It’s fashionable these days to talk about a startup asaroller-coaster, with ups and downs, flips and flame-outs, twists and turns. There’s some truth to that, and even more drama and glamor.
But roller coaster rides last five minutes, not five years. And as any venture capitalist will tell you, the average holding period for a successful early-stage investment is now approaching seven years.
It’s a new problem. Whereas the 90′s generation of startups either went public before the bubble burst or died trying, this generation is now entering an awkward adolescence: generating revenues, growing fast, still privately held.
Many entrepreneurs didn’t expect to still be at it: in the many, manylists of heroictraits an entrepreneur is supposed to have, no one includes endurance. Yet in my experience, the most common reason startups end is not because they run out of cash but because the entrepreneur runs out of gas.
Even so, some dispute that endurance is desirable, let alone important. When an entrepreneur leaves her own company, we’re supposed to nod sagely and say that this is the natural way of things, that she is better suited to starting companies than building them.
This may be true of entrepreneurs at many companies but not at the greatest ones: Microsoft for 32 years under Bill Gates, Apple for 35 off-and-on years under Steve Jobs, Oracle for 34 years under Larry Ellison, Amazon for 17 years under Jeff Bezos, Google for 15 years with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, now Facebook for 7 years under Mark Zuckerberg.
We rightfully celebrate these entrepreneurs as geniuses but I feel sure that what they value most about themselves by now is their endurance. Compared to the many talents with which they were born, endurance is the only trait these entrepreneurs have had to earn. “I can’t go on like this,” they tell themselves each year. “I’ll go on.”
In the age of the long startup, this endurance has become even more important, especially for entrepreneurs less talented than Larry Page or Bill Gates. The only plaque I have from my years at the company I co-founded, Plumtree, isn’t our IPO tombstone — I threw it out in my last move — but a cheesy piece of lucite we gave everyone on her fifth-year anniversary.
The five-year award is a tradition we’re starting this week at Redfin, in recognition of our first five-year veterans, Allie Howard and Bryan Selner. Allie and Bryan are, as Redfin’s Fernando Ferrufino likes to say, the Original Gangstas who made Redfin into their own thing, which has in turn become our thing.
Without Allie, Redfin would be much, much less fierce, in its advocacy for its clients, in its intolerance for mediocrity, in its bad-ass attitude generally. Without Bryan, Redfin would be less exacting, less thorough, less thoughtful, less pragmatic, less team-oriented, less goofy and nerdy.
But what have Allie and Bryan gotten out of Redfin? It’s a serious thing to walk into a startup on a lark and come out years older; and in an age of secondary stock sales and recruiting revolving doors, it’s more unusual too.
The simple answer to this question is, I think, love. Love is a strong word, but I find myself using it more often as the days pile up at Redfin, to describe the brilliant people around here who have stuck together through ups and downs. It gives a thickness to our life at work.
The other reason Allie and Bryan are here is because they believe in what we’re doing. What people fear most in their careers is the absence of any arc or substance, which leaves us to float in the air like that mesmerizing piece of garbage in American Beauty – moved by forces we don’t understand, hardly able to keep going.
Compare that heart-breaking aimlessness to the intensity of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. I just loved watching him alone, plugged into his laptop, listening on headphones to the film’s min0r-key soundtrack. You feel an almost pelagic sense of peacefulness and then that midnight blooming of creativity which give sudden weight to our lives; it’s one thing the whole sordid soap opera really got right about startups.
And it’s a good place for Mark to be, right there, thinking. There have been many, many nights where Redfin has been, for me, the same kind of good long groove: the place where I belong, the work I should be doing, the thing I believe in.
But if you’ve still got something to believe in and live for — a work project that will be a multi-billion-dollar force for good in the world or, more personally, a life that sits at the center of a family — the only problem is leaving not staying. Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote about this on the final page of Love in the Time of Cholera, which I still remember, 20 years on, as if I just read it:
The Captain looked at Fermina Diaz and saw on her eyelashes the first glimmer of wintry frost. Then he looked at Florentino Aziza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.
“And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?” he asked.
Florentino Aziza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights.
I was talking to a friend in Silicon Valley last night who told me about a consumer Internet startup that is generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue, with eye-popping year-over-year growth. What was striking about the conversation wasn’t the revenue itself, but that I’d never heard of the company it came from. This has happened half a dozen times in the past month.
