And because Jim was so very good at sales, which I once assumed was the art of turning customers upside down and shaking every penny from their pockets, it took me years to notice how generous he was. The first day I did was on a flight we took together.

As soon as we were aloft, I reclined back in my seat. Jim looked over in horror. “You’re just going to recline like that, wide awake?” he said.
“Yep.” I said.
“What about when the meal comes?”
“Even then.”
He shook his head. So far as Jim was concerned, reclining was fine for grandmas from Tulsa on once-a-year Christmas trips. But business travelers didn’t do that to one another.

I was surprised that Jim was so meticulous about airline etiquette. Commercial flight tortured him. He must have been 6’5’’. He didn’t like to crease his jacket by stowing it overhead. Whenever he started a new notebook, he carefully transferred a photo of a Gulfstream jet from the old notebook to the new one. If he saw me looking at the jet, he’d tell me his goal was to buy one.
“Fractional?” I’d say.
“The whole thing!” he’d say.

Jim never brought up the reclining issue again, but it stayed with me. I stopped reclining when Jim was around, then stopped almost entirely even when he wasn’t. The last straw was when someone reclined on me, leaving me almost no room to use my computer.

I fretted about this situation for years before asking for a ruling. “I’ll allow it,” Jim said. His eyes twinkled, either because he was pleased at being consulted, or because he was in the position of granting an indulgence to a lesser, more-recumbent being. I wanted to ask which it was. But I was at an age when feeling silly stopped me from asking a lot of questions.

Years later, Jim got a job running sales for Seattle-based Verdiem. We went out for dinner with a few other old friends, and Jim proposed we start with cocktails. He asked for my order first, and I suggested the only drink I knew, a Cosmopolitan — there was a time when I thought this order was cosmopolitan. Jim’s face froze, then he ordered Cosmos for the whole table. They came in pink glasses.

A month later, Jim was dead at 50 of a massive heart attack. Everyone loved talking about Jim, and everyone talked about him that day. It was already all past tense: is became was, you became him.

But Jim’s still with me. Rising up from Boston this morning, someone reclined on me. In a cycle that will outlast us all, I reclined in turn. But that cold aluminum button in the armrest acted like an on switch for the projector in my mind that re-plays everything I love about Jim. It reminds me that taking whatever you can isn’t savvy, it’s just selfish. I hear Jim telling me that on every flight. I wish you all could too.

The post Jim Flatley Wasn't a Recliner appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

In fact, someone over at Google must feel like the coach of Cuba’s national baseball team. Of the 2,174 current Facebook employees with a LinkedIn profile, 378 cited Google in their work history, or nearly 1 in 5.  What’s remarkable about their decision isn’t the aplomb of Facebook recruiting, but the lack of imagination of Facebook’s Google recruits.

What’s the point of leaving one unassailable Internet platform where all your friends work for another unassailable Internet platform where all your friends work? It’s like getting a divorce to marry your wife’s sister.

I know, because I’ve been the wife in that situation before. When a colleague at a startup joined a competitor, my old partner Kirill Sheynkman had a very different reaction from mine. The colleague’s defection seemed shockingly traitorous to me but to Kirill, it was much worse: it was boring.

“You spend years working on database query tools, only to say ‘I’m sick of it, I quit’ and join a database query tools company,” Kirill said. “Where’s the imagination?” Forget the banality of evil, what galled Kirill was the evil of banality.

To someone at Google, perhaps the choice doesn’t seem banal because the two companies seem different: Google has its own dance studio, whereas Facebook only washes employee’s clothes. Google wants to become a dominant social network, and Facebook already is a dominant social network.  But to someone at a true startup, the two kind of look the same. Both will succeed without you.

Of course, Facebook is one of the few truly great Internet companies, and it’s easy to understand why anyone would want to work there. But if you’re going to leave the security of the world’s greatest software company, why not leave to try something hard, something raw, something completely different? A successful run at Google is the Silicon Valley equivalent of diplomatic immunity in Lethal Weapon 2:  every venture capitalist wants to give you money and any startup wants to hire you.

You could help someone who actually needs it, you could do something that hasn’t been done before. If you fail, you won’t be poor, and you won’t be unemployed long. I’ve heard Facebook is hiring.

