Real estate is complex. Consider the many variables when searching for a home, and then consider the endless paperwork that goes with it - these moving pieces open the door for technology to make the process better. Redfin, a real estate brokerage, founded and run by technologists, is using innovations such as big data and digital processing to create a more seamless process and a “Complete Real Estate Solution” for purchasers, sellers and renters alike.
In this episode of The Restless Ones, we sit with Bridget Frey, CTO at Redfin, who is not only out to change the way real estate works, but the people behind those changes as well. We’ll hear how she searches for the talent and leaders in tech that help bring all voices to the forefront in her quest to create greater efficiency and equality for the real estate customer. Bridget will discuss how she and her team at Redfin choose the right technologies to unify all components of the real estate process under one solution.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
When you're a real estate company, you have to be
aware of the history of real estate, which has, you know,
in some cases, been reprehensible. You have things like redlining,
where you couldn't get a mortgage in neighborhoods that were
deemed unsafe, which was kind of a code for being
not white. It wasn't where white people live. And there's
neighborhood segregation, a lot of other things that have happened
in real estate, and so you need to build a
(00:22):
team that, in my view, reflects America, reflects the people
that you're trying to serve. Welcome to the restless ones.
I'm Jonathan Strickland. I've spent more than a decade really
learning about technology, what makes it take and then describing
and explaining that to my audience. But it's the conversations
(00:43):
with the world's most unconventional thinkers, the leaders at the
intersection of technology and business that fascinated me the most.
In partnership with T Mobile for Business, I explore the
unique set of challenges that see I O S and
c t o S face from at aansmans in cloud
and edge computing, software as a service, Internet of Things,
(01:05):
and of course five G WE are often left wondering
how the leading minds and business continue to thrive. Let's
find out. Our guest today is Bridget Fried, Chief Technology
Officer of red finn As red Fin's ct O, Bridget
(01:27):
overseas technology integrations that aimed to make the entire process
of buying, selling, or renting a home as seamless as possible.
At the same time, she works hard to improve diversity
and inclusion on her team, opening up new opportunities for
organizational success. I started off getting a bit more background
(01:48):
on Bridget and how she came to love the field
of tech and data analysis. Bridget, thank you so much
for joining us on the Restless Ones. I am very
pleased to have you here as my guest. Thanks for
having me. It's so exciting to be here. And uh,
I love to start off these conversations by learning a
little bit more about the people I'm speaking with. And
(02:10):
so I'm very curious, what was it that sparked your
love of technology? Was it an Apple computer? It was
you might you might know that story a little bit
about it. So, my dad is an appliance sales and
repairment and when I was five, he showed up at
her house with this big box and he put it
in the kitchen and inside was an Apple. To me,
this early Apple computer, and to him it was really
(02:32):
just like a dishwasher, where you get the manual and
you read the instructions and you figure out how to
use it. And so my earliest experiences with technology and
computers was just learning to code with my dad. That's fantastic. Yeah,
I also was teethed on an Apple to myself. Yep.
So I remember the Hello World and you know ten
(02:54):
print exactly. Yea, is it is kind of applicated since then? Yeah? Yeah, once,
once I got beyond the basic programming language, things got
out of my wheelhouse pretty quickly. But from what I understand,
you really went down that pathway wholeheartedly. You know, your
(03:15):
love was sparked early on. But when did you decide
that this is something I actually want to study? Yeah?
I think by the time I got to high school.
I actually was really fortunate that we had a computer
science class and a club that we're operating in my
high school. Now it's maybe more common, but I also
had a female computer science teacher who was really inspirational
to me, and so I think that those experiences helped
(03:38):
to make me feel like I belonged in the tech
industry at these formative years. And I also, you know,
I was I loved the idea of using algorithms and
technology to solve problems, and so those things really crystallized
for me by the time I was done with high school.
I'm already fascinated by this story because we've heard the
opposite so many times in the tech industry in general, right,
(04:00):
that it tends to be an industry that sometimes on
a good day you could call unwelcoming two women in
the field and to hear that you had the exact
opposite experience, and that's what inspired you, and now you're
carrying that forward as a leader. So what was your
experience like once you went to Harvard? Did you find
that environment really welcoming as well? So it was lonelier
(04:22):
when I got to Harvard in a way that maybe
I should have known, I didn't quite expect. That was
when I started to feel more like the only or
the few in the computer science classes. So there was
really only a handful of women who were in my
year major computer science. And so I did, though find
again a professor, female professor who her name is Margot Seltzer,
(04:42):
and she was also an inspiration to me. Um, she
was actually not only teaching and going for tenure, but
she was she found it a startup, and she was
also had a baby while I was at Harvard, and yeah,
she still found time to spend with me and to
mentor me and to help me through my career. And
so it was this example to me of someone who
(05:03):
somehow is really busy but still makes time to help others. Phenomenal.
I mean, that's an overachiever and a half to be
a professor, an entrepreneur, a mother, and a mentor. I'm
getting a feeling a sense of what has shaped your
philosophy because as I've read about you uh and your initiatives,
it really was one of those things where I thought, like, wow,
(05:24):
this is this is a truly remarkable person. So hearing
about these stories, I think I'm starting to get a
picture of how that all kind of coalesced. Yeah, I
think once I got later and I was trying to see,
you know what inspired me, and I realized at some
point in my career, oh, there are a lot of
people out there who are looking to form their careers
who are early like I used to be, and they're
looking for examples that you know, maybe maybe like me.
(05:47):
How how did I do this? How did I navigate
this field? And it kind of pushed me out to
get out there a little bit more and to try
to find ways to help people who were like me
a few years ago. M hmm. What was your first
job in the tech field. Yeah, so my my first
job was at a company called Plumptree Software and they
did uh it was called corporate portals. It's basically like
(06:10):
an intranet that every company has now where you can
connect to all your HR systems and all these things.
But back then it was this revolutionary idea and and
so I love this idea that I could go in
and work on business software and find ways to make
a company work better through the work that I did.
And that company was founded by Glenn Kellman, who's actually
the CEO of Redfin where I work now, and so
(06:31):
he was someone that I ultimately followed to to the
place where I am. So I'm just curious, So, in
your role working on that sort of corporate intranet portal,
were you looking at all different elements of it where
you specifically focused on user interface what were you really
concentrating on. Yeah, so I came in working on kind
of back end systems, and about a year in they
(06:54):
somehow made me responsible for security. And you know, I
was acure out of college. I guess I had a
little dea what I was doing, but you know, security,
and so I was tasked with figuring out how would
people log in and access the system? How would we
authenticate and authorize permissions? And that was a really harrowing
experience try to figure out how to architect that in
a way that's scaled and was secure. And so that
(07:17):
helped to cement my love of back end systems. I
kind of come from a data engineering, machine learning type
of background. Those are the problems that I've most most
worked on. Yeah, talk about being thrown into the deep end.
I love it. So, so when did you join Redfin
and in what capacity were you working there when you
(07:37):
first started. Yeah, so I joined about ten years ago
and I joined to found our analytics engineering team, which
was the first team to bring big data and machine
learning into Redfin. And I looked at it as this
gold mine opportunity. There is so much data in real estate,
and Redfin has this really unique data set where not
only do we have the number one brokerage website in
United States, we know what people are searching for, we
(07:57):
know what they're clicking on. But we're a national real privilege,
so we know when people make offers, when they go
on tours. And just look at this unique data set
that no one else has, you should be able to
make machine learning algorithms that no one else can dream
of that are more accurate and really help people figure
out how to navigate real estate. So that was this
big greenfield opportunity, and ten years later, there's still all
(08:18):
kinds of things we're working on, and it's it's fascinating
because about ten years ago was when I think outside
of the actual text sphere, people first started hearing about
the term big data. Yes, and I think actually within
the industry there were tons of people who weren't really
sure what the actual meaning behind big data was, and
(08:38):
that's when we saw this explosion in creativity and innovation
in how to take that information, derive meaning from it,
and then project things from that. So it sounds to
me like you were right there on the ground floor
when that was when that was happening. Yeah, absolutely, And
I think kind of being skeptical of you know, when
(08:59):
do you really need a big data solution and when
can your data just fit in a database? You know,
you have to kind of understand that as an engineer.
