“Well,” I said, expecting the conversation to take a better turn, “I like to think I know a good egg when I see one.”

“That just means you have no idea what you’re looking for,” Sean said. “Nobody can tell just like that if someone’s going to be a good hire. You have to work at it.”

It’s a problem I think about all the time, since I interview someone almost every day of my life. Google is famous for systematically tracking which interviewers are better at predicting the candidates who will thrive but a friend there told me the company concluded no one is much better than anyone else.

This conundrum came to mind at a TechStars talk last week when an engineer asked me how she could hire good marketers without knowing much about marketing herself.

All of us start from one area of expertise, but our first challenge as an entrepreneur is to hire folks from the other areas. Engineers worry their hard work will be overlooked because a marketing guru can’t deliver the buzz. Business folks entrust overseas coders to bring their million-dollar idea to life.

It’s a crapshoot, but you can raise your odds if you treat everyone the same, using the interview to dig into her work. The problem is, most engineers and business people interview one another like the Europeans in “Barcelona.” As one American in the movie gleefully reports to another, it never occurs to a Spaniard that an American is just being an ass; instead they just assume “it’s some national characteristic.”

That kind of deference in an interview is your enemy. Once you hire someone, you have to defer to her expertise, which means that before you hire someone you can’t. Engineers who can’t explain ideas clearly in the interview usually don’t code clearly. Marketing folks who seem slick in the interview won’t represent what you stand for in a genuine way. Fortune-500 guys who only talk about the big picture won’t get nitty-gritty about the work you need done.

Be Stupid
I used to nod knowingly at candidates slinging the most outrageous baloney, just so I didn’t look stupid. Now, if I don’t know what Node.JS is, or why someone would buy Windows Live Mesh, or how ad re-targeting works, I say, “I’m sorry, can you explain that to me?” And then, rather than accepting an explanation I still don’t understand, I usually ask a follow-up question: “Can you explain it to me like I’m a four year-old?”

Being stupid gives the candidate a chance to be smart: the candidate has to understand an idea down to its bones to explain it in the simplest terms. My first manager, David Lichtblau, saw on my resume that I liked physics and so asked me in my interview to explain special relativity to him, handing me a marker as if I were going to jot out the math, or depict a Fitzgerald contraction graphically. He told me the last candidate had done general relativity.

Halfway through, I realized with a flood of relief that he himself hadn’t brushed up on relativity, so I could tell him anything. But he was too tenacious for that. By the end, I found myself trying to account for the shape of the universe using the new bogus law of physics I had concocted on his white board. It took a long time, and I tried to avoid it at all costs, but what that finally forced me to do was think.

Hire Smart People Everywhere
What’s most impressive about Dave’s tenacity is what he was using it for: to hire someone to document and test a programming interface no outsider ever had, or ever would, use. Someone at that first startup had a saying, “Hire smart people everywhere,” to which my new boss gleefully added, “even for your job.”

In reality, deference can be a form of hopelessness, based on the premise that someone in a role other than yours doesn’t need to be smart, or couldn’t possibly be smart. Wrong. You can expect a human resources professional, an accountant, a salesman, a publicist, an engineer to be brilliant, and brilliance in any field is self-evident. More important, you can always judge the quality of someone’s energy, whether she has soul, how she makes other people feel. If you’re not excited about someone, regardless of her role, pass.

But most hiring managers think they have to settle for the stereotypes: a pretty face for PR, an accountant who lost his sense of curiosity in a tragic medical accident, an HR bureaucrat. These are the atoms of your being as a company, and if they are mediocre, the company will be mediocre.

“Show Your Work, Please”
Deference also prevents you from seeing someone’s work. There’s a tendency for interviews to be about someone’s work: you talk about the passion rather than showing actual passion. The first lesson I learned in interviewing was to focus on specific examples rather than generalities. You can’t ask someone if she’ll work really hard, but you can ask her to tell you about a time she did: how long ago was it, how long did it last, what did she get done, how does she feel about it now?

But even more important is to ask the candidate to do the work, not just talk about it. Ask a publicist to write the first paragraph of a press release, or a product manager to develop a feature idea, an agent to write a contract, or a salesman to pitch you on his last product. Coding challenges are widely accepted in engineering interviews – we’ve had engineers turn us down because our coding challenges weren’t hard enough — but are often viewed as cruel and unusual elsewhere.