We heard the same argument from plenty of folks when we wondered what Mint would be worth now: that the increase in valuations of Zynga and Facebook are totally unrelated to those of earlier-stage startups, because only a few venture-backed Internet companies are generating serious revenues.
What I’m seeing instead is different: yes Zynga and Facebook are in the major leagues, but there is a very healthy farm system with plenty of prospects moving up through the ranks. This is why the broad-based increase in valuations isn’t just inflation, but the result of Internet startups’ getting much, much better at generating revenue.
What happened? First, at the end of 2008 startups finally stopped listening to the most misinterpreted — and sometimes just wrong — advice in the Internet’s history: Chris Anderson’s insistence, just as Apple opened the iTunes store to software and venture funding hit the skids, that everything on the Internet be free.
To be sure, the idea of a free trial application is a good one, but many entrepreneurs became squeamish about ever asking consumers to get out their wallets. Music was Mr. Anderson’s primary example of a good that consumers would stop buying, but now Pandora, the company with the temerity to charge for music, is going public.
As we’ve argued many, many times before, as early as 2008, a whole new generation of entrepreneurs has learned from Steve Jobs to ask consumers to pay, early and often, for mobile applications like Angry Birds, or virtual goods in Farmville, or actual goods like clothes, textbooks and baby gear:
The change has been good, for startups and for the consumers buying their software, the quality of which has improved immeasurably over the past few years. Now, most of the companies that got serious about generating revenues are growing like crazy. It isn’t too stuck-up to call this change a new Internet era.
The first era was the 1990′s Age of Eyeballs, when every website sought to get as many visitors as possible, without regard for the cost of gaining each visitor or the revenues each generated. The second was the mid-2000′s Age of Acquisition, when Paul Graham encouraged most entrepreneurs to build websites as features of a larger product, and the goal was to get bought by Google or some lesser light. Since big, unsustainable startups had failed in 1990s, small became beautiful.
Now we are in The Age of Revenues, in which many Internet startups are maturing into big companies with big revenues. We’ll see more companies invest in large tele-sales operations — the whale-hunting salesmen are mostly relics, as small transactions have flourished like plankton — and we’ll see more companies grow, with more accretive acquisitions at much higher prices. And though there will undoubtedly be more ups and downs, we’ll see more public offerings too.
With great revenues come great power: a new generation of Internet titans. After years of insisting that the Internet had matured, nobody now believes that in two years the only Web behemoths will be Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. In fact, folks have begun to doubt that any of those three will rule the Internet the way they once did.
It’s an amazing turn-about. 2008 year wasn’t, as Sequoia claimed, the death of good times, but the birth of a new, long-lived era of broad and massive revenue growth. The new school of financiers at Sequoia were right about the global economy, which is still a disaster zone outside of Silicon Valley. They were just wrong about how entrepreneurs would react to it.
At breakfast earlier this month, my friend Roy Gilbert made an offhand reference to two types of people, knowers and learners. It was a distinction I’d never heard before. But I liked the idea of identifying someone as a learner, just because it’s so hard to make any change to our identity, unless part of our identity is itself a commitment to change.
At work I often marvel that the self-professed raconteur doesn’t become, for just one meeting, a sphinx. Why doesn’t the tried-and-convicted critic shock everyone just once with a simple affirmation? Why can’t I do these things? I don’t know. A few days after I met Roy, the great Twitterer Eric Barker pointed out a Harvard Business Review article, “The Best Way to Use the Last Five Minutes of the Day,” suggesting how we can become learners:
Every day, before leaving the office, save a few minutes to think about what just happened. Look at your calendar and compare what actually happened — the meetings you attended, the work you got done, the conversations you had, the people with whom you interacted, even the breaks you took — with your plan for what you wanted to have happen. Then ask yourself three sets of questions:
How did the day go? What success did I experience? What challenges did I endure?
What did I learn today? About myself? About others? What do I plan to do — differently or the same — tomorrow?
Who did I interact with? Anyone I need to update? Thank? Ask a question? Share feedback?
The Harvard essay, and many like it, are part of a culture of learning that has been one of Silicon Valley’s signal contributions to business culture. As the Valley’s engineers have become executives themselves, practices like group de-bugging and rapid iteration have become standard elements of business decisions as well as software projects. These days, even a Cleveland ketchup factory is trying to become more like a lean startup.
It wasn’t always that way, not even at startups. When I began working in Silicon Valley, startups were gladiator academies for ambitious young men competing to be the smartest person in the room. We were all knowers. The cult of precocity demanded that every entrepreneur have a vision of her fully formed company emerge like Athena from Zeus’s forehead, with a story of derring-do to go along with it.
