So, I’ve written this blog entry about five times. I’m not certain I know what I’m doing. I mean, I’m an amateur when it comes to real estate. I’m like that kid in the back of the classroom who ate paste. And I don’t mean the kid in second grade. I mean the kid in… Read More
Big news! We just announced a $10-million round of financing led by Greylock Partners’ James Slavet and his colleague David Thacker. Redfin’s group of existing investors — Madrona Venture Group, Vulcan Capital, DFJ, The Hillman Company — also pitched in on the round. We couldn’t be happier about the team behind us. Like all the… Read More
At today’s all-hands meeting, Redfin surveyed our 2008 accomplishments alongside what we wanted to do better in 2009. It was a good exercise, both so we could put to rest our mistakes, but also see how far we’ve come. Here is what we accomplished in the past 12 months: Decreased the cost of bringing a… Read More
Redfin published a guest post on TechFlash this morning about how the balance of power has shifted between the idealists in business who advance a company’s sense of mission and the mercenaries who insist on being 100% focused on profits. In many ways it picks up where an old Redfin essay about get-rich-quick-schemes left off…. 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
We waste a lot of time at Redfin trying to predict the future. Every business does I guess, but the speculation at a startup is especially poignant because the future is where you’ve pinned all your hopes. When we launched the big upgrade to our home-buying service, with unlimited home tours, agent choice and a… Read More
Redfin started life as a cult for what my mom still likes to call “your little web friends.” But our goal has always been to become a religion, appealing to grandmas and truck-drivers and everyone in between too. Unlimited Tours, Agent Choice To hit the mass market, we’re upgrading today our home-buying service to offer… 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
It’s funny how much we blog at Redfin without ever really saying what life at Redfin is really like. Enter Shahaf Abileah, the engineering lead who radically changed the speed, breadth and accuracy of our data imports from broker databases. He’s taking a long-planned one-year sabbatical with his fiancee to travel around the world, and… Read More