blog.mattgoyer.com

Thought I’d click through and find out more about Auren’s company, Rapleaf, and I see that they just hired John Green who went to Waterloo and then I remembered that Auren e-mailed me a while back about ‘We love Waterloo engineers’:

We love Waterloo engineers and would like to hire a few here in SF. please let me know if you might be interested:

Rapleaf is looking for a few amazing software developers — and we’re looking to bring on employee #3.

By then I was already enamored with real estate though sadly I’m more like employee #30-something at Redfin.

And yes, Redfin loves Waterloo too, or at least I do, and would love for some Waterloo alum’s to come join us.

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Auren Hoffman recently blogged about Why big high tech companies are losing the talent war and I agree with his general premise of why would you would not join a big company when you can join a startup. The points he touches on with my thoughts as someone making the transition from big company (Microsoft) to startup (Redfin):

Job security is a wash: This I disagree with. There is a non-trivial risk that Redfin will fail and I will be out of a job. On the other hand, while at Microsoft I saw very few people get fired or managed out. It essentially takes a year to move an under performer out of the company so barring a melt down in Redmond or a radical change in my work ethic, I always would have had a job somewhere at Microsoft.

Cash compensation: His example is that you’ll earn say 10% less at a startup. In my case I’m earning a tiny bit more and my benefits are pretty similar. Sure I no longer have a ProClub membership but I never used it anyway. The way I understand it is that in the Seattle area the startups are competing with Amazon, Google and Microsoft for talent and need to be very competitive in terms of base salary. In terms of stock compensation, at Microsoft I was receiving stock awards but assuming I sold them off as soon as I received them they were a very small percentage of my overall compensation package and were effectively meaningless (this is not necessarily the case for my friends at Amazon who receive fairly large stock awards but have relatively small cash bonuses as compared to Microsoft). At Redfin I have stock options which if we get acquired/IPO will *fingers crossed* be a large percentage of my compensation.

Corporate bureaucracy can stifle innovation: So true. My last project, essentially an Apple compete project, was mired in bureaucracy and was never ‘funded’. We spent months going in circles trying to get approval for various things only to be blocked by VPs in other groups. It was also frustrating to watch during my time at Microsoft a good number of companies form, launch and become successful in areas we could have been successful in but we were too busy futzing with Vista. We later looked at acquiring some of these companies to get back in the game in those markets only to be stymied by their high market valuations. From a personal perspective it would have been much more rewarding working at a company defining a new market instead of working at a company managing dependencies for a project moving no faster than a glacier. Unless you have worked on Vista you have no concept of just how much bureaucracy is involved in getting a bug fast tracked from a dependent team’s code branch up into the main trunk and then down into your branch and then doing it all over again when you find out there is a bug with the bug.

Dare Obasanjo of Microsoft responded with a post about the The Risk Averse and the Indentured. I agree on the risk averse point but disagree on the indentured point. When starting at Microsoft on an H1B I thought I was indentured but it turns out it is very easy to transfer an H1B to a startup. The startup needs two weeks to transfer your Visa before you start and the cost is around $5000. A small price for them to pay or for you to negotiate. That leaves the risk averse at a large company and for the most part I believe that’s true. It feels like a majority of the folks at Microsoft now have kids and are more interested in health benefits, sending their kids to private schools and work/life balance then they are in changing the world through technology.

Another difference I believe is that at a startup the employees are ‘hungry’. Hungry for the opportunity, hungry for the reward. We put in long hours not because we’re asked, but because we want to. In my experience, at Microsoft the employees need to be cajoled into working one or two weekends a year. That’s when they’re working. It felt like a large percentage of my time at Microsoft was sitting around waiting for devs to free up. I feel that a large part of this problem was that the PM team in my group was over staffed but still, Microsoft can afford to have highly paid individuals effectively doing nothing for large stretches of time while a startup cannot. There is always more work to do at the startup whether it’s writing another spec or pitching in on recruiting talent.

I know many of you work at a big company and would curious to know, are you risk averse or indentured? Or is there another reason not to make the switch to a startup during bubble 2.0?

And with that, I better get back to work :).

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Alrighty, finally, the blog post from New York. Let’s re-wind back to the 16th.

Thursday: We slept in (we spent both Wednesday night and Thursday night at the Belvedere (which was a perfectly fine hotel), grabbed breakfast at Pigalle a french cafe not far from the hotel (I should have had a croissant sandwich).

