Redfin on TechCrunch: The Maximum, Beautiful Product
Happy New Year! On the last day of 2012, Redfin published The Maximum, Beautiful Product, a TechCrunch post questioning whether the lean startup’s relentlessly incremental approach to shipping the minimum viable product is likely to lead to big technology breakthroughs: If Steve Jobs had shipped the minimum viable iPhone, might we have concluded that people… Read More
Alone, Just the Two of Us
I’d just sat down last month for a chat with the CEO of a very successful startup when his co-founder, the company’s chairman, walked into our coffee-shop. The two had been apart for a few minutes, but the chairman made such a beeline for us that I worried he wanted my pastry. He was in… Read More
Never Tell Me the Odds
In a board call last month, I finally told everyone that the commission savings that Redfin offers home sellers and buyers dramatically lowers our profits margins and there is no evidence that it drives more revenue. We have, I told our investors, given away $100 million because of my irrational belief that Redfin was put… Read More
Big news! Scott Farquhar, CEO of Atlassian, is coming by Redfin’s San Francisco office next Thursday, April 12, as the latest speaker in our series of brown-bag talks about how to start your own business. Atlassian is the maker of JIRA and Confluence, software for teams building products. Scott and I got to know each… Read More
“Greed,” Gordon Gekko once declared, “is good.” Oliver Stone’s private-equity titan was referring to the process of creative destruction, in which ravenous corporate raiders strip a businesses to its bones in three months flat. Venture capitalists have the same simple attitude toward growth: growth is good. Their fish of choice is not a piranha but… Read More
The great venture capitalist Ben Horowitz wrote last night about how the investors in his own startup once told him they wanted a real CEO. What struck me about the essay, which was mostly about how Andressen Horowitz helps founding entrepreneurs develop into great leaders, was Ben’s striking response to the insult: he acknowledged the… Read More
Just before I joined Redfin, I’d wanted to start a company but my brother got sick and I fell in love and soon I was in Seattle. What I never forgot was the lawyer who was going to help us incorporate that business, Ilan Lovinsky, a partner at Gunderson Dettmer, and brother of the great… Read More
Absurd Ideas that Have Gone through My Mind While Working at Redfin over the Years: Goth Fridays Everyone Wear Red Pants Just Like Glenn Day! Everyone Dress like Vice President of Real Estate Operations, Scott Nagel Day! (We actually got this one to happen…) Redfin: The Movie (Casting occurs with every new hire…) The plot… Read More
At last Thursday’s SIC conference, Tricia Duryee asked why online real estate companies have prospered in Seattle. One panelist cited low home prices, which let young entrepreneurs buy homes they could never afford in Silicon Valley, and from there begin to wonder how real estate could be better. Another suggestion was that HouseValues’ roaring 2004 IPO… Read More
There has been over the past 18 months a Cambrian explosion of startup life, many incubated by angels and seed funds. And now the process of natural selection is beginning again. I got back from the Valley Thursday and what I gathered from the people there is the same as what I’ve heard here: that… Read More