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

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

Slow investing can have the same impact on startups that slow food has had on cuisine: good things come to those who wait.

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

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.

Many of the libertarian entrepreneurs who only want the government to leave them alone have simply forgotten how important government research, public education, and immigration policy are to Silicon Valley's long-term success.

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.

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.

Whereas any political party, and nearly all voters, prize consistency as a sign of authentic, values-driven thinking, it is deeply alien to the hacker, who holds that changing your mind is simply intelligence in action.

I learned that sometimes you should just tell people the ugliest things about you because those are the things that people trust the most.

Almost nothing can make you more miserable than when your company is struggling, and only then do you realize that this is exactly when it's almost impossible for a CEO to quit.

Almost everything is interesting if you work at it.

I really admire the fact that whenever Marc Singer gets a call from someone running late, he says he's running late, too. I don't admit that even when it's true. Small, unnoticeable acts of generosity are sometimes the most impressive.

VCs are good at asking questions.

The most important question venture capitalists ask is what prevents your company from growing faster.

It's easy to grow 300% in your first year or two, when you're starting with nothing and people first hear about your service. What separates a potential colossus from other businesses is the capacity to keep growing at that rate in years four, five, and beyond.

Thinking constantly about world domination can give you a little vertigo. The way I usually get through my day is by limiting my horizon to serving the next few customers or increasing revenues in the next few months.

You wanna work on something big so that if you win, everybody wins, and you really have an impact on the world. And that can get you out of bed.

The one thing that Redfin has been really good at has been at delighting people.

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.

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

Over the years, I just started paying a lot more attention not to whether I was right or wrong, but just to how I make people feel.

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?

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.

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

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.

When you start a company, you become really emotionally involved in it.

I learned that it's important to treat yourself like a work in progress, to think about how you can improve, to listen to feedback.

Everybody who's been fired has heard before about the problems they have. They just don't know it's that serious. Once you know what the stakes are, you become more serious.

I learned to value speed in everything I do.

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

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

If somebody were more passionate about Redfin, how would she not be more qualified to have my job than I am? Like, that's the thing I have to be the best at.

The U.S. is one of the hardest-working cultures in the world.

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

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.

I wanted to solve every real estate problem with software.

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

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.

I'm from Seattle.

I think that real estate consumers are stuffy; I think they're scared. They don't buy a house every day. It's a very infrequent purchase.

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

I wish I was as annotative as Elon Musk.

I started a software company with a couple other folks. It went public. We made plenty of money. And I thought it was this incredible mission, but in fact, we sold software to Haliburton; we sold software to Frito-Lay and Pepsi and all these companies that didn't necessarily do good things.

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

If your values don't alienate anyone, it is just platitude.