Our latency is usually no more than 15 minutes, so we apologize for these delays. This is not a problem with CARETS, it’s our issue. We should have things fixed in Southern California by Saturday night.

UPDATE, 11/24 @ 6:30pm: We restored our normal listing update latency at 11am Saturday morning.

Redfin is the same way. If our projections are right, we could hire twice the number of agents we now have and still have enough business for everybody. So we know we need to hire like mad. But we’re still turning away almost every agent we meet.

Why? Because everywhere we’ve ever worked sooner or later goes through a bozo explosion. And the moment that happens is always indisputable. One second you’re horsing around in your office, and the next a bozo is standing in your doorway. The hiring manager beside him is already staring at her shoes.

Now we could keep a bazooka by the desk  for cases like these. But it’s a thousand times better to hire the right person in the first place. The challenge with Redfin is to be big and good, to deliver a consistently amazing customer experience from state to state, year to year. Not many real estate brokers manage that.

So we need to maintain those high standards without taking 38 years to hire each person. Some online businesses subject candidates to an intelligence test. We liked that idea. Intelligence is very important to us. But what’s even more important to us is values, not smarts.

So a bunch of us worked together on a values test, which we’ll post online for every applicant to take. Before we finalize the test, we wanted to get our customers’ and partners’ take on it. Have a look and let us know which questions you would add, edit or delete.

Many thanks to Marshall Park, Taylor Connolly and Matt Goyer for their help putting the first draft together.

1. It’s the end of the quarter and a home-buying client is about to close on a $3 million property that Redfin needs to make its revenue target. The client calls to say he isn’t sure whether the property is right for him, and wonders if it is still possible to rescind the deal. What do you do?

1. Ignore the call and proceed with the sale.
2. Explain that everyone has these anxieties and persuade him to complete the sale.
3. Lay out each of his options, explaining the costs and benefits of each.
4. Call the listing agent to discuss how best to keep the deal together.
5. This is a tough one. Talk to your manager to come up with a solution that balances Redfin’s need for revenue with the client’s best interests.

2. A colleague comes to you to complain that her manager occasionally seems sexist in his dealings with her. What do you do?

1. Tell her this information cannot be kept in confidence but entails an obligation to act. Advise her to contact the HR department; if she doesn’t, contact HR yourself.
2. Advise her to contact the HR department; if she chooses not to, keep her confidence.
3. Wait to see if the sexist behavior recurs and then escalate to HR as appropriate.
4. Tell her to approach her manager to discuss the problem directly.

3. A listing client mentions to you that she lied in her disclosure packet. What do you do?

1. Nothing. Your first responsibility is to the client; it is the buyer’s responsibility to discover any problems himself.
2. Ask the client to correct the disclosure packet. If she is unwilling to do so, inform the client that you can’t represent her knowing what you do, and help her find another listing broker.
3. Refer the client to another Redfin agent, so that Redfin retains the revenue opportunity without placing you in an awkward situation.

4. A field agent on your team reports that a touring client was unpleasant toward him. What do you do?

1. Tell the field agent to suck it up. The customer is always right.
2. Fire the client straight away. Everyone is always respected.
3. Assign the client to a different field agent, avoiding conflict.
4. Call the client to get each side of the story. Explain that a respectful relationship is a requirement for a successful outcome. If the client is disrespectful again, direct the client to work with a different broker.

5. A home-buying client under contract gets an inspection report that finds only minor problems with the property, but the client still wants major concessions from the seller. These concessions seem unreasonable to you. What do you do?

1. Explain that seeking these concessions may scotch an otherwise good deal for the client; if the client wants to proceed, negotiate to get the concessions to the best of your ability.
2. Explain that these concessions are unreasonable and help the client find another agent. Never attempt to influence the client’s judgments; just help him do what he wants to do.
3. Prepare the paperwork requesting these concessions, but inform the listing agent that you know the request is unreasonable, working together to keep the deal on track.

6. A Redfin home-buyer meets a listing agent who disparages Redfin, implying that any Redfin offer will not be taken seriously. What do you do?

