Company News
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
Redfin Launches Facebook Integration, Customer Deal Room
Big news! Redfin launched a bunch of new technologies last night — an online Deal Room to guide our home-buying customers through escrow, the ability
The Story of My Life
When we think about what makes a life good or bad, we tend to focus on the key events: a small envelope on the counter,
Celebrity or Entrepreneur?
I was just reading Chris Dixon’s notes on starting your first company, and noticed that five of his eleven recommendations focus on becoming a social-media
Jim Flatley Wasn’t a Recliner
Every time I get on a plane, I think of Jim Flatley, the vice-president of sales at my old company, Plumtree Software. Corvette-driver, hair-gunker, suit-wearer,
The Best Blog Post I've Read in a Long Time
Anyone who reads this blog even casually knows that Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson is one of my favorite bloggers. He somehow writes every day,
What Starbucks Learned About Learning
As part of our 2010 brown-bag series of workshops, Redfin on Friday hosted Christine McHugh to talk about what she learned about training folks in
Synchronous/Asynchronous Switching with Varnish
When your webapp is serving up content that’s expensive to generate, you may want to serve it up asynchronously- via AJAX calls. This is particularly
The Hangover
Redfin has hardly been an advocate for real estate tax credits. When the original first-time home-buyer credit was set to expire last November, we urged
ESI and Caching Trickery in Varnish
Varnish is a high performance, flexible, open source HTTP accelerator. We started using Varnish at Redfin in our last major release, a few weeks ago.
Engineer-to-Engineer Talk: How and Why Twitter Uses Scala
To kick off our San Francisco series of engineer-to-engineer lectures on new technologies and interesting problems in consumer software, we invited in the Great Alex