(Update: some folks at Facebook have taken me to task for the tongue-in-cheek headline calling out their creativity. I’m sorry. I hadn’t meant that seriously. The people moving between Google and Facebook are obviously the gods of Silicon Valley, people who belong on bubble-gum trading cards. And just judging by its product you can tell that Facebook is a stunningly creative company.

I really, really love Facebook, and love Google, too. I just always hope that the best engineers at both places, when it’s their time to leave, do so to work at a tiny startup or to start their own company. Deciding otherwise is understandable of course: the pay at a newer company is speculative, the hours are maybe worse than Facebook’s, but it’s a different kind of fun, feeling like the whole place would keel over if you didn’t do your part.)

The post One in Five Facebook Employees Has No Imagination Whatsoever appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

I minded my own business, thinking of a friend at Berkeley who once saw members of a cult walking down the street toward his house. Though heterosexual, he took off all his clothes, clasped the hand of his roommate and, when the missionaries knocked, invited them in for a religious debate. I imagined the argument I would have with my seat-mate in a situation like that, sipping tea naked on a couch, atomizing her world view.

While I was busy with that, the woman opened her laptop to view some paintings of flowers. Almost involuntarily, I mumbled something about how pretty they were. She mentioned that these powerful, emotional works had been painted by people with autism and dementia. She had dedicated her life, she said, to helping them paint.

Tears didn’t actually come to my eyes until a few minutes later, when I saw the pictures of the artists next to their paintings, smiling for what seemed like the first time in a long time, oblivious of the bleak institutional setting in the background. What prompted my seat-mate to help folks whom almost everyone else had given up on?

It was another reminder that people whom I disagree with are good people, and that they are as likely to be right as I am. This has been the essential humbling experience of life in my 30s, especially of my life running a startup. You see how many surprising shapes and sizes good people come in, and occasionally get zinged with how fallible you are.

Whereas my imaginary argument with my seat-mate had made me feel smug but still bad, my actual experience of her made me feel good. It’s an experience I’m lucky to have had, not just on the plane, but over and over again at work.

The reason most people have fixed opinions is that they get tired of never seeing them enacted, but I get to see my ideas in action every month at Redfin. We try out beloved website features & make hiring decisions, and discover they sometimes don’t work out. The rubber meets the road. The crazy woman speaks.

In this way, a startup turns you into both the lab rat struggling desperately to survive and the lab scientist standing back and measuring his performance. It gives you less patience with the ideologues telling you what the rat should have done.

If more people could see that the measurable, indisputable outcome of getting your way was sometimes disconcertingly bad — if reality could surprise you more with how often people you wrote off turn out to be your savior — we might stop listening to the smug partisans on talk radio, the outlandish political candidates in both parties, the outraged voices in our own heads.

And, stuck in the middle, we might get more out of our crowded, lonely flight across America.

The post The Crazy Woman Speaks appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Conventional wisdom would tell you that homes sell better when they have listing photos that were taken by a professional photographer, like the photo on the left.

Professional Photo

Amateur Photo

Never ones to be satisfied with conventional wisdom, we turned to the numbers to answer the question at the top of every seller’s mind when deciding how to market their home. Is it truly worth the money to pay for professional photography? At Redfin we believe in the power of professional photography. Every house that is listed with our brokerage is marketed with professional photos, and we pick up the tab. So, is it worth the dough?

It turns out that in most cases the answer is a resounding, “Yes!”

As The Wall Street Journal reports today, “listings with nicer photos gain anywhere between $934 and $116,076.”  The graph clearly shows that you are likely to receive thousands more if you list your home using DSLR photography than if you used a simple point-n-shoot camera to take the photos yourself.

Since the price of a DSLR camera (anywhere from $500 to $1,000+) is generally out of the price range of your average hobbyist, let us assume that photos shot with DSLR cameras are shot by professionals. Since professional photos could net you thousands more on the sale of your home, it stands to reason that spending the $100 – $500 on professional photos is a worthy investment of your marketing dollars.

Given this obvious upside, it is shocking that only 15.4% of homes in our data set were marketed using professional photography. The majority of listings, 80.9%, were photographed using point-n-shoot photography, and still another 0.7% used just a camera phone. Let’s not mince words: If you are not using professional photography to market your home, you are not really marketing your home.