And actually, as the years have gone on, I mean,
the support that's out there for big data, the algorithms
that are available off the shelf through technologies like Amazon
Web Services, all those things who have gotten so much
more available. You know, there are there are algorithms that
(09:20):
are running now that would have been cost prohibitive just
a couple of years ago, and we didn't have the
cloud and we didn't have some of these off the
shelf services. So that's that's created this opportunity for many
more engineers to work at that kind of scale. So
it's one of the common themes I've found as I've
taught the different leaders, is that identifying what's the outcome
you want and then determining how do you achieve that outcome,
(09:43):
whether it's a technological solution or otherwise. Yeah, you have
to decide when you really want to be on the
cutting edge of technology, because I think as you get experience,
you realize being on the cutting edge, being the first
company to try a new technology. It's not always that sweet.
I mean that's when there's things are untested, they don't
work at scale, there are more bugs, and there are
(10:03):
sometimes some more boring or prosaic solutions to the problem
that you have. So I think that as an architect,
as an architect develops, you really start to get a
better sense for when to use the tried and true
and when to really go out on a limb and
try something that's new. That's an excellent point to what
was your journey to the role of CTO. Yeah, so
a couple of times in my career, I have moved
(10:25):
between a number of different roles. So I've been a
software developer than a manager, than a program manager, product
management director. Like, I've kind of moved between the roles,
and each time I moved between them, I feel like
it gave me empathy for what others were going through.
So when I became a manager, I realized, oh, this
is why, you know, my manager used to want me
as a developer to really keep track of my work
(10:46):
and estimate how long it was going to take and
write down all the bugs. And so I think it
gave me a bunch of empathy but I kept being
pulled to those experiences with my dad where I could
get my hands dirty and really build things myself. And
so every time I went to that kind of building role,
I would find that the people around you would say, hey,
you know, could you just leave this one project or
this team doesn't have a manager for a couple of months,
(11:08):
could you just kind of step in? And I kept
feeling this kind of being called to leadership roles, and
eventually I just, I guess, went with it. And so
now I'm pretty solidly that's sport of a role, but
sometimes still like to whiteboard things with the engineers. Well,
I like that the sirens call of executive leadership was
impossible to resist exactly, But also it's it's incredibly valuable
(11:31):
to have that experience where you have worked in a
fair broad spectrum of the different roles, so that you
do have that understanding of what are the demands of
that position, where are the pain points you've lived that,
so that you have a better understanding how to communicate,
I would hope. So, yeah, I think that when you
can walk in someone's shoes, you just get a better
sense for what they're going through, right, And as you
(11:53):
point out empathy is a huge part of that too.
If you don't have that empathy, you don't care, then
you're really never going to have a team that works
as optimally as you would like. I wanted to learn
more about Bridget's approach to leadership, including how she approaches
fostering new leaders and improving team diversity. So first let's
(12:15):
get a little bit more of an understanding of the
parameters we're talking about her. What's the size of your
team at redfin Yeah, so my team is about three
fifty people right now, and it's everything from engineering, analytics, operations, quality,
So you know there's a you know, growing team that
is trying to make sure we're building the right software
(12:35):
for people who are trying to buy and sell homes
and then for our real estate agents who need to
help them with getting into the best home for them. Mmmm.
So if you were to define what your primary responsibilities
as c t O or how do you frame that?
So sometimes I think of it like I have two
jobs almost where one is to be a leader of
the engineering team and to set our architecture vision and
(12:58):
how are we gonna make techno goal decisions? How are
we going to grow the team. But then my other
job is as a member of the executive team, where
we're really trying to look at the whole strategy for
Redfinn as a business, and you know, how how is
engineering serving those other executives? But also you know, how
are we going to talk to our investors about the vision?
How are we going to choose where to grow the
company from a business perspective. So they're kind of two
(13:20):
different roles, and you kind of have to tell tell yourself, Okay,
now I'm in the role of engineering leader and now
I'm acting as an executive and be able to go
back and forth when we're in a world where we
can have casual cocktail parties again and someone turns to
you and said, and so, what do you do for
a living? Is that sort of the answer you give
or do you have like the elevator pitch version. That's
(13:42):
kind of what I say. I mean, every day is
really different, I think when you work in an executive role.
So sometimes people say, you know, what's a typical day like,
and it's so hard to answer that. At this point,
I think, you know, I have to I have to
be able to figure out what red Finn needs for me,
what the team needs for me at any given day,
and really try to reslessly prioritize so I'm helping people
to do their best work. We had such a monumentally
(14:05):
disruptive year in twenty twenty kount of curiosity, How did
the pandemic affect your role in process at redfin in
what ways did you have to pivot or adapt? Yeah,
it almost felt like we were kind of replanning our
strategy every couple of weeks for a while there. So
at the beginning of the pandemic, you know, we saw
demand really dropped where it didn't look like people were
(14:27):
interested in buying and selling homes for a period of time,
and it got to the point where we actually had
to furlough a significant chunk of our real estate agents
and do a small layoff it. We took pay cuts
at headquarters. It was very painful to go through that.
We hadn't really lived through something like that before. But
then within a few weeks, all of a sudden, there
were all kinds of people who wanted to move. I
(14:48):
think looking at this opportunity for remote work as a
chance to reset. So we've seen, you know, the interest
in places like Boise and Bend has doubled since the
pandemic started, so we have a lot more people looking
to move to those areas. About of people on our
side are looking to move to another area, and so
we had to figure out, all right, well, how do
(15:09):
we help these people do this? And we how to
almost overnight switched to being a fully virtual brokerage. And
that's something we've been working on for a long time.
How do you virtualize parts of real estate? You know,
we have three D walkthroughs so you can walk through
a home online. We have a direct access where you
can put a smart walk on a house and click
a button on your phone and get into a home,
and all these kind of ways of virtualizing the experience.
(15:32):
But we had to almost overnight switch our entire business
to that. It was like the future came early, and
so that was a huge pivot for the team. As
the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. There's
nothing like a global pandemic to really kick things into
high gear when it comes to figuring out how to
(15:52):
respond to that so that you can meet the needs
and expectations of your customers and have the most minimal
impact on business and same time, so pretty phenomenal. So
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(16:12):
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(17:15):
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or feature see T mobile dot com. And you're known
specifically for for working to kind of break down the
barriers for women who are trying to enter into technical fields.
(17:37):
So how do you define your sort of philosophy and
approach to that. Yeah, when I when I joined Redfind
ten years ago, I was the only woman on the
Seattle engineering team and today we're thirty six percent women,
were ten percent black or Latinos on our tech team,
and so you know, the numbers don't reflect America yet,
but they're they're moving in the right direction. And I
think that in order to get there, we have had
(17:59):
to look at every part of how we recruit, how
we onboard, how we bring people into the organization, how
we promote, how we pay. It's I've almost thought of
myself as a diversity mechanic, where you're kind of, you know,
looking at all the little parts of the system and
just tweaking one little thing and seeing if it will
unlock some potential in your team. And you have to
rejoice when you get one little thing working, even though
(18:20):
you're all all kinds of things have to happen in
order to build a diverse and inclusive team, but you
have to celebrate the winds along the way. Well, and
can you kind of put into words what you find,
what value you find in increasing diversity. Yeah, I mean
we're a real estate business, right, and so when you're
a real estate company, you have to be aware of
(18:41):
the history of real estate, which has, you know, in
some cases, been reprehensible. You have things like redlining, where
you couldn't get a mortgage in neighborhoods that were deemed unsafe,
which was kind of a code for being not white.