Now with the emphasis on “pivoting” and “failing fast,” we all seem to have become learners, not knowers. Try to imagine a ’90′s dot-com founder admitting that his white-hot, world-changing company started as a desperate side-project to sell bedroom slippers with flashlights embedded at the toes. You can’t. But this goofiness is exactly what has made Groupon’s founder so revered.
There are, of course, drawbacks to an emphasis on learning. It can become a California-style narcissism, an extended adolescence in which no one is ever wrong, only learning. Executives feel blameless, even when their mistakes cost people jobs. They breezily refer to pivoting as if it were a nifty basketball move rather than a reorganization that involved a layoff.
This casual mutability is what Robert de Niro’s Jack Byrnes hates about Dustin Hoffman’s Bernie Focker, what Kantians hate about Hegelians, what standard-model physicists hate about string theorists: you can never pin down where they really stand. Their ideas are always becoming something else.
If you’re the one entrusted to make decisions, it’s important to get them right. But I still think that most folks are too scared of being wrong, and thus unlikely to make a decision at all. Then once we’ve made a decision, we’re too stubborn about sticking with it. That’s why my money is on the learners, and why it’s important to think of yourself as a learner, no matter how much you’re supposed to know.
What’s interesting about this weekend’s debate over Fred Wilson’s contention that “marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks” is that it re-enacts an old battle: engineers’ wariness toward marketing, and marketing folks’ distrust of engineers’ build-it-and-they-will-come naivete.
But the truth is that the battle-lines between the two sides just don’t exist anymore. Some of the most effective marketing is built into products rather than applied after the fact. Just look around:
Zynga builds games using Facebook, so it’s easy for players to invite their friends.
Cubeduel asks users to “share the awesomeness,” via contacts on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Yelp’s feedback system encourages reviewers with praise like “Funny,” “Useful,” or “Cool,” which encourages more reviews, and better search-engine placement.
YouTube makes it easy to embed its video anywhere on the web, extending its reach far beyond YouTube.com.
Urbanspoon automatically links back to blogs that cite Urbanspoon reviews, updating a leader-board of the bloggers who have written the most reviews. This creates more buzz in the blogosphere.
OkCupid systematically captures stats on people’s dating patterns for use in blog posts that generate massive publicity.
Every website on the planet is now built to maximize links and keywords for search-engine placement.
Marketing gurus like Rand Fishkin and Dave McClure who violently disagree with Fred are the same ones helping companies re-design their products, not their marketing campaigns. Engineering gurus like Paul Graham and Hadi Partovi are obsessed with customer acquisition, not better algorithms. And the best entrepreneurs are now product-marketing centaurs who develop their products from the start to be viral, to be search-engines friendly, to be social.
This integration of marketing with product development has been a long time in coming. Engineers have become more self-sufficient and entrepreneurial, updating their products every day or every week in a way that brings them closer to the rhythms of the market. Marketeers have become more analytical and product-focused. It is much more likely today that the two took the same math classes for the first few years of college.
All of Fred’s critics who insist that the sizzle is more important than steak have hardly noticed that the steak is increasingly made out of sizzle (a development I’m not entirely comfy with). The modern-day version of “the medium is the message” might be that “the product is the promotion.”
Now of course, there are other forms of marketing which have very little to do with product development, and those are also important. But the folks who are defending marketing as a separate discipline are the ones most likely to approach it in real life as a joint effort.
I just toured a startup the other day and what struck me while making the rounds was the fundamental sameness of the startup vibe: a handsome group of slack-jawed folks drowning out their ADD with 80-decibels of music.
Startup offices are supposed to have the buzz a newsroom once had, but often are sort of hushed, like a law firm. The floor plan can be open but only because everyone now has a thousand MP3s to pipe through their headphones. The environment is transparent — we can see what one another is doing — without necessarily being collaborative. It’s a little bit like the panopticon a philosopher once imagined would replace our prisons.
And it’s weird, and maybe perfect too. If a 1980s office-worker emerged from a time machine and walked around a typical office, he might be surprised at many things: gym-hardened 25-year-olds riding elevators to the second floor, the presence of computers on everyone’s desk, casual dress, Costco muffins but no ashtrays, the occasional ping pong table.
But what would surprise him most might be the popularity of DJ-sized headphones, worn by everyone from the lowest-level employee to the CEO. The time-traveler might feel about headphones the way we would if we learned that future office-workers will all wear goggles, so that they never see anything except what is on their computer screens.