A few more interesting tidbits that came from our analyses:

Homes shot with a DSLR camera:

• Receive an average of 61% more views than their peers across all price tiers.
• Have a 47% higher asking price per square foot.
• Have an increased likelihood of selling for homes priced above $300,000.
• Stay on the market an average of 10 days longer across all price tiers.

Homes with professional photographs get more page views and ultimately sell for a higher price, but they surprisingly take slightly longer to sell.

The post A Picture is Worth a Thousand Dollars. True or False? appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

The coffee shop proprietor, Jessie Burke, was shocked at how much money the daily deals site charged to run the promotion. Groupon sold consumers a $13 Posie’s credit for $6, and then sought to keep the entire $6. Eventually, Posie’s and Groupon agreed on a 50% cut: Groupon would get $3 and Posie’s would get $3. Groupon’s $3 was almost pure profit,  but the cafe had to use its remaining $3 to cover the costs of $13 worth of cookies and coffee.

Is it any surprise the promotion was a smash? Over 1,000 customers used the promotion, but the cost imposed by those customers resulted in disastrous losses:

After three months of Groupons coming through the door, I started to see the results really hurting us financially. There came a time when we literally couldn’t not make payroll because at that point in time we had lost nearly $8,000 with our Groupon campaign. We literally had to take $8,000 out of our personal savings to cover payroll and rent that month. It was sickening, especially after our sales had been rising.

The losses would have been worthwhile if the Groupon customers had become loyal, profitable patrons but many only cared about a discount, not about what made the cafe special:

Over the six months that the Groupon is valid, we met many, many wonderful new customers, and were so happy to have them join the Posies family. At the same time we met many, many terrible Groupon customers… customers that didn’t follow the Groupon rules and used multiple Groupons for single transactions, and argued with you about it with disgusted looks on their faces or who tipped based on what they owed.

This is a lesson with which Redfin is very familiar. We’ve learned through our own painful experience to think like a shop-keeper rather than a web entrepreneur, focusing on happy, profitable customers rather than growth at any cost: if you don’t make money on the first widget, stop making widgets.

We’ve also learned that the customers you attract only with a discount will disregard what you love about your own business, and won’t treat you with respect; both sides usually regret the transaction.

As the grandmother of our VP of Engineering, Sasha Aickin, once said: When you buy something cheap and bad, the best you’re going to feel about it is when you buy it. When you buy something expensive and good, the worst you’re going to feel about it is when you buy it. This is why Redfin’s goal has always been to use technology to make real estate better, not just cheaper. 

And finally we’ve learned to be wary of fancy approaches to advertising return on investment. Whenever I hear a Groupon-type pitch — the old advertising saw about the lifetime value of a customer — I assume what they’re selling in some small but important way defies common sense.

The world has lavished praise on Groupon’s business model and for good reason: it’s one of the fastest-growing companies on the web. The challenge with the model isn’t making money for Groupon, but making money for its customers, the recession-pinched merchants giving away their coffee at a loss.

Building sustainable partnerships with low-margin small businesses is hard; it probably involves some level of shared risk, with pricing based on long-term profits rather than short-term revenues. Groupon can do this, but first it has to try.

The post Groupon’s Success Disaster appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

I thought of this because I was just reading Bill’s goofy comments at a Boy Scout ceremony, about weaving baskets and hiking 50 miles. His father, who has campaigned tirelessly for taxing the wealthy to fund education and balance the budget, talked about how proud he was of Bill, not as a titan of industry, but in a much humbler role: as  a good citizen.

The article’s image of Bill smiling mildly seemed like a miracle. He seemed happy with himself, not miserable about his competitors, or anxious about his next million-dollar toy.

That’s quite a trick. A Plumtree customer who met Bill in the early ’90′s, away from Microsoft, described him only as “intensely awkward.” Most prodigies are isolated by the intensity of their own thoughts, bereft by their distance from the businesses they created, unable to resist the urge to second-guess their successors.

And most have no idea what to do with their money, except to focus on buildings bearing their name, colleges that will admit their children or win a football championship, symphonies that will toast them on opening night.

Those are good causes, too. But Bill Gates is spending his money, time and passion on folks who are mostly invisible to the rest of the world, who don’t necessarily share our values, who will never be able to thank him, who probably don’t even know who he is.