It wasn't where white people live. And there's neighborhood segregation,
a lot of other things that have happened in real estate.
And so you need to build a team that, in
my view, reflects America, reflects the people that you're trying
(19:04):
to serve, so that you can bring in folks who
are going to look at aspects of your business and say, well,
that's a place where you could have bias, that's something
that we should avoid doing and make sure that that's
part of how you're growing the company. And I'm so
glad you said that because one of the things that
we're talking about a little bit more is machine learning
and artificial intelligence, and one of the big ongoing conversations
(19:27):
in that field is how do you build these systems
and minimize the entry of unintentional bias. So hearing that
and also just knowing that by inviting more voices to
the table, you get perspectives you otherwise never would have had,
and that that you can't benefit from something if you
don't know about it, Absolutely you can build a stronger business.
(19:48):
You know, I moved a lot when I was a kid.
I lived in five different states and seven different homes
before I turned eight. Team and so when I came
to red Philip's kind of opportunity to help families like mine.
When started, I realized that Redfin actually wasn't hadn't launched
in all of those places that I lived as a kid,
all of those poems that I lived in where you know,
(20:09):
maybe lower income areas or areas where Redfin had expanded.
We were mostly in coastal markets. And so one of
the things when I joined was, Hey, why don't we
go into all these areas that we're not serving and
do a really big expansion push. And so that was
one of the things that I really fought for and
then we've since done is really becoming a much more
national brokerage. And that's created, you know, a huge business
(20:30):
and revenue opportunity. I think when you can access talent
that other people aren't using, it gives you opportunities to
grow your business in ways that other companies can't. And
when you are looking at developing teams and developing leaders,
what are the qualities that you look for? One are
the things that stand out that make you say this
is what is a perfect fit for a leadership role. Yeah,
(20:52):
so we're looking for a couple of different things. I mean,
one is just is this someone who gets results? Is
this someone who can lead a team to win? That
is important part of business. But we're also looking for
a leader who is collaborative by nature, who can bring
out all the voices in the room and make sure
that there's a way to hear all of those voices.
And that's a really tricky thing to do in a
world where you know, some people are more or less extroverted,
(21:15):
some people, based on their background, are more or less
comfortable going up against a leader, and so you need
to find ways, though to bring out all of that
talent you have and then make a decision. So we're
looking for people who can foster that kind of environment. Well,
can you tell me about a project you've worked on
at red Finn that you're particularly proud of and maybe
(21:36):
walk us through from ideation to execution. Yeah. So, one
thing I've been excited about recently is that Redfinn is
now getting into the rental space. So this was a
project that my team and I worked on for many years,
just saying, you know, if our mission is to redefined
real estate in the consumers favor, we know that there
are people who are considering whether to rent or buy,
or rent or so, and we were not able to
(21:57):
serve all of those customers. So we had started putting
in some plans, you know, how could we build a
rentals business ourselves, And that eventually turned into looking at
M and A and then acquiring rent Path, which we
did just a couple of months ago, and so we
now have we're now in our rentals business. Rent Path
operates rent dot com and apartment guide dot com and
we now have this business that we can integrate with
(22:19):
red Finn to really help to solve that whole consumer problem.
And so that was a project that went on for
many years, and there's still plenty of work to do
because you know, all we've done at this point was
is a choire rent path. Now we actually have to
deliver on that vision. Cool. Well, let's transition over to
talking about one of my favorite things, which is just
emerging technology, maturing technology. We touched on one with big
(22:43):
data and your your journey over the last ten years.
Do you have any other perspectives on big data? I mean,
we talked a little bit about how the tools to
process big data are becoming more accessible and we're starting
to see providers, various third party providers come up with tools.
There any other things about big data that just leap
out at you as like this is really important. Yeah,
(23:06):
I think this idea of you know, what is a
home worth is incredibly interesting. You know, there have been
online estimates that have come out over the last few years.
You know, red fin has the most haccurate online home
value estimate where you know, we're more than twice as
likely to be within three percent of the final sale price.
And so you know, when you think about, if you
know better than anyone else, what is a home worth?
(23:28):
What kinds of businesses can you build. So not only
have we used that to help our listing agents help
us seller price their home accurately, but we've also now
started a business called redfin now basically an I buying
business where we purchase homes, we renovate them and put
them back on the market. And so they're pricing is
all about, you know what, what's the right amount to
pay for that home, what would be worth if you
(23:48):
did different kinds of renovations. How long will it be
on the market once you go and sell that. But
if you can figure that out better than anyone else,
you can really win at that type of business. So
I think pricing is this huge opportunity still in the industry. Well,
and that makes me curious because I mean, so I've
been through the process of buying a home a couple
of times, and the first time I did it, it
(24:10):
was a very different world because back when I first
bought a house, the idea of a smart home was
the thing of tex Avery cartoons. Right, It's like big
robot arms coming out and helping you get dressed and
that kind of thing. But now we're actually in a
world where we're seeing a lot more integrations of smart
(24:30):
home technology. Are your approaches to pricing, Are you starting
to look at things like that about how integrated technology
can play a part in home's value. Yeah, we we
are looking at those sorts of things, and we're also
looking at ways that a smart home can lead to
a better ability to sell a home quickly. So we
have a feature called direct Access where we'll put a
(24:52):
smart luck on home and we find that when we
put a smart luck on a home, that home gets
twice as many tours. So that's twice as many folks
who are walking through your home and trying to get
an opportunity to actually go and buy that. And so
when you look at how that can help to sell
a home, I mean it's there's huge opportunities there in
the industry. That's fascinating to me. Like that's a legit,
(25:16):
one to one sort of approach of saying, here's here's
a particular smart technology that you wouldn't necessarily associate with
a fully integrated smart home. It's not like the crazy
entertainment system, and you know all the appliances are integrated,
and yet you can point to that one data point
and say we see from just the number of tours
(25:38):
that this is a big component that inspires people to
check this out. I think that brings up how are
people going to look at the trade offs between privacy
and having a fully smart home, Like as you get
into things like five key and opportunities for just a
lot more devices sending a lot more data from your home?
Is that going to you know, increase that conversation that
people are having about under what circumstances is what are
(26:00):
they willing to share data about what's happening within your home.
That's the place where you live, and you know you
you hear that tension that's going on right now, and
so I'm really interested to see how those things develop.
I think, like you're saying, there are many homeowners who
want the promise, They want what was promised in the
Jetsons and all these old sci fi shows and things.
But but you have to figure out what the right
(26:21):
bounces for privacy as well and all those things. I agree,
And you know, finding out those spots where you think, okay,
this is a value added proposition if I go with this, well,
can you tell us a little bit more about some
of the technologies that you're using at RED finn in
order to to do what you do. Yeah. So, so
we're right now in this situation where we have multiple
(26:43):
businesses that are ready to scale at once. When I
joined ten years ago, we're really primarily a brokerage business,
but since then we've launched a mortgage business where we
built the whole owner regination system, title insurance business redfin
now where we buy homes, um pick them up, put
them back on the market. And so the engineering team
is in the situation where we're trying to figure out
how to scale all of those businesses at once. And
(27:03):
while Redmond as a business has to adapt to that,
you know, who's involved in which decisions and how do
you separate out the revenue and all those sorts of things,
the technology team is trying to figure out how do
we set up our systems to scale with the business,
Where should we separate into services, and where should things
be sharing the same back end technology. So that's presenting
a really interesting architecture challenge. You know, many companies have
(27:24):
gone through this kind of scale and we're going through
it right now, and we have to find our own
way to set up an architecture that's going to work
for our business. I can only imagine that this is
complicated exponentially by the fact that obviously you're dealing with
real estate in vastly different regions. Each ones have different
price points, different average home values. Yes, real estate is
(27:47):
a very local business, and it's one of the first
things you kind of realize when you get into the
space that a lot of these approaches that have worked
for you know, national scale websites, they just fall apart
when you realize that your algorithms and your real estate
agents and your whole business has to understand, well, what's
it like to buy a home in Albuquerque. It doesn't
matter what the you know, lowest comminent I'm here is
(28:07):
across the whole the whole country. You have to be
able to serve the customers in Albuquerque. So there's a
lot of considerations and how we built our technology to
make sure that we can bring in that local voice
at the appropriate time. That to me is phenomenal. The
idea of having to build in that ability for localization.
