Archive for the ‘Startups’ Category
February 12, 2008
The New York Times reports Friday that alone among all the cities hoping to be the next Silicon Valley, Seattle “is actually doing it.”
But the Times didn’t talk to iLike President Hadi Partovi, or Zillow.com CEO Rich Barton, both entrepreneurs who, like many of the folks at Redfin, shuttle between Seattle and Silicon Valley. None of us thinks Seattle is ever going to be much like Silicon Valley. We believe instead that what other cities can learn from Seattle is how to be different than the Valley, not the same.
In reality, most places don’t even want to try to be like the Valley. Seattle has become unrecognizably wealthier in the past decade, yet is oddly unhappy about it. Many Seattleites wish we were still a modest boreal town rather than a Microsoft-Amazon megapolis. The question I am most often asked here is where I went to high school — twenty years ago — not what I’m doing next.
The Valley by contrast is a heartless amnesiac. In my 16 years there I can’t recall anyone’s ever expressing nostalgia for how it
used to be. This is probably because almost no one in Silicon Valley has any idea how it used to be. Internet guru Michael Arrington often opens conferences by asking audience-members from Silicon Valley to raise their hands and then, if they were born in the Valley, to keep their hands raised. Hands go up and down like The Wave.
And this is what Michael loves about the Valley: that it calls out at dog-whistle frequencies to nerds across America, Russia, India and China. The single-mindedness of their migration belongs in National Geographic. My first roommate spent four years building a company in San Francisco without ever buying furniture. When his startup went bust, he packed for the trip home to Toronto the same day.
Seattle is different. People live in Seattle because they love Seattle. When I was still looking for a reason to be here myself, I often asked Redfin recruits what brought them to town. The answer I always hoped for was “CONQUEST.” But what everyone talked about was something I still barely understand: the lifestyle and schools, the mountains and lakes. “Do you have any idea,” I finally told one candidate, “how bizarre it is to swim in a lake at the center of a city?”
Failure to appreciate a lake is viewed by many Seattleites as a sign of mental illness. But the Valley’s monomania is really just a kind of pubescence. What else could account for the Valley’s self-righteousness, its congregations of frustrated dudes, its all-nighters, idealism, delusions of grandeur, mood-swings, longings, dramas, hero-worship and pranks? Anywhere else by contrast seems all grown-up.
No one in the Valley can afford to grow up. Just as stressful environments delay the onset of sexual maturity in marsupials, a high cost of living – a two-bedroom house in Palo Alto typically costs more than $1.5 million — prevents people from buying homes and having children. In Silicon Valley, Seattle’s 28 year-old family man is still working his tail off for a hit.
The Hogwarts of Silicon Valley
The other source of Silicon Valley’s youthfulness is, in fact, places like Seattle. Seattle has some of America’s best high schools, but sends many of its best computer science students to California.
The founders of Apple, Google, Intel, Sun and Yahoo! all graduated from Berkeley or Stanford; an enormous graduating class seeks to follow in their footsteps every year. The whole state of Washington produces about 150 computer science graduates a year.
Stanford in particular is not just the source of Silicon Valley’s manpower but its magic. Guy Kawasaki says it is “the single biggest reason for Silicon Valley’s existence.” And as Hadi notes, “very few colleges spit out 21-year-olds who think they can be the next Jerry Yang or Larry Page.” It’s painful for those of us never admitted to Stanford to marvel at its sunny rejection of failure, its Hadron-sized Internet connections, its courses on venture capital and Facebook, its magnificent sense of entitlement.
Yet we all know that without Stanford the Valley would grow old and die. Native Seattleites hardly notice Seattle’s Stanfordlessness; Valley expats never get over it.
Rotarians and Pirates
This is not to say that Seattle is all bad for entrepreneurs, only that the ways in which it is good only show how different it is compared to Silicon Valley. Start with Seattle’s Rotary Club, the largest in the world. High-tech entrepreneurs are expected to be pillars of the business community here, not, as Silicon Valley’s establishment likes to think of itself, pirates of the Caribbean.