1. Prepare the offer, and attempt to win over the listing agent with your professionalism.
2. Explain to the client that some listing agents are unethical, and focus on another property.
3. Ask your Redfin broker to resolve the issue diplomatically with the listing agent’s broker, presenting the offer to that broker, and explaining why you were concerned that the listing agent himself would not treat it fairly.
4. Confront the listing agent and explain that his behavior is unethical.

7. A Redfin user contacts us with an offer on a $2.5M property that he had seen with an agent from another broker. The user explain s that he worked with that agent for nearly a year, but wants to use Redfin for the commission refund. What do you do?

1. Show the property to establish Redfin as the procuring cause of the sale, ask the client to sign a buyer’s agency agreement, then write and submit the offer.
2. Ask the user to sign a buyer’s agency agreement and write the offer; showing the property is an unnecessary step.
3. Call the user’s current agent and offer her a referral fee to compensate her for the loss of the commission.
4. Explain to the client that you can represent him on future properties, but that he should probably talk to his current agent first about his decision to switch to Redfin; suggest that the client work with his current agent on the $2.5M property since that agent had done the work to show the user the house.

8. The client confronts you about a mistake you may have made on a contract. What do you do?

1. Put off the client until you can talk to your manager and our attorney about our legal liability
2. Immediately acknowledge the mistake if you made one and start working on fixing the mistake; worry about the legal consequences later (in any lawsuit, the company not you would be sued anyway).
3. Explain that a transaction this complicated involves many parties, and it’s hard to say who’s at fault.

So that’s it! What questions would you add, change or delete? How would the Redfin employees you’ve met fare on a test like this?
(Photo credit: Jack Hynes on Flickr And no one is really out of anyone’s league)

1st-tour requests: 1,686 projected for September vs 1,533 in August
Total tour requests: 5,286 projected for September vs 4,762 in August

Some of this is because Redfin has grown. Some of it is because the market has begun to revive, and the first-time home-buyer tax credit has gotten home-buyers rushing to beat the December 1 deadline for a closing. So we asked ourselves what’s going on?

Adam Wiener and Rob McGarty, who analyze Redfin’s real estate operations, report that offer submissions for the first half of this month are up 68% from the same time year, and that excludes all the new markets we opened. But they caution that the decline from the seasonal peak in July is not as steady as I’d assumed: offers last year spiked in the first two weeks of September, though not as much as they have this time. The spike at the beginning of the month  is probably because both buyers and sellers are back from their August vacations.

How much of the demand will disappear after the first-timer credit expires? Not quite as much as I’d thought. In the past two years, 55% of our offers have been in the first-timer price range, for homes under $500K — but that number in September has increased to only 61% of our offers. We looked at tours data to see if earlier on in the pipeline there was a preponderance of first-timers but the data was just noisy, with no real trends.

We also looked at Redfin Forums, to get a feel for whether buyers are getting frustrated by the competition, and there was certainly plenty of that: in the Bay Area, in Los Angeles,  and this gem in Washington DC.

But the most interesting commentary on the market came from Redfin’s Chris Glew, who sent me and Matt this note Thursday afternoon:

*~*~*~*~*

From: Chris Glew
Sent: Thursday, September 17, 2009 2:26 PM
To: Glenn Kelman; Matt Goyer

Glenn:

Over the last few days, I’ve been talking to our agents about what they’ve been seeing in their markets. One thing I’ve heard from most markets is that there are a lot of people looking to buy, but there’s very little good homes for sale. Buyers who’ve been looking since June or July have seen everything for sale in their target neighborhoods & price ranges. When a well-priced home in good condition comes on the market, buyers are ready to pounce and nice listings go under contract quickly:

Marshall Park told me “if it’s on the market over 30 days, it’s over priced or doesn’t show well.”

Mark Reitman is working with a buyer looking at homes on the North Shore priced ~$600K who’s been prepared to bid on three different homes but each one sold before they could submit an offer (all three went under contract in less than a week).

