14 ms·

After the Layoffs

349 points by juanplusjuan 11y ago

lemevi 11y ago
> The night before the layoffs, after talking with my cofounders and the Board, I called up each of the people who were going to be invited to remain with us and told them what was about to happen. So the people who were not getting laid off found out before those who did? And they knew who was getting laid off too? That seems kind of wrong to me. Like I get that managers would know that, but why would everyone know that? I think the people affected by the layoffs should be the first to know, right?
- johlo 11y ago
  They probably wanted to know if the people invited to stay on would accept/reject. That would influence which persons were laid off.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    Its basically call employee A and tell him/her. If A rejects the offer to stay then call employee B with the knowledge that B would have got fired if A had accepted.
- Ensorceled 11y ago
  Why? Seriously. Why do you feel that way? It's already going to be a bad day for the people being laid off, why make it a nasty surprise for the people who are not being laid off as well?
  - AlwaysBCoding 11y ago
    Yeah I agree, I saw a round of layoffs go by at a company I worked at that caught me by surprise. It always felt extremely disrespectful to me that I wasn't alerted beforehand. A simple heads up the night before would have done wonders.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - protomyth 11y ago
    Do you think some of the people who got the call might have talked with some of their friends who work at the company that didn't get the call? We are not talking about isolated silos.
    - freshhawk 11y ago
      That's a good point. My experiences might be unusual but for me it was quite normal to have some kind of communication channel that is not controlled by the company that includes all/most non-management employees. Or, for a bigger company, one per clique. Layoffs or rumours of layoffs make that channel blow up with speculation and comparing notes.
  - lemevi 11y ago
    I think I feel that way because my job status is incredibly personal information. For the person sitting in the desk across from me to know that I'm not going to have a job at the end of the day before I do strikes me as incredibly invasive. It also gives them an opportunity to tell people outside of work and to use that information against me before I even know about it should I happen to be in a dispute with them for any reason. I should know before someone not in my reporting chain that I'm going to lose my job, not after.
    - pvg 11y ago
      They're going to know one way or the other very soon. The focus of the CEO in this situation is continued operation and minimizing disruption - the people they plan to keep are more important for that and it's often necessary to get them on board before they start seeing their ashen-faced friends and coworkers collecting the stuff on their desks. It's not optimal for anyone but despite what this particular CEO wrote, the reality is the remaining people are the top priority.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - cortesoft 11y ago
      This is pedantic, but there are lots of people outside of your reporting chain that will probably need to know about you losing your job before you... HR of course, but also IT and facilities, perhaps, if they need to have anything prepared for when you are let go.
- chadnickbok 11y ago
  When executing layoffs like this, the hardest thing _for the company_ is to make sure that the negativity from laying people off doesn't destroy the company completely. Ben Horowitz has some interesting insights on this in this blog article: http://www.bhorowitz.com/the_right_way_to_lay_people_off http://www.bhorowitz.com/the_right_way_to_lay_people_off I think this is essentially just a better way to make sure that the people 42 floors really wanted to keep knew personally that they were important to the future of the company. And reading the article again, all they told people is that they were staying, and what was going to happen the following day. They didn't say that the people staying were told who was going to actually get let go. I think in the context of a pivot away from a failing business model, this move seems smart, not wrong. People affected by the layoffs are being let go - their happiness, in some sense, is definitely going to be impacted by the layoffs. But for those people staying, it seems like they really needed to go through some stuff, and I'm sure they all appreciated the heads up.
- carrotleads 11y ago
  They only knew they were staying not who was going.. How would the person sitting across you know you are not going to have a job... unless you talked... Except for close friendships it is quite unlikely Person A who is staying knows who isn't.. no where did Jason mention that he volunteered info on who is going...
  - sokoloff 11y ago
    They were closing down a line of business that failed (the brokerage unit). It's not a stretch to think that people working on that project would be overwhelmingly more likely to be let go than those that weren't. Nevertheless, I agree with a CEO giving the heads-up to the staff that's staying, in effect saying, "Look, we're having layoffs [tomorrow or later today] and I just want you to know that your role is safe and we value your continued contributions." That takes the anxiety away from that person without making any meaningful change in the privacy of the affected employees, especially if it's same-day, but evening before is also OK if timing doesn't permit same-day. I've gone through a few at different places (including financial services post-LTCM and post-9/11) and there is no perfect way to handle it. People are losing their jobs; Americans have this weird tie-up between their job and their identity; when a bunch of people are losing their job for reasons other than incompetence/ineffectiveness, there's going to be a lot of butthurt. No way around it, and the CEO has to balance optimizing for those leaving with the ongoing health of the remaining business (lest more rounds follow). Everyone focuses on those leaving, which is normal, but if you don't leave a healthy company at the end of it, you might as well close it all down and lay more people/everyone off.
jedberg 11y ago
I've been at the receiving end of a layoff before. I guess I'm more rational than most, because when it happened I went in and said, "yeah I'd lay me off too, the current strategy here isn't working". I know the boss took it hard -- he couldn't come back to the office for months afterwards he was so depressed. I'm glad that 42floors was decent enough to provide what sounds like a great transition -- health care, severance, job placement, etc. That certainly helps soften the blow and it's really only fair to those who basically changed their lives to partake in the experiment with you. I think it's totally fine to do an experiment that may end up with you having to let people go, as long as you acknowledge that and take good care of them. And plan accordingly. Don't call it off when you have no money left and then use that as an excuse to screw everyone.
- trhway 11y ago
  >I know the boss took it hard -- he couldn't come back to the office for months afterwards he was so depressed. well, you either give good severance and everybody on both sides if not happy than at least not depressed, or, well, you give small severance, if any, and a lot of hard feelings around.
- BHSPitMonkey 11y ago
  > and it's really only fair to those who basically changed their lives to partake in the experiment with you Couldn't you describe any employee that way?
  - jedberg 11y ago
    Yes. That's why anyone you let go should get a severance unless it was for gross negligence.
    - sneak 11y ago
      You could also argue the opposite: Having a job this week is no indication that you will have a job next week, and that without a specific contract with a specific term in it (good luck), the "at will" clause in your contract or state law means that you should always plan to be laid off at any time and have a few months of savings on hand.
dewitt 11y ago