At one of the first conferences I attended in Seattle, I was shocked to hear a speaker talk about how to improve K-12 math education, not how to hack a Tivo. It took a while to realize that “K” stood for kindergarten, not kilobytes. But this mindset connects us to a set of civic virtues bigger than any one company. It’s why I’m optimistic about Seattle over the long haul.
And it has nurtured a rookie CEO like me. A Seattle journalist e-mailed me while I was still loading the tiny U-Haul that brought me here. A VC who should have eaten my gizzard for breakfast invited me to his lake house for dinner. A startup CEO who offered money-raising advice over lunch diverted us from Quiznos to Carmines. Redfin is better because of their help.
Far from the Madding Crowd
Few people would have had the time to help in Silicon Valley. The chaos of newcomers and the desperation of those who want to stay make the Valley seem like a capital about to fall in a coup. Dingbat ideas are scattered like pennies on a sidewalk. Overlooking last night’s website launch is like showing up at a party with last year’s purse.
The cult of the new may seem like madness but here’s the method to it: what’s often most difficult about developing a new idea is figuring out if it’s already an old idea. A business just like the one you’ve been dreaming of may already be forming within Google, or preparing to launch on its own.
When you and everyone you know spend 18 hours a day downloading, hacking, breaking, sharing, gossiping, criticizing and arguing about the Web, it’s easier to tell when an idea is truly new. And if you don’t, it’s almost impossible to catch up.
This is why Hadi says so many Seattle entrepreneurs develop ideas late. We aren’t slow; just out of the loop. Even Seattle’s greatest two start-ups, Amazon and Microsoft, were first conceived somewhere else.
But being apart from Silicon Valley can give entrepreneurs the latitude to think about what works, not what’s fashionable. It was, at first, hard for me to break out of the Valley mindset. My initial question in setting Redfin’s course wasn’t “Is there a business here?” but “Is it cool?”
Because Redfin’s business — real estate — isn’t cool. And taking on the messy business of serving customers directly definitely isn’t cool. But some of the best – and most meaningful — new ventures may be the ones that combine old and new business models, experience and youthful recklessness, perseverance and opportunism. And it is these ventures that really seem to belong in Seattle.
Loyal to a Fault
Because if it turns out that Zillow, iLike or Redfin are on to something good, it may be easier to build a long-term business in Seattle. Ten years on at Microsoft, engineers deep in Redmond’s rain forests are still writing the next version of Office. Meanwhile the engineers at Google are, as Zillow’s Rich Barton points out, plotting their next startup on the company dime.
I’m not sure which engineers one would rather have, but it is true that there is a blue-collar dedication in Seattle that you don’t find in the ADD-addled Valley. “You work hard here because it’s gray,” Rich writes. “Then you go hiking or fishing or skiing.”
I really like that advice. Unfazed by any heavy weather ahead, Rich keeps chugging along and having fun. And Seattle does, too.
Thanks to Rich Barton, CEO of real estate portal Zillow.com, and to Hadi Partovi, president of music discovery startup iLike, for their help.
October 22, 2007
Hi, I’m the Redfin intern that apparently asked our CEO’s wife out. I wanted to share my experience here at Redfin in hopes of helping fellow college students find out what they want to do with their lives. I’m a senior this year at the University of Washington studying Computer Engineering.
This summer marks my sixth internship. I worked at Northrop Grumman Space Technologies (NGST) doing software for four summers and KB Home doing e-marketing for another. I can very confidently say that I learned a lot at each one of them. It’s really hard to get a good feeling for something without first trying it, so interning will at least tell you what you don’t like. If all you learn is that you don’t like something, then hopefully you at least got paid well. 