Our chairman, Paul Goodrich, asks would-be executives at Redfin to present their point of view to the entire board. I apologize to big-shot candidates when asking them to do this, but really I love it. You want an interview loop to be as close as possible to someone’s first four hours on the job.

For a candidate who loves her work, this request won’t be onerous or off-putting; it will be exhilarating. At one nadir of my professional life, I interviewed for a job as a bicycle messenger. I showed up in my good outfit. The hiring manager, a large 50-something with a gigantic ash-tray in front of her, was the dispatcher, routing messengers to pick up packages. To start the interview, she leaned back and looked me over with an appraising eye. Then she said, “Can you run in place?

“Here?” I said. “Now?” She nodded gravely. I began to run in place. She returned her attention to her black-and-white portable TV, looking up after two minutes to see that I was still enthusiastically hopping around. “You’ve got the job,” she said.

Best interview ever.

The post All You Have to Do Is Ask: How to Hire Smart People Everywhere appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

But almost immediately, we began to feel that Tom was one of us. Halfway through our first dinner together, Tom made a stray comment about having an unusual nickname from his time running Dell in Brazil. I looked up at from the blast-radius of bread-parts and beet salad that had, until that moment, been my evening’s main focus.

“What was the nickname?” I said.

“Well, I used to be called ‘The Machine,’” Tom said. “It wasn’t always a compliment.”

“I’ve been called ‘The Beast,” I said. “It’s one of the nicest things anyone ever said to me.”

And then I knew Redfin would hire Tom. He started last week.

For nearly six years before that, Tom ran marketing for REI, a co-op that happens to embody some of Redfin’s most cherished values. As a mission-driven retailer that, even in a savagely margin-sensitive industry, puts customers and employees before profits, REI has its fair share of ex-hippies and tree-huggers.

And so do we. The first time Tom met me for coffee, he looked the part: he was wearing a rock-climbing outfit with those crazy all-rubber shoes, having just descended the summit of a lonely peak. It became clear then why Tom had dedicated himself to building the REI brand. He was the REI brand.

It isn’t easy to find someone who is both a machine and a hippie, a believer and a beast. The people who are the most driven are usually the ones driven by all the wrong things.

And at Redfin, what drives you matters. After all, we aren’t just trying to draw attention to a media site. We’re trying to make our case — that real estate can be different, that the Redfin agent you see on our site puts customers, not commissions first — that we’re worth a shot. It’s a great leap of faith for our customers, and, for us, perhaps the greatest marketing challenge on the Internet. If we don’t believe, no one else will.

And so we interviewed folks for chief marketing officer who had hyped bogus diet pills, doomed websites and dubious financial services, but could never get excited by a hired gun. After every interview, Redfin’s Matt Goyer would shake his head and say, “Doesn’t love Redfin enough.” He reminded me of a Jewish mother-in-law. No one was good enough for his child.

But finally Matt and the rest of the team found someone not only good, but absolutely, insanely great. We popped the question, and the rest is history. Over the next year you’ll probably see from Redfin, for the first time in our history, a significant investment in marketing.

Part of this is because of the expertise Tom brings, and part of this is because we’re finally growing up, with a service we think everyone should try. We need to tell the world about it. Mostly, we’ll do this without marketing — through our own website and mobile tools — so we can spend more of our money giving consumers the best tools and the most value and giving our agents great pay.

But with the arrival of Tom and of another great marketer, Kuba Poraj-Kuczewski, we will also probably begin to advertise at larger scale, across the web and other media. I’m glad we held out in our earliest days against advertising, but also glad we are open to it now.

Of course, Tom’s importance goes beyond being a mouthpiece for the brand. Marketing at its best is every sensory organ for a business, its eyes, skin and ears, listening to customers and refining the entire Redfin experience – from the first website visit to the final closing — based on what we learn.

Not many people have the brainpower, the empathy, the moral authority or the belief to do that. Tom does. Welcome Tom!

The post The Machine and the Beast appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

I’ve spent 15 years making that case, often to the Winklevoss types Wall Street loves to hire: folks from elite schools, with high grades, a history of leadership, strong math skills, a broad education. Every year Wall Street paid more, with Bridgewater now offering college graduates $130,000, and every year recruiting got harder.

