42Floors Lays Off Half of Staff as It Cuts Brokerage Team, Refocuses on Search
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This product is pretty underwhelming. I was expecting something game changing--on par with Redfin or Zillow. There's no maps, no ability to filter by zip code or name of areas within the city of Los Angeles. Craigslist is actually more advanced in several key ways. They've been working on this since 2011? Where has that $17 million gone?
reverius42 is simply using a bit of hyperbole with "global minimum". obviously they could do worse if they tried, but they might be on a small hill.
I suspect they probably would have needed another 20-30MM to really get moving on the latter. A lot of that money going to consolidation of existing brokerages and monopolizing listing content.
Being a neutral aggregator is mutually exclusive from being a dominant brokerage.
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From http://web.archive.org/web/20140618142018/http://blog.42floo...
> Another quick story before I really dive into this blog post. We had a gentleman over to interview for one of our account executive positions at 42Floors. He had strong experience leasing SF office space: great resume, great cover letter, did well in our initial phone screen.
> When he walked in the door, we could hear the clacking of his shoes on our hardwood floor. He was dressed impeccably in a suit that probably cost more than my first car and was carrying one of those leathery-thingys that seemed to exist only for the purpose of being carried during interviews.
> I stole a glance to a few of the people from my team who had looked up when he walked in. I could sense the disappointment.
> We’re all happily wearing blue jeans and sneakers. It’s not that we’re so petty or strict about the dress code that we are going to disqualify him for not following an unwritten rule, but we know empirically that people who come in dressed in suits rarely work out well for our team.
> He was failing the go-out-for-a-beer test and he didn’t even know it.
I've heard a lot of stuff about the startup scene in SV, but honest question: would anyone ever consider showing up for a job interview in anything more informal than shirt-trousers-shoes? And if the interviewee in that showed up to that interview in jeans/tshirt would the blog post have been different, or was the interviewer just looking to pad it out with an interview\culture-clash horror story and would we instead have been reading:
> Another quick story before I really dive into this blog post. We had a gentleman over to interview for one of our account executive positions at 42Floors. He had strong experience leasing SF office space: great resume, great cover letter, did well in our initial phone screen.
> When he walked in the door, we could hear the squeaking of his sneakers on our hardwood floor. He was dressed shabbily in a tshirt and jeans that he probably picked up off his floor five minutes before heading for the interview...That being said, if someone either isn't aware of the custom or prefers to interview in a suit, it's idiotic to count that against them.
The attitude displayed by startups seems indicative of their arrogance and overconfidence after being given money for their "great" ideas...
One of our partners had agreed to terms on a project that required us to staff up. When the project fell apart on their end the whole thing was cancelled. We just didn't have the budget at the time to keep those people on.
It absolutely sucked. We tried to be generous with severance.. but these were people who had just turned down other jobs to take this one. We just kind of dumped them back into the market. It absolutely sucked.
I vowed then and there to never hire people unless I was absolutely positive the money was in our bank account.
Perhaps as someone round here suggested some time ago, you should treat these companies as film projects. A group of freelancers get hired in to complete a project then when their work finishes they go on to the next project?
But remember that the opposite scenario, where companies only hire folks when they are sure they have a permanent role for them, is far worse.
As far as "the 37Signals way", that path isn't right (or even available) to every company.
In my little bubble, everyone is a developer and never leaves the house without a large stick to beat off the hordes of roaming recruiters :)
I was only in the job market very briefly before giving up on the whole mess and starting a business. I didn't finish college, so it was brutal. The jobs I did get were non-traditional companies who took a chance on me. Sales jobs in particular will give anyone a chance to prove themselves. I came to deeply appreciate that.
Startup success - uncheck!
Many gurus are bad businesspeople. (What makes them a good guru contradicts the nuts and bolts of running a company) I'm glad to see how well he's done.
The generic header image that makes it look like a domain squatter's landing page certainly doesn't help. And a phone number in a prominent position at the top of the page, very Internet savvy.
In other words, the people they depend on for the listings probably had no interest in sharing leasing fees with them...but are thrilled to be able to list and even pay a premium listing fee.
Focus is the right buzzword for them to spin this...but my bet is that they shot themselves in the foot when they decided to compete with their users.
1. As a founder, how does one balance one’s evangelical passion about the product/mission with the responsibility one has to explain the risks of a job to new employees? Should one just be super passionate and expect the employee to have a “caveat emptor” approach, or is there a minimum threshold of kimono-opening one should do in order to advise potential hires of the riskiness of both the market generally and one’s startup specifically?
2. In the case of the people who were fired from 42Floors, being a good broker is a very fungible skill and is relatively agnostic of firm affiliation; either you’re good at selling real estate or you’re not (compared to, say, being a good designer, where a given individual might be excellent in one role and terrible in another, depending on team and mission). Anyway, question is: when hiring employees with fungible, broker-like skillsets, is it appropriate to be more — I don’t know what the term is, risk-tolerant, freewheeling, forward-leaning, etc — in deciding whether it’s appropriate to hire a new person? The logic here being that if things go bad (as they did at 42Floors), those people will be able to land on their feet relatively easily, compared to others who are going to need more time/effort to find a new job. 3. If you have raised a lot of money and have cash in the bank, and lay off an entire division of people, what is your obligation to give them severance / extended health care / etc? My inclination would be to be very generous in this regard (i.e., firing good people who had to be fired because I realized I made a mistake hiring a bunch of people with their skills, not them specifically), mainly on a moral basis rather than a reputation-saving one. However, does doing so make one look weak in the eyes of the Valley VC community? Say you gave everyone something generous, like 3-6 months of severance….would it be hard to raise money later because investors think you don’t have a hard enough heart to run a profitable business?
I know this is a relatively stale thread and not a lot of people watching, but very interested to hear thoughts on this.
> Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Jokes are fine but please follow the guidelines.
Of course it's still 42Floors. Just that half of them are vacant and searchable for rent on 42Floors.
it really sucks short term for the employees. but it sets them free and it's in their long term best interest too if they'll end up learning more and being more successful elsewhere.
so i give kudos that he didn't take the easy route of letting the mistake continue, looking in the mirror and waking up to a very difficult day.