Jim Holt says, “It feels like summer with all the activity.” 19 of the 21 offers (90%) Jim submitted in August were on homes with multiple offers. He says almost everything is selling for more than you would expect and sellers are concerned deals won’t appraise out so they’ll often counter with no appraisal contingency. Jim is working with a buyer who’s made 4 offers in the last 4 weeks on $525K – $625K homes in Daly City & Pacifica. All four offers were rejected and the homes all sold above list. One was listed at ~$530K, received close to 20 offers and sold for ~$650K.

Adam Welling says that in Cambridge & Somerville there’s a lot of activity across the board: SFHs & condos, $300K to $700K. It’s not the tax credit, it’s that everyone is trying to buy before prices and mortgage interest rates start going up.

I hope this helps.

*~*~*~*~*

So it sounds like demand is up, but there aren’t many high-quality homes to buy, in part beccause builders haven’t added much new inventory anywhere either except a bit in Seattle and the Bay Area and in part because home-sellers still don’t want to compete with all the foreclosure inventory on the market or about to enter the market. The increase in demand notwithstanding, we aren’t worried about prices increasing — there’s enough inventory waiting in the wings that prices can’t increase too much — but we do worry about the expiration of the tax credit and — far more importantly — an increase in interest rates.

So we’re starting to believe that there really is some pent-up demand, beyond that created by the tax credit, but we’re not sure it will survive the first big jump in rates. What’s your take?

Is this normal? We checked  other real estate apps and found a far more even distribution. Here’s one:

And here’s another:

Why is Redfin’s distribution so different? Is it because we’re new to the iPhone, and the most passionate advocates weigh in first? Or that Redfin is simply more polarizing, regardless of what the app itself does?

The one-star reviews almost never include any comment. But the 5-star reviews are effusive:

• “This is quite possibly the best iPhone app out there in terms of execution and usefulness.  If you to buy or sell you NEED this app.”
• “I have been using this app all day and I get more and more impressed as time goes on.  I have been waiting for a Redfin iPhone app for a while and this does everything I want and more.  It’s the little things that put this in the 5 star area.”
• “Must download if buying a home.  I would pay $50 for this, it is so useful.

We’ve also gotten plenty of notices on Twitter:

• “After a test run, I have concluded that @Redfin has created perhaps the best free real estate iPhone application I’ve encountered yet.”
• “New #redfin iPhone app is ON. THE. MONEY.”
• “I didn’t think it was possible to love them any more than I do already, and then Redfin goes and releases an iPhone app.”

A few months ago, online jeweler Blue Nile co-founder Ben Elowitz gave Redfin’s Seattle office a brown-bag talk. Our brown-bag lunch series features presentations by entrepreneurs, VCs, real estate agents, journalists, and our own employees so we can all learn from each other, usually over tin foil bins of Indian food. Ben spoke about how Blue Nile built a trustworthy and successful brand in part by becoming an authority on diamond education and guidance. They did this by writing a diamond buying guide, expanding on the “4 C’s” of diamond evaluation, and producing a glossary of terms. We all sat up and realized that we need to be providing the same kind of comprehensive real estate education for our customers. We’ve got the best search site, the most experienced agents, and now we need to be the authoritative source for home buying and selling help content.

So here’s our first shot at a real estate glossary. We focused on depth since we figured a two-sentence definition doesn’t adequately help a first-time home buyer looking to get an FHA loan, wondering about what’s on a Purchase and Sale agreement, or curious about how a home appraisal can affect financing. We wanted to draw on the knowledge and experience of our agents and customers, so we didn’t license the content. Instead, we kept digging to present clear and honest definitions. Each term linked within the glossary has a special format: when you click on the link, a little pop-up gives you a bit of teaser content with a link to the term’s full definition if you’d like to learn more.

Creating the glossary was a collaborative effort across our engineering, real estate operations, and marketing teams. Many thanks to our web developer/official Redfin Class Clown Jason Brackins for designing and coding the interface, our agents, and Brian Thielicke, Matt Allen, and John Wheaton, three of our preferred mortgage lenders who provided great feedback as we produced draft after draft. And a special shout-out to Redfin customer extraordinaire @basiamontauk for reviewing our entire 20+ page doc! We can’t thank you enough for your support of Redfin.