The same starry-eyed idealists who spent the first third of their life digging wells in Tibet and marching for every crunchy cause would chuck it all after graduation to run numbers for a bank. But that is changing this year.

Redfin is interviewing at least a dozen Ivy-League students, many studying the disciplines of math, philosophy and economics that Wall Street loves, who refused even to consider finance. Many worked on Wall Street last summer, but recently decided that wherever their career takes them next spring, it won’t be to a hedge fund.

I’m sure New York-based start-ups, venture capitalists and even management consulting firms are seeing the same trend: recruiting against Wall Street got much easier this year.

What changed? Part of it may be “The Social Network,” which made a sort of poetry out of writing software alone. Part of it may be the beatification of Steve Jobs. But at least part of the reason has to be that Occupy Wall Street has stigmatized a career in finance. The first slide of Redfin’s standard talk for Ivy League campuses begins with the headline, “Consider the Alternatives,” and shows poor Lloyd Blankfein squirming before a Congressional lynch mob.

These are the images that matter. Previous critiques of Wall Street failed because they were rational: Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” and Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker nominally deplored Wall Street’s excess while reveling in its glamour. Who after all would you rather be, the virile corporate raider Gordon Gekko or the aging union boss played by Martin Sheen? Believe me, no one at Yale in the ’80s seriously considered a life at Bluestar Airlines. But now many I’m sure want to be like Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network.”

The Occupy Wall Street protesters are finishing the job, re-casting Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe in a more disdainful light. Like the animal-rights activists who splatter fur-wearing women with blood, these protesters are people you just don’t want to walk by every day on your way to work. No matter how easily you can dismiss the logic of their arguments, their presence might  make you feel dismayed, shamed, tainted, unsavory. How many 21-year-olds are ready to sign up for that?

Probably not as many. And this I think will be the most serious outcome of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It won’t result in any legislation that stymies Wall Street’s essential money-making powers, but it may in fact divert some of our best and brightest away from Wall Street and toward careers creating more useful products, and more jobs.

Though I respect the work that bankers do, and would far prefer that America rather than China or the United Kingdom dominate the financial services market, I think having more of our best and brightest work on Main Street rather than Wall Street is is a good direction for America, and I’m glad to see it happening now. You can’t fight the beast, and in many cases we shouldn’t try to anyway, but maybe we can starve it for a little talent.

The post Starve the Beast appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Before our thoughts turn to the holidays, we wanted to take a moment to thank last summer’s interns. Redfin’s engineering, products and marketing teams are notorious for piling the responsibilities onto young recruits, but this year’s group delivered the goods:

• Seth Goldenberg used machine-learning algorithms to predict which homes will sell, and also developed two new versions of the iPhone app once featured in Apple’s national TV ads. He’s re-joining us for a full-time job this winter.

• Daniel Petkevich produced, directed and shot a video of our top-rated Android application, ran a direct-mail campaign and single-handedly placed over a dozen Redfin stories in the local press. Since there isn’t a single quiet spot in the whole Redfin office, he shot the video from underneath a fire blanket. Now Daniel has made it his personal mission to persuade every Yale student to apply for a job at Redfin, which we appreciate. We’ll have the world’s  best company orchestra!

• Hardeep Uppal processed 100 gigabytes of data in Hadoop, then used Pig, Map/Reduce, and Hive to report on how revenue-producing customers use our site differently than everyone else. Hardeep is also a DJ. In the picture below, Hardeep is the one who is embarrassed at how much Daniel loves to show off his body.

• Ji Mun helped to revamp our online agent profiles, letting users vote customer reviews up or down; she also dived into machine-learning algorithms for automated home recommendations. Ji became famous for her hats.

• Coral Peterson built a dynamic tool for marketing listings that our home-selling customers love. As you can see from the photo, Redfin gave Coral an iPad at the end of her summer here, and a bong made out of tube socks.

• Kevin Thai analyzed some of our six million+ listings on a Hadoop cluster to find ways to automatically improve data quality, one of our primary sources of competitive advantage. Probably the best football player we’ve ever recruited.

• April Alexander: led a design team that increased the rates at which users signed up to become Redfin customers, with the potential to increase our 2012 performance by millions of dollars.  April is also re-joining us this winter.

Seth, Daniel, Hardeep, Ji Mun, Coral, Kevin, April and others, thanks to all of you for your dazzling work. You probably expected to sit around waiting for the next Costco order, but all of you went on a high-productivity rampage.

