Quotes from Glenn Kelman

I'm from Seattle.

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.

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.

Those in technology who can afford to stay in Silicon Valley all know it as one of the most beautiful places to live in the world, but a wariness has sunk in as folks from other walks of life are forced to leave: coffee shops are wall-to-wall with aspiring entrepreneurs, and restaurants buzz with talk of valuations and venture capital.

From squalls, jibes, and other sudden calamities, I learned you don't always get to decide when you've got to make a decision.

I 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.

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.

It's important for a CEO to feel lucky.

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.

Once you become more like Madison Avenue, you become acutely sensitive to what's going to annoy your clients.

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.

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

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

At different points, I applied to graduate school. I got into medical school. I thought about being a writer. I thought about being an investment banker. I just didn't know what I wanted to do with myself. I think the thing that best suits me about being a C.E.O. is that you get to exercise many different talents and wear many different hats.

I do think entrepreneurs need to be smart, but there's another scale I never evaluated myself on that is now the source of my deepest strength: Not how much brains I have, but how much love I have.

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

As a captain of industry, I would prefer more tax breaks to help people buy houses, but as a citizen, I realize someone has to pay.

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.

I think the company that has the clearest set of values is Amazon. That company knows what it is. It may be that it's not your cup of tea, but every single person at that company knows what the Amazon values are.

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.

Funny money has always been the reason housing prices have risen too fast. First, it was liar loans and negative-amortizing mortgages, where the total amount you owed increased rather than decreased every month. We all know how that ended, with the global financial crisis of 2008.

I think if I had gone to a private school and been coddled a little bit, I wouldn't be as tough as I am now.

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

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?