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
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
One small good thing about Wall Street’s terrifying meltdown: this year’s graduating class will send fewer of its best people into investment banking and more into fields where they’ll actually make something new and good. I remember walking around Pioneer Square last year with one of my favorite Redfin engineers, who was mulling career options… Read More
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…. Read More
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… Read More
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,… Read More
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… Read More
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… Read More
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… Read More