Bill has won plenty of accolades for his foundation, but more from the world of charities and doctors than from us. When the digerati last year launched a rallying cry to give entrepreneurs the Nobel Prize, it was for the founders of Twitter, not Bill Gates. Undoubtedly, the Twitter folks are visionaries who deserve all that’s coming to them. But Bill has been embraced more warmly by others than by his own.

Why do you think Silicon Valley has never quite come around on this guy? He deserves better.

The post Bill Gates, Hero appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

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.

The post UP AND OVER, UP AND OVER COME ON! appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

But the Times didn’t talk to iLike President Hadi Partovi, or Zillow.com CEO Rich Barton, both entrepreneurs who, like many of the folks at Redfin, shuttle between Seattle and Silicon Valley. None of us thinks Seattle is ever going to be much like Silicon Valley. We believe instead that what other cities can learn from Seattle is how to be different than the Valley, not the same.

In reality, most places don’t even want to try to be like the Valley. Seattle has become unrecognizably wealthier in the past decade, yet is oddly unhappy about it. Many Seattleites wish we were still a modest boreal town rather than a Microsoft-Amazon megapolis. The question I am most often asked here is where I went to high school — twenty years ago — not what I’m doing next.

The Valley by contrast is a heartless amnesiac. In my 16 years there I can’t recall anyone’s ever expressing nostalgia for how it used to be. This is probably because almost no one in Silicon Valley has any idea how it used to be. Internet guru Michael Arrington often opens conferences by asking audience-members from Silicon Valley to raise their hands and then, if they were born in the Valley, to keep their hands raised. Hands go up and down like The Wave.

And this is what Michael loves about the Valley: that it calls out at dog-whistle frequencies to nerds across America, Russia, India and China. The single-mindedness of their migration belongs in National Geographic. My first roommate spent four years building a company in San Francisco without ever buying furniture. When his startup went bust, he packed for the trip home to Toronto the same day.

Seattle is different. People live in Seattle because they love Seattle. When I was still looking for a reason to be here myself, I often asked Redfin recruits what brought them to town. The answer I always hoped for was “CONQUEST.” But what everyone talked about was something I still barely understand: the lifestyle and schools, the mountains and lakes. “Do you have any idea,” I finally told one candidate, “how bizarre it is to swim in a lake at the center of a city?”

Failure to appreciate a lake is viewed by many Seattleites as a sign of mental illness. But the Valley’s monomania is really just a kind of pubescence. What else could account for the Valley’s self-righteousness, its congregations of frustrated dudes, its all-nighters, idealism, delusions of grandeur, mood-swings, longings, dramas, hero-worship and pranks? Anywhere else by contrast seems all grown-up.

No one in the Valley can afford to grow up. Just as stressful environments delay the onset of sexual maturity in marsupials, a high cost of living – a two-bedroom house in Palo Alto typically costs more than $1.5 million — prevents people from buying homes and having children. In Silicon Valley, Seattle’s 28 year-old family man is still working his tail off for a hit.

The Hogwarts of Silicon Valley
The other source of Silicon Valley’s youthfulness is, in fact, places like Seattle. Seattle has some of America’s best high schools, but sends many of its best computer science students to California.

The founders of Apple, Google, Intel, Sun and Yahoo! all graduated from Berkeley or Stanford; an enormous graduating class seeks to follow in their footsteps every year. The whole state of Washington produces about 150 computer science graduates a year.

Stanford in particular is not just the source of Silicon Valley’s manpower but its magic. Guy Kawasaki says it is “the single biggest reason for Silicon Valley’s existence.” And as Hadi notes, “very few colleges spit out 21-year-olds who think they can be the next Jerry Yang or Larry Page.” It’s painful for those of us never admitted to Stanford to marvel at its sunny rejection of failure, its Hadron-sized Internet connections, its courses on venture capital and Facebook, its magnificent sense of entitlement.

Yet we all know that without Stanford the Valley would grow old and die. Native Seattleites hardly notice Seattle’s Stanfordlessness; Valley expats never get over it.

Rotarians and Pirates
This is not to say that Seattle is all bad for entrepreneurs, only that the ways in which it is good only show how different it is compared to Silicon Valley. Start with Seattle’s Rotary Club, the largest in the world. High-tech entrepreneurs are expected to be pillars of the business community here, not, as Silicon Valley’s establishment likes to think of itself, pirates of the Caribbean.

