These were the moments when I decided that the people who do the hardest work at Redfin are my people, and that I will follow you to the ends of the earth! It has been an honor to run Redfin, on its own, and now into the great, great beyond with Rocket. Thank you Redfin & Rocket!.

A San Diego agent sent me a series of emails chronicling the acts of love from his team that kept him going through chemotherapy. His final message had this subject line: JIM JOHNSTON, SAN DIEGO CANCER SLAYER, IS RETIRING. He'd made it.

At a time of unrest, one of Redfin’s best agents called me from a closet. She didn’t want her kids to hear her crying because some people would always hate them for being Black. I had no idea what the real size or strength of this country was until I criss-crossed it for Redfin.

I tried to think of anyone in tech who would do that, and I couldn’t. This became a repeated experience at Redfin.

That changed when I got a ride to O’Hare from Jim Carollo, a Redfin agent now leading sales across a string of smaller cities. He told me about adopting a child with only one hand, and then adopting another so the first wouldn’t be lonely.

Rocket is the perfect parent for Redfin because we both believe in combining technology with service. But for the longest time, I felt mixed about running a business that wasn’t purely virtual. I missed my friends from Silicon Valley, who once teased me about being a Realtor.

This is why we come to Rocket with unfinished business, and why we’re combining brokerage service with Rocket mortgages. You should ask yourself why it is that not everyone wants an agent who charges a lower fee, but everyone wants a lower mortgage rate.

Redfin has saved consumers more than $1 billion in fees. But we’ve only partly lived up to our name: Redfin is supposed to be real estate redefined. Finding a home is still hard. Fees are still high.

Answering that is like trying to tell a robot about love.

Who knows where Redfin got its pebble, but it’s the hardest pebble in the world. Do you know what it’s like to be the underdog for 20 years? To be asked over & over again why we don’t just charge a full fee, or give up on insurance for Realtors?.

But there’s a third part of who we are. It’s the size of a pebble, & deep as a grudge, & as alone & intense as a neutron star. It's the refusal to die; the insistence against all evidence that you matter; the unwillingness, even in a small, easy way, to betray our flawed selves.

Rejection, and delusions of grandeur, formed a small, hard place inside of us. Small is the opposite of how we usually describe our inner being. On the day we marry, our heart becomes permanently larger. As we age, our soul quietly unfurls to its natural size, which is infinite.

What was less fun was raising money, which was hard, because we wanted to build a brokerage, not just a website. I commiserated with other startup CEOs, saying 10 different investors had passed, but no one could make me feel better because really it was 100.

For a week, I rode a rented bicycle up a mountain where Netflix was shooting a reality show. Trying to sneak into the nearby Stranger Things set felt like busting into Hawkins Lab. Hanging with the cast felt like being at camp. Riding back, swarms of bats would flutter by my face

But being a CEO is also fun. For example: just before the taping of a 60-Minutes segment from our tiny office, the make-up artist told me my interview was likely to go well. “You wouldn’t be getting powder if we wanted to see you sweat.”.

He was the one who said he’d been a CEO for 30 years, even though his LinkedIn profile said 15. “Fifteen during the day,” he explained. “Another fifteen worrying about it in my sleep.” It’s true what everyone says about the job, which has probably shortened my life.

Even the board had its quirks. Our founding chairman hired me only after another candidate asked for severance. A second board member had a vacation home made of rubber. A third asked if anyone on the management team had FedExed a horse.

Later, when we organized a company trip to Whistler, a colleague let us borrow his Land Cruiser, which was impounded by border agents with drug-sniffing dogs.

At a sales kickoff, we asked every employee to sprint through a scavenger hunt. After participants complained of being drenched in sweat or left behind, the next year’s contest was in cars driven by our youngest employees, at speeds we should’ve anticipated & still regret.

At our first picnic, our HR leader set up a boxing ring with oversized gloves, shuttling between contestants to say, “I think this guy wants to put you in the hospital,” which is exactly what happened.