Now we need your help. Every page has a feedback box where you can send us suggestions for new terms and how we could improve. Check out the glossary and let us know what you think!

The index — we now have a formal definition of Case-Shiller in our glossay so we can stop explaining it every month — measures how the prices of houses have changed, focusing exclusively on houses that have been sold before without any major renovations, so the only real driver for a price increase or decrease is demand, rather than a new kitchen or a recently upgraded basement. The index publishes data only for an entire metropolitan area, which includes not only a city like Chicago, but also its farthest-flung suburbs.

The largest gain was in the San Francisco area at 3.1%. The most sustained gains were in DC- and Chicago-areas — where prices have increased over three consecutive months — and in the Boston area — where prices have increased for four consecutive months.

As usual, we have prepared a table summarizing the date at which each market peaked, the date when home prices were last at this level (”equivalent date”), the percentage drop from the peak, the year-over-year change, and the month-over-month change. We’ve also added a new column to track the number of consecutive months that prices have increased in a market.

In general, prices are at June 2003 levels, down year-over-year but up .7% month over month.

And here are the graphs, first for the index since 2000 so you can see the whole bubble form and then pop…

And now we see the same data for just the last 12 months, so we can see how prices are bottoming out, at least for the moment.

We still don’t know what will happen to prices once the first-time home-buyer tax credit runs out in November, or even if it will run out since the industry is lobbying Congress for an extension. What do you think will happen? As always, we anxiously await our readers’ comments…

We’ll integrate all of this data into a larger portrait of the market, hopefully later today in the big Redfin newsletter.

Once we adjust for seasonality – home prices tend to increase in the summer – the gain becomes a loss nationwide of .2% . But even after this adjustment, the Bay Area (.7%), DC (.7%), Chicago (.5%) and Boston (.3%) still gained month-over-month. Year-over-year, prices nationwide are down 17%.

As usual, we’ve prepared a little table that shows the month when each market peaked, the month in the past when prices were last at this level (”the equivalent month”), the size of the drop from the market’s peak, the change since May 2008, and the change since April 2009:

	Date of Peak	Equivalent Month	Drop from Peak	YoY Change	MoM Change
LA Area	Apr-06	Jul-03	-41.4%	-19.8%	-0.9%
San Diego	Mar-06	Jul-02	-42.3%	-18.5%	-0.3%
Bay Area	Mar-06	Aug-00	-45.1%	-26.1%	0.7%
DC Area	Mar-06	Dec-03	-32.8%	-14.9%	0.7%
Chicago Area	Mar-07	Sep-02	-26.4%	-17.5%	0.5%
Boston Area	Nov-05	Dec-02	-18.0%	-7.2%	0.3%
New York Area	May-06	Apr-04	-20.9%	-12.2%	-0.1%
Seattle Area	Jul-07	Apr-05	-22.0%	-16.6%	-0.8%
Composite-20	May-06	Apr-03	-32.0%	-17.1%	-0.2%

Small price increases are being seen not only in the existing homes tracked by Case Shiller, but also in the sales of new single-family homes which increased 11% in June; again the strongest increases were in California and Washington DC. ]]> http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2009/07/case_shiller_prices_are_up_but_not_everywhere_not_if_you_adjust_for_seasonality.html/feed 2 http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2009/07/the_only_things_you_probably_dont_know_about_michael_arrington.html http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2009/07/the_only_things_you_probably_dont_know_about_michael_arrington.html#comments Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:12:52 +0000 Glenn Kelman http://blog.redfin.com/?p=1409 Did anyone wonder why TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington participated in last week’s Naked Truth? I have, many times.