Don’t we come to an office so we can work together?
I do, but then I don headphones to isolate myself. We have all seen offices with thousands of people like me — the size of a new country, with its own silent language and customs.
I catch myself deferring face-to-face discussion in favor of online chats and email — the growth of IM and the sales figures for headphones probably line up very nicely – just so I can finish listening to a song. I do this even though I can’t concentrate while listening to music unless I listen to the same songs over and over again. I do this even when, as is usually the case, I am wearing headphones without listening to music at all, just to block out background noise.
This tactic may be the latest twist on Virginia Woolf’s insistence on having a room of one’s own. At work I often think of her advice to keep windows open and doors closed: a way to see and feel the world while still preserving your own creative space. Now the office sights and sounds come to us via IM windows and email messages, popping up in a manageable corner of our computer screens rather than standing in our office doorways, demanding our full attention.
Sometimes, it’s good to avoid a face-to-face conversation. When I get back to my desk from a face-to-face conversation, I have to take a few moments to re-orient myself to the three-ring circus running on my computer, and I have to queue up my music all over again. The person I interrupted has the same challenge.
But usually, a conversation is essential. Whenever I disagree with someone, I try to do so in person because we end up reaching a fruitful compromise much more quickly. And whenever I need to collaborate on an idea, I get more energy from being in the same room with someone. I work at Redfin because I love the people here, and noticed I’m happier when I actually get to talk to them.
So whenever I think that maybe I should go chat with someone — I slowly take off my headphones — but never decide to email them instead. And whenever I’ve tried — a dozen times at least — to give up my headphones entirely, I lose control of my perimeter, and get less done. Modern life will give us more and more ways to enter that isolated yet connected state, with open windows and closed doors. Our only challenge is not to spend too much time there.
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.)
Watching Steve Jobs’s primary reaction — annoyance – to the iPhone 4 antenna debacle, it has been hard not to think about it in terms of the decisions Redfin needs to make every day: between going for something innovative or making incremental improvements to satisfy customer requests.
Steve Jobs is at such a far end of that spectrum that he can hardly bear to hear customer complaints for even a minute. Redfin’s engineers get caught somewhere in the middle: we try to make beautiful software, but we also spend a lot of time manually adjusting the location of listings based on users’ requests.
Business schools talk about innovation and customer focus as if the two were one and the same virtue. But mostly they’re opposites. Customer focus is a painstaking process of listening to customers and solving their problems one by one. Innovation is mostly the art of not-listening, so you can hear the creative voice inside yourself.
I’ve never met an innovative person whom I could really describe as customer-driven. The most innovative maniac I’ve ever worked with was happiest when he jabbed the air with a finger and said “F*** the customer!” — which he did all the time. He solved problems primarily for himself, and his products decisions were mostly made in terms of what was cool, not useful.
The fact that many people are now arguing that an iPhone doesn’t really have to function as a phone is the ultimate triumph of coolness over utility. But examples are everywhere: do any Redfin old-timers remember how the map used to swoop around before landing on a location? Or have you ever noticed that dandelions pop up in the background as you complete each field of Picnik’s registration form?
Both the swoop and the dandelions take time to code, and often slow the user experience. Both come from folks who believed in their products as works of art, an end, rather than as just a means to an end. It’s obvious in watching Steve Jobs talk about the iPhone that he believes it belongs in a museum as much as your left hand.
If Steve Jobs worked at Nordstrom or Zappos he couldn’t take that position. Just imagine Jobs being confronted with the canonical examples of customer service: someone ordering a pizza from Zappos’s call center or returning snow tires to Nordstrom’s clothing stores. It wouldn’t be pretty. If you turn that around, and try to think of a company driven by customer-service that is also innovative, you can’t.
Except for Amazon. How does the company that came up with the S3 or the Kindle also deliver groceries on time? I don’t know. But now that I’ve worked at Redfin for a few years, I feel sure that Amazon will be a great brand 50 years from now precisely because it has somehow struck a balance between the chutzpah of innovation and the humility of customer service. It works a lot better than being humble all the time or just being cocky.
Fred Wilson posted a thoughtful essay on Friday, about putting the band from one startup back together for the next. While acknowledging that it was an inevitable tendency, Fred stopped short of deciding whether it was a good or a bad thing, which suggests to me his feelings are mixed on the topic.
