Sometimes I wish I was less of a maniac; sometimes I wish I was more.
Glenn Kelman
What's most revolutionary about Uber is not the tool that consumers use but the fact that the only equipment needed by its drivers is their iPhone.
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.
Most of the tech CEOs I know used to think that moving to the Midwest or the South was beneath us, a good tactic for the Boeings of the world who don't need the kind of rare skills we depend on, who have to grub for profits when we reach for growth. But if Amazon can't afford to keep growing in Seattle, who can?
When I was still settling into being a CEO, I wasted a lot of time driving initiatives designed to please others, acting as if someone wouldn't let me do what I wanted to do with Redfin.
The really basic stuff that fuels 30-year job booms almost always comes from government research, stuff like biotech, the transistor, the Internet. The idea that private capital can handle the early spade work is a joke.
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.
I wanted to solve every real estate problem with software.
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.
So many tech companies have embraced a mission that they say is larger than profits. Once you wrap yourself up in a moral flag, you have to carry it to the top of other hills.
When we talk about a city's cost of living, we don't mean food, transportation, or clothing, which cost about the same everywhere. We mean housing.
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.
Startups alternate between nostalgia for the garage and millennial longing for a lucrative exit. But what I always keep in mind is how disconnected and purposeless I felt before Redfin or my earlier startup, Plumtree. All I ever wanted was to get into a situation where I could win. Everybody has that dream.
When my brother and I were 11, our father designed a 17-foot boat for sailing around the world. He'd never ventured more than a few miles from the U.S. He'd never sailed - or designed a boat before.
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.
Employers are as sensitive to housing costs as their employees, which is why, when we build more houses, we create more jobs.
The one thing that Redfin has been really good at has been at delighting people.
Short of a space-alien invasion or an Oklahoma tornado, there is almost no problem that a democracy can tackle in a year. But that isn't why we have a government. We have a government to solve the problems that greedy, short-sighted businessmen like me can't.
Any educated person recognizes that curiosity and creativity aren't just important; they are among the essential human activities.
From squalls, jibes, and other sudden calamities, I learned you don't always get to decide when you've got to make a decision.
It's important for a CEO to feel lucky.
I'm from Seattle.
We need to create technologies - and a culture of respect, and an updated legal doctrine, too - that allow creative folks to make money from their own efforts.
I wish I was as annotative as Elon Musk.
With Facebook's IPO, the world learned a new way of organizing businesses around one overriding imperative: to ship new products quickly.
Every firing happens differently except in this one respect: the person being fired can't believe how fast it happens.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Those in technology who can afford to stay in Silicon Valley all know it as one of the most beautiful places to live in the world, but a wariness has sunk in as folks from other walks of life are forced to leave: coffee shops are wall-to-wall with aspiring entrepreneurs, and restaurants buzz with talk of valuations and venture capital.
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.
If your values don't alienate anyone, it is just platitude.
At different points, I applied to graduate school. I got into medical school. I thought about being a writer. I thought about being an investment banker. I just didn't know what I wanted to do with myself. I think the thing that best suits me about being a C.E.O. is that you get to exercise many different talents and wear many different hats.
People can smell a lack of respect from a mile away.
In 2006, I appeared before a House subcommittee considering real estate reform. It was like visiting the capital for the 'Hunger Games' as an outsider in a glamorous and byzantine fairy tale: I couldn't believe how beautiful all the congressional aides were, and I never understood the system of bells and alarms warning legislators to vote.
In some ways, it's better to be undervalued a little than overvalued a lot, just because it's still easy to believe our best days are ahead of us.
If we don't give the authors of music, film, literature, and journalism a way to control the distribution of their goods, the quality of all of these creative efforts will decline.
Most CEOs walk around the office like we own the place, without realizing that the place itself isn't worth owning: a business's value comes from the people who walk out the door every night, who have to decide each morning whether to walk back in. One of the simplest things you can do as a leader is honor their choice and appreciate their work.
When I was trying to write a novel, I ran out of money, and I was delivering packages on a bicycle. And I finally connected with these guys who started a software company, and almost serendipitously fell into that. I felt like they were goofy guys and that I was a goofy guy.
The problem for new businesses isn't corporate taxes. Anyone who has actually started a new business knows you don't make enough money for years to pay any meaningful tax on it.
Funny money has always been the reason housing prices have risen too fast. First, it was liar loans and negative-amortizing mortgages, where the total amount you owed increased rather than decreased every month. We all know how that ended, with the global financial crisis of 2008.
What employing thousands of people in the middle of the country has taught me is how good and hard-working Americans in all cities are, and how much most of the country resents our wealthiest cities' sense of entitlement and condescension.
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 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.
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.
Folks are leaving Silicon Valley, mostly because they can't afford to stay.
I wish I was as smart as Jeff Bezos. He's just a large-brained space alien.
Once you become more like Madison Avenue, you become acutely sensitive to what's going to annoy your clients.
Steve Jobs knows how to hold his hand out, to build beautiful products and make people pay for them.