It makes me think of completely different industries that often
(28:27):
have to look at localization. If you're talking about maybe
a software product where you need to have a team
specialized in localization for that, but for something where you're
talking about localization within a single country, that's pretty phenomenal. Yeah,
and yeah, it's almost in some ways more like a
retail business to grow a real estate business, because you
almost you really have to understand what the consumers in
(28:49):
that one particular part of the country. Bridget has an
innovative and yet pragramatic approach to integrating technology. I really
wanted to hear her thoughts on emerging and maturing tech
and how those might play a part in redfins business
moving forward. So Kubernetes is one that we're really investing
(29:09):
in right now. So that's it's related to that strategy
that I talked about to make sure that we can
support multiple growing businesses and have a really well defined
services architecture layer. So Kubernetes is helping us to do that,
and you know, hopefully to do that in a way
that's neutral about different cloud platforms over time, where you know,
we can choose what the right places to deploy our
(29:31):
software based on costs and performance and many other factors.
I think you're the first person to talk about Kubernetes
on this PODCASTA. Alright, well, so we're we are on
I would say a cusp of another data explosion, right,
because we are in the era of the Internet of
Things and we're seeing this proliferation of devices connecting to
(29:53):
networks that are just constantly collecting data from whatever sensors
are attached there. And now we're also seeing the roll
out of five G which is supporting incredible throughput of
data with low latency. How does that future impact you
or is that something more that you would experience as
(30:14):
a consumer as opposed to someone incorporating it into your work.
So I think, I mean, real estate is so data
intensive with you know, photos and video and you know,
potentially at some point sensors that could tell you the
air quality, the sound quality of a home. There are
things that people are looking for information about homes that
they typically can't get without visiting the home. And so
(30:35):
I think as we see more interconnectedness, maybe that that
data can feed into a real estate say in a
real estate business, for sure. But I also look at
you know that we're talking about five you over here,
but there's still twenty million Americans that don't have access
to broadband. There are many more who are not able
to afford broadband access. The pandemic has really exposed this
(30:56):
kind of two America's in this way about who can
get onto the Internet and who can't, and that really
affects a business like ours as well, because when we
send someone to a home, we send a real estate
agent with an app that they can use to help
their customer learn about the home in the area. And
we have the smart lacks. We have all these things,
and those technologies don't work when you're in an area
(31:16):
that doesn't have either broadband or or cell phone support.
So I'm still kind of looking at that as a
huge opportunity in America to really bring internet to everyone,
and I think you'll see like an explosion of other
technologies as they reach more people. I agree the digital
divide is a very real thing. We see that in
lots of communities across the United States. I'm sure that
(31:38):
you have far greater insight into that than even I do.
So seeing this rollout where we're getting greater penetration in areas,
I'm hopeful that it goes far beyond urban centers and
starts to reach those communities that otherwise tend to be
either unserved or underserved, so that then we can really
(31:58):
talk about what the connected technologies can can do. Once
everyone has a seat at that table, and we may
see this kind of you know, digital nomad trend as
that accelerates really you know, people who want to live
in the rural part of Georgia that you're talking about
on the lake or you know, and then finding that
there's no internet. It could be that those folks who
have an opportunity to work remotely may start to push
(32:21):
for for Internet in addition to the people who are
already living in that community, and that could help to
accelerate this trend. But we'll have to see. That's interesting, yeah,
because that makes me think of people who are early
adopters to technology, and those are the ones who ultimately,
because they're adopting the tech, help bring accessibility and bring
down the price of that tech for you know, normal
(32:43):
schmows like me. Well, are there any technologies that you
are hoping that you can incorporate into red fins approach
in the short term future? Yeah? So, I mean we're
there's there's just so many things that we're working on. Um.
I mean, I am really excited to bring rentals in.
I'm very cited about our mortgage business. So mortgage is
another area that's just really right for innovation and new approaches,
(33:06):
and because we've built our own loan origination system, it's
giving us some opportunities to look for ways to digitize
parts of the process that really have never been digitized
before and to get you know, better efficiency and to
offer a better mortgage product and price point for our
customers over time. So that's another area that we're really
investing in. UM. It's a lot of looking at ways
(33:27):
to build what we call the complete real Estate solution,
where we can bring in a lot of very complicated
pieces of the business at a technical layer, so that
a consumer can have a relationship with redfin and we
can help them with their whole move. Everything you're saying
is resonating so deeply with me right now, because that
process is incredibly stressful, and having a tool or set
(33:49):
of tools that are actively or even proactively helping you
through that process, that's just such an incredible thing to
have at your disposal. And many people who are buying
our selling at home, they realize there are gaps between
all of the people who are trying to help you
get through that UM that the lender doesn't know the
Asian doesn't know the title insurance person, and there's paperwork
(34:10):
that's lost, you have to duplicate it. People are still
faxing the paperwork. You know, there's there's all these things
that are happening. And so you know, when we bring
all of those businesses under one roof, you know, your
agent is able to help you through that whole process,
and all the people who are there um supporting them
are integrated using the same technology. They're all integrated. So
you know, and and every time where we build a
(34:32):
feature that helps make a real estate agent more efficient,
I just think, well, now the real estate agent can
spend more time with the customer, you know, instead of
faxing documents or splitting PDFs into multiple sections, that agent
can really sit down and understand a customer what they're
really looking for. And over time, you know, we're just
we're just chipping away at that. We're giving the agent
of their day back. It's the promise of technology, right,
(34:53):
the idea that technology will take the parts of our
our duties that are the most time consuming, often the
least fulfilling, and be able to offload that so that
we can focus more on the things that we are
fulfilling that are meaningful to us. That's also one of
the things I absolutely love about well implemented tech. I
(35:15):
couldn't let Bridget go without asking her one more thing,
what keeps you up at night? It seems like we're
finding more ways as a planet to have these kind
of global problems that we're going to need to find
ways to collaborate on. I mean, the pandemic has exposed,
a climate change, plastics, There's there's so many things that
(35:36):
we're going to have to find ways as a planet
to solve together. And so I hope we're able to
find ways that you know, community is in in smaller
parts of the planet can solve problems that we can
then use to apply to the larger ones. You're clearly
a very empathetic person, so that's the sort of answer
I would have anticipated and one I can certainly identify
(35:57):
with Bridget. Thank you so much for joining us today.
This has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much
for having me. This was a lot of funs. What
I took away from Bridget is that a strong CTO
really can't focus exclusively on technological solutions. A great CTO
has to be an advocate for their team and to
(36:19):
make certain that the projects they launch support the organization
as a whole. Bridgets incorporation of empathy and leadership with
identifying the right technological solutions comes across as a holistic
approach to achieving goals and honestly, hearing about a company
that's dedicated to making the process of buying a home
less arduous goes a long way in my book, thank
(36:43):
you for listening to the restless Ones. Be sure to
tune into future episodes where I'll have more conversations with
leaders in tech who are shaping the future of how
technology and business intertwined. I'm Jonathan Strickland. These days, new
(37:03):
ways of working have become the norm, and the status
quo no longer cuts it when it comes to helping
businesses evolve and grow. That's why T Mobile for Business
uses unconventional thinking to help businesses sees innovation only. T
Mobile offers America's largest and fastest five gene network, which
makes their new WFX solutions possible, letting businesses stay connected
(37:26):
and productive where work happens. See what T Mobile for
Business can do for you at t mobile dot com.
Slash Unconventional Open Signal awarded. T Mobile fastest five G
network based on average speeds. USA five G User Experience Report, January.