It’s not because we’re close personal friends. We don’t hang out, and we disagree about almost everything, starting with whether you can build a great technology company in Seattle. I’ve complained that his official sanctioning of music theft is adolescent and even  immoral. I’ve argued that his enthusiasm for free software services has led an entire generation of entrepreneurs over a cliff. I’ve chastised him for bashing traditional media competitors when he has friends in journalism who’ve lost jobs, a point he grumbled about just before the Naked Truth started. I’ve been so upset about TechCrunch coverage of Redfin that I couldn’t sleep. He knows I think he probably over-covers Twitter; he knows I disagree with his position that Facebook should give Nazis the boot.

So if anything, Mike helped out because of our disagreements, not in spite of them, because he believes in disagreement as a dialectic for discovering the truth. And he is still eager, after all these years, to help out whenever he can.

This is not to say that Redfin feels more gratitude to Michael Arrington than to our other speakers: Damon Darlin, Fred Wilson and Fred Vogelstein. As we have said in other places, public and private, words cannot express how grateful we are to all of you, each of whom drove all day or flew all night to be at the Naked Truth. But Michael is a special case because only Michael has had his motives questioned so thoroughly.

Everyone pretends to know all about Michael, but as a half-assed, ten-minutes-a-day organizer of a small conference in a small corner of the U.S., here’s what I wish Michael’s critics knew about him:

1. He gives himself away. Even though TechCrunch makes most of its money from events, Mike supports others’ events that charge no admission and pay him no money. In 2006, after Jason Calacanis and others had shown Mike how essential events were to building a sustainable media business, he asked me if we could charge for the Naked Truth and then give the money to charity, just to avoid setting a precedent that the events he headlines are free. He called rather than emailed to ask, and he was so ham-fisted about it that I could hardly understand what he was saying. Before he could finish the request, he told me I didn’t have to do it and probably shouldn’t. Since that call, he has helped us out every year and never raised the issue again. Last Thursday on the sidewalk outside the Naked Truth 2009, I told Mike “you’re the only hooker who gives it away.” He looked crestfallen. Every year, I am sure he won’t be back again.

2. He’s one of us. Most of the people whom entrepreneurs talk to look at us like a space alien: we get over-excited, or tired and cranky, because we’ve lost perspective or lost sleep. We go too far, we speak in tongues. Mike’s that way too. For years, he let entrepreneurs crash at his place. On one of his visits to Seattle, Redfin once offered to put him up somewhere fancy, and he chose a dive to save us money. True to his belief that journalists shouldn’t get free gear, he has the shittiest iPhone in Silicon Valley, last year’s model with a gigantic crack in the screen. And after all these years, he’s still a breathless fanboy and an outraged critic, a user and a creator of new technologies.  In a resignation letter by perhaps the greatest of all editors, The New Yorker’s William Shawn, there is a halting expression of emotion that must capture how Mike feels about his own publication, too:  “the operational word is, I think, love.” Even after Mike has hired a dozen writers of varying talent, TechCrunch is, more than almost any other blog I read, a labor of love. Whatever faults Mike has, they are those of a true entrepreneur. He cares too much, not too little.

3. And he cares a lot: the day Michael Arrington wrote a piece taunting me for leaving Silicon Valley in favor of a kick-back lifestyle in Seattle, my cell-phone rang. It was Mike, calling to make sure he hadn’t hurt my feelings. He called again last Friday to ask if anyone had his feathers ruffled during the Naked Truth. In 2006, after he told a conference of real estate agents that their whole business was doomed and wrong, he anxiously asked “how’d you think that went over?” It turned out he’d stayed up all night preparing the speech. Like a kid who can’t help blurting out the wrong thing at a dinner party, Mike always seems genuinely surprised that people take it personally when he disagrees with them. And yet it’s impossible to take ideas seriously without occasionally being disagreeable. Every polarizing statement Michael Arrington makes costs him dearly, but he can’t stop saying what he thinks, which can only mean that his opinions come from somewhere real.