Amazing how much of that post was about the CEO's personal relationship with the layoffs, considering the #1 bit of advice in every comment on yesterday's thread about layoffs was "whatever you do, don't make it about yourself." [1] I don't know if it's good advice or bad advice, but the dissonance was strong. PS: I still respect the CEO. The actions (severance, health care, references, etc.) speak loudly, even when the words, no matter how heartfelt and sincere, aren't always the right ones. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9876009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9876009
- cblock811 11y ago
  I think it's good to tell yourself "Don't make it about me" but in the end, he was a leader who had to let go of team members. Seems natural that he would feel things over it. It would be like saying "Startups die all the time. Don't make it about yourself." From what I read (and I don't know this person at all) he seems to really own his role as a leader. I noticed is that he took responsibility for strategy though, which is refreshing to read every now and then.
  - gohrt 11y ago
    "Don't make [public announcements] about yourself" is not the same as "Don't care about yourself or your feelings". The audience is relevant.
    - mynameisvlad 11y ago
      The advice was never "Don't make public announcements about yourself" it was "When you're telling the employees they're being laid off, don't talk about yourself". There is a very clear difference there. None of the advice talked about what to do or not do during public announcements.
- kylec 11y ago
  I think it's fine for the blog post to be about the CEO's feelings. I'm assuming that when he actually broke the news to the employees he didn't dwell too much on "you don't know how hard this is for me" and focused on doing right by the people he was laying off.
jftuga 11y ago
Extending health care coverage for three months was extremely nice of him to do for the people he had to let go. I can't imagine being in that situation.
- JimboOmega 11y ago
  Yeah, that struck me the most of this. It's one thing to talk on and on about how it sucks you have to lay people off, it's another to actually give them something, like a meaningful severance.
- xacaxulu 11y ago
  Great thing about having an EU passport is that this situation doesn't even come up.
geuis 11y ago
This is a great way to handle a bad situation.
dandanisaur 11y ago
I love the transparency here, especially for the situation. Maybe this could be good for the people who were laid off (closure?). Taking good care of your employees even after they are gone/admitting your mistakes goes way farther in marketing than some think.
chadnickbok 11y ago
The part of this story I liked the most was the team's reaction; gathering up their desks into one part of the office, and breaking down the old desks that were now unused. Seems like a kind of mourning process, and makes me feel like this team must be really special to be a part of.
justonepost 11y ago
He should have spent time talking about the severance. Honestly, if I was going through a layoff, that's all I'd care about at that point.
- seiji 11y ago
  spent time talking about the severance. Often severance can be negotiated on an individual basis. Typically you start with some base amount (4 weeks + 2 weeks for every year at the company), but that can vary for different roles. e.g. when a CEO is fired, they typically get larger severance packages than bottom-of-the-org-chart employees (because, try putting out a job request: "Will be CEO for food." World doesn't work that way.) Also, severance payments+benefits aren't some magic gift from a company—it's a legal contract giving you monetary compensation in return for things like not disparaging the company in the future. Any time a company tries to bind your future actions outside of employment, you have room for negotiation.
  - mrbill 11y ago
    I got hit in the layoffs at Halliburton here in Houston back in January, and at no time was "don't disparage the company" ever made a condition of accepting severance. In fact, the only thing I had to sign said "I've returned all of the company property I might have", and that was it.
    - seiji 11y ago
      Good point. At large companies, sometimes they don't include it for non-executives. At smaller companies, it should probably fall on everybody since each voice carries more weight and everybody would have more insight into the actual workings of the company. It's all about making a legal guard against employees trying to "retaliate" over being suddenly released from employment against their will. At large employers, edge nodes in the employment graph can't do much harm to the overall company because they probably don't have insight into the deeper machinations of what's really happening outside of their compartmentalized roles (employer->employee power dynamics are fun).
  - 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
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davidgrenier 11y ago
"and we supported them all the same." What does this mean? "I wouldn’t fault them if they chose to leave." What would it mean if you did?
- comrh 11y ago
  Nothing, it just sounds good.
bbarn 11y ago
I've been through this same exact scenario before, twice. Once as a manager having to cut half my staff, another time as the leftover manager two years later. Both times for the same reason. The company got expand-itis, and started grabbing for more, more, more, and "hey let's be the pipes instead of servicing the stuff coming in and out". This is a classic example of overextending a company. If this new vertical was that risky, then it should have been said every day to those people hired to do this job. "This is a new venture for this company and if it fails we can't support your role. Are you still interested?" Oh, and the "I feel terrible" bit, as much as you may feel terrible, comes off as insulting to those you are sending home - good severance packages or not. If you really care about them, you give them complete transparency in what's happening WHILE it's happening, and give them the chance to correct the ship for you or get out. Holding on until you can hold on no longer and have to do a massive layoff is a huge failure.
- unclebucknasty 11y ago
  >if you really care about them, you give them complete transparency in what's happening WHILE it's happening To be fair, sometimes it's not always obvious that it's "happening". It can be a pretty tricky timing thing, and sometimes you try to hold on a bit too long, hoping to turn it around. But, maybe I missed a nuance in the post that you gleaned, which gave a better picture of the timing here. On another note, maybe I'm old school, but a CEO dropping a bunch of f-bombs in a public forum just isn't professional, IMO. I think it's cool for companies to be edgy and non-corporate, but using language that is generally considered offensive shows a certain lack of appreciation for your position as a representative of your company, board, partners, customers and other stakeholders. This, as well as a lack of respect for an audience whose sensibilities almost certainly vary. And, the repeated use of it in the phrase "I f*ed up" comes off as overdone to the point of disingenuousness and, oddly, maybe even a little narcissistic.
philbarr 11y ago
This is a FAR better situation for the people being laid off here than in an ordinary scenario. The CEO did what's right for the company, nothing wrong with that, but at least he tried to do it in the right way. My experiences of layoffs are: 1. A job in a huge software house. The company didn't hit the 12% profit margin it had promised it's shareholders, making a "measly" 10%. People knew when they were being laid off when the person going round with some fold up boxes dropped one at your feet and said, "pack your stuff". I wasn't laid off at that time but plenty of people I worked with were. 2. A minimum wage job when I was 19 years old. The owner calls us in and sacks a bunch of us in one go, with a big fat "sorry". I asked what the severance package was, since no-one else wanted to ask. He said, "erm, er....", and when it became clear there wasn't one because he hadn't enough empathy to even consider the proposition I said, "you can at least give us some money to go to the pub." He laughed, others nervously laughed. I said, "12 of us multiplied by a tenner each is £120". I eventually got £60 off the miserable excuse for a cunt who had his new Aston Martin parked on the carpark directly outside the window. (Yes I made sure everyone who got laid off got an equal share of that £60 at the pub).