Capable device required coverage not available in some areas. Some
users may require certain Planner feature see t mobile dot
com
When you're a real estate company, you have to be
aware of the history of real estate, which has, you know,
in some cases, been reprehensible. You have things like redlining,
where you couldn't get a mortgage in neighborhoods that were
deemed unsafe, which was kind of a code for being
not white. It wasn't where white people live. And there's
neighborhood segregation, a lot of other things that have happened
in real estate, and so you need to build a
(00:22):
team that, in my view, reflects America, reflects the people
that you're trying to serve. Welcome to the restless ones.
I'm Jonathan Strickland. I've spent more than a decade really
learning about technology, what makes it take and then describing
and explaining that to my audience. But it's the conversations
(00:43):
with the world's most unconventional thinkers, the leaders at the
intersection of technology and business that fascinated me the most.
In partnership with T Mobile for Business, I explore the
unique set of challenges that see I O S and
c t o S face from at aansmans in cloud
and edge computing, software as a service, Internet of Things,
(01:05):
and of course five G WE are often left wondering
how the leading minds and business continue to thrive. Let's
find out. Our guest today is Bridget Fried, Chief Technology
Officer of red finn As red Fin's ct O, Bridget
(01:27):
overseas technology integrations that aimed to make the entire process
of buying, selling, or renting a home as seamless as possible.
At the same time, she works hard to improve diversity
and inclusion on her team, opening up new opportunities for
organizational success. I started off getting a bit more background
(01:48):
on Bridget and how she came to love the field
of tech and data analysis. Bridget, thank you so much
for joining us on the Restless Ones. I am very
pleased to have you here as my guest. Thanks for
having me. It's so exciting to be here. And uh,
I love to start off these conversations by learning a
little bit more about the people I'm speaking with. And
(02:10):
so I'm very curious, what was it that sparked your
love of technology? Was it an Apple computer? It was
you might you might know that story a little bit
about it. So, my dad is an appliance sales and
repairment and when I was five, he showed up at
her house with this big box and he put it
in the kitchen and inside was an Apple. To me,
this early Apple computer, and to him it was really
(02:32):
just like a dishwasher, where you get the manual and
you read the instructions and you figure out how to
use it. And so my earliest experiences with technology and
computers was just learning to code with my dad. That's fantastic. Yeah,
I also was teethed on an Apple to myself. Yep.
So I remember the Hello World and you know ten
(02:54):
print exactly. Yea, is it is kind of applicated since then? Yeah? Yeah, once,
once I got beyond the basic programming language, things got
out of my wheelhouse pretty quickly. But from what I understand,
you really went down that pathway wholeheartedly. You know, your
(03:15):
love was sparked early on. But when did you decide
that this is something I actually want to study? Yeah?
I think by the time I got to high school.
I actually was really fortunate that we had a computer
science class and a club that we're operating in my
high school. Now it's maybe more common, but I also
had a female computer science teacher who was really inspirational
to me, and so I think that those experiences helped
(03:38):
to make me feel like I belonged in the tech
industry at these formative years. And I also, you know,
I was I loved the idea of using algorithms and
technology to solve problems, and so those things really crystallized
for me by the time I was done with high school.
I'm already fascinated by this story because we've heard the
opposite so many times in the tech industry in general, right,
(04:00):
that it tends to be an industry that sometimes on
a good day you could call unwelcoming two women in
the field and to hear that you had the exact
opposite experience, and that's what inspired you, and now you're
carrying that forward as a leader. So what was your
experience like once you went to Harvard? Did you find
that environment really welcoming as well? So it was lonelier
(04:22):
when I got to Harvard in a way that maybe
I should have known, I didn't quite expect. That was
when I started to feel more like the only or
the few in the computer science classes. So there was
really only a handful of women who were in my
year major computer science. And so I did, though find
again a professor, female professor who her name is Margot Seltzer,
(04:42):
and she was also an inspiration to me. Um, she
was actually not only teaching and going for tenure, but
she was she found it a startup, and she was
also had a baby while I was at Harvard, and yeah,
she still found time to spend with me and to
mentor me and to help me through my career. And
so it was this example to me of someone who
(05:03):
somehow is really busy but still makes time to help others. Phenomenal.
I mean, that's an overachiever and a half to be
a professor, an entrepreneur, a mother, and a mentor. I'm
getting a feeling a sense of what has shaped your
philosophy because as I've read about you uh and your initiatives,
it really was one of those things where I thought, like, wow,
(05:24):
this is this is a truly remarkable person. So hearing
about these stories, I think I'm starting to get a
picture of how that all kind of coalesced. Yeah, I
think once I got later and I was trying to see,
you know what inspired me, and I realized at some
point in my career, oh, there are a lot of
people out there who are looking to form their careers
who are early like I used to be, and they're
looking for examples that you know, maybe maybe like me.
(05:47):
How how did I do this? How did I navigate
this field? And it kind of pushed me out to
get out there a little bit more and to try
to find ways to help people who were like me
a few years ago. M hmm. What was your first
job in the tech field. Yeah, so my my first
job was at a company called Plumptree Software and they
did uh it was called corporate portals. It's basically like
(06:10):
an intranet that every company has now where you can
connect to all your HR systems and all these things.
But back then it was this revolutionary idea and and
so I love this idea that I could go in
and work on business software and find ways to make
a company work better through the work that I did.
And that company was founded by Glenn Kellman, who's actually
the CEO of Redfin where I work now, and so
(06:31):
he was someone that I ultimately followed to to the
place where I am. So I'm just curious, So, in
your role working on that sort of corporate intranet portal,
were you looking at all different elements of it where
you specifically focused on user interface what were you really
concentrating on. Yeah, so I came in working on kind
of back end systems, and about a year in they
(06:54):
somehow made me responsible for security. And you know, I
was acure out of college. I guess I had a
little dea what I was doing, but you know, security,
and so I was tasked with figuring out how would
people log in and access the system? How would we
authenticate and authorize permissions? And that was a really harrowing
experience try to figure out how to architect that in
a way that's scaled and was secure. And so that
(07:17):
helped to cement my love of back end systems. I
kind of come from a data engineering, machine learning type
of background. Those are the problems that I've most most
worked on. Yeah, talk about being thrown into the deep end.
I love it. So, so when did you join Redfin
and in what capacity were you working there when you
(07:37):
first started. Yeah, so I joined about ten years ago
and I joined to found our analytics engineering team, which
was the first team to bring big data and machine
learning into Redfin. And I looked at it as this
gold mine opportunity. There is so much data in real estate,
and Redfin has this really unique data set where not
only do we have the number one brokerage website in
United States, we know what people are searching for, we
(07:57):
know what they're clicking on. But we're a national real privilege,
so we know when people make offers, when they go
on tours. And just look at this unique data set
that no one else has, you should be able to
make machine learning algorithms that no one else can dream
of that are more accurate and really help people figure
out how to navigate real estate. So that was this
big greenfield opportunity, and ten years later, there's still all
(08:18):
kinds of things we're working on, and it's it's fascinating
because about ten years ago was when I think outside
of the actual text sphere, people first started hearing about
the term big data. Yes, and I think actually within
the industry there were tons of people who weren't really
sure what the actual meaning behind big data was, and
(08:38):
that's when we saw this explosion in creativity and innovation
in how to take that information, derive meaning from it,
and then project things from that. So it sounds to
me like you were right there on the ground floor
when that was when that was happening. Yeah, absolutely, And
I think kind of being skeptical of you know, when
(08:59):
do you really need a big data solution and when
can your data just fit in a database? You know,
you have to kind of understand that as an engineer.
