Posts from Listings

Last year our niece decided to move about half way through her lease and ended up having to Airbnb her apartment for six months until she got out of her lease.

This summer our daughter is at graduate school upstate and rented her apartment to her friend for the summer.

One of our analysts decided to move to Brooklyn and had to figure out what to do with her apartment in Manhattan.

This is how millennials live. They go from apartment to apartment, roommate to roommate, city to city, job to job.

But this is not how apartments are rented. The apartments are leased for one year, two years, three years, with upfront security deposits, brokers fees, and a bunch of other costs that make the “fluid” approach to living difficult.

Enter Flip.

Flip is “the easiest way to sublet or get out of your lease and it is 100% free to list”

So if you or someone you know is looking to move and wants help with a sublet or needs to get out of a lease, Flip is the place to go.

The Gotham Gal has been an investor in Flip since the very beginning. I have been watching the company grow and build out this market opportunity with interest.

Earlier this year, she introduced the Flip founders to my partner Andy and the result is that USV is now also an investor in Flip.

Andy explained why USV is so interested in Flip on the USV blog a couple of days ago.

It’s a great post and you should go read it, but my favorite part of the post is this word cloud, taken from Flip’s listings, that explains why people use Flip:

Finally, Flip is looking to hire some engineers. They have built everything with just four people. That’s bootstrapping. I love it. They plan to double the team to eight people with this new investment. So if you want to work with great people, building technology that helps people with important changes in their life, Flip would be the place to do both of those things.

Every couple years USV hires a two year analyst. This is an ideal job for a young person early in their career who is looking to get a bird’s eye view on startups, the tech sector, and venture capital investing.

This is not the start of a career at USV as this job ends after two years and we expect the analyst to move on to other things. Our past analysts have launched a seed fund, joined one of our portfolio companies, joined another venture firm, joined another venture backed startup and worked on their own start-ups.

We have kicked off a new analyst search and my colleague Nick blogged about it on the USV blog on Friday. We’ll be accepting applicants until 11:59pm Eastern time on Tuesday, May 31st.

This search is open to anyone. There are no credentials required other than the ability to legally live and work in the US. This job is in New York City and we are not open to a remote work situation for this position.

If you remain interested after reading all of that, please visit the USV blog where there are details of what we need to know about you and how to apply.

Our portfolio HeyZap brings games and game play to places on the web you don’t usually find them. They are a fast growing company based in San Francisco. And they are looking to make a key business development hire.

Here’s a blurb from the job description:

You will be primarily in charge of identifying, initiating and building long-lasting relationships with some of the top online website publishers. You will play a pivotal role in marketing the Heyzap platform, growing our distribution network, and increasing our user base.  Heyzap works with Ning, Hi5, theChive, and a growing network of 290,000 websites serving millions of gameplays per month.

The job posting is here. If you live in the bay area, love games, and enjoy business development, you should give this job a lookover.

I can't say what company this is for but I can assure you its one worth joining.

Here's what they are looking for:

NYC start-up looking for a ruby/rails developer who enjoys working up and down the application stack. You'll have a huge impact on the expansion of our platform and the growth of our small engineering team. Your time will be split between iterating on the product, developing new areas of functionality, and applying a maintainability and scaling-aware mindset to our core architecture. 

Help us solve interesting problems, from adding location features, to looking for interesting patterns in our data, to assessing and implementing new technologies like MongoDB. We encourage contribution to open source projects and appreciate diverse backgrounds in and out of technology. Experience with payment platforms, faceted search, and building content management tools is nice but not a must.  

Interested? Get in touch at [email protected] (pls link to your github profile, if you have one).

I'm looking for a VP Marketing for a NYC-based company in the online advertising business. If you are or know of a person who has significant experience in marketing to online agencies and their clients, please get in touch with me.

You can do that by sending me an email to me here.

I'd love a link to a linkedin in the email if possible.

Thanks!

A little over a week ago, I posted that I am looking for a "killer multi-function printer" and asked for advice. I received a fair bit of advice, 120 comments so far. This post is an attempt to sum up the advice and then I'll tell you what I decided to purchase.

