Over the past few months, Twitterers and TechFlash readers have invented a war between big and small startups, and somehow Redfin has landed on the wrong side of it. I only noticed it last night. The great Josh Petersen of 43 Things compared Adam Doppelt’s fantastic essay on boot-strapping Urbanspoon to a talk Marcelo Calbucci… Read More
Fred Wilson talked the other day about the importance of choosing a group of venture capitalists who like working together. It reminded me of how much I like our investors: Paul Goodrich from Madrona Capital, Marc Singer from BEV, Emily Melton from DFJ and Steve Hall from Vulcan. When I first got involved in raising… Read More
After Redfin’s layoff last week, the CEO of a startup down the street emailed to say “at least we’re not public!” Which made me wonder how private we really are. You can hide from the Wall Street Journal but not from the hundreds of tech and real estate blogs that covered Redfin last week. One… Read More
Today Redfin laid off roughly 20% of our employees. Unlike other startups, our industry’s recession started a year ago, when home prices first plunged. Since then, we’ve fought like starving animals, and with some success: while industry-wide transaction volumes dropped 33%, we grew revenues by nearly 50%. Traffic grew more than 300%. Even a month… Read More
It’s funny how much we blog at Redfin without ever really saying what life at Redfin is really like. Enter Shahaf Abileah, the engineering lead who radically changed the speed, breadth and accuracy of our data imports from broker databases. He’s taking a long-planned one-year sabbatical with his fiancee to travel around the world, and… 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