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Today, we had our annual RentHop Secret Santa gift exchange. We upgraded from the old "names in a hat" method to the much higher-tech Elfster (because one employee was tired of getting the same recipient three years in a...

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.,...

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...

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...

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...

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...