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
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
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
Quick! Name the top 10 publicly traded consumer internet businesses in the US. When you woke up Thursday morning, the list was: Google: $171 billion market capitalization (26% annual revenue growth) Amazon: $90 billion (38% growth) eBay: $43 billion (14% growth) Priceline: $26 billion (38% growth) Yahoo!: $21 billion (-24% growth) Netflix: $13 billion (45% growth)… Read More
The United States is becoming a startup factory. It’s a very good trend for the U.S. and for entrepreneurs. But this post is how it must feel different than it once did, when startups were hand-crafted in a basement or a garage, and stayed there much longer than they now do. First, a few numbers…. Read More
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… Read More
It has almost been 18 months since Intuit acquired Mint for $170 million, so long ago that we can hardly remember how vigorously venture investors defended the deal, even as Redfin and Jason Fried suggested that Mint would have been fine going it alone, too. The Valley’s digerati were unanimous in praising Mint for taking… Read More
Whoa! Shocking news, guys. An engineer left Google for Facebook. The great Lars Rasmussen, creator of Google Maps and Google Wave, quit Google Thursday to join Facebook. This has, admittedly, happened before. In June, Matthew Papakipos defected from Google’s Chrome team. In May, it was mobile guru Erick Tseng. Even Facebook’s chef, Josef Desimone, was recruited… Read More