Top 45 Glenn Kelman Quotes

It’s important for a CEO to feel lucky.

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.

We need to create technologies – and a culture of respect, and an updated legal doctrine, too – that allow creative folks to make money from their own efforts.

Startups alternate between nostalgia for the garage and millennial longing for a lucrative exit. But what I always keep in mind is how disconnected and purposeless I felt before Redfin or my earlier startup, Plumtree. All I ever wanted was to get into a situation where I could win. Everybody has that dream.

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.

If you actually believe in free speech and not simply the free distribution of other people’s intellectual property, you should let journalists, law firms, and investors exercise their rights to it alongside your own.

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.

Growing up is mostly the process of having to acknowledge the differences between your world and the whole world.

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.

I’m from Seattle.

The tech industry’s love for scrappy, accessible founders adds to the pressure. You’re expected to lead by example, to roll up your sleeves, to know everything going on.

I worry all the time that we’re going to screw up a customer’s offer.

I wish I was as smart as Jeff Bezos. He’s just a large-brained space alien.

When I was still settling into being a CEO, I wasted a lot of time driving initiatives designed to please others, acting as if someone wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do with Redfin.

In some ways, it’s better to be undervalued a little than overvalued a lot, just because it’s still easy to believe our best days are ahead of us.

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.

I learned to value speed in everything I do.

When my brother and I were 11, our father designed a 17-foot boat for sailing around the world. He’d never ventured more than a few miles from the U.S. He’d never sailed – or designed a boat before.

I learned, even when all hell is breaking loose, first to take time to make my environment productive.

Folks are leaving Silicon Valley, mostly because they can’t afford to stay.

If you build a better mousetrap, regardless of your marketing budget, the world will beat its own path to your door.

Any educated person recognizes that curiosity and creativity aren’t just important; they are among the essential human activities.

I think of myself as someone who’s trying to make things better.

We need a government policy all-out in favor of more, denser housing.

People knew about IBM before they knew about Apple. Sometimes it takes a little longer for better to win.

People can smell a lack of respect from a mile away.

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.

I learned that people love to be good at things, even the silliest things.

Sometimes I wish I was less of a maniac; sometimes I wish I was more.

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 wish I was as annotative as Elon Musk.

What employing thousands of people in the middle of the country has taught me is how good and hard-working Americans in all cities are, and how much most of the country resents our wealthiest cities’ sense of entitlement and condescension.

The core hacker premise that ‘code wins arguments’ is just another way of saying that anything is worth trying, regardless of whether it is a conservative or liberal idea, and that whatever works is worth keeping.

After a young adulthood trying to get him to see the world for how it really is, my brother Wes and I have come back to the way our dad is, realizing that it’s sometimes our job to see the world as it could be, as we want it to be.

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.

My advice for men who aren’t yet parents is to make sure you’re a happy person before having a baby.

VCs are good at asking questions.

With Facebook’s IPO, the world learned a new way of organizing businesses around one overriding imperative: to ship new products quickly.

Almost everything is interesting if you work at it.

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.

So many tech companies have embraced a mission that they say is larger than profits. Once you wrap yourself up in a moral flag, you have to carry it to the top of other hills.

What’s most revolutionary about Uber is not the tool that consumers use but the fact that the only equipment needed by its drivers is their iPhone.

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?

Every firing happens differently except in this one respect: the person being fired can’t believe how fast it happens.

Behind the driven person is just an enormous amount of misery. You have to be miserable with the status quo to want to change it.