The Tale of the Tribe

In closing today’s $2-billion sale of Redfin to Rocket, Redfin has made a careful inventory of every asset to convey to our new home: the sofas, the coffee table, the books. And now that we’ve rolled down the door of the van and set the latch, we just realized that we need to pop back into our old place for one last thing.

A Rabid Squirrel

It’s a stuffed animal that Goldman gave us at our IPO: a squirrel with a ridiculous, rabid expression on its face. I never knew whether it was a token of appreciation or just a gentle poke. But it represents the way Redfin has thought of ourselves from our start-up days in a stifling apartment to becoming a billion-dollar public company: supposedly savage, a tad self-mocking.

Many Employees Went Feral

We failed so consistently to meet corporate norms that we didn’t always try. We relied on each employee to do so much that many went feral: wary of bureaucracy, restless to get results. Like any business, Redfin has been a grubby grind, and a welter of triumphs and mistakes, but what we hoped to stand for as an independent company is a rejection of corporate hogwash and executive plunder, and the aspiration that everyone’s work can be meaningful and maybe even beautiful.

What We’ll Take With Us Wherever We Go

Now I know that a stuffed animal can hardly stand in for all that, but still for this last leg of our move, it’ll have to do, sitting on our lap in the cab of the truck, reminding us of what we want to take with us wherever we go.

 

Redfin Was Always Different. No, Really Different.

 

Avoiding the Prison Dentist

What’s most important to take with us is that Redfin has never been conventional. One of our first agents went to prison for running a pot farm. When asked why he spent his last months of freedom showing houses, he said that our benefits let him get work done that would’ve otherwise been handled by the prison dentist.

A Russian Spy

Another agent was arrested as a Russian spy. When Scott Nagel, our long-time president, called to tell me, I asked him, “Was it you?” Thus began a history of sometimes getting attention for the wrong reasons. Our first advertising expense was to plaster the Redfin logo all over a car that we entered into a demolition derby. When Redfin listed my home for sale, a competitor took a chainsaw to our yard sign.

 

A Sea of Love

 

“I Think That Guy Wants To Put You In The Hospital”

Company events had the same flair for fiasco. At our first picnic, our HR leader set up a boxing ring with oversized gloves, shuttling between contestants to say, “I think this guy wants to put you in the hospital,” which is exactly what happened.

Sprinting Through A Scavenger Hunt

In our Redferno sales kickoff, we asked every employee to sprint through a scavenger hunt. After participants complained of being drenched in sweat or left behind, the next year’s contest was in cars driven by our youngest employees, at speeds we should’ve anticipated and still regret.

The Night Is Only Over When Bridget Says It’s Over

Later, when we tried to organize a company trip to Whistler, a colleague let us borrow his Land Cruiser, which was impounded by border agents with drug-sniffing dogs. Our board finally asked if there was anyone even in charge of these things. I blamed Bridget Frey, our chief technology officer and mother of two; she was known for hosting after-parties at hip hop clubs, then taking the survivors to see the sunrise from a Waffle House.

The Best Possible Board… But Also A Little Weird!

 

“Have You Ever FedExed a Horse?”

Even the board had its quirks. Our founding chairman hired me only after another candidate asked for severance. A second board member asked if any of our execs had ever FedExed a horse. A third had a vacation home made of rubber. A fourth flew across the country the day I told him I’d lost sight of how to be good at my job and good at raising my children. This is a kindness I will never forget. I organized two board hikes into the mountains, and forgot to bring food for both.

Nobody Talks About How Fun It Is To Be a CEO

 

Eight Years Of Days, Another Eight Through the Nights

On one of those trips, a board member said he’d been a CEO for 16 years, even though his LinkedIn profile said eight. “Eight during the day,” he explained. “Another eight worrying about it in my sleep.” It’s true what everyone says about the job, which has probably shortened my life.

Haboobs in the Distance

But the job’s also fabulously fun. Just before taping a 60-Minutes segment from our tiny office, the make-up artist told me my interview was likely to go well. “You wouldn’t be getting powder if we wanted to see you sweat.” For a week, I rode a rented bicycle up a mountain where Netflix was shooting a real estate reality show.

Sneaking Into Stranger Things

Trying to sneak into the nearby “Stranger Things” set felt like breaking into Hawkins Lab. Hanging with the cast, many of whom knew each other from a Survivor gig in the Philippines, felt like being at camp. The NFL player who was my costar led us in prayer before every segment. Riding back, swarms of bats would flutter by my face.

An Underdog for 20 Years

 

Two Left Shoes

What was less fun was raising money, which was hard, because we wanted to build a brokerage, not just a website. I rode to a coffee-shop meeting with a venture capitalist, arriving early to change out of my cleats, only to find that I had two left shoes in my bag; to save time, I’d bought multiple pairs of the same shoe. Trying to cram my right foot into a left shoe, I yelled and cried on the sidewalk, then hoped no one would notice that I gave the pitch with one bare foot. They did.

