Our Blog on Apartments and Renting

Updated 9 hours ago

Last time we discussed the very early days. From mid-2008 to 2010, RentHop used co-founder Lawrence Zhou's apartment to write code on nights and weekends, while the founders held day jobs at Traxis Partners, D. E. Shaw & Co., and Two Sigma Investments. The doormen must have assumed we were…

Updated 9 hours ago

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 initial l y offered a 60% discount off the prevailing USD to BTC exchange rate to encourage adoption of the new technology, and RentHop…

Updated 6 days ago

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 at least they wrote a case study about Lawrence Zhou and…

Updated 1 week ago

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 features to track listings prices through the 2004-2010…

Updated 2 weeks ago

One of our Y Combinator batch mates way back in Summer 2009 was a company called InstantQ, founded by Dana Levine and Jeff Shi. They were an early version of Groupon, allowing restaurants to fine tune pricing specific to certain customers, day of week, time of day, etc. At the time, Paul…

Updated 63 months ago

Twice a year, Y Combinator holds Demo Day to officially debut and graduate a batch of startups presenting to investors and press. An event called Alum Demo Day takes place the night before. It's the last chance for the startups to practice and rehearse their presentations to a field of YC alums…

Page 1 of 1