4. He rallies: when we asked Michael Arrington to speak at this year’s event, he agreed to do it on the spot. Then it turned out that there were no flights to get him back to Palo Alto for the all-day event TechCrunch was hosting at 9 the following morning (9 a.m. for Michael Arrington is like 4 a.m. for a normal human being). When he called to say he couldn’t make it, I must have sounded a little hurt. An hour later, he’d found one last flight into a third-tier airport. Best case, he’d get home by 1 a.m. When I told him he really didn’t have to do it, he lied and said it would be a good excuse to visit his parents; I already knew that flight would only give him a few minutes in Seattle prior to the event. He traveled six hours to spend an hour as one of eight people on a panel. What’s funny is that during the panel, Mike told the audience that the speakers all came because it was somehow in their self-interest to come. But in fact he had already made that calculation – who hasn’t said, “why on earth did I agree to do this?” – and then he came anyway.

5. He fights the baloney avalanche: Mike is one of the only people in tech to stand before a daily avalanche of baloney and shout, with real emotion and even indignation, “NO!” Of course, many other journalists silently sift through all the hoo-ha to find out what’s true. But no one else is so deeply offended by it, no one calls it out so much, no one is continually goaded by it like one of those bug-addled deer you hear about that throw themselves off a cliff. That’s exactly what I like about Michael; that he is still capable of fresh outrage — do you know how hard it is to be idealistic and cranky at the same time? — that he is fighting a lonely, almost ceaseless battle against the minor, countless lies we tell each other to get along and the seeping mediocrity that all the rest of us just sort of surrender to. When Mike waxes nostalgic about how Meebo and Sphere launched in his living room, you get the unmistakable feeling that he is protecting something small and precious — the entrepreneurs, the technology — in a near-hopeless battle against a far-more numerous enemy that nobody else even sees.

6. We need him: do you know how boring Silicon Valley would be without Michael Arrington? I do. I remember reading eWeek and thinking I just can’t take much more of this. We can go back to those days, but I don’t think anyone – least of all Michael Arrington’s detractors – wants that. The truth is we need someone to mix it up a little; we need someone to grumble about and point at. If Michael Arrington didn’t exist, we’d have to create him. Lost in all the talk of his celebrity is that his raw writing talent is off the charts. And no one more than Mike wants our industry to be bigger and better and more fun.  He has given a voice and a sense of belonging to a lot of lonely people who spend their days and nights feeling fly-by-night. Most startups get their first notice on TechCrunch, and Michael Arrington is often the first person to have taken them seriously after years of doubt and work (work is hard, and doubt is terrible, but the two together are what can really make a startup miserable). I still remember how everyone here at Redfin felt when TechCrunch first wrote about us. Ten thousand real estate agents said it would never work. And Michael Arrington said it just might.

1. Giving consumers a choice of agent, and unlimited home tours.
2. Publishing agent reviews, which increased demand 36% in a single month.
3. Simplifying the agent choices we offer consumers, which increased demand a further 16% in a single month.
4. Generating referral revenues from customers in outlying areas that we can’t afford to serve ourselves.
5. Figuring out Google optimization, which drove a 300% increase in traffic year over year, though that growth is now slowing.

It’s nice to wonder how much more profitable Redifn can be once the market really recovers. But since real estate is a seasonal business, we’ll have plenty more ups and downs in our fortunes along the way.

The difference now is that even if Redfin goes back down, we’ll always know that we can go back up. And knowing that is a huge salve for what’s most unbearable about startup life: the aching possibility that it can never work, that the game is so stacked against you it doesn’t even matter what moves you make. Well, Redfin has plenty of problems, and we could still easily fail, but we know now how we can win, too.

Wait, What About the Naked Truth?
And we’ll keep on trying to learn from others, like the entrepreneurs, journalists and investors who attended the Naked Truth tonight. We’ll post the Naked Truth video some time on Friday, but for now here’s what struck us as most interesting about the event.

Picnik’s Jonathan Sposato –  wearing Gucci wrap-around glasses and a seersucker suit – said that partnerships only generated 16% of Picnik’s traffic, and that subscriptions accounted for 80% of its revenues. (I was surprised by how much Picnik’s margins seemed to be affected by photo storage, a feature I never cared about as a premium subscriber.) What really impressed me  about Jonathan’s overview of Picnik – I have always been opposed to ads on Redfin, and more interested in subscriptions – was how important  that 20% of ad-generated revenue was to Picnik.

