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.
I learned that sometimes you should just tell people the ugliest things about you because those are the things that people trust the most.
Almost everything is interesting if you work at it.
Sometimes I wish I was less of a maniac; sometimes I wish I was more.
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.
VCs are good at asking questions.
The most important question venture capitalists ask is what prevents your company from growing faster.
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.
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.
The one thing that Redfin has been really good at has been at delighting people.
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 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.
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 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?
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.
People knew about IBM before they knew about Apple. Sometimes it takes a little longer for better to win.
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.
When you start a company, you become really emotionally involved in it.
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.
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.