- pgrote 11y ago
  " I eventually got £60 off the miserable excuse for a cunt who had his new Aston Martin parked on the carpark directly outside the window. " Why does owning an Aston Martin make someone a cunt? I am American and unfamiliar with British cars.
  - mplewis 11y ago
    They're $80,000 cars. Having one means you spent $80,000 on a vehicle.
    - akerl_ 11y ago
      Do British cars not support leases or loans? It seems odd to look out the window at the car park and think you can judge somebody's whole financial situation, and from that extrapolate how they should handle other peoples' money.
gk1 11y ago
Couldn't help but notice that after such a serious post, he still ended with a link to the homepage that's entirely for SEO purposes. (The link to the homepage in the final paragraph is phrased intentionally to boost search rankings for keywords like "search for office.")
- robbiemitchell 11y ago
  A always, B be, C closing
- drinkzima 11y ago
  Linking / link-text from your own domain doesn't yield any SEO benefit, so he's really just trying to redirect traffic from the post to folks interested in office space (or exploring the site).
  - gk1 11y ago
    Yes it does. Pages are ranked based on both the domain's merit and the individual page's merit.
sytelus 11y ago
While this sentiment and gesture is appreciable, this is also a potential example of rackless irresponsible hiring. When you hire people, you better damn make sure there would have something to do for them in foreseeable future as much as possible. Otherwise, go hire contractors. There is always some risks involved for employees however you don't want to bring in ton of people just to execute on one specific strategy with no backup plan if that strategy failed. Hiring should be sustainable in the sense that company should be making enough money to support all that extra hiring. If project A failed, we can start working on project B and so on. If that is not the case, candidates should be informed at the interview that if the project that they would be working on fails then they would be out of job.
- rgbrgb 11y ago
  FYI you're probably getting downvoted because of gratuitous negativity, an ungenerous reading of the situation, and unsubstantiated moral claims. It's pretty hard to read the future and the CEO in question fully admits he fucked up.
  - pbiggar 11y ago
    But don't forget, when you write a piece about one of the hardest times in growing your business, for the benefits of a community of people who could really benefit to learn from those who have been through it, when it's possibly the hardest thing you could ever write but you do it anyway because it's important, nevertheless, someone on HN will shit on you for doing it.
    - sytelus 11y ago
      It's one thing to be "negative"/"shit on it" and quite another to be direct and objective. I feel there is a new fashion in our industry where "I screwed up" emails are becoming quite common. In fact it is being expected from every leader who made mistake like Japanese want CEOs to publicly cry. The problem with this whole new fashion is that these tears/"I screwed up" emails are often empty and/or has no objective value other than asking for forgiveness. These emails are starting to almost look like template without any actual retrospection about real root causes and what someone else should do differently in future. In 42floors post, that's exactly the problem: there is absolutely no retrospection about what he could have done differently or what others should do differently. It's just plain and simple "I screwed up/it was the hardest thing/it hurts my heart" template. It's almost as if these leaders are suggesting that it was just bad luck, here's my tears and now let's move on. While all these regret and emotions are commendable, I fail to see single thing that CEO has mentioned as his learning on what he could have done differently. From his post my interpretation was that they hired whole bunch of guys to execute on single strategy, without long term feasibility and without disclosing the risk that failure of that one strategy would mean loss of jobs. Now that's something they could have done differently.
jriordan 11y ago
I think that these layoffs were made significantly less burdensome because of who was laid off -- i.e. real estate brokers. Almost all real estate brokers in the non-tech world work as 1099 contractors anyway, paid completely on commission -- no salary and no benefits. This has always been the "standard" in real estate, and pretty much everyone gets into the brokerage business knowing that. Sure, there have been some innovative exceptions over the last couple of decades (limited-service residential brokerages like HelpUSell or Assist2Sell, for instance), but full-commission is the general rule. So... you are a broker and you take a salary or semi-salary job with a tech start-up... You ought to realize that you are stepping outside the way your business normally operates. You are much more likely to be standing on shaky business ground, much more likely to be discarded when the boss changes his mind about the deal he signed (which happens in real estate all the time!). Laid off from that company with the snazzy HN post "42 Floors is Hiring!" from a short time ago? If you are a competent broker, you have a career path available that has always been there and will be there for the foreseeable future-- back to being a commissioned salesperson. If you can produce sales, you can get a new spot quickly and without much hassle. If it were any other demographic, the boss would have had a harder time.
bane 11y ago
I've survived layoffs 3 or 4 times (depending on how you count them). I survived because I had some specific value to the company that the laidoff employees didn't have. This was a plus. I now knew that I was a better candidate for better jobs. So as soon as layoffs started, in my mind, I was already out the door, only now I had time to look for a better, more stable, job. Each time, I found such a job and quickly left. Side note: the first time I went through layoffs, people were zombies afterwards, even though most of the people who were gone were dead weight. There were enough people who were also let go who were covered under contract that we knew that there was the chance of more to come. So it made sense to look for someplace else to go.
- xirdstl 11y ago
  I've survived also, but deep down feel cheated of missing the incredibly generous severance. Oh, to be incompetent ...
  - swalsh 11y ago
    It always feels bittersweet. I recently switched jobs, but just before I left the company laid off 40 people. We all knew it was coming, so I've been searching (though really more like making a decision, i had about 4 offers to choose from) for a few months at that point. A large part me was pretty disappointed when my project was the only one out of 3 to survive the cuts. I ended up leaving 2.5 weeks afterwards.
  - aswanson 11y ago
    Generous severance, hilarious. At one gig I worked they gave the dead weight something like 6 months pay 4 months medical and quite a few refused it while some of the more competent employees were volunteering to take it, and being denied the opportunity. It was a SNL skit situation.
    - mcguire 11y ago
      "For those of you who choose to take it, the severance package will be...." "Wow. Can I take it?" says I. "No, you're a co-op."
ElComradio 11y ago
tl;dr summary: "We figured out that we will still need to hire in the future, so we crafted this post to get the message out that it's ok to still come work for us- should things not work out again, you can rest assured we will feel bad again."
rmason 11y ago
I've both had to lay off people and been laid off myself. The former, believe it or not, is much harder than the later. I know what is going through his mind when he spoke of breaking down desks because I've had a similar experience. If there's a bigger gut punch for an entrepreneur, I don't know what it could possibly be.