If you’re in Seattle for the holidays, come by the office and we’ll all go out to dinner. And if you decide to venture beyond Redfin for a permanent position, let me know where and I’ll tell your new boss to give you more money!

College students interested in working at Redfin for next summer or for a permanent position, just check out what we’re hiring for and throw your hat into the ring!

The post So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish! appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

And if you could have a summer internship anywhere in the world, it should probably be in Seattle. For three short months, the place is absolutely daft with greenery, sunshine and joy. I’ll organize a picnic atop Mount Dickerman, or a sail on Lake Union. The Redfin Cycling Team will institute a no-drop policy for one morning only, just to accommodate all the wannabes who join us in the warm months. We’ll have a lot of fun.

If you know folks who should apply, send ‘em here, and soon: the application deadline is March 10, but since it’s a rolling selection process, earlier is better.

The post A Few Good Interns… 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.

To my mind, fear that a startup will fail isn’t why Ivy-League graduates spurn startups. At least when I interviewed for a job out of college, it never occurred to me that a startup could fail. The startup was run by adults, and my relationship to adults was defined by their judging whether I succeeded or failed, not the other way ’round. Few college-level candidates have ever asked about Redfin’s financial performance, even when we had less than three months of cash in the bank.

So if it isn’t the risk of failure, what is it? I think the reason that startups struggle to recruit out of the Ivy League is more subtle:  startups just don’t seem elite to someone who has spent her whole life pursuing ever-more elite institutions. Since you aren’t likely to persuade a Harvard graduate that status doesn’t matter, you have to persuade her that your startup can confer status.

The status problem becomes evident when you compare a start-up to Goldman, then to Harvard. Harvard is self-evidently discriminating; like Goldman, it is notorious for interviewing many and accepting few. To college graduates who still believe in the Wizard of Oz, the bespoke suits and penthouse suites simply define new strata of ambition. By contrast, a start-up has ratty carpet and goofy people, who tend to be either anti-social or over-eager — or, like me, both. Few college students realize that many startups are pickier than Goldman; if the students knew how many candidates a startup rejects, more would apply.

Just as importantly, Harvard is broad, with courses in humanities, sciences, arts and engineering; Goldman covers many industries, with a wide range of abstract products like debt and equity that seem foundational to the entire economy, even intellectual. By contrast, a startup — whether it’s making real estate more consumer-friendly or inserting ads into mobile applications — can seem narrow.

What students don’t know is that banking analysts just run the same spreadsheets day after day, whereas new recruits often get to do everything at a startup. In my first few months at a startup; I wrote a white paper, learned Visual Basic and flew to Italy, where we tried to sell shrink-wrapped software at a trade-show for cash.

Moreover, Harvard is highly structured, with a four-year program defined by prerequisites, degree requirements, grades, honors criteria and graduation ceremonies. Likewise, Goldman has two-year programs, followed by business school or a promotion to the lofty title of associate. A startup has someone who will point you to a desk, and tell you to figure out for yourself how to connect to the network; where you make your way from there is anyone’s guess.

The problem isn’t that this lack of structure is intimidating; it’s that it’s potentially aimless. In my disorienting post-graduate world, the only direction I wanted from anyone was to figure out which way was up.  It was obvious at Goldman which way was up, because there were a dozen floors above you that you’d never visit until you had evolved from your current larval stage between frog turd and human.

Finally, Harvard, like Goldman, is filled with lots of people from your socioeconomic background, which you can befriend or even date. This is important when you’re moving out of the dorm and into a new city. If it recruits enough young people, a startup can function as a second dorm — it can be a sea of love — but most students don’t realize it. The only reason I joined my first startup instead of a bank or a consultancy was because I saw, during an office tour, the back of Michael Smedberg’s very young and handsome head. I thought he looked like someone who could be my friend. Seventeen years later, we are still friends.

So to recruit from the Ivy League, startups have to get elite: give recruits a brass ring to reach for, a sense of the broad responsibilities they’ll get, a structured program for touring those responsibilities, and a group of cohorts to poke on Facebook.

