Company News
When Bad Companies Do Good Things
Entrepreneurs often ask me where good ideas come from. My answer usually is from bad companies. The most obvious example of this is Facebook. MySpace
Knowers and Learners
At breakfast earlier this month, my friend Roy Gilbert made an offhand reference to two types of people, knowers and learners. It was a distinction
Redfin Now Showing 700% More Foreclosed Homes
Last night, we flipped the switch on a different data source that gives us a more complete picture of the number of foreclosed homes that
The Double-Dip (Probably) Stops Dipping in March (Feb. Roundup)
Every month, Redfin publishes two newsletters on real estate prices. One, usually published on the last Tuesday of every month, is a Redfin Roundup, which
How Much Would Mint Be Worth Now?
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
Friendship and Solitude
Have you read the wonderful, deeply counter-cultural lecture on solitude and leadership delivered by William Deresiewicz in spring 2010 to the West Point plebe class? I
DeeJayOh Argues that the Problem is Still Inventory, not Demand
Every month, Redfin publishes a newsletter about real estate prices out to a few hundred thousand people. A few hundred write back. The tone of
Tracey Foley
A Boston-area Redfin field agent was arrested today by the FBI on charges of being a Russian spy. In her job application, she identified herself
The Rise of the Quants
My favorite anecdote in Michael Lewis’s The Big Short is about one of the first people to make big bets against mortgage bonds, a Deutsche
What the Government Could Really Do to Support Entrepreneurs
Innovation and entrepreneurship are becoming my two least-favorite words, mostly because they are being appropriated in ways that are neither innovative nor entrepreneurial. Like in
Jeff Hammerbacher on Hadoop, Facebook and a Surprising Bit About Microsoft
As part of our engineer-to-engineer series of technical talks, Cloudera co-founder Jeff “The Hammer” Hammerbacher visited Redfin’s San Francisco office last week to explain why
Engineer-to-Engineer: Evolving a New Analytical Platform with Hadoop
In the second installment of our San Francisco series of engineer-to-engineer lectures, Jeff Hammerbacher described the challenges of building data-intensive, distributed applications and how using