jakejake 11y ago
I went through a layoff round once. The company was about 40 people and I worked in a small room with 3 others, including my supervisor to whom I reported. Everyone being laid off got notified in a private meeting at once. Everybody but me in that room got laid off and the next day I was in the office by myself with no instructions, no tasks and nobody to report to! I was a young guy without a ton of experience so it was bizarre and I didn't know what to do. I did busywork for about 2 months until I joined one of my former co-workers at a new place. Two weeks later the former company shut down, letting everybody know by posting a sign on the front door that the business was closed.
shawnee_ 11y ago
The brokerage model failed because the brokerage model itself is inherently flawed as a business model. Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the real estate industry. Its natural inclination is toward Bernie Madoff-like pyramid, where consolidation and cartel-like cooperation among "a few" (the Brokers and Agents) hurts "the many". Agents are forced into paying brokers for the "privilege" of association and access to the MLS... agents pass those costs on to clients by forcing those clients to sign on the dotted lines ("closing the deal"). Clients end up paying inflated commissions, as each person (or entity) up the chain takes their cut in larger and larger portions. 42Floors was trying to be the Redfin of commercial real estate? Well of course that doesn't solve the problems created by the existence of brokerages, especially when we're talking about renting or leasing a space, where ROI is already ridiculously negative from the get-go. Where commissions are just unnecessary garbage expenses. Why would it ever have been a good idea to involve brokerages at all? We’re going to step decisively away from that model now and focus only on providing a great search experience. We’ll leave the deal closing to the professionals. Over time, we’ll develop our new business model, which will be based around premium listing opportunities for those that want greater exposure to tenants So the idea is to package the potential client list from a "better search engine" and sell it to those poor, struggling brokerages like it's insider information? Sounds like the MLS on steroids. Doesn't make much sense.
xacaxulu 11y ago
> I cried and many of them cried. It was emotional for everyone. Some were angry and some were already focused on what to do next. I don't find this behaviour particularly galvanizing in a leader. Your feelings and tears aren't worth much to me but your business acumen is. I'd prefer you spent more time analyzing the business strategy that apparently lacked careful scrutiny and cold logical evaluation so we could have avoided this situation altogether. Give me the Steve Jobs and Larry Ellisons of the world so we can stop the group crying/healing session and get back to work innovating and generating wealth.
kriro 11y ago
I don't get all the bad sentiment. It's written respectfully and he clearly assigns blame to himself. I completely disagree with the whole "it makes people that got layed off feel worse so don't post it"/"this is too selfish" line of reasoning. He's a human being, too. It's probably therapeutic to post his point of view. And personally I'd rather read this blog post after being layed off than nothing at all. +it seems like they handled the layoffs pretty well
- peteretep 11y ago
  > he clearly assigns blame to himself I found the amount he said "it was all my fault" over and over again to make the whole thing sound insincere, but I guess there's no pleasing everyone. I've only fired people before, never laid people off, but where I'm from the process is long and drawn out, and you have many many meetings that need to focus on a person's failings. Being able to say "it's not you, it's me", and sending someone on their way with generous severance sounds like a bucket load more fun than having to document - in excruciating detail and face to face - why someone you like as a person is incompetent and needs to go.
  - philjr 11y ago
    That's a different dynamic. Consciously managing someone out is very different than taking potentially star performers and laying them off for nothing you can attribute to them.
Taek 11y ago
Were the employees aware of the risks of their role? Did they know that success was uncertain and that failure would mean termination? Did they know their severance package when they agreed to take on the risky role? If the answer is yes to all of these questions, than no wrong was done. It's just business, and they knew what they were in for. The company did the right thing.
42floorshater 11y ago
I don't want to be such a hater, but every time I see this company and this guy posting something, it's not about what they do, it's about the trials and tribulations of being a startup. They don't seem to care - at all - about their industry, their space, whatever their value proposition to their customer is. They just care about being a startup. It's super annoying to be honest. Weren't these the guys that famously wrote a blog post saying that culture is everything, and that people that come to interviews in suits are automatically denied?
- missblit 11y ago
  > Weren't these the guys that famously wrote a blog post saying that culture is everything, and that people that come to interviews in suits are automatically denied? https://web.archive.org/web/20140618142018/http://blog.42floors.com/interviewing-at-a-startup/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140618142018/http://blog.42flo... Not automatically denied. That's only ding #1. You also lose-- ahem don't win-- points for leaving the interview on time, neglecting to bring a fancy gift, and failing to obsessively read the company blog.
  - bshimmin 11y ago
    I think it's terrific that they post things like that so openly. If I were ever going to apply for a job again (and I hope never to), I would definitely read up about the company and read at least some of their blog posts. And if I found a post both so intensely dim and so offensively exclusionary as the one on archive.org that you link, I would immediately know that this was not a company for me. My personal favourite bit is sneering at the guy for saying "you can never overdress for an interview" - I can just imagine the poor candidate sitting there in his suit, feeling horribly out of place amongst these imbeciles, trying desperately to make light of his situation with that remark (it's probably just what I would say myself, in fact) and unwittingly providing more fodder for their asinine blog.
    - throwaway128363 11y ago
      I was once in that situation and my life-saver was: "Yeah, I'm a big Leonard Cohen fan". Turned out the team-lead was as well. It got me through the awkward moment, but I didn't get the job.
codeshaman 11y ago
It never gets any easier! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjN6xh8nsf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjN6xh8nsf4
Simulacra 11y ago
I work for a company of 41 teleworking employees, and we have avoided 42Floors. We think they offer a great service, but we disagree with the CEO's attitude and view of his employees, and the world. This concern kind of began with the black hole phone number for recruiters. It seemed like overkill, and kind of a dick thing to do. Sometimes just because a company offers a great service is not the best reason to use them. We disagree with the CEO and his attitude, so we chose not to ever use their service.
- B_Sutherland 11y ago
  Same here, when we were looking for a new office last year, I knew about 42 floors but the limited information I knew about the ceo and the company was enough for us to steer clear of them. Im still not sure what great service they actually offer, its basically Craigslist for offices, not any different than Craigslist itself. We've had great luck finding both our offices on CL and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for office space then have to stroke this guys ego anymore.