And actually, as the years have gone on, I mean,
the support that's out there for big data, the algorithms
that are available off the shelf through technologies like Amazon
Web Services, all those things who have gotten so much
more available. You know, there are there are algorithms that
(09:20):
are running now that would have been cost prohibitive just
a couple of years ago, and we didn't have the
cloud and we didn't have some of these off the
shelf services. So that's that's created this opportunity for many
more engineers to work at that kind of scale. So
it's one of the common themes I've found as I've
taught the different leaders, is that identifying what's the outcome
you want and then determining how do you achieve that outcome,
(09:43):
whether it's a technological solution or otherwise. Yeah, you have
to decide when you really want to be on the
cutting edge of technology, because I think as you get experience,
you realize being on the cutting edge, being the first
company to try a new technology. It's not always that sweet.
I mean that's when there's things are untested, they don't
work at scale, there are more bugs, and there are
(10:03):
sometimes some more boring or prosaic solutions to the problem
that you have. So I think that as an architect,
as an architect develops, you really start to get a
better sense for when to use the tried and true
and when to really go out on a limb and
try something that's new. That's an excellent point to what
was your journey to the role of CTO. Yeah, so
a couple of times in my career, I have moved
(10:25):
between a number of different roles. So I've been a
software developer than a manager, than a program manager, product
management director. Like, I've kind of moved between the roles,
and each time I moved between them, I feel like
it gave me empathy for what others were going through.
So when I became a manager, I realized, oh, this
is why, you know, my manager used to want me
as a developer to really keep track of my work
(10:46):
and estimate how long it was going to take and
write down all the bugs. And so I think it
gave me a bunch of empathy but I kept being
pulled to those experiences with my dad where I could
get my hands dirty and really build things myself. And
so every time I went to that kind of building role,
I would find that the people around you would say, hey,
you know, could you just leave this one project or
this team doesn't have a manager for a couple of months,
(11:08):
could you just kind of step in? And I kept
feeling this kind of being called to leadership roles, and
eventually I just, I guess, went with it. And so
now I'm pretty solidly that's sport of a role, but
sometimes still like to whiteboard things with the engineers. Well,
I like that the sirens call of executive leadership was
impossible to resist exactly, But also it's it's incredibly valuable
(11:31):
to have that experience where you have worked in a
fair broad spectrum of the different roles, so that you
do have that understanding of what are the demands of
that position, where are the pain points you've lived that,
so that you have a better understanding how to communicate,
I would hope. So, yeah, I think that when you
can walk in someone's shoes, you just get a better
sense for what they're going through, right, And as you
(11:53):
point out empathy is a huge part of that too.
If you don't have that empathy, you don't care, then
you're really never going to have a team that works
as optimally as you would like. I wanted to learn
more about Bridget's approach to leadership, including how she approaches
fostering new leaders and improving team diversity. So first let's
(12:15):
get a little bit more of an understanding of the
parameters we're talking about her. What's the size of your
team at redfin Yeah, so my team is about three
fifty people right now, and it's everything from engineering, analytics, operations, quality,
So you know there's a you know, growing team that
is trying to make sure we're building the right software
(12:35):
for people who are trying to buy and sell homes
and then for our real estate agents who need to
help them with getting into the best home for them. Mmmm.
So if you were to define what your primary responsibilities
as c t O or how do you frame that?
So sometimes I think of it like I have two
jobs almost where one is to be a leader of
the engineering team and to set our architecture vision and
(12:58):
how are we gonna make techno goal decisions? How are
we going to grow the team. But then my other
job is as a member of the executive team, where
we're really trying to look at the whole strategy for
Redfinn as a business, and you know, how how is
engineering serving those other executives? But also you know, how
are we going to talk to our investors about the vision?
How are we going to choose where to grow the
company from a business perspective. So they're kind of two
(13:20):
different roles, and you kind of have to tell tell yourself, Okay,
now I'm in the role of engineering leader and now
I'm acting as an executive and be able to go
back and forth when we're in a world where we
can have casual cocktail parties again and someone turns to
you and said, and so, what do you do for
a living? Is that sort of the answer you give
or do you have like the elevator pitch version. That's
(13:42):
kind of what I say. I mean, every day is
really different, I think when you work in an executive role.
So sometimes people say, you know, what's a typical day like,
and it's so hard to answer that. At this point,
I think, you know, I have to I have to
be able to figure out what red Finn needs for me,
what the team needs for me at any given day,
and really try to reslessly prioritize so I'm helping people
to do their best work. We had such a monumentally
(14:05):
disruptive year in twenty twenty kount of curiosity, How did
the pandemic affect your role in process at redfin in
what ways did you have to pivot or adapt? Yeah,
it almost felt like we were kind of replanning our
strategy every couple of weeks for a while there. So
at the beginning of the pandemic, you know, we saw
demand really dropped where it didn't look like people were
(14:27):
interested in buying and selling homes for a period of time,
and it got to the point where we actually had
to furlough a significant chunk of our real estate agents
and do a small layoff it. We took pay cuts
at headquarters. It was very painful to go through that.
We hadn't really lived through something like that before. But
then within a few weeks, all of a sudden, there
were all kinds of people who wanted to move. I
(14:48):
think looking at this opportunity for remote work as a
chance to reset. So we've seen, you know, the interest
in places like Boise and Bend has doubled since the
pandemic started, so we have a lot more people looking
to move to those areas. About of people on our
side are looking to move to another area, and so
we had to figure out, all right, well, how do
(15:09):
we help these people do this? And we how to
almost overnight switched to being a fully virtual brokerage. And
that's something we've been working on for a long time.
How do you virtualize parts of real estate? You know,
we have three D walkthroughs so you can walk through
a home online. We have a direct access where you
can put a smart walk on a house and click
a button on your phone and get into a home,
and all these kind of ways of virtualizing the experience.
(15:32):
But we had to almost overnight switch our entire business
to that. It was like the future came early, and
so that was a huge pivot for the team. As
the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. There's
nothing like a global pandemic to really kick things into
high gear when it comes to figuring out how to
(15:52):
respond to that so that you can meet the needs
and expectations of your customers and have the most minimal
impact on business and same time, so pretty phenomenal. So
if there's one thing most businesses can agree on these days,
(16:12):
it's that change has never come about so quickly. New
ways of working have become the norm. As a result,
the status quo no longer cuts it when it comes
to helping businesses adapt and innovate. That's why T Mobile
for Business uses unconventional thinking to help businesses work smarter
and grow faster. Only T Mobile offers America's largest and
(16:33):
fastest five gene network. It's just one reason they're better
able to help businesses solve the real world challenges they
face as they evolve. For instance, their new WFX solutions
help team members stay connected and productive where work happens.
With nearly two and a half times the network coverage
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(16:55):
and forty billion dollars invested in network and business improvements
over the next three years, T Mobile for Business is
better for your business right now and into the future.
See what they can do for your organization at T
mobile dot com. Slash Unconventional Open Signal awarded T mobile
fastest five G network based on average speeds USA five
(17:15):
G user experience report January. Capable device required converts not
available in some areas. Some users may require certain plann
or feature see T mobile dot com. And you're known
specifically for for working to kind of break down the
barriers for women who are trying to enter into technical fields.
(17:37):
So how do you define your sort of philosophy and
approach to that. Yeah, when I when I joined Redfind
ten years ago, I was the only woman on the
Seattle engineering team and today we're thirty six percent women,
were ten percent black or Latinos on our tech team,
and so you know, the numbers don't reflect America yet,
but they're they're moving in the right direction. And I
think that in order to get there, we have had
(17:59):
to look at every part of how we recruit, how
we onboard, how we bring people into the organization, how
we promote, how we pay. It's I've almost thought of
myself as a diversity mechanic, where you're kind of, you know,
looking at all the little parts of the system and
just tweaking one little thing and seeing if it will
unlock some potential in your team. And you have to
rejoice when you get one little thing working, even though
(18:20):
you're all all kinds of things have to happen in
order to build a diverse and inclusive team, but you
have to celebrate the winds along the way. Well, and
can you kind of put into words what you find,
what value you find in increasing diversity. Yeah, I mean
we're a real estate business, right, and so when you're
a real estate company, you have to be aware of
(18:41):
the history of real estate, which has, you know, in
some cases, been reprehensible. You have things like redlining, where
you couldn't get a mortgage in neighborhoods that were deemed unsafe,
which was kind of a code for being not white.
