If your values don't alienate anyone, it is just platitude.
— Glenn Kelman
I started a software company with a couple other folks. It went public. We made plenty of money. And I thought it was this incredible mission, but in fact, we sold software to Haliburton; we sold software to Frito-Lay and Pepsi and all these companies that didn't necessarily do good things.
I think that real estate consumers are stuffy; I think they're scared. They don't buy a house every day. It's a very infrequent purchase.
I am not excited about Bitcoin. I think it's an outrage that, in an era of global warming, there are racks of servers next to the Columbia River. I wish I could explain to the salmon that we've created a dam generating hydroelectric power so that we can generate a fake currency.
The truth is that I love working. I love my kids. But I don't view one as evil and the other as good. I need to work to be a happy person, to be a good parent.
I think companies psych themselves out and say, 'Now that we're public, we've got to get all stuffy. We've got to be a certain way,' and the entrepreneurial spirit dies. What you got to keep alive is the intimacy, the energy, this crazed sense of purpose.
I learned, even when all hell is breaking loose, first to take time to make my environment productive.
Everybody who's been fired has heard before about the problems they have. They just don't know it's that serious. Once you know what the stakes are, you become more serious.
We don't need to take the world by storm. We just need to make our customers happy, and when we do that, the word spreads.
People don't think of me as Glenn Kelman; they think of me as the real estate guy. If I wasn't interested in real estate, that would be pretty tragic, wouldn't it?
You have to be sort of an emotional steward to really get a business to do something hard - to take people up the hill, to conquer the mountain, to sack the city. You have got to be a maniac.
I think if I had gone to a private school and been coddled a little bit, I wouldn't be as tough as I am now.
Thinking constantly about world domination can give you a little vertigo. The way I usually get through my day is by limiting my horizon to serving the next few customers or increasing revenues in the next few months.
VCs are good at asking questions.
Sometimes I wish I was less of a maniac; sometimes I wish I was more.
I learned that sometimes you should just tell people the ugliest things about you because those are the things that people trust the most.
Many of the ex-hippies who started companies like Apple, or the early online bulletin boards dedicated to organic food and following the Grateful Dead, were an odd combination of liberals and libertarians.
I think the company that has the clearest set of values is Amazon. That company knows what it is. It may be that it's not your cup of tea, but every single person at that company knows what the Amazon values are.
I wish I was as annotative as Elon Musk.
I'm from Seattle.
I think of myself as someone who's trying to make things better.
My advice for men who aren't yet parents is to make sure you're a happy person before having a baby.
If somebody were more passionate about Redfin, how would she not be more qualified to have my job than I am? Like, that's the thing I have to be the best at.
I learned to value speed in everything I do.
I learned that it's important to treat yourself like a work in progress, to think about how you can improve, to listen to feedback.
People knew about IBM before they knew about Apple. Sometimes it takes a little longer for better to win.
Over the years, I just started paying a lot more attention not to whether I was right or wrong, but just to how I make people feel.
People can smell a lack of respect from a mile away.
The one thing that Redfin has been really good at has been at delighting people.
It's easy to grow 300% in your first year or two, when you're starting with nothing and people first hear about your service. What separates a potential colossus from other businesses is the capacity to keep growing at that rate in years four, five, and beyond.
I really admire the fact that whenever Marc Singer gets a call from someone running late, he says he's running late, too. I don't admit that even when it's true. Small, unnoticeable acts of generosity are sometimes the most impressive.
Almost everything is interesting if you work at it.
Whereas any political party, and nearly all voters, prize consistency as a sign of authentic, values-driven thinking, it is deeply alien to the hacker, who holds that changing your mind is simply intelligence in action.
Many of the libertarian entrepreneurs who only want the government to leave them alone have simply forgotten how important government research, public education, and immigration policy are to Silicon Valley's long-term success.
I worry all the time that we're going to screw up a customer's offer.
I wish I was as smart as Jeff Bezos. He's just a large-brained space alien.
Behind the driven person is just an enormous amount of misery. You have to be miserable with the status quo to want to change it.
I wanted to solve every real estate problem with software.
The U.S. is one of the hardest-working cultures in the world.
I learned that people love to be good at things, even the silliest things.
Everybody has been told already that they're too shy, too aggressive, too emotional, too reserved. They know what their fatal flaw is. They know the one thing to do to get better. But they just don't commit to changing because they feel a little bit in love with it, a little bit in love with the way they've been.
When you start a company, you become really emotionally involved in it.
One reason I was so convinced that Redfin would work was that I never met anyone who bought or sold a home who thought the process was ideal.
I do think entrepreneurs need to be smart, but there's another scale I never evaluated myself on that is now the source of my deepest strength: Not how much brains I have, but how much love I have.
I had a choice between working on Wall Street or doing consulting or working at a start-up, and I got a job at a start-up. I was one of the first employees there, and I did everything for them, and it was so much fun.
You wanna work on something big so that if you win, everybody wins, and you really have an impact on the world. And that can get you out of bed.
The most important question venture capitalists ask is what prevents your company from growing faster.
To build a great business, you have to do something hard just to be able to withstand all the competition that will later come your way.
Almost nothing can make you more miserable than when your company is struggling, and only then do you realize that this is exactly when it's almost impossible for a CEO to quit.
The core hacker premise that 'code wins arguments' is just another way of saying that anything is worth trying, regardless of whether it is a conservative or liberal idea, and that whatever works is worth keeping.