I started interning thinking I’d go into software. I had the incredible experience of being a snowboarding, surfing, skateboarding, snowmobiling, soccer-playing teenager trapped in a cubicle for 40 hours a week, and I quickly decided that I didn’t want a desk job. I explored other industries such as investment banking, medicine, and marketing only to find that each of these industries would push me into a desk as well. For a long time I thought that fun at work could only be achieved away from a desk, until I started here at Redfin. Not only did I learn an insane amount about web development, product managing, etc, but I also finally figured out what I want in a career.
I need a work place that I can become a part of. A work place that lets me be myself and lets me share a connection with my work and my coworkers. A work place where my coworkers can become my friends. A work place that doesn’t confine me or limit me. A work place where I can use the fun I have as energy to spend late nights at the desk. In my opinion, this place is a startup. For me, knowing that I’m working hard with and for the people around me makes working behind a desk easy. All of us here at Redfin are working hard to stir things up, and it feels great even when sitting behind that desk.
Before I go any further, I should say that Redfin is the only startup I’ve worked at, but I’ve heard about others’ experiences at startups as well. Startups have to prove that they can survive. They have to thrive when others say they will fail. That knowledge in and of itself is enough to rally me to kick some ass, sitting or standing.
If you’re a college student, then try interning at a startup. Had it not been for Redfin, I would have continued to think that all desk jobs suck. Perhaps I could have had a similar experience at a larger company, but this scenario seems less likely to me. Now, I just have to figure out if I’m ready to start my post-college life in Seattle (I’m originally from Los Angeles).
Bonus story: Working for a startup also means you get your hands dirty in lots of different places. At Redfin I’ve shipped code, managed products, organized company trips, answered tech support emails, contributed to a focus group, and last but not least, conducted a Redfin photo shoot on the streets of downtown Seattle. Here’s a photo of our marketing dude, Bahn, trying to avoid getting hit by a bus while carrying a Redfin sign in downtown Seattle.
Seattle kudos to those of you that know what building this is in front of.
September 20, 2007
Zillow announced today that the real estate media company raised $30 million in a round led by private-equity firm Legg Mason. What’s interesting to us is how the world is reacting to one of the biggest venture investments since the 1990’s. Becky Buckman at the Wall Street Journal speculates that the valuation was $350 million, but without mentioning whether this includes the $30 million in cash.
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch is the only one to notice that Legg Mason was the same investor that led the other mammoth Web 2.0 investment this year, the $44 million round in Marc Andressen’s Ning from July 2007. VentureBeat reports the news on the heels of a depressing announcement that a 6th-grader raised $6.5 million.
Seattle’s John Cook goes deep with a Rich Barton interview in which the Zillow CEO describes a money-raising effort that wasn’t an effort at all. What struck me most about this interview though was Rich’s reaction to Web 2.0 startups, which John described as trying to “build something very cheap with two or three engineers, you test it, you try to build it through a grass roots marketing campaign and then if it is successful, then you sell out, like Flickr.” Rich responds, “That is completely anathema to me.”
And we agree with Rich’s objections to startups that stay small so they can sell out early, having argued before how important it is for entrepreneurs to shoot the moon. But what if John had asked the question slightly differently, about startups that want to do something big, but don’t raise a lot of capital? This is Web 2.0’s $24,000 question. Can community — people selling dressers, taking pictures, arguing over Scientology — take the place that capital — sock puppets, fancy offices, huge financing rounds — once had in the ’90’s?
For all the baloney oozing out of warmed-over Web 2.0 startups, this was the one premise that seems really worthwhile and even precious: that we could combine existing web software to build sites where the people who use them create a lot of the value, all without spending too much money.
This has been on my mind ever since I heard Rich’s comments to a group of entrepreneurs in which he predicted that Wikipedia and Craigslist (first audio clip) would have to make a lot of money or lose to better-funded competitors. It was a fiendishly provocative statement, because those sites have special meaning to any Internet aficionado, which in turn probably explains why they have thus far flourished.
It still seems possible that a small number of committed engineers, supported by an enthused community of people, can change the world (you see this stuff on the back of cars – albeit never very nice cars – all the time). In so doing, the engineers can usually make money.
