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.
We need a government policy all-out in favor of more, denser housing.
It's hard to improve our schools. It's hard to redistribute wealth created by the concentration of technological and financial power or to increase middle-class wages. But it might be easier to lower middle-class costs by building more housing.
Even though I am sympathetic to newspapers, I am not entirely convinced by the newspapers' claim that Google News violates fair use standards in posting snippets from news articles on its site.
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.
Startups can be the most conservative organizations in the world. We spend so much energy nurturing our delicate egos against naysayers and self-doubt that we can hardly admit mistakes. This is especially true of first-time CEOs.
I often think about what my replacement will do after I'm fired. She won't have emotional commitments to decisions that I already regret.
Control of the browser that people use to access the Web turned out to be far less meaningful than the search engine we use as the starting point for finding Web information. I switch between Safari, Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome browsers all day. I never stray from Google search.
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.
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 I was 28, running products for a company I'd co-founded, the CEO called to say that I had a problem with the board, that I probably couldn't overcome it, that I'd have to leave the company.
It's important for a CEO to feel lucky.
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.
Growing up is mostly the process of having to acknowledge the differences between your world and the whole world.
After a young adulthood trying to get him to see the world for how it really is, my brother Wes and I have come back to the way our dad is, realizing that it's sometimes our job to see the world as it could be, as we want it to be.
From squalls, jibes, and other sudden calamities, I learned you don't always get to decide when you've got to make a decision.
If you build a better mousetrap, regardless of your marketing budget, the world will beat its own path to your door.
Slow investing can have the same impact on startups that slow food has had on cuisine: good things come to those who wait.
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.
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.
