read More
Today Redfin laid off roughly 20% of our employees. Unlike other startups, our industry’s recession started a year ago, when home prices first plunged. Since then, we’ve fought like starving animals, and with some success: while industry-wide transaction volumes dropped 33%, we grew revenues by nearly 50%. Traffic grew more than 300%. Even a month… Read More
Now that the splurge passed, everyone is arguing about whether Republicans or Democrats are to blame. I had naturally assumed it was the party that favors deregulation, the Republicans. But then Redfin’s Rob McGarty sent me a video of all our old friends, the congressmen from the Housing and Finance Subcommittee. These are the people… Read More
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… Read More
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”… Read More
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… Read More