The following multi-function printers were most frequently mentioned in the comments:

1 - Canon Pixma Family – there are so many Pixma printers to choose from it makes your head spin. Five of Amazon's 10 most popular multi-function printers are Pixma models.

2 – Brother MFC Family – very popular choice among the readers of this blog.

3 – HP OfficeJet Pro 8500 – the most controversial printer among the readers. Quite a few of you have had bad experiences with HP printers. But HP was the only manufacturer that bothered to leave a comment. Big props to HP for that.

4 – Lexmark – mentioned by several with strong references.

5- Epson Artisan and Epson Workforce – not mentioned by many, but the ones who did love their Epson printer.

It seems like Canon, Brother, and HP are the "big three" of multi-function printers. They have the most models and they were most frequently mentioned in the comments. But I got negative comments about each of them from multiple people. And to be honest, it was confusing deciding which of their products was right for us.

So I made up a list of the top products from the big three and added several from Lexmark and Epson to it and went looking at online reviews. This one from consumersearch was helpful and got me seriously thinking about the Epson Workforce.

I then went into the Amazon reviews for each product and looked at specific areas that matter a lot to me (like pull and push scanning over the network). The size of the printer is also a critical issue for me.

In the end after I did all of this work, we came out in favor of the Epson printers. We like both the Workforce and the Artisan. This review from About.com tilted the balance and we are going with the Epson Artisan.

One thing that came out loud and clear in the comments is that a dedicated scanner is also a good idea. And the one that pretty much everyone recommended is the Fujitsu Scansnap S1500. You can get it for Windows or Mac. We are getting the Mac version for our family.

So that's it. I hope you all found this follow-up post helpful. I sure found all your comments helpful in my search for the best printer for our family.

We just moved into a new home and we are using the opportunity to say goodbye to some old trusty devices and add some new ones. At the top of that list right now is our laser printer. It's served us incredibly well for the last decade but it is time to move on.

We are looking for an awesome multi-function printer (print, scan, fax, copy) that is small enough to fit on a home office desk and works well in a networked environment.

Here are some specific requirements:

1) The max dimension envelope is 16" high, 20" wide, 22" deep

2) The printer must be accessible by everyone on our home network (we'll connect it via wired ethernet) and the scanned files should be stored on the network automatically.

3) I've always preferred laser printing to ink-jet printing but I hear that ink-jet has really improved recently. I'm open to going with ink-jet.

4) We need the ability to easily manually feed things like envelopes, cards, etc to the printer

I think those are the main requirements. Please let us know what you all think is the best multi-function printer out there for us. We really appreciate your advice and assistance.

Our portfolio company Targetspot is looking for an experienced online direct marketer to "own" and manage their self serve advertising business.

This
is a fun job for the right person because it is an opportunity to run
and grow a small business inside a bigger business. If you are an "entrepreneur" looking for a chance to show what you can do, this job is probably a good fit for you.

Targetspot's self service ad
business is growing nicely and we want to invest and grow it using
classic online direct marketing channels and measurement systems.

The
right candidate will have significant experience in:

• Knowledge of Google
  Analytics and ability to test results on campaign landing
  pages.
• Experience in SEO, SEM or both (either as an affiliate, or as
  part of an e-commerce site).
• Internet media buying.
• Online direct
  marketing.
• Webmaster experience.

The job description is here and if you are interested, please email [email protected] with "Self Service" in the subject.

Our portfolio company Covestor is looking for a VP Product and a head of marketing. Both positions are in New York City.

Covestor has created an entirely new form of investment product – people powered investing. With Covestor you don't buy stocks and you don't buy funds. You "follow investors" with your capital. I've been investing this way since the summer and it's a very interesting new way to manage your money.

These two job openings are opportunities to help define this new form of investing, from the product side and the messaging side. 

If you are looking for a new challenge and the opportunity to change the game in an important industry, then these positions might just be the thing for you. If you want to learn more, click on the links at the top of this post and if you want to send in your resume, email it to jobs1009 [at] covestor.com.