349 points by juanplusjuan 11y ago

> The night before the layoffs, after talking with my cofounders and the Board, I called up each of the people who were going to be invited to remain with us and told them what was about to happen. So the people who were not getting laid off found out before those who did? And they knew who was getting laid off too? That seems kind of wrong to me. Like I get that managers would know that, but why would everyone know that? I think the people affected by the layoffs should be the first to know, right?

johlo 11y ago
They probably wanted to know if the people invited to stay on would accept/reject. That would influence which persons were laid off.
- protomyth 11y ago
  Its basically call employee A and tell him/her. If A rejects the offer to stay then call employee B with the knowledge that B would have got fired if A had accepted.
Ensorceled 11y ago
Why? Seriously. Why do you feel that way? It's already going to be a bad day for the people being laid off, why make it a nasty surprise for the people who are not being laid off as well?
- AlwaysBCoding 11y ago
  Yeah I agree, I saw a round of layoffs go by at a company I worked at that caught me by surprise. It always felt extremely disrespectful to me that I wasn't alerted beforehand. A simple heads up the night before would have done wonders.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- protomyth 11y ago
  Do you think some of the people who got the call might have talked with some of their friends who work at the company that didn't get the call? We are not talking about isolated silos.
  - freshhawk 11y ago
    That's a good point. My experiences might be unusual but for me it was quite normal to have some kind of communication channel that is not controlled by the company that includes all/most non-management employees. Or, for a bigger company, one per clique. Layoffs or rumours of layoffs make that channel blow up with speculation and comparing notes.
- lemevi 11y ago
  I think I feel that way because my job status is incredibly personal information. For the person sitting in the desk across from me to know that I'm not going to have a job at the end of the day before I do strikes me as incredibly invasive. It also gives them an opportunity to tell people outside of work and to use that information against me before I even know about it should I happen to be in a dispute with them for any reason. I should know before someone not in my reporting chain that I'm going to lose my job, not after.
  - pvg 11y ago
    They're going to know one way or the other very soon. The focus of the CEO in this situation is continued operation and minimizing disruption - the people they plan to keep are more important for that and it's often necessary to get them on board before they start seeing their ashen-faced friends and coworkers collecting the stuff on their desks. It's not optimal for anyone but despite what this particular CEO wrote, the reality is the remaining people are the top priority.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - cortesoft 11y ago
    This is pedantic, but there are lots of people outside of your reporting chain that will probably need to know about you losing your job before you... HR of course, but also IT and facilities, perhaps, if they need to have anything prepared for when you are let go.
chadnickbok 11y ago
When executing layoffs like this, the hardest thing _for the company_ is to make sure that the negativity from laying people off doesn't destroy the company completely. Ben Horowitz has some interesting insights on this in this blog article: http://www.bhorowitz.com/the_right_way_to_lay_people_off http://www.bhorowitz.com/the_right_way_to_lay_people_off I think this is essentially just a better way to make sure that the people 42 floors really wanted to keep knew personally that they were important to the future of the company. And reading the article again, all they told people is that they were staying, and what was going to happen the following day. They didn't say that the people staying were told who was going to actually get let go. I think in the context of a pivot away from a failing business model, this move seems smart, not wrong. People affected by the layoffs are being let go - their happiness, in some sense, is definitely going to be impacted by the layoffs. But for those people staying, it seems like they really needed to go through some stuff, and I'm sure they all appreciated the heads up.
carrotleads 11y ago
They only knew they were staying not who was going.. How would the person sitting across you know you are not going to have a job... unless you talked... Except for close friendships it is quite unlikely Person A who is staying knows who isn't.. no where did Jason mention that he volunteered info on who is going...
- sokoloff 11y ago
  They were closing down a line of business that failed (the brokerage unit). It's not a stretch to think that people working on that project would be overwhelmingly more likely to be let go than those that weren't. Nevertheless, I agree with a CEO giving the heads-up to the staff that's staying, in effect saying, "Look, we're having layoffs [tomorrow or later today] and I just want you to know that your role is safe and we value your continued contributions." That takes the anxiety away from that person without making any meaningful change in the privacy of the affected employees, especially if it's same-day, but evening before is also OK if timing doesn't permit same-day. I've gone through a few at different places (including financial services post-LTCM and post-9/11) and there is no perfect way to handle it. People are losing their jobs; Americans have this weird tie-up between their job and their identity; when a bunch of people are losing their job for reasons other than incompetence/ineffectiveness, there's going to be a lot of butthurt. No way around it, and the CEO has to balance optimizing for those leaving with the ongoing health of the remaining business (lest more rounds follow). Everyone focuses on those leaving, which is normal, but if you don't leave a healthy company at the end of it, you might as well close it all down and lay more people/everyone off.

jedberg 11y ago

I've been at the receiving end of a layoff before. I guess I'm more rational than most, because when it happened I went in and said, "yeah I'd lay me off too, the current strategy here isn't working". I know the boss took it hard -- he couldn't come back to the office for months afterwards he was so depressed. I'm glad that 42floors was decent enough to provide what sounds like a great transition -- health care, severance, job placement, etc. That certainly helps soften the blow and it's really only fair to those who basically changed their lives to partake in the experiment with you. I think it's totally fine to do an experiment that may end up with you having to let people go, as long as you acknowledge that and take good care of them. And plan accordingly. Don't call it off when you have no money left and then use that as an excuse to screw everyone.

trhway 11y ago
>I know the boss took it hard -- he couldn't come back to the office for months afterwards he was so depressed. well, you either give good severance and everybody on both sides if not happy than at least not depressed, or, well, you give small severance, if any, and a lot of hard feelings around.
BHSPitMonkey 11y ago
> and it's really only fair to those who basically changed their lives to partake in the experiment with you Couldn't you describe any employee that way?
- jedberg 11y ago
  Yes. That's why anyone you let go should get a severance unless it was for gross negligence.
  - sneak 11y ago
    You could also argue the opposite: Having a job this week is no indication that you will have a job next week, and that without a specific contract with a specific term in it (good luck), the "at will" clause in your contract or state law means that you should always plan to be laid off at any time and have a few months of savings on hand.