I think it’s a good thing up to a point. My career has spanned three startups. Nine of us have worked together at two of the three, and two of us worked together across all three. These folks are a big reason I come to work every day.
And this group’s belief in itself is a big reason the company has come as far as we have. To a lone person, the transformation of an idea into a product and a product into a business can seem like some kind of mysterious alchemy, reputedly possible yet highly improbable.
But a group of folks who have brought an idea to life once before have the confidence to keep at it. We know there’ll be ups and downs, and that software when you work at it long enough is usually a good business.
Striking Out On Your Own The problem is that great people have plenty of opportunities. The folks from Plumtree, the last company I worked at, have had their share: to be the first engineer at AdMob; to co-found Episodic or CubeTree; to lead sales & marketing at Atlassian or business development at LogMeIn; to run Xoom. Over time, probably a dozen Plumtree alumni will become great CEOs, and the same will be true one day of Redfin alums too.
We should welcome that development. But we also fear it. Whenever I get together with old colleagues, we talk about setting aside our own empires and just working together again as a small group of friends. I would love that. But at the conversation’s end, someone often says, “And no lame people,” as if none of us has ever been lame. What that really means is “And no other people at all,” since you can only be sure someone isn’t lame after you hire him.
Time to Find a New Band
And that’s where I say no. First because lameness is more situational than you think, with someone who excels at one startup struggling in another. But also because there’s a tendency to overestimate what you’ve done, and to underestimate what you can do.
Whenever a startup ends, you feel there’s only one truly great band and you were just in it. It’s hard to let go. But the whole idea of “putting the band back together” comes from a movie that ends where it starts, in prison.
The truth is that there’s more than one band, and each has the potential to be better than the last. This can only happen if you keep making it new. What has surprised me about Redfin is exactly what surprised me about Plumtree, that somehow we hired a team 95% different from the folks in the past that is still in its own way awesome.
At both companies, I was convinced we’d never match the old team until the very moment that the new team performed so magnificently that I finally had to see all the ways in which it was excelling. It’s like turning on a basketball game and finally noticing that LeBron does things that Jordan can’t. We’re surprised only because we notice unhappiness more quickly than happiness, and tally losses more carefully than gains.
So how do you combine the old and the new? In an exchange of comments on Fred’s original post, Fred asked me about avoiding cronyism. I’m not sure that we’ve mastered it at Redfin, but here’s what we’ve learned so far:
Back off & let the team decide: whenever an old colleague interviews with a new team, respect the new team’s decision. They know how you feel without your saying a word. And however much you may resent it when they dong your buddy, they’ll resent it more when you force him through.
Use peer reviews: the rating old friends give one another in a performance review are hardly a mystery — they’re all high. It’s good to find out from the new team how your old colleague is doing.
Never marry someone you wouldn’t want to divorce: I like some old colleagues so much that I’d consider quitting in lieu of firing them. If someone’s a friend, it’s even more important that she’s good.
Hang with the new people: you may treat everyone the same while at the office, but it’s easy to find yourself hanging out after-hours only with the old-timers. People come to a startup to be a part of something, not to feel left out.
No yes-men: the people I’ve been with the longest are the ones I feel most comfy challenging, and they’re the ones most comfy challenging me. Redfinnians of all stripes have seen Michael Smedberg or Michael Young take me down, and it has taught them to do the same. Old colleagues should be the ones to stand up to you first, not the ones to stand down.
Watch out for new stars: and lift them through the ranks. Everyone at a startup should have an opportunity to excel, not just old hands from the last band.
The truth is that Redfin would be lost without the help of old friends from previous companies. But most of our stars are folks I’d never met before they walked into our office.
And if I could take one thing from the Valley, it would be Stanford. It’s not that Stanford students are so brilliant, though they are. It’s that they naturally assume the cantaloupe you were slicing is just for them, that the rules of our Matrix can be bent or broken to suit their fancy, that they can start a company as easily as you or I could eat a bag of chips. It’s an amazing aura. It is a way I’ve always wanted to be.
At a colloquium this Tuesday hosted by the University of Washington computer science department, we talked about what we can learn from Stanford to develop our local computer scientists into entrepreneurs. Most of the entrepreneurs in Seattle are folks like me on our second go-round, or MBAs focused as much on business models as on products. Those folks are great, but we need some young turks fresh from the UW to shake things up a bit too.
Here’s the preso, with some narration added in parentheses to each slide.
And here’s a run-down of the ideas in the presentation; some are for students, some for faculty, some for VCs, some for startups.
