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.” An executive-in-residence role is a common landing spot for veteran operators in the process of figuring out their next move.
Greylock, 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.
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.
We’ve contacted Kelman for more information, including his long-term entrepreneurial plans and whether he plans to stay in Seattle. We’ll update this story with any response.
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.
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