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42Floors Lays Off Half of Staff as It Cuts Brokerage Team, Refocuses on Search
- Lambent_Cactus 12y agoIs there a standard synecdoche for the type of tech company that's better at 'thought leadership' than at its actual business?
- talsraviv 12y agoIf the thought leadership revolves around the journey, learning, and transparency then I respect a company CEO who shares thoughts independently of the short-term ups and downs of the company.
- fitshipit 12y agoSounds like the opposite of what you'd want in building a business.
- pbreit 12y agoI sort of thought that when I first read the headline but then when you actually see what's going on, I think the moves makes sense and is more a demonstration of a reasonable attack that ultimately didn't make sense vs calamitous failure.
- mathattack 12y agoI used to think that was Joel on Software, but then he did StackExchange. It was as if he was preparing his whole life for that.
- bobofettfett 12y agoTrick is: Stay long enough in the game, earn enough money to stay afloat, then find the gold at the end of the rainbow. Expose yourself to luck.
- mathattack 12y agoIndeed. And he was very selective and disciplined about what he chose not to do. 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.
- lmm 12y agoTrello was what convinced me he'd really got it. It's got like 1% the features of Jira - and is 10x more useful because of it.
- prawn 12y agoDave Winer maybe?
- skmurphy 12y agoAcqui-Hire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqui-hiring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqui-hiring
- gaius 12y agoPrevious discussion of these guys https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7930430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7930430
- revmoo 12y agoThese guys are clowns, this is not surprising in the least.
- bketelsen 12y agois it 21Floors now? <bring forth the downvotes>
- markcerqueira 12y agoNo jokes allowed on HackerNews. Only serious and totally informed discussions by people who have clairvoyance levels over 9000...
- JetSpiegel 12y agoBut if they worship sinking businesses like this, doesn't that debuffs their levels?
- lolwhat 12y agoheh
- kajecounterhack 12y ago> Resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. > Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Jokes are fine but please follow the guidelines.
- partisan 12y agoSeriously? Of course it's still 42Floors. Just that half of them are vacant and searchable for rent on 42Floors.
- dropit_sphere 12y agoToo bad. I interviewed with these guys and have nothing but good things to say about them.
- woah 12y agoDid you bring heirloom carrots?
- deedubaya 12y agoMan, I feel bad for these people who were hired on for an experiment just to be dumped after a few months. That sucks.
- darkstar999 12y agoEvery startup employee should know it's a risk.
- jonknee 12y agoIt sucks, but it's also a great market to be a real estate broker and shouldn't be hard to find new work. Also, if you're ever hired on for an experiment it would be wise to assume you won't make a career out of it.
- austinlyons 12y agoI'm not sure the interviewee would know they are interviewing to join an "experimental" team.
- austinlyons 12y agoThis "our idea didn't work out, so we are letting you go" probably happens more than we realize. Props to Jason for being open and honest about it.
- enjo 12y agoI've been in startups for about 15 years. One of the hardest things I've had to do was lay off 4 people we had just hired a month earlier. 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.
- tswartz 12y agoIt's disappointing to see the layoffs, but I think its smart of them to stick with the core focus of providing excellent listings for office space. There are a lot of costs ($$s and energy) associated with doing business as a brokerage company and for a small startup it makes sense to focus on one thing first. Perhaps they will be able to add the brokerage arm once they've proven out the search side.
- davemel37 12y agoI suspect this is less about focus and more about conflict with other brokerage houses. Most commercial real estate is owned by an owner-broker who syndicates a deal and primarily makes a good portion of his money off closing the sale, property management and leasing... 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.
- pdq 12y agoJason has a blogpost on this today: http://blog.42floors.com/back-to-our-roots/ http://blog.42floors.com/back-to-our-roots/
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- frandroid 12y agoBecause an essential task after layoffs is to re-assure stakeholders and investors, so you push other work back to later.
- davmar 12y agothe CEO has to make the tough calls. it separates the men from the boys. kudos to jason for making those decisions.
- bigethan 12y agoThat's a nice Kleiner Perkins outlook you've got there.
- davmar 12y agojust in case i'm misunderstood - i'm simply suggesting that he must have struggled intensely with this. it hurts him and he could drag the pain on and not face the music that he made a mistake. instead, he faced his mistakes head on and set a clear direction for his company. 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.
- free2rhyme214 12y agohahaha
- ugh123 12y agoI can't tell if you are serious or making a joke. All that guy does is talk about startup culture and not about actively growing his business (and being successful at it).
- ripberge 12y agoI've heard the name 42Floors many times over the years as they seem to get a lot of press for being a hot startup. For the first time, I just visited their website as I'm in the market for some office space. 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?
- brandnewlow 12y agoThey'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/ http://blog.42floors.com/behind-scenes-ab-split-testing/
- reverius42 12y agoSeems like they might have found a local maximum/global minimum.
- frozenport 12y agoSaddle point?
- Dylan16807 12y agoNo, that's a minimum in one dimension and a maximum in another. 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.
- suckystartup 12y agoFrom http://web.archive.org/web/20140618142018/http://blog.42floors.com/interviewing-at-a-startup/ 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 don't know where the $17 mil has gone but anyone working at a startup that displays this kind of head-up-your-arse arrogance should expect layoffs. Maybe if this company hired for skill and not for beer buddies it would have been able to close deals.
- wwwong 12y agoI met this team a while back. All good people, very smart, but unfortunately seemed more focused on being a silicon valley startup than building a business in commercial real estate. As indicated by the topics discussed on the site's blog...
- snarfy 12y agoPivot. I believe the next step is to try to acquire a second round of funding.
- ulisesrmzroche 12y agoHave any of you ever seen "Rejected" by Don Hertzfeld? This reminds me of that one scene with the happy clouds.
- mathattack 12y ago17.4 million in investment can't maintain a staff of 28? What are their big expenses? Or is it more of a strategic redirection? I like a lot of what Jason Freedman writes, though I don't have much experience with them as a company. Based on their public profile, I suspect this will get a lot of PR.
- free2rhyme214 12y agoStartup culture - check! (https://42floors.com/team https://42floors.com/team) Startup success - uncheck!
- georgebonnr 12y agoThe search on the homepage is confusing to the point of seeming broken. I clicked 'Areas' and selected a few different neighborhoods in SF. Nothing happened. Clicked away. Nothing happened. Clicked the out-of-the-way, 'search' button (which was confusing because it was too wide to be a button and looked almost more like its true calling life was to be an input field). I don't think anything happened? Closed page.
- skuhn 12y agoIt did do something when I clicked the Search button, but the design is indeed a total mess. 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.
- dec0dedab0de 12y agoI seriously didn't realize they were a company. I thought it was just a blog that ended up on hn sometimes.
- leroy_masochist 12y agoI’m late to these comments which is too bad because reading this makes a few questions come up in my mind and would love to hear others’ thoughts: 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.