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
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
The talk of the town today in Seattle has been TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington’s participation in last night’s TechFlash panel. One panelist said he wanted to spend the rest of his life building his startup, which is just the kind of hand-over-heart sentiment that Mike for some reason feels compelled to subvert, first by insulting… Read More
Almost every event at Redfin can be divided into two categories: success-disasters and disaster-disasters. In a success-disaster, the best-case scenario is so unexpected that it results in a fiasco. The web servers crash under the load. The dog catches the car. The Democrats win Congress. You wear the same outfit Sunday morning as on Saturday… Read More
Redfin published an essay in TechCrunch today, “To Steve or Not to Steve,” about entrepreneurs who impose their personalities on a startup. Redfin’s Matt Goyer read it first, to make sure it wouldn’t offend anyone. Matt’s an insightful soul, so I knew he would also appreciate the nuances of my argument. When he was done,… Read More
Michael Arrington published another hum-dinger of an essay this morning, this one on the future of blogging and journalism in a world of rampant theft: one writer takes another writer’s story, hardly bothering to rewrite it, and posts it somewhere else, with the Internet portal and search engines richly rewarding the copycat rather than the… Read More
Redfin just published an essay on TechCrunch about what we learned from venture capitalists while raising money. Some of the small-is-beautiful thinkers here in Seattle may say it’s just another how-to guide for kissing investors’ fannies rather than boot-strapping a business. Not true! Our point wasn’t to tell people how to raise money; the entrepreneurs who are… Read More
In what became the most-discussed post of the day, a mystery author argued yesterday on TechCrunch for regulating Google’s algorithm for ranking search results and ads. The author compares the Internet to a vast, wonderful country — if the Internet were like Italy or Hawaii, and could only be visited two weeks a year, how… Read More
Many thanks to Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld for publishing an essay this morning on what I’ve learned as a CEO during the downturn. Did anyone notice that the picture of Arnold in “Predator” is strikingly similar to the picture of me? The premise of the post isn’t that Redfin has found our way out… Read More
Have you heard? Yammer is Twitter for corporations. On Monday it launched. On Wednesday, it won TechCrunch50′s top prize. By this morning, Yammer was reporting it had signed up 10,000 people from 2,000 companies. This afternoon, the great Dan Fabulich of Redfin asked if we could start using it. Of course, Dan was only being… Read More