And yes, we have to take Roger’s advice, and speak at top universities every chance we get. Redfin, for example, is speaking on May 18, 3:30, at a University of Washington colloquium on why some universities produce entrepreneurs and others don’t. If you’d like to come, leave a comment and we’ll see if we can get you in…

(Photo credit: Mailaliasgar on Flickr)

The post Harvard, Goldman, Startup appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

It’s fun working on a cult site that people love, fun making customers deliriously happy, and fun being surrounded by smart, passionate people. It’s fun having a big, simple mission that everyone believes in, fun doubling the business every year, and fun giving everyone a say in what we do next.  It’s fun launching a new, multi-million dollar business every 18 months, and fun promoting someone from within to run it, which I hope we do every time.

But it’s hard hiring people. We can never get enough candidates, and we mostly say no. The business is growing like gangbusters, and we can’t keep up. So we’re publishing the job descriptions for a few of my favorite openings in the hope that you can help us find smart people who get things done. If you enjoy this blog, please help us out by forwarding this post around to your friends. If we hire someone you recommend, we’ll send you a gift certificate for the nicest dinner in town.

Search Software Engineer, San Francisco
We’re hiring software engineers for our downtown San Francisco office, which is where the magic happens for the entire Redfin user experience. About half of our engineers and two of our engineering executives work in San Francisco, and this is where the thought leadership is around making search social, fun and mobile. Increasingly, the San Francisco team is working on a problem that must be one of the most interesting in all of e-commerce:  getting more people to make the leap from searching a website to using that site to buy a house. Since I’m from San Francisco, I get together with the San Francisco team all the time. To get this gig, you need to be a stone-cold great coder, but also someone who likes to think about design and business strategy, with the potential to manage folks over time. Apply to sasha (dot) aickin @ redfin (dot) com.

Commerce Software Engineer, Seattle
Here in Seattle, we’re also hiring a rock-star engineer to help our commerce team build a self-service system for every step of the home-buying and -selling process. This is the system that will reinvent real estate beyond just the initial search, giving consumers transparency, control and convenience at every turn; it’s a big part of how Redfin will be the best brokerage in the country, not just the most efficient. And it’s the only way Redfin will scale its business to hundreds of our own agents and thousands of partner agents, allowing us to monitor customer-service glitches and enforce consistent standards of care, all while capturing real-time market data that we can surface back to consumers just beginning their search. Apply to gordon (dot) brown @ redfin (dot) com.

Business Analyst
On the business side, we need a number-cruncher and a big-thinker to work for one of my favorite managers at Redfin, Adam Wiener. Adam is in charge of all our new business initiatives, but he also analyzes every aspect of real estate operations. This means that every fun question that Redfin has to answer would go through you: how many customers our agents can handle really well before we refer business to partners, what we should charge for selling a home, which markets we should open next, what business model makes sense for loans and escrow services. To dig into these problems, we need someone with Freakonomics levels of curiosity and resourcefulness, big-picture thinking, and the ability to launch a Space Shuttle using Excel macros.  Apply to adam (dot) wiener @ redfin (dot) com.

Business Product Manager
If you’ve got an entrepreneurial spark, the best Redfin job might be as a business product manager for our home-buying service. This is a business generating tens of millions of dollars, in which we have done very little customer research about the characteristics of the service people want to use, or how to promote that service on our site. So your first order of business would be to figure out how to broaden our offering, and then to launch whatever new services for which you find a market. You need to be comfy with designing online and offline components of a user experience, field evangelism and training, and website analytics and optimization. This takes executive range, big brains, charisma, business savvy. Apply to matt (dot) goyer @ redfin (dot) com.

Training & Development Manager
And last but not least, we’re hiring someone to run training and employee development. In an industry where training is almost unheard of, training will be one of Redfin’s major competitive assets: how we recruit the best young agents, and how we make each one better every year. We’ll deliver training via in-person classes, a web portal, online templates, tests and study guides, all integrated into promotions and compensation changes, with extensive executive support. Since this is a people-driven business suddenly taking on a lot of people, your impact on our brand, our culture and our success will be huge. Apply to angela (dot) cough @ redfin (dot) com.

So those are some of my favorite job openings at Redfin. Except I left off the new stats product manager, the PR manager, the test engineer and all the agent positions in real estate — we alreadyget many, many applicants to be an agent. If you know of someone who might find a happy place at Redfin, please send ‘em our way! We are an equal opportunity employer.

(Photo credit: Laverrue on Flickr)

The post Join Us, and Together We Can Rule the Galaxy! appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

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 )

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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.

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