Zillow may of course have both a community that extends beyond the real estate industry as well as an unusually large amount of capital, but it’s the community — people talking about real estate on Zillow — that will drive their success, not the capital.
August 22, 2007
The Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Buckman published an article yesterday depicting Redfin as the oddball on an ad-crazed Sand Hill Road. Which is unfortunately true.
When we were meeting investors about our last round of financing, three huge deals for ad networks had just set venture capital abuzz: Microsoft bought aQuantive for $6 billion, Google bought Doubleclick for $3.1 billion, and Yahoo! bought RightMedia for $680 million.
Eager to capitalize on the trend, many potential Redfin investors seemed genuinely shocked that Redfin doesn’t run any ads whatsoever. Serving customers directly via flesh-and-blood agents, rather than simply sending them from our website to a traditional brokerage — this is a much messier business than running ads.
Yet having come to grips with this fact, investors couldn’t stop asking about “page views,” as if there were no other measure of a website’s success than how many ads it could have served. This page-view fetish is the reductio ad absurdum of the ad-driven mentality: a “page” after all is just a component of a web application, and a “view” is the most passive way to interact with that application. By measuring web applications in terms of page-views, we lose sight of what the application is supposed to accomplish, which in our case is the sale of a home. (We try to accomplish that goal with as few page views as possible.)
The circularity of the quest to generate page views perhaps explains the anomie behind many ad-driven Web 2.0 businesses. My friends at these businesses sometimes seem not merely daunted, which happens to all of us, but occasionally uninspired. Silicon Valley has gone from taking out the middleman to being a middleman, hoping to waylay users at a website before passing them on to a business that hasn’t changed at all how it serves customers. Travel sites like Kayak have become portals to other portals like Orbitz. The Web is becoming a gigantic lead-generation contraption for business-as-usual. It’s hard to get excited about that.
What’s funny is that Silicon Valley still thinks of itself as the swashbuckling foe of traditional industries, but every day it’s becoming more like Madison Avenue, minutely sensitive to traditional advertisers’ needs, and unwilling to rock the boat. The two used to be miles apart: Madison Avenue wants only to entertain you long enough to implant the urge to buy a Pepsi; Silicon Valley used to want to change the world. Now no one at an ad-driven real estate website can breathe a word about whether the real estate industry needs change.
And maybe they shouldn’t. It can seem naive or self-important to think that a business should have any purpose beyond making money. Yet many of the businesses most successful over the long haul — Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, for example — have been built around a sense of purpose that motivates employees, appeals to customers and simplifies decisions. Nothing endures as well as a purpose.
And without some purpose, Silicon Valley will lose the fervor that once propelled us to build great companies. Of course Redfin is hardly great now, but we aim to be great. Our purpose is to use technology to put consumers in charge of buying or selling their home. This is the most valuable change we can offer the consumer. We hope that it can lead to our becoming the most valuable company in our industry.
If this makes companies like Redfin neither fish nor fowl, with real estate agents working alongside software engineers, then perhaps we will be the first awkward creature to stagger ashore on our own two feet, hopefully into a slightly better world.
August 20, 2007
I’ve been asked by many of my friends and family why I decided to leave my position at Microsoft, where I was appreciated and rewarded, for more work, more responsibility, and more stress. Well, the decision was mainly a result of three factors. First, someday I may start my own company, and transitioning from a startup makes that much easier. Second, I didn’t agree with many of Microsoft’s decisions and direction. Third, I wanted to build a product that would really cater to consumers and could stand on its own.
Almost all the top engineers I know talk ad nauseum about starting their own company, with the caveat of, “I’ll stay at big company XYZ for 2-3 years, then I’ll go out on my own.” Well, it never made sense to me how they thought that they could make the transition from being so removed from the business and the end to end process of creating and shipping a product. Working at a startup, you’re about as close as you can be to running your own business, and you don’t have to spend nearly all of your time and effort trying to raise money. For instance, the only financial statements I ever saw at Microsoft were quarterly reports (as a shareholder), and even those were a mystery. At Redfin, we get to see all of our financials, like pro forma cash flow statements that we might show to investors, and are encouraged to understand it and ask questions. Even raw talent can’t make up for this kind of experience.
