Former Redfin CEO joins venture firm Greylock as chief residential officer – GeekWire
Real estate icon Glenn Kelman has found his next home — professionally, anyway.
The longtime Redfin executive, who stepped down in January, six months after Rocket Companies acquired the Seattle brokerage for $1.75 billion, has joined venture capital firm Greylock as chief residential officer.
In the new role, announced by the Silicon Valley firm on Tuesday, Kelman will work directly with founders on leadership development, company building, go-to-market strategy, and what Greylock calls “the hard parts of scaling that don’t fit well in the boardroom.”
When he announced his departure from Redfin in January, Kelman said he wanted to find “another mission-driven business outside of real estate.”
Reached by email on Wednesday, Kelman confirmed that this is still the plan.
“I’m still looking to start a new machine-driven business, which involves being in the wilderness for a bit and testing ideas that won’t work and howling at the moon,” he wrote. Sometimes, I end up washing the children’s clothes in the middle of the day.
Greylock’s role, he said, will help his creative process by exposing him to a variety of great ideas sponsored by the company.
But he does not intend to become an investor himself. Kelman noted that he bet longtime Seattle investor Greg Gottesman back in 2005 that he wouldn’t become a VC — a bet he says he still hasn’t lost.
He explained this role as “a lot of it is just advising other founders which I think is not compatible with starting my own things, you learn a lot from other people.”
Kelman said he’s lived in Seattle (“probably my whole life”), citing “the people, the trees, the mountains, the lakes and the islands here.”
Greylock, he added, “gives me more exposure to what’s going on in Silicon Valley and beyond, which I really like.” The company, founded in 1965, is among the oldest firms in the US, known for its early bets on companies such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Airbnb and Workday.
Kelman’s ties to the company run deep. Greylock partner James Slavet was an early Redfin investor and board member, and the firm credits him for playing “a positive role in Glenn’s development as a leader,” according to the announcement of his new role.
A veteran tech innovator, Kelman joined Redfin in 2005, a year after it launched, and spent two decades building the Seattle-based company into one of the most recognizable names in US real estate. Redfin went public in 2017 at a valuation of approximately $1.73 billion.
Along the way, Kelman became one of the industry’s most outspoken voices: testifying before Congress about commission reform, kicking Redfin out of the National Association of Realtors in 2023, and turning earnings calls into must-read theater with his off-the-cuff analogies.
Redfin, meanwhile, is pushing ahead under Rocket. The brand has retained its name and headquarters in Seattle as a subsidiary of Rocket. Rockets CEO Varun Krishna has been running Redfin since Kelman’s exit.