We then subwayed down to Century 21. If you’re in New York and you’re into clothes you have to check out Century 21. Why? It’s a massive discount store with amazing deals on a wide range of brands. Brands like Penguin, Le Tigre, Diesel, Chip and Pepper, Seven, DKNY, Juicy Couture and on and on. Now while you can get a pair of Diesel jeans for $50 you likely only have one style to choose from and it might be a style that is clearly something only suitable for a discount retailer because no one wanted to buy them from the gay boutique in Chelsea. So be careful not to get sucked into the deals just because they’re deals :). The other catch with Century 21 is that, at least for men’s wear, there are no change rooms! This means you should wear a t-shirt so you can at least try on shirts and sweaters. But for jeans unless you know your size (which for me varies by jean manufacturer and sometimes varies across their lines) you will likely be buying a couple different pairs and returning the one’s that don’t fit. Anyhow, the place is often a zoo but deals can be had. I loaded up here and ’saved over $650!’ :P.

For dinner we ate at Thai place in midtown named Chanpen Thai. Then we headed off to see the Broadway show Grey Gardens. We had mistakenly thought it was a play but it turned out to be a musical. Unfortunately I didn’t quite appreciate it as much as Alex since it’s based on a documentary I haven’t seen and I’m also not much of an American royalty follower so I’m not up on the last hijinks of the Onassis’s and Kennedy’s.

Afterwards we had drinks at two wine bars, the first in midtown, [insert name], and at another in Chelsea named Veloce. Before dropping into Veloce we prowled around the neighborhood and had $1/drinks at an absolutely trashy gay venue named View Bar (not recommended). Sadly I forgot about the Tech Crunch party at Bungalow 8 (a very upscale club that is impossible to get into unless you’re a cast member on a WB show).

Friday: Friday we slept in again and then switched hotels to the Hampton Inn (nicer than the Belvedere but pricier). Next we grabbed breakfast at Cosmic Diner. Then we trekked over to Central Park to enjoy the New York sunshine.

Katrina and I then split off from the group and headed down to SoHo to hit up the G-Star store and learned that the next trend in men’s jeans will be all black jeans (ugh). Instead of SoHo we should have gone skating in the park (next time).

After SoHo a few of us went to the MOMA for Target Free Friday Night. We had been warned there would be a big line, and there was, but it moved fast and we were inside in less than five minutes.

For dinner we went to a tapas place, Oliva, in the lower east side, drank lots of sangria and ate lots of food. It was loud, yummy and fun. They also packed us in so tight that you couldn’t go to the bathroom without clearing the tables out of the way, gotta love New York.

Next Bria led us on a tour of the L.E.S. (which one of us embarrassingly asked what it stood for) as none of us had partied here before. We started at Verlaine for $4 lychee martini’s that was packed with an incredibly diverse range of people all sucking down cheap martini’s. Then it was onto Suba a restaurant/bar with a fancy interior featuring a grotto downstairs, worth checking out for the interior alone. Next we went to The Delancey which looked to be like a cool bar with a view of the Williamsburg Bridge exit but oddly no one was there. Next it was off to the Stanton Social Club which was the highlight of the night with mini-burgers, beautiful people, nice interior design, and boy was it packed. Definitely violating some crowding laws. After the Social Club we went to the French bar Cafe Charbon were we saw the L.E.S. shirts. Then we ended the night at Happy Ending a massage parlor turned club but sadly it wasn’t the happy ending we were looking for to a long night but it had to do since it was nearly morning.

Saturday: Saturday we slept in again (noticing a trend?) grabbed breakfast at a touristy diner and then Ben and I headed down to West Chelsea to hit the gay shops and boutiques (it’s so nice to visit stores just for men). Since I spent my budget at Century 21 I held back and watched Ben drop lots of money on some great items. We also visited a couple stores in search of Freitag bags and found a motherlode at Atrium which looked to be a great shop in SoHo which I wish we had more time to explore but we had to meet up with the other kids at Magnolia bakery to have some cupcakes to celebrate Alex’s birthday. That place was a zoo and the cupcakes rich.

Next it was off to Better Burger for some organic goodness. Next stop was the hotel for a nap.

Before our 10pm dinner reservation we headed to The Dove a great lounge in Greenwich that I’ll definitely go back to if I’m in the neighborhood. We showed up before the 9pm rush and the hostess was very nice and let us sit at a reserved table for a couple rounds of drinks. Then we grabbed dinner at a little ten table French restaurant named, [insert name], and had a great, rather affordable meal (we had wanted to go to pricey Nobu but the only sitting they had was at 11:15pm! Next time we’ll book restaurant reservations with our plane tickets). After dinner I tried to lead a tour of the Meat Packing District and West Chelsea. We started at the Highline, a place I could imagine the older Jetson kid’s grabbing a drink at. It even had a small splash pool in the basement.

But the crowd was too young and we felt out of place and so we headed to The Park which when you first get in feels like a small lounge but we discovered the place had many many rooms. We had a drink and explored the garden, the patio, the upstairs dance floor, the fireplace rooms and the hot tub area (closed) but again the crowd wasn’t right and people weren’t really getting their dance on.

