Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman’s mission is to make real estate better

The gig: Before becoming online real estate brokerage Redfin’s chief executive, Glenn Kelman was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with little experience in real estate. He co-founded Plumtree Software, backed by the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, and before that worked at another start-up, Stanford Technology Group. At Redfin, a Seattle company that has helped move shopping for homes online, Kelman, 40, has at times knocked heads with the real estate world.

Realtor resistance: “I was unprepared for the Redfin job,” Kelman said. “I came to a conference and then made what I thought were the most anodyne statements in the world. I said Redfin is a new company and our goal is to make real estate a bit better and a bit more efficient. There was a strong reaction to that that I was unprepared for. Making those statements — and those sometimes more swashbuckling statements — was a mistake on my part. It doesn’t mean I have sold out or gone soft. Redfin is on a mission, or I wouldn’t be there. The mission is to make real estate better, to make it more efficient, to make it more customer-focused.”

Early work ethic: The Seattle native wrecked the family car at age 151/2 and had to pay it off by working summers, first at a fast-food restaurant specializing in roast beef. “There was only one dishwasher in the restaurant — and it was me,” he said. “Whenever I wasn’t at work the dishes would just pile up, and I had nightmares that while I was sleeping there would be more dishes than I could possibly wash. So they told me I could come in whenever I wanted to. I came in all the time. It got to the point where I smelled like a roast beef sandwich so much that my dogs attacked me one time coming home in the middle of the night.” Next came landscaper work. “When I finally got a job making copies for an environmental engineering firm, I couldn’t believe that somebody paid me to be indoors and sit in a chair.”

School days: A graduate of UC Berkeley, Kelman said, “I just developed this deep affection for the place. I felt like it was sort of an intellectual scrum, a political scrum. It is kind of a gladiator academy. I think if I had gone to a private school and been coddled a little bit, I wouldn’t be as tough as I am now.”

First start-up, at age 22: “I had a choice between working on Wall Street or doing consulting or working at a start-up, and I got a job at a start-up. I was one of the first employees there, and I did everything for them, and it was so much fun.”

Learning resilience: “Toughness is probably the most important quality in somebody who ends up starting a business, because you just get demoralized and rejected so often that if you don’t have experience with that through a place like Cal it can knock the wind out of you.”

Managing differences: Redfin’s workforce is a mix of people specializing in property or programming, Kelman said. “The software engineers are used to Google-like perks: catered lunches, Aeron chairs, big double monitors. And the real estate agents just have different expectations. One of the challenges of Redfin is trying to bring those two worlds together. I would say it is probably the fundamental challenge. We can’t make real estate better if the software engineers don’t understand what the real estate people are doing, and vice versa. We have these company meetings where, time was, you could have run a railroad track through the middle of the room, and I think we have overcome that.”

Taking people seriously: “People can smell a lack of respect from a mile away. If the folks in real estate feel that somehow I don’t love diving in up to my armpits into their world, they won’t want to pour their guts out for Redfin, and so that is what I had to do.”

Personal: Married with two children, Kelman has run marathons and biked in long-distance races. “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,” he said. “But to also be a consistently constructive force, that means you have to exercise every day or that energy will pour out in other ways that aren’t as productive.”

alejandro.lazo@latimes.com