All You Have to Do Is Ask: How to Hire Smart People Everywhere
Many years ago, one of Redfin’s investors asked Sean Moriarty, former TicketMaster CEO, to take me to lunch. Sean asked only two questions: “Are you some kind of star-f****er?” (I’d breathlessly inquired, as if it wasn’t self-evident, what David Lee Roth was really like) and “Do you have an eye for talent?” “Well,” I said,… Read More
Redfin has hired Tom Vogl as our chief marketing officer. It once seemed hard to ask a total stranger to be the ambassador for Redfin’s brand: of the ten people now on our management team, only one prior to Tom hadn’t been promoted from within Redfin. But almost immediately, we began to feel that Tom… Read More
The Occupy Wall Street protests once seemed so futile to me. You just can’t stop smart people from making money, and I’m not really sure why you’d want to. But it turns out you can persuade those people to make money by doing something useful beyond lining up on either side of a financial bet. They… Read More
October is the quietest month at Redfin. The interns leave in September, and the new recruits don’t visit the office until November. In the mountains, it begins to rain but hasn’t yet snowed. Before our thoughts turn to the holidays, we wanted to take a moment to thank last summer’s interns. Redfin’s engineering, products and… Read More
Redfin, Madrona Venture Group and eight other startups today launched a new program to recruit computer-science students to work in the Seattle area as interns this summer. The selection process is rigorous but it’s a sweet deal for the finalists: not only do you get to interview at a who’s who of Seattle startups all… Read More
Whoa! Shocking news, guys. An engineer left Google for Facebook. The great Lars Rasmussen, creator of Google Maps and Google Wave, quit Google Thursday to join Facebook. This has, admittedly, happened before. In June, Matthew Papakipos defected from Google’s Chrome team. In May, it was mobile guru Erick Tseng. Even Facebook’s chef, Josef Desimone, was recruited… Read More
Roger Ehrenberg just posted an essay about why Harvard students prefer Goldman Sachs to a 15-person startup, which I found via Chris Dixon’s excellent Twitter feed. Roger speculates that “many equate start-up enterprises with uncertainty and fear, and only appropriate for those with massive risk tolerances.” This seems to me like the thinking of someone with… Read More
Redfin can be a fun place to work. Not because we have catered lunches or dazzling offices or happy hours or ski trips or push-up contests or cycling races or cook-outs or high-speed, demolition-derby scavenger hunts, but mostly because we try very hard to be a good place to work: my bonus depends on employee happiness…. 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
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