At one of the first conferences I attended in Seattle, I was shocked to hear a speaker talk about how to improve K-12 math education, not how to hack a Tivo. It took a while to realize that “K” stood for kindergarten, not kilobytes. But this mindset connects us to a set of civic virtues bigger than any one company. It’s why I’m optimistic about Seattle over the long haul.

And it has nurtured a rookie CEO like me. A Seattle journalist e-mailed me while I was still loading the tiny U-Haul that brought me here. A VC who should have eaten my gizzard for breakfast invited me to his lake house for dinner. A startup CEO who offered money-raising advice over lunch diverted us from Quiznos to Carmines. Redfin is better because of their help.

Far from the Madding Crowd
Few people would have had the time to help in Silicon Valley. The chaos of newcomers and the desperation of those who want to stay make the Valley seem like a capital about to fall in a coup. Dingbat ideas are scattered like pennies on a sidewalk. Overlooking last night’s website launch is like showing up at a party with last year’s purse.

The cult of the new may seem like madness but here’s the method to it: what’s often most difficult about developing a new idea is figuring out if it’s already an old idea. A business just like the one you’ve been dreaming of may already be forming within Google, or preparing to launch on its own.

When you and everyone you know spend 18 hours a day downloading, hacking, breaking, sharing, gossiping, criticizing and arguing about the Web, it’s easier to tell when an idea is truly new. And if you don’t, it’s almost impossible to catch up.

This is why Hadi says so many Seattle entrepreneurs develop ideas late. We aren’t slow; just out of the loop. Even Seattle’s greatest two start-ups, Amazon and Microsoft, were first conceived somewhere else.

But being apart from Silicon Valley can give entrepreneurs the latitude to think about what works, not what’s fashionable. It was, at first, hard for me to break out of the Valley mindset. My initial question in setting Redfin’s course wasn’t “Is there a business here?” but “Is it cool?”

Because Redfin’s business — real estate — isn’t cool. And taking on the messy business of serving customers directly definitely isn’t cool. But some of the best – and most meaningful — new ventures may be the ones that combine old and new business models, experience and youthful recklessness, perseverance and opportunism. And it is these ventures that really seem to belong in Seattle.

Loyal to a Fault
Because if it turns out that Zillow, iLike or Redfin are on to something good, it may be easier to build a long-term business in Seattle. Ten years on at Microsoft, engineers deep in Redmond’s rain forests are still writing the next version of Office. Meanwhile the engineers at Google are, as Zillow’s Rich Barton points out, plotting their next startup on the company dime.

I’m not sure which engineers one would rather have, but it is true that there is a blue-collar dedication in Seattle that you don’t find in the ADD-addled Valley. “You work hard here because it’s gray,” Rich writes. “Then you go hiking or fishing or skiing.”

I really like that advice. Unfazed by any heavy weather ahead, Rich keeps chugging along and having fun. And Seattle does, too.

Thanks to Rich Barton, CEO of real estate portal Zillow.com, and to Hadi Partovi, president of music discovery startup iLike, for their help.

The post How Green Was My Valley appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

I’ve been asked by many of my friends and family why I decided to leave my position at Microsoft, where I was appreciated and rewarded, for more work, more responsibility, and more stress. Well, the decision was mainly a result of three factors. First, someday I may start my own company, and transitioning from a startup makes that much easier. Second, I didn’t agree with many of Microsoft’s decisions and direction. Third, I wanted to build a product that would really cater to consumers and could stand on its own.

Almost all the top engineers I know talk ad nauseum about starting their own company, with the caveat of, “I’ll stay at big company XYZ for 2-3 years, then I’ll go out on my own.” Well, it never made sense to me how they thought that they could make the transition from being so removed from the business and the end to end process of creating and shipping a product. Working at a startup, you’re about as close as you can be to running your own business, and you don’t have to spend nearly all of your time and effort trying to raise money. For instance, the only financial statements I ever saw at Microsoft were quarterly reports (as a shareholder), and even those were a mystery. At Redfin, we get to see all of our financials, like pro forma cash flow statements that we might show to investors, and are encouraged to understand it and ask questions. Even raw talent can’t make up for this kind of experience.

