In 2006, I appeared before a House subcommittee considering real estate reform. It was like visiting the capital for the 'Hunger Games' as an outsider in a glamorous and byzantine fairy tale: I couldn't believe how beautiful all the congressional aides were, and I never understood the system of bells and alarms warning legislators to vote.
We need a government policy all-out in favor of more, denser housing.
Those in technology who can afford to stay in Silicon Valley all know it as one of the most beautiful places to live in the world, but a wariness has sunk in as folks from other walks of life are forced to leave: coffee shops are wall-to-wall with aspiring entrepreneurs, and restaurants buzz with talk of valuations and venture capital.
The really basic stuff that fuels 30-year job booms almost always comes from government research, stuff like biotech, the transistor, the Internet. The idea that private capital can handle the early spade work is a joke.
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.
From squalls, jibes, and other sudden calamities, I learned you don't always get to decide when you've got to make a decision.
I think the company that has the clearest set of values is Amazon. That company knows what it is. It may be that it's not your cup of tea, but every single person at that company knows what the Amazon values are.
I think the corporate world is pretty starved for personality. The reason you have comic strips like 'Dilbert' and sitcoms like 'The Office' is that people just can't be genuine human beings in a corporate environment. So if you can really be your own self, even if it's a little bit different, I think people are really drawn to that.
I am not excited about Bitcoin. I think it's an outrage that, in an era of global warming, there are racks of servers next to the Columbia River. I wish I could explain to the salmon that we've created a dam generating hydroelectric power so that we can generate a fake currency.
The one thing that Redfin has been really good at has been at delighting people.
I wish I was as annotative as Elon Musk.
I think companies psych themselves out and say, 'Now that we're public, we've got to get all stuffy. We've got to be a certain way,' and the entrepreneurial spirit dies. What you got to keep alive is the intimacy, the energy, this crazed sense of purpose.
I'm an identical twin, and I felt that with my twin brother, we sort of formed this unassailable force, and it gave me the confidence to be different. Even if I was a goofball, my twin brother was a goofball with me, so I didn't have to worry about fitting in as much. I was able to march to my own drummer.
The truth is that I love working. I love my kids. But I don't view one as evil and the other as good. I need to work to be a happy person, to be a good parent.
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.
To build a great business, you have to do something hard just to be able to withstand all the competition that will later come your way.
The most important question venture capitalists ask is what prevents your company from growing faster.
Once you become more like Madison Avenue, you become acutely sensitive to what's going to annoy your clients.
If you build a better mousetrap, regardless of your marketing budget, the world will beat its own path to your door.
With Facebook's IPO, the world learned a new way of organizing businesses around one overriding imperative: to ship new products quickly.
