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RentHop BitCoin Appreciation Exceeds Boston and Chicago Profits

In December 2013, RentHop.com began accepting BitCoin as a form of payment for landlords and real estate brokers to advertise apartment listings. The company initially offered a 60% discount off the prevailing USD to BTC exchange rate to encourage...

RentHop Office Spaces: The Early Years

Our original office was Lawrence's apartment on West 43rd Street and 9th Avenue. This was back in summer 2008 - Lehman Brothers was still around, I was still a quant at D. E. Shaw & Co. by day, and...

Craig Releases New App!

Speak of the devil, we just mentioned the former massive network effects from old sites, in particular the NYC loved and hated Craigslist. Researches and professors at the Harvard Business School have studied the phenomenon at length - or...

MMT: Modern Monetary Theory, or Magical Mortgage Tease?

For almost 10 years now, experts everywhere have called for rising mortgage rates. Shortly after the financial crisis, everyone everywhere felt bad about buying anything. But as we bounced from the March 2009 lows, slowly the financial gears began...

Craigslist, Freshness, Bait and Switch Problems

When Lawrence and I gave our original Demo Day pitch in the Summer 2009 Y Combinator batch, we cited Craigslist as a large part of the New York City apartment finder problem. Back then, you could not sort by...

ZipRealty: Early Pioneer turned Zombie Company?

Does anyone remember ZipRealty? Back in the Dotcom 1.0 era, they were among the first widespread discount real estate brokerage companies with a reasonably strong presence in the west coast. I have fond memories of using their saved search...