It wasn't where white people live. And there's neighborhood segregation,
a lot of other things that have happened in real estate.
And so you need to build a team that, in
my view, reflects America, reflects the people that you're trying
(19:04):
to serve, so that you can bring in folks who
are going to look at aspects of your business and say, well,
that's a place where you could have bias, that's something
that we should avoid doing and make sure that that's
part of how you're growing the company. And I'm so
glad you said that because one of the things that
we're talking about a little bit more is machine learning
and artificial intelligence, and one of the big ongoing conversations
(19:27):
in that field is how do you build these systems
and minimize the entry of unintentional bias. So hearing that
and also just knowing that by inviting more voices to
the table, you get perspectives you otherwise never would have had,
and that that you can't benefit from something if you
don't know about it, Absolutely you can build a stronger business.
(19:48):
You know, I moved a lot when I was a kid.
I lived in five different states and seven different homes
before I turned eight. Team and so when I came
to red Philip's kind of opportunity to help families like mine.
When started, I realized that Redfin actually wasn't hadn't launched
in all of those places that I lived as a kid,
all of those poems that I lived in where you know,
(20:09):
maybe lower income areas or areas where Redfin had expanded.
We were mostly in coastal markets. And so one of
the things when I joined was, Hey, why don't we
go into all these areas that we're not serving and
do a really big expansion push. And so that was
one of the things that I really fought for and
then we've since done is really becoming a much more
national brokerage. And that's created, you know, a huge business
(20:30):
and revenue opportunity. I think when you can access talent
that other people aren't using, it gives you opportunities to
grow your business in ways that other companies can't. And
when you are looking at developing teams and developing leaders,
what are the qualities that you look for? One are
the things that stand out that make you say this
is what is a perfect fit for a leadership role. Yeah,
(20:52):
so we're looking for a couple of different things. I mean,
one is just is this someone who gets results? Is
this someone who can lead a team to win? That
is important part of business. But we're also looking for
a leader who is collaborative by nature, who can bring
out all the voices in the room and make sure
that there's a way to hear all of those voices.
And that's a really tricky thing to do in a
world where you know, some people are more or less extroverted,
(21:15):
some people, based on their background, are more or less
comfortable going up against a leader, and so you need
to find ways, though to bring out all of that
talent you have and then make a decision. So we're
looking for people who can foster that kind of environment. Well,
can you tell me about a project you've worked on
at red Finn that you're particularly proud of and maybe
(21:36):
walk us through from ideation to execution. Yeah. So, one
thing I've been excited about recently is that Redfinn is
now getting into the rental space. So this was a
project that my team and I worked on for many years,
just saying, you know, if our mission is to redefined
real estate in the consumers favor, we know that there
are people who are considering whether to rent or buy,
or rent or so, and we were not able to
(21:57):
serve all of those customers. So we had started putting
in some plans, you know, how could we build a
rentals business ourselves, And that eventually turned into looking at
M and A and then acquiring rent Path, which we
did just a couple of months ago, and so we
now have we're now in our rentals business. Rent Path
operates rent dot com and apartment guide dot com and
we now have this business that we can integrate with
(22:19):
red Finn to really help to solve that whole consumer problem.
And so that was a project that went on for
many years, and there's still plenty of work to do
because you know, all we've done at this point was
is a choire rent path. Now we actually have to
deliver on that vision. Cool. Well, let's transition over to
talking about one of my favorite things, which is just
emerging technology, maturing technology. We touched on one with big
(22:43):
data and your your journey over the last ten years.
Do you have any other perspectives on big data? I mean,
we talked a little bit about how the tools to
process big data are becoming more accessible and we're starting
to see providers, various third party providers come up with tools.
There any other things about big data that just leap
out at you as like this is really important. Yeah,
(23:06):
I think this idea of you know, what is a
home worth is incredibly interesting. You know, there have been
online estimates that have come out over the last few years.
You know, red fin has the most haccurate online home
value estimate where you know, we're more than twice as
likely to be within three percent of the final sale price.
And so you know, when you think about, if you
know better than anyone else, what is a home worth?
(23:28):
What kinds of businesses can you build. So not only
have we used that to help our listing agents help
us seller price their home accurately, but we've also now
started a business called redfin now basically an I buying
business where we purchase homes, we renovate them and put
them back on the market. And so they're pricing is
all about, you know what, what's the right amount to
pay for that home, what would be worth if you
(23:48):
did different kinds of renovations. How long will it be
on the market once you go and sell that. But
if you can figure that out better than anyone else,
you can really win at that type of business. So
I think pricing is this huge opportunity still in the industry. Well,
and that makes me curious because I mean, so I've
been through the process of buying a home a couple
of times, and the first time I did it, it
(24:10):
was a very different world because back when I first
bought a house, the idea of a smart home was
the thing of tex Avery cartoons. Right, It's like big
robot arms coming out and helping you get dressed and
that kind of thing. But now we're actually in a
world where we're seeing a lot more integrations of smart
(24:30):
home technology. Are your approaches to pricing, Are you starting
to look at things like that about how integrated technology
can play a part in home's value. Yeah, we we
are looking at those sorts of things, and we're also
looking at ways that a smart home can lead to
a better ability to sell a home quickly. So we
have a feature called direct Access where we'll put a
(24:52):
smart luck on home and we find that when we
put a smart luck on a home, that home gets
twice as many tours. So that's twice as many folks
who are walking through your home and trying to get
an opportunity to actually go and buy that. And so
when you look at how that can help to sell
a home, I mean it's there's huge opportunities there in
the industry. That's fascinating to me. Like that's a legit,
(25:16):
one to one sort of approach of saying, here's here's
a particular smart technology that you wouldn't necessarily associate with
a fully integrated smart home. It's not like the crazy
entertainment system, and you know all the appliances are integrated,
and yet you can point to that one data point
and say we see from just the number of tours
(25:38):
that this is a big component that inspires people to
check this out. I think that brings up how are
people going to look at the trade offs between privacy
and having a fully smart home, Like as you get
into things like five key and opportunities for just a
lot more devices sending a lot more data from your home?
Is that going to you know, increase that conversation that
people are having about under what circumstances is what are
(26:00):
they willing to share data about what's happening within your home.
That's the place where you live, and you know you
you hear that tension that's going on right now, and
so I'm really interested to see how those things develop.
I think, like you're saying, there are many homeowners who
want the promise, They want what was promised in the
Jetsons and all these old sci fi shows and things.
But but you have to figure out what the right
(26:21):
bounces for privacy as well and all those things. I agree,
And you know, finding out those spots where you think, okay,
this is a value added proposition if I go with this, well,
can you tell us a little bit more about some
of the technologies that you're using at RED finn in
order to to do what you do. Yeah. So, so
we're right now in this situation where we have multiple
(26:43):
businesses that are ready to scale at once. When I
joined ten years ago, we're really primarily a brokerage business,
but since then we've launched a mortgage business where we
built the whole owner regination system, title insurance business redfin
now where we buy homes, um pick them up, put
them back on the market. And so the engineering team
is in the situation where we're trying to figure out
how to scale all of those businesses at once. And
(27:03):
while Redmond as a business has to adapt to that,
you know, who's involved in which decisions and how do
you separate out the revenue and all those sorts of things,
the technology team is trying to figure out how do
we set up our systems to scale with the business,
Where should we separate into services, and where should things
be sharing the same back end technology. So that's presenting
a really interesting architecture challenge. You know, many companies have
(27:24):
gone through this kind of scale and we're going through
it right now, and we have to find our own
way to set up an architecture that's going to work
for our business. I can only imagine that this is
complicated exponentially by the fact that obviously you're dealing with
real estate in vastly different regions. Each ones have different
price points, different average home values. Yes, real estate is
(27:47):
a very local business, and it's one of the first
things you kind of realize when you get into the
space that a lot of these approaches that have worked
for you know, national scale websites, they just fall apart
when you realize that your algorithms and your real estate
agents and your whole business has to understand, well, what's
it like to buy a home in Albuquerque. It doesn't
matter what the you know, lowest comminent I'm here is
(28:07):
across the whole the whole country. You have to be
able to serve the customers in Albuquerque. So there's a
lot of considerations and how we built our technology to
make sure that we can bring in that local voice
at the appropriate time. That to me is phenomenal. The
idea of having to build in that ability for localization.