And I learned a lot about ads. Urbanspoon’s Ethan Lowry – - who said that Urbanspoon employed only three people full-time when Michael Arrington picked out a fourth Urbanspooner in the crowd (”she’s part-time!”) – said that Citysearch’s local salesforce got top-dollar, whereas Adsense and iPhone ads paid much lower rates. The closer ads are to a point of purchase, the higher the rate; the best rates come from local restaurants hoping to get a reservation directly from the ad.

As a buyer of ads, Animoto’s Brad Jefferson explained that you can’t buy traffic until you understand how much revenue it will generate; at first, pay advertisers based on the revenue they generate, then later based on impressions or clicks. It sounded so obvious when he said it, but we paid for traffic in the early days without knowing diddly about what it was worth to us.

Michael Arrington said that TechCrunch makes its money mostly from events, not ads. Damon Darlin said the New York Times has avoided events so that it doesn’t become a cheerleader for the businesses it covers.

Twitter and Growth
Fred Wilson said that Twitter hadn’t chosen a revenue model because it was focused purely on growth — a luxury that it seems Twitter alone can afford to have right now — and Michael Arrington said that Twitter was like YouTube, which sold for a high valuation because Google had to evaluate it revenue potential in lieu of actual revenues.

Fred then claimed that his own blog got as much traffic from Twitter and Facebook as from Google, whereupon Michael Arrington told Fred he was wrong about his own blog. Which is why we all love Michael Arrington.

Fred Vogelstein said that startups could generate less revenue because they spent less money. Fred Wilson said that companies focus on revenues too much in lieu of earnings.

Ethan noted that a $5 iPhone application that sold to all 40 million iPhone owners would still only have a total possible market of $200 million. Fred Wilson shot back that iPhone developers will make far more money now on the new ability to charge for  upgrades and transactions.

And Then The Fur Started Flying
Damon Darlin showed Michael Arrington his notes for their hotly disputed interview about bloggers’ accuracy and speed. Fred Wilson told Michael Arrington that his complaints against Seattle were a “crock of shit” but then — because Arrington gets blamed for everything —  everyone pretended that it was Michael who had called out  Fred (when all Mike said was:  ”Name another big Seattle hit besides  Amazon and Microsoft?”). Damon Darlin compared me to Steven Spielberg. I told Fred Wilson my blog posts took forever to write; he said, once he started writing, his never took more than 30 minutes. (How on earth does he do that?)

Thanks to everyone who came to the event, to our fantastic panelists who traveled from far and wide to participate, to our sponsors Madrona, Fenwick & West and Square 1 Bank, and to Angela Cough and the rest of the Redfin crew here who put it together. And thanks most of all to our wonderful clients, to this community, to all the hard-working folks of Redfin, past and present, who got us to this big milestone!

Now the sun has come out and we don’t have to work within the limits of the 450 who can fit into the pavilion. So we’re moving the panel outdoors and opening the event to everybody. Damon Darlin, Michael Arrington, Fred Wilson, Jonathan Sposato, Ethan Lowry and Brad Jefferson will all be there. John Cook, Todd Bishop, Brier Dudley and Marcelo Calbucci are confirmed. Wired editor Fred Vogelstein has also just signed on.

Who will pay for all these people? Our sponsors — Madrona, Fenwick & Square 1 Bank — only signed up to provide drink tickets and organic, locally grown, Emeril-endorsed  free-range super-hot Uli sausages  for the first 400 guests. So get there early, and bring a towel, blanket or pillow to sit on the grass in the evening sun. It’s going to be a beautiful night. Doors open at 5:30.

If you can’t make it in person, starting at 5:30 Seattle 2.0 is live-streaming the event here, on their fabulous new TV channel and on TechFlash. The hash-tag for the event is #nakedtruth.