dewitt 11y ago

Amazing how much of that post was about the CEO's personal relationship with the layoffs, considering the #1 bit of advice in every comment on yesterday's thread about layoffs was "whatever you do, don't make it about yourself." [1] I don't know if it's good advice or bad advice, but the dissonance was strong. PS: I still respect the CEO. The actions (severance, health care, references, etc.) speak loudly, even when the words, no matter how heartfelt and sincere, aren't always the right ones. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9876009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9876009

cblock811 11y ago
I think it's good to tell yourself "Don't make it about me" but in the end, he was a leader who had to let go of team members. Seems natural that he would feel things over it. It would be like saying "Startups die all the time. Don't make it about yourself." From what I read (and I don't know this person at all) he seems to really own his role as a leader. I noticed is that he took responsibility for strategy though, which is refreshing to read every now and then.
- gohrt 11y ago
  "Don't make [public announcements] about yourself" is not the same as "Don't care about yourself or your feelings". The audience is relevant.
  - mynameisvlad 11y ago
    The advice was never "Don't make public announcements about yourself" it was "When you're telling the employees they're being laid off, don't talk about yourself". There is a very clear difference there. None of the advice talked about what to do or not do during public announcements.
kylec 11y ago
I think it's fine for the blog post to be about the CEO's feelings. I'm assuming that when he actually broke the news to the employees he didn't dwell too much on "you don't know how hard this is for me" and focused on doing right by the people he was laying off.

jftuga 11y ago

Extending health care coverage for three months was extremely nice of him to do for the people he had to let go. I can't imagine being in that situation.

JimboOmega 11y ago
Yeah, that struck me the most of this. It's one thing to talk on and on about how it sucks you have to lay people off, it's another to actually give them something, like a meaningful severance.
xacaxulu 11y ago
Great thing about having an EU passport is that this situation doesn't even come up.

geuis 11y ago

This is a great way to handle a bad situation.

dandanisaur 11y ago

I love the transparency here, especially for the situation. Maybe this could be good for the people who were laid off (closure?). Taking good care of your employees even after they are gone/admitting your mistakes goes way farther in marketing than some think.

chadnickbok 11y ago

The part of this story I liked the most was the team's reaction; gathering up their desks into one part of the office, and breaking down the old desks that were now unused. Seems like a kind of mourning process, and makes me feel like this team must be really special to be a part of.

justonepost 11y ago

He should have spent time talking about the severance. Honestly, if I was going through a layoff, that's all I'd care about at that point.

seiji 11y ago
spent time talking about the severance. Often severance can be negotiated on an individual basis. Typically you start with some base amount (4 weeks + 2 weeks for every year at the company), but that can vary for different roles. e.g. when a CEO is fired, they typically get larger severance packages than bottom-of-the-org-chart employees (because, try putting out a job request: "Will be CEO for food." World doesn't work that way.) Also, severance payments+benefits aren't some magic gift from a company—it's a legal contract giving you monetary compensation in return for things like not disparaging the company in the future. Any time a company tries to bind your future actions outside of employment, you have room for negotiation.
- mrbill 11y ago
  I got hit in the layoffs at Halliburton here in Houston back in January, and at no time was "don't disparage the company" ever made a condition of accepting severance. In fact, the only thing I had to sign said "I've returned all of the company property I might have", and that was it.
  - seiji 11y ago
    Good point. At large companies, sometimes they don't include it for non-executives. At smaller companies, it should probably fall on everybody since each voice carries more weight and everybody would have more insight into the actual workings of the company. It's all about making a legal guard against employees trying to "retaliate" over being suddenly released from employment against their will. At large employers, edge nodes in the employment graph can't do much harm to the overall company because they probably don't have insight into the deeper machinations of what's really happening outside of their compartmentalized roles (employer->employee power dynamics are fun).
- 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

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davidgrenier 11y ago

"and we supported them all the same." What does this mean? "I wouldn’t fault them if they chose to leave." What would it mean if you did?

comrh 11y ago
Nothing, it just sounds good.

bbarn 11y ago

I've been through this same exact scenario before, twice. Once as a manager having to cut half my staff, another time as the leftover manager two years later. Both times for the same reason. The company got expand-itis, and started grabbing for more, more, more, and "hey let's be the pipes instead of servicing the stuff coming in and out". This is a classic example of overextending a company. If this new vertical was that risky, then it should have been said every day to those people hired to do this job. "This is a new venture for this company and if it fails we can't support your role. Are you still interested?" Oh, and the "I feel terrible" bit, as much as you may feel terrible, comes off as insulting to those you are sending home - good severance packages or not. If you really care about them, you give them complete transparency in what's happening WHILE it's happening, and give them the chance to correct the ship for you or get out. Holding on until you can hold on no longer and have to do a massive layoff is a huge failure.

unclebucknasty 11y ago
>if you really care about them, you give them complete transparency in what's happening WHILE it's happening To be fair, sometimes it's not always obvious that it's "happening". It can be a pretty tricky timing thing, and sometimes you try to hold on a bit too long, hoping to turn it around. But, maybe I missed a nuance in the post that you gleaned, which gave a better picture of the timing here. On another note, maybe I'm old school, but a CEO dropping a bunch of f-bombs in a public forum just isn't professional, IMO. I think it's cool for companies to be edgy and non-corporate, but using language that is generally considered offensive shows a certain lack of appreciation for your position as a representative of your company, board, partners, customers and other stakeholders. This, as well as a lack of respect for an audience whose sensibilities almost certainly vary. And, the repeated use of it in the phrase "I f*ed up" comes off as overdone to the point of disingenuousness and, oddly, maybe even a little narcissistic.

philbarr 11y ago

This is a FAR better situation for the people being laid off here than in an ordinary scenario. The CEO did what's right for the company, nothing wrong with that, but at least he tried to do it in the right way. My experiences of layoffs are: 1. A job in a huge software house. The company didn't hit the 12% profit margin it had promised it's shareholders, making a "measly" 10%. People knew when they were being laid off when the person going round with some fold up boxes dropped one at your feet and said, "pack your stuff". I wasn't laid off at that time but plenty of people I worked with were. 2. A minimum wage job when I was 19 years old. The owner calls us in and sacks a bunch of us in one go, with a big fat "sorry". I asked what the severance package was, since no-one else wanted to ask. He said, "erm, er....", and when it became clear there wasn't one because he hadn't enough empathy to even consider the proposition I said, "you can at least give us some money to go to the pub." He laughed, others nervously laughed. I said, "12 of us multiplied by a tenner each is £120". I eventually got £60 off the miserable excuse for a cunt who had his new Aston Martin parked on the carpark directly outside the window. (Yes I made sure everyone who got laid off got an equal share of that £60 at the pub).

