Congratulations to Glenn Kelman and the Redfin team on their successful IPO this morning!!!!

10 years ago, to the month, my partner Emily Melton led the $12 million financing that began our partnership with Glenn and Redfin.

Perhaps no other company has taken a bigger stab at reshaping the real estate business. And it has been a long and rocky road, learning how to “fight like wild animals” as Glenn describes it, while navigating the roadblocks of a deeply entrenched industry.

After 56 road show meetings, Glenn connected with investors that “saw a sliver of our soul: our crazed sense of purpose and destiny, the fever to get better every day, the humility to serve others, the scrappiness and out-and-out weirdness of our rabid-squirrel culture.”

So, let us raise our coffee mug today and offer three caffeinated cheers to the rabid Redfin squirrels!

P.S. Here is Emily’s retrospective blog post on the Redfin journey.

2 responses to “Congratulations to Glenn Kelman and the Redfin team on their successful IPO this morning!!!!”

jurvetson

Jul 28, 2017 at 3:29 pm

Emily and Glenn… Go, go go! Rabid Team T-shirts! Ringing the opening bell on NASDAQ… Signing the stock certificate… Priced above the range, and a strong opening just now… And from the company’s letter: "And this is our mission, in a sales-mad, baloney-gorged world, to be the truth-teller, the fee-squeezer, the game-changer. Our idealism may not benefit stockholders over months or quarters, but we believe that over years and decades it will deliver the best results.

Of course idealists often get punched in the nose by the real world. But we’re also fighters. A long time ago, when we were competing against giants in markets where homes had lost half their value, a journalist described us as rabid squirrels.

We embraced this identity. It gave us the pluck to go after big markets with an unreasonably small number of people and resources, a mentality that is essential to creating stockholder value. This tenacity has been a good complement to the almost fevered idealism on which Redfin was founded, letting us ignore present-day pain for long-term gain. Rabid squirrels don’t give up.
…
So this is Redfin: rabid squirrels on a mission to make real estate better, and to treat everyone we work with along the way respectfully. Since we’re in real estate, we know there will be ups and downs. But we also know that when you work very hard for a long time to make things better for people, you usually create something meaningful, durable and good. We hope you see Redfin the same way. Thank you to our families and friends for supporting us in this effort."

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gsikich1

Jul 28, 2017 at 5:00 pm

The guy crossing the street in the Khaki pants looks amused. Congrats.

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