While I was at Microsoft, many things didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t understand the massive “re-orgs”, which, if you hadn’t heard about ahead of time, it meant nothing material changed for you. I didn’t understand why we’d try to enter dominated markets with an uncompetitive offering. I didn’t understand those little table tents on the cafeteria tables or the giant banners and posters promoting intranet websites. I didn’t understand why site searches on MSDN were abysmal. I wasn’t the only one who was confused. Minimsft would try to speculate about a re-org or an acquisition. And on popular internal aliases like “litebulb”, for instance, there’d be email threads where people would ask why Vista had 6 (ok, 
SKUs, why Zune wouldn’t work with PlaysForSure, why their product had to be renamed from something cool to something like Windows Communication Framework, or why there were 2 confusing boxes on local.live.com (or so adverse to just calling it “maps.live.com” in the first place). Legitimate questions often got defensive responses. To paraphrase one developer, “Why are these responses always along the lines of, ‘We know what we’re doing’? Personally, I’d welcome the feedback, because that’s how I’ll improve. Why can’t you provide the reasons that led to your decision?” I couldn’t have agreed more.
Once I had decided I was leaving the company, I spent a lot of time trying to find the startup I’d be most passionate about. It sounds arrogant, but good software engineers can pretty much choose where they want to go. And it’s nearly frictionless to change jobs these days. You can post your resume up on Monster and get daily calls and emails. So, you do your homework and find a startup that really appeals to you. I was definitely not looking for some me-too social networking site or some company that was funded purely based on its management team’s connections. When I found Redfin, I knew it was just what I was looking for. During my home buying process a few years ago, I was convinced the real estate industry needed some serious changes. For instance, searching online required clicking in a multiple highlight box with 50 neighborhoods I’d never heard of, but I checked them anyways just in case they were somewhere near where I wanted to live. After much research, I learned that my agent would probably be getting a 3% commission when I bought a house. It wasn’t a “free” service as many led me to believe. Ten grand to drive me around and guilt me into buying a house I didn’t feel was right for me? Redfin’s scrappiness and audaciousness to battle it out with the traditional agents, brokerages, and MLSs on behalf of consumers like me was very appealing.
Startups aren’t for everyone. But for any of you on the fence and considering the startup world, here’s my advice:
- Plan for the future. Thinking about what I could accomplish in 5 years at a well established company versus a nascent one intrigued me. You’ll have much more influence over the development of an infant than you will a 30 year old, and the rewards should be commensurate.
- If you refer to your company in the third-person, or have to ‘beat’ the system to be productive, it’s a bad sign. (One rumor at Microsoft was that your group should spend exactly 100% of its budget/headcount, otherwise ‘they’ would cut next years.)
- Make sure your whole company feels like one team. Ballmer once joked at a company meeting, “Why do the different groups only clap for themselves?”
- Be as important to the company as it is to you. In a technology startup, the people ARE the startup. Our CEO reminds us, “The company’s only assets walk out the door every night.”
- Consider working where there are no sacred cows. Don’t like something? Be able change it!
- And finally, to quote Paul Glen, “Never underestimate the power of free food.”
July 18, 2007
Redfin today announced its expansion to the Washington, D.C. area and a $12-million series-C financing led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the folks behind Skype, Overture and Hotmail.
The whole process of raising money from DFJ seemed to encapsulate the essential Redfin traits (persistence, serendipity, adventure, speed): Redfin wooed DFJ somewhat unsuccessfully over the course of a year; but it was a zealous customer who arranged the initial meeting; which we traveled to by plane, train and bicycle; demonstrating a website that had only been launched the day before; resulting in a closing that took just a few weeks.