pgrote 11y ago
" I eventually got £60 off the miserable excuse for a cunt who had his new Aston Martin parked on the carpark directly outside the window. " Why does owning an Aston Martin make someone a cunt? I am American and unfamiliar with British cars.
- mplewis 11y ago
  They're $80,000 cars. Having one means you spent $80,000 on a vehicle.
  - akerl_ 11y ago
    Do British cars not support leases or loans? It seems odd to look out the window at the car park and think you can judge somebody's whole financial situation, and from that extrapolate how they should handle other peoples' money.

gk1 11y ago

Couldn't help but notice that after such a serious post, he still ended with a link to the homepage that's entirely for SEO purposes. (The link to the homepage in the final paragraph is phrased intentionally to boost search rankings for keywords like "search for office.")

robbiemitchell 11y ago
A always, B be, C closing
drinkzima 11y ago
Linking / link-text from your own domain doesn't yield any SEO benefit, so he's really just trying to redirect traffic from the post to folks interested in office space (or exploring the site).
- gk1 11y ago
  Yes it does. Pages are ranked based on both the domain's merit and the individual page's merit.

sytelus 11y ago

While this sentiment and gesture is appreciable, this is also a potential example of rackless irresponsible hiring. When you hire people, you better damn make sure there would have something to do for them in foreseeable future as much as possible. Otherwise, go hire contractors. There is always some risks involved for employees however you don't want to bring in ton of people just to execute on one specific strategy with no backup plan if that strategy failed. Hiring should be sustainable in the sense that company should be making enough money to support all that extra hiring. If project A failed, we can start working on project B and so on. If that is not the case, candidates should be informed at the interview that if the project that they would be working on fails then they would be out of job.

rgbrgb 11y ago
FYI you're probably getting downvoted because of gratuitous negativity, an ungenerous reading of the situation, and unsubstantiated moral claims. It's pretty hard to read the future and the CEO in question fully admits he fucked up.
- pbiggar 11y ago
  But don't forget, when you write a piece about one of the hardest times in growing your business, for the benefits of a community of people who could really benefit to learn from those who have been through it, when it's possibly the hardest thing you could ever write but you do it anyway because it's important, nevertheless, someone on HN will shit on you for doing it.
  - sytelus 11y ago
    It's one thing to be "negative"/"shit on it" and quite another to be direct and objective. I feel there is a new fashion in our industry where "I screwed up" emails are becoming quite common. In fact it is being expected from every leader who made mistake like Japanese want CEOs to publicly cry. The problem with this whole new fashion is that these tears/"I screwed up" emails are often empty and/or has no objective value other than asking for forgiveness. These emails are starting to almost look like template without any actual retrospection about real root causes and what someone else should do differently in future. In 42floors post, that's exactly the problem: there is absolutely no retrospection about what he could have done differently or what others should do differently. It's just plain and simple "I screwed up/it was the hardest thing/it hurts my heart" template. It's almost as if these leaders are suggesting that it was just bad luck, here's my tears and now let's move on. While all these regret and emotions are commendable, I fail to see single thing that CEO has mentioned as his learning on what he could have done differently. From his post my interpretation was that they hired whole bunch of guys to execute on single strategy, without long term feasibility and without disclosing the risk that failure of that one strategy would mean loss of jobs. Now that's something they could have done differently.

jriordan 11y ago

I think that these layoffs were made significantly less burdensome because of who was laid off -- i.e. real estate brokers. Almost all real estate brokers in the non-tech world work as 1099 contractors anyway, paid completely on commission -- no salary and no benefits. This has always been the "standard" in real estate, and pretty much everyone gets into the brokerage business knowing that. Sure, there have been some innovative exceptions over the last couple of decades (limited-service residential brokerages like HelpUSell or Assist2Sell, for instance), but full-commission is the general rule. So... you are a broker and you take a salary or semi-salary job with a tech start-up... You ought to realize that you are stepping outside the way your business normally operates. You are much more likely to be standing on shaky business ground, much more likely to be discarded when the boss changes his mind about the deal he signed (which happens in real estate all the time!). Laid off from that company with the snazzy HN post "42 Floors is Hiring!" from a short time ago? If you are a competent broker, you have a career path available that has always been there and will be there for the foreseeable future-- back to being a commissioned salesperson. If you can produce sales, you can get a new spot quickly and without much hassle. If it were any other demographic, the boss would have had a harder time.

bane 11y ago

I've survived layoffs 3 or 4 times (depending on how you count them). I survived because I had some specific value to the company that the laidoff employees didn't have. This was a plus. I now knew that I was a better candidate for better jobs. So as soon as layoffs started, in my mind, I was already out the door, only now I had time to look for a better, more stable, job. Each time, I found such a job and quickly left. Side note: the first time I went through layoffs, people were zombies afterwards, even though most of the people who were gone were dead weight. There were enough people who were also let go who were covered under contract that we knew that there was the chance of more to come. So it made sense to look for someplace else to go.

xirdstl 11y ago
I've survived also, but deep down feel cheated of missing the incredibly generous severance. Oh, to be incompetent ...
- swalsh 11y ago
  It always feels bittersweet. I recently switched jobs, but just before I left the company laid off 40 people. We all knew it was coming, so I've been searching (though really more like making a decision, i had about 4 offers to choose from) for a few months at that point. A large part me was pretty disappointed when my project was the only one out of 3 to survive the cuts. I ended up leaving 2.5 weeks afterwards.
- aswanson 11y ago
  Generous severance, hilarious. At one gig I worked they gave the dead weight something like 6 months pay 4 months medical and quite a few refused it while some of the more competent employees were volunteering to take it, and being denied the opportunity. It was a SNL skit situation.
  - mcguire 11y ago
    "For those of you who choose to take it, the severance package will be...." "Wow. Can I take it?" says I. "No, you're a co-op."

