Glenn Kelman in 2021, during his tenure as Redfin CEO. (Redfin Photo)
Real estate industry icon Glenn Kelman has found his next home — professionally, anyway.
The longtime Redfin CEO, who stepped down in January, six months after Rocket Companies acquired the Seattle brokerage for $1.75 billion, has joined venture firm Greylock as an executive in residence.
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 neatly into a board deck.”
When he announced his departure from Redfin in January, Kelman said he wanted to find “another mission-driven enterprise outside of real estate.”
Reached by email Wednesday, Kelman confirmed that’s still the plan.
“I’m still looking to start some kind of new mission-driven enterprise, which involves being in the wilderness a bit and exploring ideas that are never going to work and howling at the moon,” he wrote. “Occasionally, I just end up doing the kids’ laundry in the middle of the day too.”
The Greylock role, he said, will aid his creative process by exposing him to the range of big ideas the firm has backed.
But he doesn’t intend to become an investor himself. Kelman noted that he bet longtime Seattle investor Greg Gottesman back in 2005 that he’d never become a VC — a bet he says he still hasn’t lost.
He described the role as “mostly just advising other founders, which I don’t think is incompatible with starting my own thing. You learn a lot from other people.”
Kelman said he’s staying in Seattle (“probably for the rest of my life”), citing “the people, trees, mountains, lakes and islands here.”
Greylock, he added, “gives me more exposure to what’s happening in Silicon Valley and beyond, which I really like.” The firm, founded in 1965, is among the oldest venture firms in the U.S., known for its early bets on companies such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Airbnb and Workday.
Kelman’s ties to the firm run deep. Greylock partner James Slavet was an early Redfin investor and board member, and the firm credits him with playing “a formative role in Glenn’s development as a leader,” according to the announcement of his new role.
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A veteran tech founder, Kelman joined Redfin in 2005, a year after it launched, and spent two decades building the Seattle company into one of the best-known names in U.S. real estate. Redfin went public in 2017 at a valuation of roughly $1.73 billion.
Along the way, Kelman became one of the industry’s most candid voices: testifying before Congress on commission reform, pulling Redfin out of the National Association of Realtors in 2023, and turning routine earnings calls into must-read theater with his off-the-cuff analogies.
Redfin, meanwhile, is pressing ahead under Rocket. The brand kept its name and Seattle headquarters as a Rocket subsidiary. Rocket CEO Varun Krishna has been running Redfin since Kelman’s exit.
