42Floors Blog

Great article, thanks for sharing. Couldn't help but notice one thing on your home page: the price is given in $/sqft/year. Did you A/B test with other representations? It doesn't feel intuitive at all to me. I would expect people to have an idea of the total budget they have (/month or /year). Also I'm sure it's in your backlog already, but a lot of your listing prices are way off (http://42floors.com/?page=1&order%5Blistings_rate_per_sqft_per_yea…

I love 4 WTC, for some reason its extra-mirrory, really tall with a flat roof, from the street it often looks like it disappears. https://42floors.com/images/H596cc3895888f38019aee71d9a212479bdf344d9S… https://42floors.com/images/H2ace7a05db1517e4a6726532b38d4e65aec3ec1aS… https://42floors.com/images/Hc03b5fe9133b1ba7b10f11d22531e875b4702cf0S…

42Floors - San Francisco - Full Time -- http://42floors.com Growth Hacker / SEO 42Floors has complex content generation, SEO, SEM, and link building needs. We're looking for a jack of many trades to build on our strong existing foundation while exploring new areas of opportunity.

If anyone from 42Floors is reading this: your link to your own site with the anchor text "office space" is a relative link and therefore broken: <a href="42floors.com">office space</a> You need to make that http://42floors.com or it's not going to work for users (and search engines ;) )

42Floors (http://42floors.com/) San Francisco, CA We're looking for extremely talented people to help us bring the commercial real estate industry into the 21st century. Hiring salespeople, operations coordinators, data analysts, market researchers, admins/EAs, full stack engineers, and back-end engineers. (Apply: http://42floors.com/jobs) All positions are full time, SF-based. YC W12, $18m in funding from NEA, Bessemer, Thrive, SV Angel, etc. (http://42floors.com/investors) Learn more about us here: http://42floors.com/press or email me with any questions!

Apartment discovery is already well served. There are a dozen new startups that apply innovative methods to search. http://www.apartmentlist.com/, https://livelovely.com/, http://42floors.com/ come to mind. Software for estate agents needs to be become more modern though. http://nestio.com/ just rebranded themselves to do that for example. There's a German property portal (number two in the market) which released an iPad app for estate agents. Property management, contact list, calendar etc. Something like 50 USD/month for the app or $100/month for the hardware&app. Website is in German, but there are screenshots and video http://immonetmanager.de/produkt/

Looking at a listing[1], I notice that you provide email addresses to users and presumably act like a craiglists for anonymous messaging... I'm just curious though, don't you find that you get spammed out if you do this? I think providing email addresses to users on a marketplace is a great way of keeping discussions/messages boxed up in your platform, but showing the emails on the site must result in way too many spam emails? [1] : http://42floors.com/ny/new-york/25-w-39th-st/3171

Seeing http://42floors.com/showroom was one of the greatest "aha!" moments I've ever had looking at any startup. I'm thrilled to see the company continuing to grow, I think it's a fantastic model.

I think 42Floors is going to get there first: http://42floors.com/

> Who chose the open office concept in the first place!? I always figured zoning laws usually discourage heavy development, so companies are heavily incentivized to use open-plan offices to save on rent. Here's a listing for 3 offices for 900 sq. feet for $63.33/year, or $55,197/year. Each office might be something like 10% of your fully loaded cost, so a company with at 10 employees is spending an entire employee on rent. https://42floors.com/us/ca/san-francisco/235-montgomery-st?listings=58… . You could cram them into a box and they would whine, but it might be worth it if you can get an entire extra employee out of it. Though, there are 3 8-hour shifts in a single 24-hour day, so I'm surprised they don't stagger scheduled times for employees so they can share the same space. I myself usually like starting work at 4 or 5 AM, since there are fewer people around. There's probably way too much social inertia for that in general, compared to spending a few thousand $ on some cubicle walls. If you can afford more than 10 employees, you're probably quite profitable and the margin on well-run software companies is pretty high, so maybe they don't care about rent at that point.