It makes me think of completely different industries that often
(28:27):
have to look at localization. If you're talking about maybe
a software product where you need to have a team
specialized in localization for that, but for something where you're
talking about localization within a single country, that's pretty phenomenal. Yeah,
and yeah, it's almost in some ways more like a
retail business to grow a real estate business, because you
almost you really have to understand what the consumers in
(28:49):
that one particular part of the country. Bridget has an
innovative and yet pragramatic approach to integrating technology. I really
wanted to hear her thoughts on emerging and maturing tech
and how those might play a part in redfins business
moving forward. So Kubernetes is one that we're really investing
(29:09):
in right now. So that's it's related to that strategy
that I talked about to make sure that we can
support multiple growing businesses and have a really well defined
services architecture layer. So Kubernetes is helping us to do that,
and you know, hopefully to do that in a way
that's neutral about different cloud platforms over time, where you know,
we can choose what the right places to deploy our
(29:31):
software based on costs and performance and many other factors.
I think you're the first person to talk about Kubernetes
on this PODCASTA. Alright, well, so we're we are on
I would say a cusp of another data explosion, right,
because we are in the era of the Internet of
Things and we're seeing this proliferation of devices connecting to
(29:53):
networks that are just constantly collecting data from whatever sensors
are attached there. And now we're also seeing the roll
out of five G which is supporting incredible throughput of
data with low latency. How does that future impact you
or is that something more that you would experience as
(30:14):
a consumer as opposed to someone incorporating it into your work.
So I think, I mean, real estate is so data
intensive with you know, photos and video and you know,
potentially at some point sensors that could tell you the
air quality, the sound quality of a home. There are
things that people are looking for information about homes that
they typically can't get without visiting the home. And so
(30:35):
I think as we see more interconnectedness, maybe that that
data can feed into a real estate say in a
real estate business, for sure. But I also look at
you know that we're talking about five you over here,
but there's still twenty million Americans that don't have access
to broadband. There are many more who are not able
to afford broadband access. The pandemic has really exposed this
(30:56):
kind of two America's in this way about who can
get onto the Internet and who can't, and that really
affects a business like ours as well, because when we
send someone to a home, we send a real estate
agent with an app that they can use to help
their customer learn about the home in the area. And
we have the smart lacks. We have all these things,
and those technologies don't work when you're in an area
(31:16):
that doesn't have either broadband or or cell phone support.
So I'm still kind of looking at that as a
huge opportunity in America to really bring internet to everyone,
and I think you'll see like an explosion of other
technologies as they reach more people. I agree the digital
divide is a very real thing. We see that in
lots of communities across the United States. I'm sure that
(31:38):
you have far greater insight into that than even I do.
So seeing this rollout where we're getting greater penetration in areas,
I'm hopeful that it goes far beyond urban centers and
starts to reach those communities that otherwise tend to be
either unserved or underserved, so that then we can really
(31:58):
talk about what the connected technologies can can do. Once
everyone has a seat at that table, and we may
see this kind of you know, digital nomad trend as
that accelerates really you know, people who want to live
in the rural part of Georgia that you're talking about
on the lake or you know, and then finding that
there's no internet. It could be that those folks who
have an opportunity to work remotely may start to push
(32:21):
for for Internet in addition to the people who are
already living in that community, and that could help to
accelerate this trend. But we'll have to see. That's interesting, yeah,
because that makes me think of people who are early
adopters to technology, and those are the ones who ultimately,
because they're adopting the tech, help bring accessibility and bring
down the price of that tech for you know, normal
(32:43):
schmows like me. Well, are there any technologies that you
are hoping that you can incorporate into red fins approach
in the short term future? Yeah? So, I mean we're
there's there's just so many things that we're working on. Um.
I mean, I am really excited to bring rentals in.
I'm very cited about our mortgage business. So mortgage is
another area that's just really right for innovation and new approaches,
(33:06):
and because we've built our own loan origination system, it's
giving us some opportunities to look for ways to digitize
parts of the process that really have never been digitized
before and to get you know, better efficiency and to
offer a better mortgage product and price point for our
customers over time. So that's another area that we're really
investing in. UM. It's a lot of looking at ways
(33:27):
to build what we call the complete real Estate solution,
where we can bring in a lot of very complicated
pieces of the business at a technical layer, so that
a consumer can have a relationship with redfin and we
can help them with their whole move. Everything you're saying
is resonating so deeply with me right now, because that
process is incredibly stressful, and having a tool or set
(33:49):
of tools that are actively or even proactively helping you
through that process, that's just such an incredible thing to
have at your disposal. And many people who are buying
our selling at home, they realize there are gaps between
all of the people who are trying to help you
get through that UM that the lender doesn't know the
Asian doesn't know the title insurance person, and there's paperwork
(34:10):
that's lost, you have to duplicate it. People are still
faxing the paperwork. You know, there's there's all these things
that are happening. And so you know, when we bring
all of those businesses under one roof, you know, your
agent is able to help you through that whole process,
and all the people who are there um supporting them
are integrated using the same technology. They're all integrated. So
you know, and and every time where we build a
(34:32):
feature that helps make a real estate agent more efficient,
I just think, well, now the real estate agent can
spend more time with the customer, you know, instead of
faxing documents or splitting PDFs into multiple sections, that agent
can really sit down and understand a customer what they're
really looking for. And over time, you know, we're just
we're just chipping away at that. We're giving the agent
of their day back. It's the promise of technology, right,
(34:53):
the idea that technology will take the parts of our
our duties that are the most time consuming, often the
least fulfilling, and be able to offload that so that
we can focus more on the things that we are
fulfilling that are meaningful to us. That's also one of
the things I absolutely love about well implemented tech. I
(35:15):
couldn't let Bridget go without asking her one more thing,
what keeps you up at night? It seems like we're
finding more ways as a planet to have these kind
of global problems that we're going to need to find
ways to collaborate on. I mean, the pandemic has exposed,
a climate change, plastics, There's there's so many things that
(35:36):
we're going to have to find ways as a planet
to solve together. And so I hope we're able to
find ways that you know, community is in in smaller
parts of the planet can solve problems that we can
then use to apply to the larger ones. You're clearly
a very empathetic person, so that's the sort of answer
I would have anticipated and one I can certainly identify
(35:57):
with Bridget. Thank you so much for joining us today.
This has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much
for having me. This was a lot of funs. What
I took away from Bridget is that a strong CTO
really can't focus exclusively on technological solutions. A great CTO
has to be an advocate for their team and to
(36:19):
make certain that the projects they launch support the organization
as a whole. Bridgets incorporation of empathy and leadership with
identifying the right technological solutions comes across as a holistic
approach to achieving goals and honestly, hearing about a company
that's dedicated to making the process of buying a home
less arduous goes a long way in my book, thank
(36:43):
you for listening to the restless Ones. Be sure to
tune into future episodes where I'll have more conversations with
leaders in tech who are shaping the future of how
technology and business intertwined. I'm Jonathan Strickland. These days, new
(37:03):
ways of working have become the norm, and the status
quo no longer cuts it when it comes to helping
businesses evolve and grow. That's why T Mobile for Business
uses unconventional thinking to help businesses sees innovation only. T
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