I just don't like bullies. Especially hypocritical bullies.

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

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

Most of the tech CEOs I know used to think that moving to the Midwest or the South was beneath us, a good tactic for the Boeings of the world who don't need the kind of rare skills we depend on, who have to grub for profits when we reach for growth. But if Amazon can't afford to keep growing in Seattle, who can?

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

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

Employers are as sensitive to housing costs as their employees, which is why, when we build more houses, we create more jobs.

It's hard to improve our schools. It's hard to redistribute wealth created by the concentration of technological and financial power or to increase middle-class wages. But it might be easier to lower middle-class costs by building more housing.

Control of the browser that people use to access the Web turned out to be far less meaningful than the search engine we use as the starting point for finding Web information. I switch between Safari, Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome browsers all day. I never stray from Google search.

Even though I am sympathetic to newspapers, I am not entirely convinced by the newspapers' claim that Google News violates fair use standards in posting snippets from news articles on its site.

Startups can be the most conservative organizations in the world. We spend so much energy nurturing our delicate egos against naysayers and self-doubt that we can hardly admit mistakes. This is especially true of first-time CEOs.

I often think about what my replacement will do after I'm fired. She won't have emotional commitments to decisions that I already regret.

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

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

The problem for new businesses isn't corporate taxes. Anyone who has actually started a new business knows you don't make enough money for years to pay any meaningful tax on it.

When I was 28, running products for a company I'd co-founded, the CEO called to say that I had a problem with the board, that I probably couldn't overcome it, that I'd have to leave the company.

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

It's important for a CEO to feel lucky.

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

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

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

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.