In the DFJ bathroom, I remember seeing a photo of one of the partners being strapped (was it head-first?) into a go-kart for a big race and also a piece of artwork painted by another partner, and feeling sure we had come to the right place. And we had. Of all the investors we talked to, DFJ was the most committed to building a long-haul, consumer-centered business, which sounds like motherhood and apple pie but is increasingly unusual in an ad-addled world.
DFJ’s Emily Melton will join Redfin’s board; she shares the Redfin spirit of candor, dog-craziness and derring-do but also brings with her Silicon Valley’s smarts and values. In a pinch, she drives the wrong way down one-way streets.
The fund-raising itself was fun. We roared around San Francisco in a convertible Mustang; felt glamorous in big, drugstore-bought sunglasses; listened to dance music on the radio; sat around a Starbucks getting nervous in between meetings. For no reason at all, we wore cufflinks, ran demos that didn’t work, slept on a friend’s couch to save money.
Many thanks to the folks at Redfin now and before who got the company to this point, to our partners at Madrona, Vulcan, BEV and Orrick for their constant support, to DFJ of course for leading the round, and last but not least, to all our friends in Silicon Valley and San Francisco who gave us a little help along the way.
And now of course we have to celebrate, with the opening of the Washington, D.C. market, which includes Baltimore and suburban Virginia. We used to launch these markets with one guy in his basement, e-mailing a dozen of his neighborhood friends for our “viral campaign,” but now we’ve got a huge list of people to notify that we’ve arrived in the area, and a team of folks led by Catherine Jardine, and many promises to keep too.
July 13, 2007
A year ago, the Diddy spirit pervaded Seattle, resulting in a NerdPartySupernova led by an Ephod-clad Michael Arrington as the Grand Poobah. Beer-hauling trucks conked out, young men fell fatally in love, entrepreneurs with Hare-Krishna looks in their eyes rampaged through the ranks of venture capitalists.
This year, we’re doing something bigger. First of all, we’re bringing in the barbecue pit. More importantly, we’re on a mission to introduce journalists to entrepreneurs, so that little companies with big ideas can put themselves on the map, and figure out how they want to talk to the press. With a tip of the hat to Robert Scoble, we’re calling the event The Naked Truth.
Rebecca Buckman from the Wall Street Journal, Fred Vogelstein from Wired, Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, John Cook from the Seattle PI and Tricia Duryee from the Seattle Times will be on a pre-party panel to answer questions. And startup bigshots like Hugh Crean, Hadi Partovi, Jason Goldberg and Ben Elowitz will be in the crowd to ask.
Here are the details:
When: Tuesday, July 24, 2007. The panel starts at 5:30, the party starts at 6:30.
Where: The Havana Social Club, 1010 East Pike Street, Seattle
Who: every entrepreneur, dreamer, procastinator, narcissist, coder, starter, joiner, flim-flam man, gonzo PR guy, bigshot, littleshot and networking twizzler in town… please come!
Madrona Venture Group and Redfin are paying for the kegs and the ‘cue, and iLike, WetPaint, Farecast, Jobster and WildTangent are helping us put it together. If you want to come, you have to sign up in advance, or overpower our HGH-juiced Cambodian bouncer at the door. Panel attendance is limited to 200 people. We’ve tented a nearby parking lot so the party can handle 500.
Madrona’s Greg Gottesman, master of ceremonies for the panel, has already laid down the law for his approach: “I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass—and I’m all out of bubble gum.”
Edit the wiki to put your name on the list…
May 10, 2007
Redfin has just begun raising money for what we hope will be our last round of private financing. If we’re lucky, it’ll take us four months.
To kick things off, I’ve spent the past two days powering a rented Dodge Avenger up and down Interstate 280, through oak-covered hills that are bright green from the rain, diddling with my phone because I have no one to call, overdosed on NPR — alone on a beautiful drive that I used to take all the time. Sometimes, a car can feel like the last reflective place there is.