Next stop, West Chelsea. Unfortunately we rolled into West Chelsea sometime close to 2am and everything was at capacity. Buying a bottle here or there (at $360/bottle) could have gotten us in, or Katrina and I on our own could have gotten in on our own, but with three guys (even though one was gay) and two girls made it hard. So we had some drinks at Brite Bar, a lounge on the corner (recommended). After a few drinks I scoped out Marquee and we decided to try and get in and fortunately they let us past the velvet rope. Marquee was pretty cool, decent music and all and two dance floors but not amazing. When we spilled out in the wee hours of the morning (4am-ish) there was tons of cabs but they were all full. Katrina and I headed off uptown on foot but ended up taking a cycle-rickshaw the twenty blocks back to the hotel (cycle rickshaws appear to be more prevalent in New York than in India).

Sunday: Oddly I was less hung over today and spent my few hours between waking up and leaving first at Century 21 returning a pair of jeans that were too tight and then getting lost on the subway (a bunch of lines weren’t running and I got confused about local vs express trains).

We then had a thankfully uneventful flight home. Though as soon as I dropped my bag off I picked up my hockey bag and headed out to a game with John. Even though I was exhausted I scored two goals :).

Photos: You can find them all of the real ones on Zooomr and some camera phone ones on Flickr.

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Trevor recently blogged about his agent interview here at Redfin, My Interview at Redfin:

Redfin has the feeling like “Something big is going to happen.” I wonder if this is what Google felt like in 1998, or Microsoft in 1988? I am hoping to be on the ground level of this amazing company.

I don’t know what it was like to be at those companies back in the day but I often wonder the same thing :). Right now we’re in only two markets, Seattle and the Bay Area, but it won’t be long before the rapid expansion begins and once we start ramping traffic will go through the roof, revenues will increase, headcount will go up and all of sudden we’ll be a big company.

BTW, I’ll be in San Francisco Wednesday and Thursday of this week for work…

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We (a motley crew of friends from Microsoft, Amazon and Redfin) went to Whistler for American Thanksgiving. Drove up Wednesday and skied, apres-skied, hot tubbed, ate and drank pretty much for four days straight. I am now in desperate need of a day off from both working and vacationing.

While there I bought a new pair of skis, a pair of Head Monster IM 88’s (with bindings since tried as they could, they couldn’t get my red and chrome Nordica bindings to mount). I had been planning on buying new skis around Christmas time but with so much snow coming to the north west so soon I couldn’t wait any longer and had to make an impulse buy. There was simply no way I would bother hiking up to closed lifts with my skinny pair of Dynastar’s. But with a pair of fatter skis, hike we did :), and we scored some great powder runs. My new DaKine Heli Pack came in very handy on the hikes but it needs a heated drinking tube since for two days it was -15′C in the alpine, brrrr!

The drive home was epic since there was snow all the way from Whistler to Seattle which is pretty unheard of. Facing a four hour delay at the border, our driver and my co-worker, Rob made the executive decision we would stop at Vijs in Vancouver for a gourmet Indian dinner before braving the conditions in his rear wheel drive 5-series BMW (which is odd since Rob owns no less than three Land Cruisers! (down from a high of five!) Apparently his tabs were expired which is why he couldn’t bring one up). Anyhow, I highly recommend Vijs for Indian fusion and always take your most capable vehicle to the mountain.

For what it’s worth, I’m also burned out on the Whistler club scene. They really need to get some more upscale places where you don’t have to deal with artificial lines because the coat check person can’t keep up with the mandatory coat check rule, where they turn on the heat to make up for the fact that the line causes their door to be open a lot, where they know that Maker’s Mark isn’t a vodka and where the place isn’t full with nineteen year olds.

We were also disappointed the outdoor hot tub at our hotel wasn’t available. While it was functional they lacked the necessary government permits to open it up after doing some renovations. It’s inexcusable they didn’t have this resolved before opening weekend!

I’ll link to photos as others post them…

Update: Ming’s Whistler Photos.

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• Wood LED Clock – Maybe this is the designer alarm clock to go in my new condo
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• Second Life’s First Millionaire – I keep meaning to check this out, but who has time for video games?

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More photos from two big parties at the end of October/beginning of November that I went to… Depending on your office environment these may not be safe for work (NSFW) :).

• SeaCompression 06 official gallery
• Polyrealism photos of HiveMind Halloween

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I found out today that we have a surprising amount of open head count right now. So just a reminder that Redfin is hiring. We’re looking for everything from engineers/programmers (SDEs) to kick ass test engineers/quality assurance (SDETs) to agents.

If you’re curious about what it’d be like to work here I’m always happy to go for a drink and let you know how it’s worked out for me (just ping me at mail *at* mattgoyer.com).

And if you’re not interested in real estate, Billmonk is hiring, which is cool since we use their site to keep track of our vacations. I can’t help but wonder if they got funded?

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In the car on the way to Whistler. I’ll start working on a post about the rest of my New York trip for as long as the battery lasts. Of course the wifi won’t last as soon as we actually start moving :).

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