ElComradio 11y ago

tl;dr summary: "We figured out that we will still need to hire in the future, so we crafted this post to get the message out that it's ok to still come work for us- should things not work out again, you can rest assured we will feel bad again."

rmason 11y ago

I've both had to lay off people and been laid off myself. The former, believe it or not, is much harder than the later. I know what is going through his mind when he spoke of breaking down desks because I've had a similar experience. If there's a bigger gut punch for an entrepreneur, I don't know what it could possibly be.

jakejake 11y ago

I went through a layoff round once. The company was about 40 people and I worked in a small room with 3 others, including my supervisor to whom I reported. Everyone being laid off got notified in a private meeting at once. Everybody but me in that room got laid off and the next day I was in the office by myself with no instructions, no tasks and nobody to report to! I was a young guy without a ton of experience so it was bizarre and I didn't know what to do. I did busywork for about 2 months until I joined one of my former co-workers at a new place. Two weeks later the former company shut down, letting everybody know by posting a sign on the front door that the business was closed.

shawnee_ 11y ago

The brokerage model failed because the brokerage model itself is inherently flawed as a business model. Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the real estate industry. Its natural inclination is toward Bernie Madoff-like pyramid, where consolidation and cartel-like cooperation among "a few" (the Brokers and Agents) hurts "the many". Agents are forced into paying brokers for the "privilege" of association and access to the MLS... agents pass those costs on to clients by forcing those clients to sign on the dotted lines ("closing the deal"). Clients end up paying inflated commissions, as each person (or entity) up the chain takes their cut in larger and larger portions. 42Floors was trying to be the Redfin of commercial real estate? Well of course that doesn't solve the problems created by the existence of brokerages, especially when we're talking about renting or leasing a space, where ROI is already ridiculously negative from the get-go. Where commissions are just unnecessary garbage expenses. Why would it ever have been a good idea to involve brokerages at all? We’re going to step decisively away from that model now and focus only on providing a great search experience. We’ll leave the deal closing to the professionals. Over time, we’ll develop our new business model, which will be based around premium listing opportunities for those that want greater exposure to tenants So the idea is to package the potential client list from a "better search engine" and sell it to those poor, struggling brokerages like it's insider information? Sounds like the MLS on steroids. Doesn't make much sense.

xacaxulu 11y ago

> I cried and many of them cried. It was emotional for everyone. Some were angry and some were already focused on what to do next. I don't find this behaviour particularly galvanizing in a leader. Your feelings and tears aren't worth much to me but your business acumen is. I'd prefer you spent more time analyzing the business strategy that apparently lacked careful scrutiny and cold logical evaluation so we could have avoided this situation altogether. Give me the Steve Jobs and Larry Ellisons of the world so we can stop the group crying/healing session and get back to work innovating and generating wealth.

kriro 11y ago

I don't get all the bad sentiment. It's written respectfully and he clearly assigns blame to himself. I completely disagree with the whole "it makes people that got layed off feel worse so don't post it"/"this is too selfish" line of reasoning. He's a human being, too. It's probably therapeutic to post his point of view. And personally I'd rather read this blog post after being layed off than nothing at all. +it seems like they handled the layoffs pretty well

peteretep 11y ago
> he clearly assigns blame to himself I found the amount he said "it was all my fault" over and over again to make the whole thing sound insincere, but I guess there's no pleasing everyone. I've only fired people before, never laid people off, but where I'm from the process is long and drawn out, and you have many many meetings that need to focus on a person's failings. Being able to say "it's not you, it's me", and sending someone on their way with generous severance sounds like a bucket load more fun than having to document - in excruciating detail and face to face - why someone you like as a person is incompetent and needs to go.
- philjr 11y ago
  That's a different dynamic. Consciously managing someone out is very different than taking potentially star performers and laying them off for nothing you can attribute to them.

Taek 11y ago

Were the employees aware of the risks of their role? Did they know that success was uncertain and that failure would mean termination? Did they know their severance package when they agreed to take on the risky role? If the answer is yes to all of these questions, than no wrong was done. It's just business, and they knew what they were in for. The company did the right thing.

42floorshater 11y ago

I don't want to be such a hater, but every time I see this company and this guy posting something, it's not about what they do, it's about the trials and tribulations of being a startup. They don't seem to care - at all - about their industry, their space, whatever their value proposition to their customer is. They just care about being a startup. It's super annoying to be honest. Weren't these the guys that famously wrote a blog post saying that culture is everything, and that people that come to interviews in suits are automatically denied?

missblit 11y ago
> Weren't these the guys that famously wrote a blog post saying that culture is everything, and that people that come to interviews in suits are automatically denied? https://web.archive.org/web/20140618142018/http://blog.42floors.com/interviewing-at-a-startup/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140618142018/http://blog.42flo... Not automatically denied. That's only ding #1. You also lose-- ahem don't win-- points for leaving the interview on time, neglecting to bring a fancy gift, and failing to obsessively read the company blog.
- bshimmin 11y ago
  I think it's terrific that they post things like that so openly. If I were ever going to apply for a job again (and I hope never to), I would definitely read up about the company and read at least some of their blog posts. And if I found a post both so intensely dim and so offensively exclusionary as the one on archive.org that you link, I would immediately know that this was not a company for me. My personal favourite bit is sneering at the guy for saying "you can never overdress for an interview" - I can just imagine the poor candidate sitting there in his suit, feeling horribly out of place amongst these imbeciles, trying desperately to make light of his situation with that remark (it's probably just what I would say myself, in fact) and unwittingly providing more fodder for their asinine blog.
  - throwaway128363 11y ago
    I was once in that situation and my life-saver was: "Yeah, I'm a big Leonard Cohen fan". Turned out the team-lead was as well. It got me through the awkward moment, but I didn't get the job.

codeshaman 11y ago

It never gets any easier! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjN6xh8nsf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjN6xh8nsf4

Simulacra 11y ago

I work for a company of 41 teleworking employees, and we have avoided 42Floors. We think they offer a great service, but we disagree with the CEO's attitude and view of his employees, and the world. This concern kind of began with the black hole phone number for recruiters. It seemed like overkill, and kind of a dick thing to do. Sometimes just because a company offers a great service is not the best reason to use them. We disagree with the CEO and his attitude, so we chose not to ever use their service.

B_Sutherland 11y ago
Same here, when we were looking for a new office last year, I knew about 42 floors but the limited information I knew about the ceo and the company was enough for us to steer clear of them. Im still not sure what great service they actually offer, its basically Craigslist for offices, not any different than Craigslist itself. We've had great luck finding both our offices on CL and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for office space then have to stroke this guys ego anymore.