And Sand Hill Road itself has always seemed weirdly deserted, like a grocery store in the middle of the day, serene where other places that wealthy would be frantic or colossal. Gardeners groom the grass, attractive receptionists IM themselves silly, entrepreneurs ogle the plaques in the lobby; the walls are still slick with gore from all the guys who never made it out alive. It is unnaturally quiet.
I’ve raised money before, usually in relatively small amounts, with plenty of help, and always with the hope that we would be the glamorous ones, that it would be easy, that no one would say no. Here is what seems to happen every time instead:
1. Near the end of a one-hour presentation, someone will ask, “What do you do again?”
2. The gratuitously risky alpha demo will crash, everyone will smile understandingly, and we will be led away, still mumbling excuses.
3. A venture capitalist will mention an extremely successful company, then say, “We passed on that one.” This is like saying, “Cindy Crawford… she wanted me.”
4. The people we present to won’t even wait for us to leave before gathering in a glass-walled room to talk about us. This is obviously intensely pleasurable for them. It’s unsettling to see people laughing while you stand by the elevator with your hands in your pockets.
5. We’ll try to imply that our deal will be in great demand. Later, when it becomes apparent to everyone that it isn’t, we’ll regret this.
6. At some point, a VC will ask me a polite form of the question: “How would you feel if we fired you?” “Fantastic,” I’ll say.
7. A presentation will go horribly. I’ll sit in the Avenger in the aftermath, wondering how to tell everyone I screwed up. And then, I’ll remember the consolation offered by my old friend Kirill Sheynkman, after I bombed a presentation to Sequoia’s partners. He put the top down on his red Mercedes, declared “you win some, you lose some,” then lit the stogie he had brought along to celebrate a triumph. We drove off together into the fading California sun.
This, for now, will have to be where we leave off. No venture capitalist will talk to Redfin in confidence if we blog about what happens next, and we would hurt our money-raising prospects if we did. Wish us luck!
March 18, 2007
All of us in software have been in a little bit of a funk over the new new thing in Silicon Valley, alternative energy. It’s the preeminent challenge of our time, and it’s largely in the realms of material science, not computer science.
Watching a new vanguard go by is a novel experience for many of us, and so we all have felt at least a momentary impulse to leap into the fray and join the next Exxon, the one based on technology rather than plunder.
But I’m not sure the Internet crowd is cut out for that. Harrison Ford once said that George Lucas only gave two types of direction to the Star Wars cast: “faster” and “the same, but better.” This is what the alternative energy folks are doing, which is a different kind of creativity than building software.
A fuel cell or a solar panel doesn’t have to be beautiful like Netvibes, or fun like Flickr. It won’t help people fall in love, find a home, or write a novel as they do on MySpace, or Redfin, or Zoetrope. It isn’t a Second Life or a World of Warcraft. You won’t have an immediate emotional reaction to it the way you did — I still remember this moment, that sound! — when you first turned on a Mac. It won’t be compulsive like blogs, or make you smile in surprise like YouTube.
Somewhere in your basement, under your hood, in the belly of big ships headed out to sea, alternative energy will make the world a profoundly better & wealthier place. Software has sometimes done that too. But our main consolation lies in what Yeats described as the rag-and-bone shop of the heart: making stuff that delights people. This is something we think about here at Redfin, even if it’s just a real estate site, even if we have a very long way to go yet in that effort…
Bonus tidbit from a friend of Redfin: [Jesse] Owens never met Hitler, but his victories were recorded by the Fuhrer’s favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, in her remarkable documentary about the games, “Olympia.” (While cajoling Nazi leaders, Riefenstahl carried on an affair with the American athlete Glenn Morris, who later played Tarzan in the movies. After winning the gold medal in the decathlon, Morris ripped open Riefenstahl’s blouse and kissed her breasts in full view of 100,000 spectators.)
And, finally, Redfin shows up on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle’s business section this Sunday… the print article apparently has a cartoon of us dressed up like Don Quixote.