While I was at Microsoft, many things didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t understand the massive “re-orgs”, which, if you hadn’t heard about ahead of time, it meant nothing material changed for you. I didn’t understand why we’d try to enter dominated markets with an uncompetitive offering. I didn’t understand those little table tents on the cafeteria tables or the giant banners and posters promoting intranet websites. I didn’t understand why site searches on MSDN were abysmal. I wasn’t the only one who was confused. Minimsft would try to speculate about a re-org or an acquisition. And on popular internal aliases like “litebulb”, for instance, there’d be email threads where people would ask why Vista had 6 (ok, 8) SKUs, why Zune wouldn’t work with PlaysForSure, why their product had to be renamed from something cool to something like Windows Communication Framework, or why there were 2 confusing boxes on local.live.com (or so adverse to just calling it “maps.live.com” in the first place). Legitimate questions often got defensive responses. To paraphrase one developer, “Why are these responses always along the lines of, ‘We know what we’re doing’? Personally, I’d welcome the feedback, because that’s how I’ll improve. Why can’t you provide the reasons that led to your decision?” I couldn’t have agreed more.

Once I had decided I was leaving the company, I spent a lot of time trying to find the startup I’d be most passionate about. It sounds arrogant, but good software engineers can pretty much choose where they want to go. And it’s nearly frictionless to change jobs these days. You can post your resume up on Monster and get daily calls and emails. So, you do your homework and find a startup that really appeals to you. I was definitely not looking for some me-too social networking site or some company that was funded purely based on its management team’s connections. When I found Redfin, I knew it was just what I was looking for. During my home buying process a few years ago, I was convinced the real estate industry needed some serious changes. For instance, searching online required clicking in a multiple highlight box with 50 neighborhoods I’d never heard of, but I checked them anyways just in case they were somewhere near where I wanted to live. After much research, I learned that my agent would probably be getting a 3% commission when I bought a house. It wasn’t a “free” service as many led me to believe. Ten grand to drive me around and guilt me into buying a house I didn’t feel was right for me? Redfin’s scrappiness and audaciousness to battle it out with the traditional agents, brokerages, and MLSs on behalf of consumers like me was very appealing.

Startups aren’t for everyone. But for any of you on the fence and considering the startup world, here’s my advice:
- Plan for the future. Thinking about what I could accomplish in 5 years at a well established company versus a nascent one intrigued me. You’ll have much more influence over the development of an infant than you will a 30 year old, and the rewards should be commensurate.

- If you refer to your company in the third-person, or have to ‘beat’ the system to be productive, it’s a bad sign. (One rumor at Microsoft was that your group should spend exactly 100% of its budget/headcount, otherwise ‘they’ would cut next years.)

- Make sure your whole company feels like one team. Ballmer once joked at a company meeting, “Why do the different groups only clap for themselves?”

- Be as important to the company as it is to you. In a technology startup, the people ARE the startup. Our CEO reminds us, “The company’s only assets walk out the door every night.”

- Consider working where there are no sacred cows. Don’t like something? Be able change it!

- And finally, to quote Paul Glen, “Never underestimate the power of free food.”

The post Will Work For Food: Why I Left Microsoft for a Startup appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

We only get one shot at the explanation because returning visitors see a view of our map as they left it on their last visit. Many are so thunderstruck by Redfin’s search superpowers that they never realize we have to make a living buying and selling homes.

When we surveyed our customers about what they wanted to see on the home page 58% asked for an explanation of our commission refund, 47% for an overview of our company, and 45% for a step-by-step guide to the process. But you should just say what you want: even though this blog is by and for people at an absurd remove from reality, please don’t feel like you have to channel anyone normal. It never works.

Here are the choices, which you can click to enlarge:

1. Illustrated explanation of the buying process:

2. Photo illustration of the buying process:

3. Who we are, in paragraph form:

4. Who we are, in bullet form:

Tell us which one you like first, second, third and last; suggest modifications or an entirely new treatment. Thanks to Savan Kong, Jason Wu, Michael Young, Matt Goyer, Jeff Yee, Marc Singer, Dana Irming, Bryan Selner, Leo Shklovskii and many others for their input so far. And thanks to everybody else for your feedback now…

We’ll also post a link to Redfin Forums, too.

The post Vote Early, Vote Often appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.