What a coup for Redfin! The founder and former CEO of CarMax, Austin Ligon, joined Redfin’s board of directors this week, and also made a small investment in the company. The note we sent out Monday night to everyone here at Redfin captures some of our excitement at Austin’s arrival: The big news this week is… Read More
The more complicated a business gets, the more of a math problem it becomes. Running a lemonade stand, you don’t need to analyze gross margins or survey customers because you squeeze the lemonade yourself, and hand it to every customer. But once you have employees and customers you’ve barely met, numbers become more important. For… Read More
As part of our brown-bag lunch program on management best practices, the legendary Brian McAndrews visited Redfin Friday. Brian took aQuantive through the highs and lows, leading the company out of the dot-com bust and building it into the juggernaut that sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6 billion. His talk on how to manage… Read More
Redfin published an essay in TechCrunch today, “To Steve or Not to Steve,” about entrepreneurs who impose their personalities on a startup. Redfin’s Matt Goyer read it first, to make sure it wouldn’t offend anyone. Matt’s an insightful soul, so I knew he would also appreciate the nuances of my argument. When he was done,… Read More
Some blog posts give us a glimpse of our own obituary. When a Seattle journalist last week speculated on what went wrong at a startup, an anonymous mob formed to attack the CEO, comment by comment. It was hard not to feel like you were watching your own beheading. No one objected. And almost everyone in… Read More