January 29, 2007
Steve Jobs is the Internet generation’s Robert Kennedy. Close your eyes, and the Apple CEO even sounds like a Kennedy: follow your passion, the charismatic icon tells our youth; change the world. Except Jobs is selling gadgets, not civil rights.
No one seems to have noticed. Now, oil companies gush over the environment. Insurance ads quote Thoreau. Retailers fight HIV. And it all started in Silicon Valley.
I worked there from 1995 - 2005, and saw Silicon Valley take in the world’s best and brightest. Unlike other fortune-seekers, many of us were idealists, the kind of people who in a different time might have become teachers, doctors and social workers. In 1997, just after Netscape’s public offering inaugurated the Internet era, medical school applications declined precipitously for six straight years. Over that same period, the U.S. faced the worst teacher shortage in its history. The idealists had become virtual idealists.
It’s hard afterwards to come back to genuine ideals. Two years ago, my twin brother left a law firm protecting the Internet bubble’s investment bankers, for a government job protecting the environment. Now he complains you can’t turn the lights on in his office over the weekend without calling a special number. Before that, he worked for a non-profit that represented asylum seekers, who often showed up late for meetings. “No one ever did that when I cost $390 an hour,” he said.
In a year away from high-tech, I volunteered at inner-city schools and felt the same way: my time was lightly valued because I was giving it away, and many of the tutors seemed unmotivated compared to my old colleagues.
So now I’m back in Internet software, mostly because I missed the sense of purpose and importance that being around other driven people gave me. I believe in what we’re doing. But since we’re also out to turn a profit, some have ventured to call this belief disingenuous.
And it may seem so, but not to anyone in high technology, which has so thoroughly mixed virtue with commerce that you can hardly tell the two apart. Apple launched the Mac with an ad showing a woman heaving a hammer at a televised image of Big Brother. Google is famous for its promise to not be evil, and eBay’s latest slogan is “people are good.”
What each of these companies fears most is the loss of their original idealistic zeal: for CEO Jeff Bezos, it is still “day one” at Amazon; topping 10,000 employees, Google insists that it has “a small-company feel.” With near-monopolies in online bookselling, music, search and auctions, these companies imagine themselves as Davids, not Goliaths.
The touchstone of this idealism is the Internet itself, which for many of us has the conceptual magnitude of a new America, with new possibilities of community (MySpace), self-expression (YouTube), freedom (Second Life), love (Match.com), and authenticity (blogs). We forget about the porn, the spam, the get-rich-quick schemes. Nothing could be more American than dressing up an historic money-grab into a City on the Hill.
And every entrepreneur is straining to be John Winthrop. The most coveted role in Silicon Valley is that of the visionary, the pied piper who leads the poets and the dreamers on a mission to build a better gizmo. These entrepreneurs are the kind of free spirits who could have started a movement.
Together, we’ve made our corner of capitalism a bit better: many of the rewards go to those who actually do the work, the engineers; the work itself is done in small groups, so we have a meaningful connection to what we make; our product is the purest form of creativity, built from ones and zeros rather than coal and trees; and the result is often useful and delightful to other people — occasionally it even changes the world.
It can, more rarely than we would like, also make us rich. It’s considered a bit grubby to make things that people will pay for, even when — as was the case with Google, Yahoo!, eBay (and yes, Redfin) - we make it before having any idea how people will pay. But it isn’t hard to choose between the grubbiness of making something (even if it’s just a website) and what my brother does at his non-profit job, which is essentially trying to stop people from making something. Making something might be the most basic and fulfilling compulsion humans have.
And so that’s why, for my generation, Apple is our Woodstock. Google is our Chicago Democratic Convention. The class of 1967 would not have campaigned so vociferously against Vietnam if they could have imagined themselves starting Google. And the class of 2007 might be marching against Darfur now if it could think of anything but starting another Google.
We’re still idealistic, but about e-mail spam, online privacy and net neutrality, not war, or poverty, or racism. The world around us is falling apart and we can hardly look up from our computer screens, where the Internet becomes more beautiful every day.