Dorms & clubs: lots of folks at UW commute or live in a fraternity. It’s easier to talk all night about an idea in a dorm, and you’re more likely to meet co-founders. For as long as you can stand the food, live in a dorm.
Mentorship: every would-be entrepreneur in UW’s CS department should hook up with a mentor in the Seattle community.
Brashness: I don’t know how to teach our polite young folks at UW brashness, and I’m not sure I want to, but a good entrepreneur needs a dash of Zuckerberg, too.
Electives: Stanford students are different from Cal Tech graduates. They occasionally enroll in a philosophy or drama class. It really helps later in life.
Fun classes: Sure it wasn’t technically novel, but Stanford’s Facebook class got everyone excited about coding. UW could do the same with Amazon’s cloud or Real’s music.
Competitions: UW’s business-plan competitions are fantastic, but student hackathons also appeal to engineers, particularly if judged by bigshots like Jonathan Sposato or Mark Vadon.
Internships: UW students may prefer the safety of Microsoft or Google for permanent employment, but why not give a startup a shot for a summer internship?
VCs: I’ve long wondered if UW graduates could sign up for a two-year gig at a VC’s entire portfolio, learning social marketing at TeachStreet, user interface design at Redfin, architecture at Apptio, product management at Animoto. It would be the ultimate entrepreneurship boot-camp.
No matter how many academic breakthroughs emerge from UW, nothing will draw the best and brightest from around the country than producing our own Jerry Yang or Larry Page.
Many thanks to UW’s Oren Etzioni for hosting us, and to the UW students for coming out. We had a lot of fun.
Hauling myself out of bed this morning, I jabbed my foot into a sharp piece of plastic. I peered into the gloom to see what it was and remembered that Redfin just won the Seattle 2.0 award for “Best Startup.” Our trophy had started the night in bed and then been cast aside — until I stepped on it.
And now the trophy is in our office near Pike Place Market. We’ll treat it like the Stanley Cup, letting everyone on the team take it home for one night to use as a dinner plate or a magnifying glass. There are many cliches appropriate for this occasion, all of them true. Any success we’ve had so far is because of other people, not me. The award seems silly compared to the magnitude of the challenges we face in making Redfin the world’s best place to work, in serving our customers, in creating a lasting business.
And it is important for others to remember that we could still screw up; we are already keenly aware of this. In fact, every pore of our skin has become less attuned to the typical sensations of warmth, hardness, dryness than to the zillion, seething ways we are screwing up right now. But we’re confident we’ll figure out how to stop screwing up, mostly faster than new screw ups can occur.
And it’s nice for a moment to take stock of how far we’ve come from David Eraker’s sweaty summer-time apartment at 10th & Roy in Seattle. We had a website running on one computer, built from a map of Seattle hand-stitched together when Google or Microsoft had no online mapping services; we had a few hundred thousand dollars in capital and plenty of bills. Two other startups had raised millions from two of the Valley’s best firms to launch national real estate search using open technologies.
In my first week, I walked out of the apartment and into the stairwell to call our sole investor, Madrona. My message was simple: “Holy shit.” Our competition had far more money, more engineers, and executives that had built publicly traded consumer Internet giants. I came home that night and communicated to my wife in the most meaningful language available to the two of us, citing Han Solo’s comment to Princess Leia before escaping the Empire’s fleet with a jump into hyperspace: “Sure hope that tractor beam’s out of commission, or this is gonna be a real short trip.”
Somehow, the tractor beam was out of commission, and our little ship escaped into deep, open space. Later that week, we decided against running real estate ads and instead became a brokerage, hiring real estate agents and serving customers. It was a feel-good decision to make because of all the ways we wanted to make real estate better, but I also remember feeling a shadow of pain — “as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.” We knew in becoming a customer-service business not only that ours would be a far longer and more complicated journey but that we were largely the kind of people with the compulsions to delight and to grind that we would need on that journey.
And then we got back to work.
Many thanks to our founding team of David Eraker, David Selinger, Michael Dougherty, to all the folks who worked for free but especially the last two — Savan Kong and Bahn Lee — to all the folks at Redfin past and present who pour your guts out for Redfin, and to all our fanatical, roof-raising customers. Thanks too to this community. Without your advice and support, we’d have never made it this far.
Redfin's corporate blog is the place to read what Redfin employees have to say about Redfin, the real estate industry and other topics such as life at a startup or usability and web design.