I think YC has reached a point where anything PG says is likely to be interpreted in the worst possible light. That's unfortunate, because YC really doesn't have a type. I don't think there was a single Zuckerberg clone in our batch[1], a large portion of the batch had a foreign accent (me included), there were several awesome women led teams (Shoptiques, HireArt, TheDailyMuse, 99Dresses...) and we all got in. As I told a friend somewhat indelicately recently, the best attitude to have post YC-rejection is "Screw YC, we are going to go gangbusters on this anyway". Ironically, this makes you more likely to get in the the next time, should you choose to apply. If not, you still win. Mbellotti clearly got that part right with this: "Everything I have ever achieved in life has started with a panel rejecting me, YC was just another notch." So godspeed to her! [1] The closest may have been Jason Freedman, and he looks nothing like Zuckerberg http://42floors.com/team

You'd like this related discussion from way back when on https://42floors.com/blog/startups/i-dont-know: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7334671

> Shows how big the market is... I think the huge valuation has more to do with how absurd startup valuations really are[1], and less to do with showing how big the market for a niche product is. [1] Behind the gloss of absurdly high startup valuations https://42floors.com/blog/startups/absurdly-high-valuations Discussed here => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6874838

Cost wise, seems feasible on a sqft basis (assuming a small office - cubicle equivalent). And I don't imagine the fit-out would be significant on a long lease. Average for bay area is $40/sqft/yr https://42floors.com/office-space/us/ca/san-francisco-bay-area Office size data (small office ~100 sqft) https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-square-footage-of-office-spa… CBRE will have more details with registration: https://researchgateway.cbre.com/PublicationListing.aspx?PUBID=1e65af9…

this relevant item was posted today: https://42floors.com/blog/startups/after-the-layoffs

They've actually dropped a lot of those features after A/B testing showed they performed worse: http://blog.42floors.com/behind-scenes-ab-split-testing/

Startup culture - check! (https://42floors.com/team) Startup success - uncheck!

Jason has a blogpost on this today: http://blog.42floors.com/back-to-our-roots/

> That linked 42Floors blog post is terribly self-unaware. It seems it has been taken down (http://blog.42floors.com/interviewing-at-a-startup/), or is someone getting content?

Not sure what you mean, i don't see them that much. And they had some good stuff, like about manual scaling: http://blog.42floors.com/manual-scaling/

this is depressing. cheers to the guy for his persistence and interest - but seriously - why would you still want to work for a company after being literally treated like crap like that? also - what bargaining value do you have at all w.r.t. salaries or equity if you go in seeming like the most desperate person alive? It should be the other way around - if you´re good and talented - which the author of the article obviously is - then companies should court you to be come a part of their business. Case in point - the 42floors guys - who were awesome enough to really try to woo Dan Shipper publicly - http://42floors.com/blog/consider-this-a-job-offer-to-work-at-42floors - at the end of the day - you want to be valuable to a company - and you want them to want you - telling them that they can use you isnt that.

Actual link the above obfuscated link refers to: http://42floors.com/blog/posts/consider-this-a-job-offer-to-work-at-42…

I don't want to comment on the post but I want to complete what the author is talking about: http://42floors.com/blog/posts/technical-coder-non-technical-non-coder Hm why does all that remind me of the movie 8Mile? Is it the refrain? Where is the DJ?

Reminds me of this: http://blog.42floors.com/100-day-goals/

This post is highly reminiscent of a previous post... http://42floors.com/blog/posts/be-yourself-abnormal-people-create-abno… The recurring theme is..."Don't be a faker. Don't be a poser." My two cents is that most of us feel like we got to where we are by "Paying Our Dues" and resent others who seem to jump to the top without making the sacrifices we made. The real truth is...we all have stories playing in our heads of who we are, and what we accomplished. It is very easy to look across the street and wonder why you had to work so hard, and other seem to just have life handed to them on a silver platter. The reality is though, we have no idea what challenges they faced and overcame, and more importantly they have no control of how we perceive them. Seeing a programmer in a suit, upsets you cuz its fake, but it really upsets you because you know it took a heck of a lot more than a suit to get funding. Boy would it suck if he got funding just for wearing a suit. Seeing a non-coder claim to be a technical founder must suck because you are a real founder, who knows what it really takes, and you feel you have no right to claim you are a technical founder. The truth is, we can write whatever story we want about ourselves, and you can choose to believe whatever stories you want to about others. None of it really matters... At the end of the game, "The Pawn and the King both go back in the same box." I can really relate to how the author feels within other…