Alaska News

Photo via Redfin Redfin first quarter results : The Seattle real estate company saw a 40% surge in revenue in the first quarter, reporting $268 million in sales. Its gross profit soared 229% to $42 million, and its net loss was cut nearly in half to $36 million compared to the first quarter of 2020. Its net loss came out to 37 cents per share. The consensus analyst revenue estimate for the quarter was $253 million, while the earnings per share estimate was -34 cents per share. Full results here . What the execs are saying : “After scrambling in the second half of 2020 to hire enough agents and lenders to handle a pandemic-driven surge in demand, Redfin is just about hitting on all cylinders,” said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. Key numbers : RedfinNow, the company’s direct home buying and selling service, sold 171 homes in the first quarter. That was the same number as the first quarter of 2020, and was up from 83 in the fourth quarter of 2020. Redfin’s market share in the U.S. residential m

Startup CEOs are known for talking big games. A judge says Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes may bring up that fact in defending herself against criminal charges.

Era Software CEO Todd Persen. (Era Software Photo) New funding : Seattle-area database architecture startup Era Software , formerly known as EraDB, raised $15.2 million in a Series A round led by Playground Global. The tech:  Era helps companies manage their cloud-native workloads. Its first product, EraSearch, is built for log management and offers an alternative to Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. The idea is to reduce cloud hardware and operational costs. EraSearch is in private beta. Leadership: Era was founded by CEO Todd Persen , co-founder and former CTO of InfluxData, and CTO Robert Winslow , co-maintainer of Google’s FlatBuffers low-latency storage framework in Rust and co-creator of the Time Series Benchmarking Suite. Investors: Other backers in the 20-person company include Foundation Capital, Array Ventures, Global Founders Capital, and angel investors. Total funding to date is more than $22 million.

Triller’s parent company on Wednesday appointed a new CEO, Mahi de Silva, after acquiring his company, Amplify.ai for an undisclosed price.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said the brokerage halted trades to meet demands from its clearinghouse — not to protect hedge funds from retail investors rallying each other on Reddit.

Neither tech company CEOs nor politicians want to make the tough calls on internet speech. Now they may have an alternative

‘The risks … are simply too great,’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said of allowing President Trump to continue posting on Facebook between now and the Jan. 20 inauguration of his successor.

The Zappos CEO tried to create a tech utopia in downtown Las Vegas. It didn’t quite work, but the city is still reaping the benefits of his big idea.