Enterprise Value: -$8 Million

Another VC said Redfin wasn’t right for his firm, but asked if I wanted his opinion on how much we were worth. Before I could answer, he said “$0.”

“But what about the $8 million in the bank?” I said.

“Soon that’ll be $0 too,” he said.

Only an hour before, we’d sat chatting on the floor outside his office, waiting for the receptionist to open the door.

A Small, Hard Place

This repeated experience of rejection combined with our delusions of grandeur to form a small, hard place inside of us. Small is the opposite of how we usually describe our inner being. On the day we marry or meet our best friend, our heart becomes permanently larger. As we age, our soul quietly unfurls to its natural size, which is infinite.

As Intense As A Neutron Star

But there’s a third part of who we are, well known to the birds hunched against a night of winter rain, that is the size of a pebble, and deep as a grudge, and as alone and intense as a neutron star. It is the refusal to die; the insistence against all evidence that you matter; the unwillingness, even in some small, easy way, to betray our flawed selves.

The Hardest Pebble in the World

I don’t know where Redfin got its pebble, but it’s the hardest pebble in the world. Do you know what it’s like to be the underdog for 20 years? To be asked over and over again why we don’t just charge a full fee, or sell ads to traditional agents, or give up on health insurance for Realtors? The premise of the question has been so cynical it was impossible to answer, like trying to tell a robot about love.

What Kept Us Going

 

Driving to the Hospital With the Good Cafeteria

But let me try. A year before joining Redfin, I’d left a company I’d co-founded, in part to care for an older brother who couldn’t stop drinking. His wife and I rushed him to the ER so often that we usually drove a little further, to the hospital with better food. There I met people for whom there was no percentage in slowing someone’s self-destruction, but who did so all the same.

Finding a Home Is Still Hard; Fees Are Still High

Because of them, at the age of 34, I almost went to medical school. Instead, I just decided that Redfin would be my way to make the world better. We’ve saved consumers more than $1 billion in fees. Our site tells 50 million people a month everything there is to know about the housing market. But we’ve only partly lived up to our name: Redfin is supposed to be real estate redefined. Finding a home is still hard. Fees are still high.

Unfinished Business

This is why we come to Rocket with unfinished business, and why we’re combining brokerage service with Rocket mortgages. Not everyone wants an agent who charges a lower fee, but everyone wants a lower mortgage rate.

Confessing to Any Acts of Manual Labor

Rocket is the perfect parent for Redfin because we believe in combining technology with service. But for the longest time, I felt mixed about running a business that wasn’t purely virtual. I was like the monks in the middle ages, who confessed to any acts of manual labor that distracted them from the life of the mind. I missed my friends from Silicon Valley, who once teased me about being a Realtor.

The Day I Knew I Was Where I Belonged

That changed when I got a ride to O’Hare from Jim Carollo, a Redfin agent now leading sales across a string of smaller cities. He told me his dad wanted him to take over the family muffler shop, but he chose Redfin instead. He told me about adopting a child with only one hand, and then adopting another so the first wouldn’t be lonely. I tried to think of anyone in tech who would do that, and I couldn’t.

 

So Much Strength, So Much Grief

This became a repeated experience at Redfin, talking to agents from across the country about their faith, or their fear when family members were sent into combat. I still remember when, during a period of great unrest, one of Redfin’s most formidable agents called my cell from inside her closet. She didn’t want her children to hear her crying because she’d just been reminded that some people would always hate them for being Black. I hadn’t imagined a person could feel so much grief and still be so strong. I had no idea what the real size or strength of this country was until I criss-crossed it for Redfin.

Unwonted Gratitude

But maybe the conversations I remember best are with the people of Redfin who had suddenly come to grief because of a cancer diagnosis, or a husband’s heart attack, or a child born with special needs. Our agents often went out of their way to thank Redfin for our health insurance.

Jim Johnston, San Diego Cancer Slayer

No one should ever have to be grateful for that, but what they wanted to talk about was so much more than that. A San Diego agent named Jim Johnston sent me a series of emails chronicling the acts of love from his team that kept him going through chemotherapy: other Redfin agents toured his clients, wrote his offers, brought him food. These emails spanned years. I became emotional only when I got his final message, which had this subject line: JIM JOHNSTON, SAN DIEGO CANCER SLAYER, IS RETIRING. He’d made it.

 

Redfin People Are My People

These were the moments when I decided that the people who do the hardest work at Redfin are my people, and that I will follow you to the ends of the earth. It has been an honor to run Redfin, first as an independent company, and now into the great, great beyond with Rocket. Thank you, Redfin, and thank you Rocket. What we’ll do together is going to be big and good and real. I’m more confident about our prospects than I’ve ever been.

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